Who Really Wants to Defund the Police? Democrats, That’s Who

T he quickest way to check out new Democratic Party talking points is to head over to Dana Milbank’s column in the Washington Post. His latest — initially headlined “Even the Squad is more pro-police than these Republicans,” but later changed to read, “Republicans have a new strategy: Blue Lies Matter” — is a snarky regurgitation of White House press secretary Jen Psaki’s highly inventive assertion that Republicans are really the anti-cop party. Why? Because they voted against President Biden’s $1.9 trillion boondoggle “rescue” package, which included $350 billion for state and local governments that could be spent on police.

This argument is metastasizing. “Who Really Wants to Defund the Police?” asks Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg. “The GOP should be held accountable for deserting law and order,” contends the White House’s favorite pundit, Jennifer Rubin. The other day, Chris Wallace asked Jim Banks: “You voted against that package, against that $350 billion, just like every other Republican in the House and Senate. So can’t you make the argument that it’s you and the Republicans who are defunding the police?”

Well, you are free to make the argument, but it doesn’t really hold up.

For one thing, voting against supplementary federal funding isn’t the same as divesting it from law enforcement — or even the same as redirecting existing money. And need it really be said, that if Congress had written a bill solely aimed at increasing law-enforcement manpower — let’s call it the “Fund the Police Act” — very few, if any, Democrats would have voted for it? Republican opposition to Biden’s nearly $2 trillion plan wasn’t predicated on the police funding any more than the Democrats’ filibustering of Republican COVID-rescue plans in 2020 meant they opposed assisting small businesses.

Milbank goes on to point to an “online poll” which informs us that 72 percent of Democratic Party voters in NYC’s mayoral primary wanted more police officers on the streets. Well, yeah, after huge spikes in violent criminality in big cities such as NYC, this is somewhat unsurprising. A national poll by USA Today/Ipsos Poll from earlier this year, found that 34 percent of Democrats still supported the effort — even when many believed it was a straight cut in funding. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats support redistributing portions of police budgets to social programs — compared with only 16 percent of Republicans. If you’re trying to make case that conservatives are more prone to slash funding for law enforcement, polling isn’t the way to go.

Indeed, Milbank’s flimsy evidence for claiming that The Squad are more pro-police than their Republican critics are some cherry-picked stats from the National Association of Police Officers (NAPO) legislative scorecard:

. . . Democratic Reps. Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) all scored 86 percent. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) scored 71 percent. Where it really counts, all four members of the Squad are more pro-police than their Republican critics.

No, the NAPO’s scorecard doesn’t “really count” on the topic of law enforcement. The reason some Democrats score higher than some Republicans is that most of the top priorities of NAPO — The Social Security Fairness Act, Restoring Tax Fairness for States and Localities Act, SALT Deductibility Act, the Middle Class Health Benefits Plan, the Rehabilitation of Multiemployer Pensions Act, and so on — have little or nothing to do with policing and everything to do with bolstering unions and spending.

In the real world, The Squad wants to defund — as in, prevent from receiving money — the cops. When Barack Obama observed that “slogans” such as “defund the police” tend to hurt Democrats, Ilhan Omar pushed back, asserting that it was “not a slogan but a policy demand.” Then-congressional candidate Cori Bush ran on defunding the police, often saying things such as, “We need to defund the police and make sure that money goes back into the communities that need it.”

As Isaac Schorr has meticulously detailed, Kamala Harris, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vanita Gupta, Marty Walsh, and, yes, Joe Biden — who, when asked, “Do we agree that we can redirect some of the funding?” answered, “Yes, absolutely” — all backed defund- police efforts to some extent. It’s true that Biden walked back his support for the movement after winning his party’s nomination, but it takes only rudimentary research to see that Black Lives Matter protests not only spurred the broad-brush vilification of cops but the widespread progressive embrace of the defund-the-police movement. City councils across the nation began debating or embracing the idea, including in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered. Not one of the cities that toyed with this “new transformative model for cultivating safety” was run by Republicans.

Even now, as Andrew McCarthy points out, though Democrats may incidentally vote for police funding in rescue bills, they are simultaneously changing the definition of “policing” to something that would not be commonly understood as law enforcement by most American voters — jettisoning practices that helped bring crime rates to historic lows.

Now, the surging violent-crime rates that accompanied progressive “defund the police” rhetoric and policy has become a problem for Democrats. So they’ve concocted one of the most transparently silly talking points in memory.