“Depolicing”

A new study exclusively obtained by Fox News found an alarming increase in retirements and resignations across 10 police departments in the U.S. over the past year following protests.

Research from the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund (LELDF) analyzed active police memberships and activity from June 1, 2020, to April 30, 2021, and compared it to the same period a year prior – meaning the study analyzed the numbers before and after the murder of George Floyd, which prompted national and global protests that demanded police reform to the tune of “Defund the Police.”

After the police department in this midsize mountain city lost more than a third of its force to resignations and retirements last year, bringing in seven new academy graduates in December seemed like a small step in the right direction.

As its roster fell from 238 officers to only about 150, the department had to drop some community services and saw its response times climb. Department leaders gutted detective units to put more officers on road patrol. Officers were forced to triage calls, and they stopped responding in person to some they deemed low-priority.

San Francisco will provide monthly stipends to discourage gun violence.

San Francisco has a new plan to stem a recent surge in deadly shootings: pay potential shooters. That’s the principle behind the city’s new Dream Keeper Fellowship, which will enroll 30 individuals deemed at high risk of shooting or being shot and pay them a $300 monthly stipend. They can collect an additional $200 per month for completing such milestones as taking job interviews, complying with probation, or meeting with the life coach assigned to them.

The program has a certain logic. Crime is a highly concentrated phenomenon: in San Francisco, police analysis has found that just 12 criminal gangs are the major drivers of shootings. If incentives work, then paying people not to shoot could conceivably drive down crime.

Bullets crashed through the walls of Brandy Earthman’s house on Minneapolis’ north side one evening this summer. The shots sheared through the door of the living room where her children were playing. One severed a bone in her 19-year-old son’s arm.

The gunfire was part of a wave of shootings this year in Minneapolis, where killings are on the rise and, Earthman and others complain, the police are frequently nowhere to be seen.

“They don’t care anymore,” she said. “They’re just going to let everybody kill themselves.”

h/t OB

An anti-police nonprofit gets the facts wrong.

Police leaders, local officials, and analysts have been sounding the alarm about “de-policing,” including mass resignations and retirements in America’s police departments, driven by the increasing challenges of the job in the wake of last summer’s anti-cop protests. Now the Marshall Project, a media organization devoted to criminal-justice reform, has some news: data say that the de-policing trend is all made up.

A Chicago police union boss says the city’s mayor Lori Lightfoot is to blame for a deadly shooting which killed one cop and seriously-injured another.

John Catanzara, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police Chicago Lodge #7, told Fox News that Lightfoot’s tough on cops, soft on crime approach has emboldened criminals like the killer who shot and killed Ella French, 29, and blasted a bullet into her brain.

He also said that dozens of officers were justified in turning their backs on the mayor as she approached them at University of Chicago Medical Center on Saturday.

Last June Portland’s Mayor Ted Wheeler, who is also the police commissioner, decided to put an end to the Gun Violence Reduction Team (GVRT) as part of an effort to reimagine policing. The $6 million that would have gone to the team was redirected ” toward communities of color.” Even at the time the assistant chief of police warned their could be serious consequences.

Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, who had ‘Black Lives Matter’ painted on the street that leads to the White House, now wants to hire more police officers and reopen the courts, citing an increase in homicides in the US capital.

Slashing the police budget for 2021 by $15 million hurt recruitment, resulting in only 42 new hires as opposed to 250 in a normal year, Bowser said on Wednesday. She called for another $11 million to hire and train 20 more officers in the current fiscal year, and 150 in 2022. The proposal is unlikely to be approved by the city council, however.

Yesterday, social media sites exploded over a viral video that purported to show a white police officer “planting evidence” in a black driver’s car. This led to an intense mob atmosphere that targeted the officer in question. He was eventually doxxed as has become the trend in these situations. The obvious point meant to be gleaned from the video was that the officer is a racist and police are unfairly abusing black people.