Consequences of ‘Defund the Police’: Big City Police Departments Bleeding Staff, Unable to Recruit

As crime rates climb across the nation, police departments in several major U.S. cities are facing a crisis, namely, the inability to recruit new police officers. As a result, staffing shortages have led to increased overtime, thinly spread patrols, and a rise in crime rates. 

Violent crimes remained higher during the first half of 2023 compared to the first half of 2019, according to the Council on Criminal Justice. The International Association of Chiefs of Police published a paper called “A Crisis for Law Enforcement” that shows 78% of law enforcement agencies have had “difficulty in recruiting qualified candidates” and that 65% reported having “too few candidates applying to be law enforcement officers.”

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Gisele Fetterman Campaigned with Defund Police Supporters After Husband Wiped ‘Black Lives Matter’ from Website

Gisele Fetterman, the wife of Senator-elect John Fetterman, campaigned with defund the police supporters after her husband deleted the Black Lives Matter section of his website.

Defunding the police and shifting it to mental health and social workers has been a demand of the Black Lives Matter movement.

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Bill Clinton Warns Democrats Not to Let ‘Defund the Police and Socialism’ Hurt Them This Election

Former President Bill Clinton warned the Democratic Party that it shouldn’t let “defund the police and socialism” damage their chances of winning the Nov. 8 election.

Clinton was asked how the U.S. should handle existing threats to its democracy.

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Commentary: To Save Freedom, Defund Pro Sports

In the last few years, the “Defund the Police” cry has reverberated through many of our cities. The police are not serving our communities, we’re told, and they’re wasting taxpayer money on ineffective services and driving racism. “It’s time to get rid of them,” many yell.

They’re barking up the wrong tree. If the public wants to defund something that’s wasting money and not serving the community, then they should look toward pro sports and defund them.

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Report: Stacey Abrams’ Campaign Spent $450K on Security Despite Backing ‘Defund Police’ Movement

Democratic Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams has doled out hundreds of thousands on private security despite her ties to the Defund the Police movement, according to Fox News.

Abrams’ campaign paid $450,000 to an Atlanta-based security firm called Executive Protection Agencies between December 2021 and April 2022, Fox News reported Tuesday. But Abrams also sits on the board of The Marguerite Casey Foundation — a nonprofit she joined in 2021 that has supported abolishing and defunding police.

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Veteran Dave Galluch, in Pennsylvania 5th Congressional District Run, Seeks Restoration of ‘Time-Honored Traditions in American Leadership’

Republicans very recently used to dominate the locale composing much of Pennsylvania’s Fifth Congressional District. Geographically overlapping with much of the erstwhile Seventh District (nixed four years ago by the state Supreme Court), the Delaware-County-based territory had Republican Pat Meehan as its U.S. representative from 2011 to 2018. Before Meehan’s predecessor Joe Sestak (D) won the seat for two two-year terms, GOP Congressman Curt Weldon held it for two decades.

The district today is, well, different: Republicans’ old stronghold of Delaware County has flipped Democratic (though the GOP still fares well in some municipalities). And anyone waging a general-election campaign against Democratic Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon must also make inroads in south Philadelphia, Lower Merion, Upper Merion, Narberth, Bridgeport and Norristown — all places where “blue” voters have long outnumbered “red” ones. 

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Cambria County Prosecutor: Difficulty Recruiting Police Is Fueling Pennsylvania Crime

FBI data currently indicate that Pennsylvania’s violent crime rate exceeds any other northeastern state’s, and a county prosecutor told state senators this week he attributes much of that reality to difficulty recruiting and retaining police officers.

Cambria County District Attorney Gregory Neugebauer testified before the Senate Republican Policy Committee alongside other law-enforcement professionals to illuminate what is driving up crime in the Keystone State and what can be done about it. The hearing, held at the Cambria County Courthouse in Ebensberg, was the first of several the panel is hosting this week to address crime prevention in conjunction with National Crime Victims’ Rights Week.

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Numbers of Black Americans Murdered Increased in Wake of Defund the Police Movement: Report

Support for calls across the nation to to defund police departments nationwide and pandemic-related factors has led to an increase in the number of murders of black Americans, according to an analysis by the Manhattan Institute.

The overall murder rate increased 30% from 2020 to 2021, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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Soros Family Continues to Support ‘Defund the Police’ Candidates

George Soros

Far-left billionaire George Soros, along with his daughter Andrea Soros Colombel, is continuing to donate to organizations that bankroll radical candidates who support defunding the police in the United States.

