NAACP Called 'Detached' Over Policing

In deep blue cities across the country, "progressives" have enacted policies that, in the most charitable interpretation, they seem to think will help stamp out any racial iniquities that still plague our law enforcement and criminal justice systems. These measures often include funding cuts to police departments, or non-enforcement of laws against minor crimes, or non-prosecution of many criminal offenses.

(I think of the whole as the opposite of the "Broken Windows Theory" of policing in both method and results.)

Waves of crime follow. And when ordinary people, including the victims, make the obvious connection between the policies and the outcomes, they are basically called idiots.

The latest example comes from Oakland, California, which is experiencing a nasty crime wave after its police department saw an $18 million budget cut and a fifty-man reduction in the size of its force.

The NAACP out there is pleading for better police protection, as Jeff Jacoby reports:

I didn't know what a "side show" is until this article caused me to become curious. Imagine something like this blocking your route to work for the better part of an hour! (Video from Wikimedia Commons. License.)

Now, two years later, amid shocking levels of mayhem and murder, the local NAACP president and the city's foremost Black pastor are pleading with city officials to open their eyes.

"African Americans are disproportionately hit the hardest by crime in East Oakland and other parts of the city," they write. They are under no illusions about where the blame lies. It isn't systemic racism or white privilege or out-of-control cops that have made Oakland so unsafe. It is the political assault on common-sense policing -- the replacement of tried-and-true law enforcement practices with an ideology from which even lifelong liberals like former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis have recoiled.

"Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney's unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life-threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals," the NAACP letter declares. "If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar." [bold added]

The response to this from one of the leaders of an "activist" group that supports the measures and claims concern for the welfare of these victims?

Another critic of the NAACP letter was Cat Brooks, a founder of Oakland's hard-left Anti Police-Terror Project, which seeks, in its words, to "radically transform -- and eventually abolish -- police and policing as we know it." The NAACP chapter president and the bishop, Brooks told the San Francisco Standard, are "completely detached from what's actually happening." [bold added]

If anything, Jacoby makes this look polite. The source makes Brooks look even more like a hipster saying Okay, boomer than she already does.

I hope that anyone who would consider electing a "progressive" gets wind of this spectacular level of arrogance and condescension. Someone is definitely out of touch here, and I don't think it's the authors of that letter.

-- CAV