Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is as radical as they come. And that means he hates law enforcement.
But what Chuck Schumer is about to do to police will outright disgust you.
A Bipartisan group of members of the U.S. House of Representatives voted on April 19 to reject the D.C. City Council’s adoption of the misleadingly named “Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act” (CPJRAA), which would have defunded the Washington Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in part. The vote was 229-189.
However, Senate Majority Leader Schumer has not taken any action. This reckless bill will become law if the U.S. Senate doesn’t follow the House’s example and reject it by the end of the day on May 11.
The CPJRAA is the latest attempt to pass what looks to be a straightforward police “reform” measure, but is actually a post-George Floyd-style measure that would take away essential equipment that keep police personnel safe and limit their capacity to perform their duties.
Defunding police departments is bad policy and, when tried, has had devastating results, not the least of which include growing rates of crime, turnover from police departments, and recruitment issues in those police departments. This should be obvious by this point.
And by this point, lawmakers ought to have realized that enacting legislation that hinders local police agencies from carrying out their challenging duties is not just risky but also unpopular.
But the D.C. City Council isn’t saddled with common sense. They also did not anticipate, at least up until now, that the people would reject their extreme proposals for reforming the criminal justice system and the police, much less the U.S. Congress, which has jurisdiction over the District because it is not a state and never intended to be one.
In July 2020, the D.C. City Council reduced $15 million from the local police force’s budget. They reduced the baseline for the police budget to the extent that the D.C. police department began the fiscal year for 2021 (on October 1, 2020) with $33 million less than the previous year.
The leader of the initiative, Charles Allen of the D.C. City Council, acknowledged that his plan was to “reduce our police force size in a responsible way by turning off the spigot.”
The police force’s “numbers… will drop by about 200 officers,” he boasted, adding that “this is the biggest reduction to MPD that I’ve ever seen.”
All of these cuts to the MPD, a police department with a majority of minorities, were made in the name of “racial justice.”
The bill would severely handcuff the MPD if Schumer does nothing and the City Council’s anti-police, pro-criminal scheme becomes law.
At a panel discussion hosted by the Heritage Foundation in March, Gregg Pemberton, the chairman of the D.C. police union, noted that the MPD force has lost over 600 officers and that it will take ten years to make up the shortfall.
A force of around 4,000 officers is what the MPD should have, however as of February, it is down to 3,386.
According to Pemberton, the present force’s size is insufficient to combat the rising homicide rate. The overall crime rate has increased 27% since previous year.
Watch what politicians like Schumer and others do, not just what they say, when they claim to take crime, particularly violent crime, seriously.
Stay tuned to the Federalist Wire.
