Defund the police. That’s the latest demand from those protesting the murder of George Floyd and the continuing pattern of police brutality across the United States. Defund the police. It makes as much sense as abolish ICE, which was the cry of the AOC crowd when it was revealed that Customs Border and Protection was locking children up in cages on the border.
Abusive police are reprehensible and don’t belong on the force of any city. But what do people hope to accomplish by defunding police departments? Are they forgetting the words of James Madison in Federalist 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary?” A defunded police force would lead to two things: at best, a police force populated by brutish thugs who can’t get jobs anywhere else, and at worst, anarchy.
As I read about the George Floyd murder (and there’s no other word for it), I learned that police officer Derek Chauvin worked part time as a bouncer at a nightclub. Police officers should get paid enough so that they don’t have to work part time jobs. If localities pay peanuts, they’ll get monkeys. Good pay combined with far better psychological screening of applicants, would result in a far more professional police force. Professionals who are rigidly screened before being given access to deadly weapons and who are paid well, tend not to kneel on the neck of an unarmed suspect for 8 minutes.
Defunding the police would lead to anarchy, and ever since the 2016 election, I think anarchy has been the desired end state of both the hard left and the hard right. The hard right voted for Trump in the hope that he would dismantle the stability of the federal government and ultimately destroy the United States. The hard left, building on its fury from the bailout of the financial industry and Senator Sanders not getting the 2016 Democratic nomination, has decided that the intelligence community, ICE, billionaires and now the police have to go enroute to the destruction of the United States. Anarchy seems to appeal to both extremes of the political spectrum.
Look, I’m an African-American male. I fully understand the fear that comes with any police stop, and full disclosure: every time I’ve been stopped by the police I’ve been in the wrong (I have a lead foot). That being said, anarchy doesn’t achieve anything except lawlessness, and lawlessness is the last thing minority communities need. This country is simultaneously in the middle of a pandemic and a depression. Defunding police forces would add an additional layer of misery to an already smoldering cauldron of misery. Those who think that a utopia will emerge from defunding police forces should know that when Sir Thomas More wrote Utopia, he was being sarcastic. He took two Greek words: ou=not; topis=place. Utopias don’t exist. Defunding police forces will bring anarchy, which I guess could be defined as a not place…from hell.