Surprise! Look who suffered most from fierce push to defund police

(Photo by Joe Kovacs)
(Photo by Joe Kovacs)

A review of FBI data shows that in the wake of the death of George Floyd and the defund-police movement, black Americans were disproportionately affected by the massive rise in murders in 2020.

Among black Americans, the number of deaths spiked by more than 32% compared to 2019, according to an analysis by Fox News Digital. Meanwhile, the overall rise was 30%, the largest single-year increase in killings since the agency began tracking the crimes.

Significantly, at least 9,941 black Americans were murdered in 2020, compared to 7,043 white people. But white Americans make up 76% of the population while black Americans representing only 13%, according to Census data. A study in the journal Victimology featured by the Justice Department found that in about 80-90% of cases in which a black person is a victim of murder, the perpetrator is black.

Some experts have blamed the 2020 spike on the coronavirus pandemic. But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute argues the spike began immediately after the riots in response to George Floyd’s death, which was months after the lockdowns began.

May 2020 recorded 1,499 murders before reaching a peak of 1,772 in July, which is far above July peaks in the previous six years, according to the New York Times, citing FBI data.

Progressive leaders have implemented criminal-justice reforms with the intent of rectifying the imbalance of black Americans who are arrested, convicted and incarcerated, Fox News Digital said. But in cities such as New York, the reforms resulted only in a spike in crime, experts say.

Hannah Meyers, director of the policing and public safety initiative at the Manhattan Institute, and Jim Quinn, a former executive district attorney in the Queens district attorney’s office, published an essay in the New York Times on the subject.

They argued that by “aiming for racial equity in criminal justice rather than focusing solely on deterring and responding to crime, policymakers seem to have neglected the foundational purpose of law and order.”

“What has followed — a sharp rise in victims of crime, who remain disproportionately Black, and a slight increase in the percentage of Rikers Island inmates who are Black — is a racial imbalance of a more troubling kind,” the authors wrote.

One year after the death of George Floyd in policy custody in Minneapolis, a consortium of news organizations asked 800 Minneapolis voters what they thought of the city’s police department.

Most viewed the department unfavorably, Slate reported.

Yet three-quarters of the poll’s black respondents said the city should not reduce its police force.

In fact, black voters were considerably more opposed to the idea than were white voters.

A USA Today/Detroit Free Press poll in Detroit had a similar result. Black respondents named public safety as their top concern and ranked police reform last. And a higher percentage of black residents opposed defunding the police than white residents.

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This article was originally published by the WND News Center.

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