As reported by Fox News, the Soros family has still been donating to a joint fundraising committee that oversees multiple other PACs. The committee, called Lead The Way 2022, includes the Way to Lead PAC, the campaign committee of radical Congresswoman Cori Bush (D-Mo.), and the campaigns of up to 12 other far-left political candidates running for the U.S. Congress.

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U.S. Civil Rights Commissioners to AG Merrick Garland: U.S. Attorneys Must ‘Increase Prosecutions in Cities Where Local Prosecutors’ Are Soft on Crime

Attorney General Merrick Garland

In a letter obtained by The Star News Network, four commissioners of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights express their “urgent concerns” to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland about the radical increase in violent crime in America, and ask him to direct the Department of Justice to escalate prosecutions of violent criminals.

U.S. Civil Rights Commissioners Peter Kirsanow (R), Gail Heriot (I), J. Christian Adams (R), and Stephen Gilchrist (R), wrote to Garland Thursday, “not on behalf of the Commission as a whole,” of their concerns about the significant rise in crime “that has affected our nation over the past two years.”

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After Defund the Police Changes Local Sex Offender Policies, Students Feel ‘Compromised’

With cops in Austin, Texas, not supervising “hundreds of sex offender cases” due to Defund the Police budget cuts, Campus Reform spoke with students at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) about their safety.

“The situation in the city of Austin has been critical for some time ever since the city of Austin council decided to defund the police unanimously in the summer of 2020, and reduce their police budget by one-third,” sophomore Carter Moxley said.

Moxley also discussed UT Austin President Jay Hartzell’s decision last November to “increase [University of Texas Police Department] patrol in the west campus area and develop additional options to enhance safety for [the] students” after a violent incident near campus.

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Commentary: The ‘New Normal’ and the Assault on Reason

Our political situation is so chaotic and strange right now that we can’t take anything for granted—including what is normal. So it’s often necessary to explain what may seem obvious to readers of American Greatness, but is regarded as strange or almost incomprehensible to other people. 

For example, it is obvious to me, and probably to you, that today’s “progressive” agenda is actually pushing our country back to a more primitive past. 

Consider some of the most urgent priorities of woke ideology:

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Wokeness Is a Multi-Billion Dollar Business in America, and It Has Some Dems Scared

An outpouring of grants to activist groups promoting race-based ideology is causing problems for some Democrats by highlighting the most unpopular beliefs of party members, according to an op-ed published in The New York Times.

Charitable support for “racial equity” projects skyrocketed after the death of George Floyd in June 2020. These projects received $3.3 billion from 2011 to 2019, then $12.7 billion and $11.6 billion in 2020 and 2021, respectively, according to the NYT op-ed.

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‘Thin Blue Line’: Veteran Comic Book Writer Goes Indie to Crowdfund Pro-Police Graphic Novel

The team behind the pro-police graphic novel “Thin Blue Line” earned some polite rejections from several comic book companies.

The project, focused on a single Latina mom and a fellow cop holding off violent protesters, “isn’t what we’re currently looking for,” one company demurred.

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George Soros, Unions, Other Far-Left Entities Donated Heavily to Defeat Pro-Police Ballot Measure in Austin, Texas

Police lights on top of car

A ballot measure aimed at increasing the number of police officers in the city of Austin, Texas was defeated in Tuesday’s election after hundreds of thousands of dollars was spent against it by George Soros, unions, and other organizations from outside of Texas, as reported by Fox News.

The question before voters, known as Prop A, would have required the city to hire two police officers for every 1,000 residents, and would subsequently increase officer training to accommodate the new hires. The measure was put on the ballot in response to a surge in violent crime in the wake of last year’s violent race riots, and a subsequent decline in the number of officers due to the “defund the police” movement as well as increasingly strict vaccine mandates.

The bulk of the money spent against Prop A came from outside the state of Texas. Chief among them was the far-left Equity PAC, which was given $500,000 by George Soros’s Open Society foundation, contributing to a total war chest of around $1.2 million. Other culprits include the equally far-left group known as the 1630 Fund, which spent $100,000 against Prop A, and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, which spent another $100,000. Another Soros-linked group, the Fairness Project, spent $200,000 to defeat Prop A.

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