Democrat-run cities that backed the push to “defund the police” are now struggling with record-high violent crime rates, according to a NYT report.
New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and other Democrat strongholds are facing a concerning rise in violence.
The soaring crime rate is forcing liberal city leaders to completely reevaluate their knee-jerk reaction in defunding police departments.
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Dailycaller.com reports: The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) lost $150 million, or 8% of its budget in 2020, The NYT reported. The Minneapolis Police Department’s and the Metropolitan Police Department’s budgets were cut by $7.7 million and $15 million, respectively.
Homicides grew by 45% in New York and 36% in Los Angeles last year, according to The NYT.
The trend can be observed in smaller cities, too. Louisville, for instance, saw a record-high number of murders at 173 homicides last year. The city is expected to exceed this number in 2021, according to The NYT.
Los Angeles City Council reversed its 2020 decision mid-May 2021, when it approved a boost in LAPD’s funding, essentially restoring the department’s original budget. The LAPD is planning to use its increased budget for hiring additional 250 officers in 2021, the report says.
Los Angeles and other cities that became part of the upward trend in violent crimes are likely to have a hard time going back to the pre-pandemic crime rates, given that the nation also witnessed a historic increase in firearm purchases in 2020, according to the report.
“We’ve lost more than a decade of progress,” Chief of the LAPD Michel Moore said, referring to 350 murders recorded in Los Angeles in 2020, the highest in the past ten years.
“I won’t argue that there is substandard housing, education, broken families, substance abuse, the systems that are racist and have systemic issues that have gone on for generations,” Moore said when asked about the “Defund The Police” movement. “But the fix of that is not to eliminate policing.”
