By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, June
22, 2021
WANTED: Trained security
professionals to deal with elevated levels of crime and mayhem at risk to their
own life and limb, while getting called racist oppressors and potentially
thrown under the bus by elected officials.
This has become the de facto employment
notice for police around the country, and, unsurprisingly, cops and prospective
cops don’t find it particularly enticing. Why would they?
America’s cities are feeling the effects
of a years-long experiment in what would happen if nearly everyone celebrated a
movement based on the idea that police are racist goons — if they excused
rioting, explained away spiraling crime, and made it clear to cops that if they
make a mistake, they will, at the very least, become instantly infamous.
It hasn’t gone well.
Portland, Ore., has been a veritable
research lab for this experiment. The latest blow to the city is the mass
resignation of the Portland Police Bureau’s Rapid Response Team, which is
responsible for policing protests in the city — a challenging, endless, and
literally thankless job.
Rioting has become part of the fabric of
urban life in Portland, where demonstrators have battled with cops nearly every
other night since the death of George Floyd.
The city’s leadership has been hapless, at
best, in dealing with the chaos, and loud voices have been condemning the cops.
After an officer in the unit was charged
with a crime for striking a photographer in the head with a baton after he had
pushed her to the ground, the members considered it a last straw.
Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty
kicked them on the way out the door, calling the resignations “yet another
example of a rogue paramilitary organization that is unaccountable to the
elected officials and residents of Portland.” She didn’t want them to quit but
instead to stay on the job so they could be fired.
Either way, she thinks it’s a great
opportunity to show what “deescalation in policing looks like” — effectively
blaming the police for black-clad thugs constantly trying to burn things down.
The same argument was made about federal officers during the Trump
administration, but, lo and behold, the disorder continued even after federal
forces stepped back and even after Joe Biden was elected president.
The head of the Portland police union
issued a stinging statement in reply to Hardesty, saying that members of the
unit “did not volunteer to have Molotov cocktails, fireworks, explosives,
rocks, bottles, urine, feces, and other dangerous objects thrown at them.” Nor,
he continued, did they volunteer “to be subject to warrantless criticism and
false allegations by elected officials, or to suffer through baseless
complaints and lengthy investigations devoid of due process.”
What’s happening in Portland’s riot unit
is a microcosm of what’s happening everywhere. According to a survey by the
Police Executive Research Forum, police resignations were up by 45 percent and
retirements up 18 percent over the past year, while hiring has been slow.
In other words, when we need more cops in
response to rising crime, we are getting fewer. This is like cutting back on
firefighters while a wildfire is raging or reducing the size of the Army while
it is fighting a war. No rational person would want smaller forces right now,
yet the elite culture, leftist politicians, and obnoxious street protesters are
conspiring to shrink them.
The crux of the matter is the moral status
of the police. The question is whether they fulfill an absolutely crucial role
that deserves to be honored and supported to the hilt by public officials, who
unstintingly back order on the streets as a foundational public good — or not.
There are signs that even liberal
jurisdictions are beginning to get this (crime has been a top issue in the New
York City mayoral race). We aren’t going to recruit or keep good cops unless
the job description, which has become so off-putting, is again worthy of the
indispensability of the work.
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