The city of Northfield is not going to defund its police department.
The city of Ocean City is not going to defund its police department.
The city of Cape May is not going to defund its police department.
We could go on with the list of communities because we know defunding our local police departments is never going to happen.
Well, perhaps there is one way: if global warming puts our shore communities 10 feet under water in the distant future, we may not need police departments, just extra Coast Guard patrols, but we digress.
As shown last week by the boisterous pro-police rally in Northfield, and by Ocean City council members feeling the need to make pro-police comments, there is a real fear among citizens that their police departments – hence, their safety and security – is in jeopardy.
It is not.
The police departments aren’t going anywhere.
Local citizens’ safety and security is not at risk.
However, there is a defund-the-police mantra. And the chorus behind it is loud.
The mantra is an outcropping of the outrage and protests over bad police conduct resulting in the senseless deaths of black men and women that prompted a nationwide movement to examine and eliminate racial bias in policing and society at large. Part of that movement is calling to defund the police.
That call is coming from people who feel victimized by police rather than protected, from people who believe they are looked at as suspects first and citizens second, from people who worry when they get stopped by police for the smallest of infractions that their lives are at risk.
We cannot pretend – though many do – there is no racial bias in policing, just as we cannot pretend that racial bias has ever been banished from the rest of our institutions and our national consciousness.
We cannot ignore the fact that our toxic political atmosphere, ramped up in a presidential election year, is using the defund-the-police mantra to stoke those fears among voters everywhere.
For those people who believe that their local police departments are at risk, consider this:
– A community’s elected leaders – city council members, mayors, etc. – decide the fate of their police departments, the budget, the staffing, the equipment, etc.
– Those elected leaders answer to their citizens (the voters).
– Is there any combination of council and mayor locally that has ever proposed eliminating a police department, unless in context of combining it with a neighboring police force?
– Is there any reason to believe any combination of local public officials would ever stick their necks out – risk political suicidal – to go against the will of the majority of their voters and decide to do something as radical as eliminating their police department?
Our public officials are not going to go against the will of their constituents. Eliminating police departments is not on the agenda in any of our communities and it is not going to be.
