By Sam Stone
Chaos is coming. Police agencies across the country, battered by low pay, brow-beaten by paid anti-police protesters, and hung out to dry by feckless politicians are already experiencing a staffing crisis. And it shows, violent crime is up in virtually every city in the country. New Yorkers are avoiding the subway and fearful to venture out of their houses at night, even in formerly quiet neighborhoods. More than half of all San Francisco residents report being the victim of a theft or larceny. Police in Chicago have basically withdrawn from significant portions of the city, and working class families are paying the price.
This is only the beginning.
Over the next 5 years, a massive wave of retirements will hit virtually every major police force in the United States, and there are no recruits to take the place of these senior officers. Austin, Texas, has had 77 officers pull retirement papers for March. Another 232 are eligible to retire immediately. Austin’s 1800 total officers – already hundreds short of the number needed – will soon find themselves stretched even further. In my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, a third of the entire force of 2800 officers will be eligible to retire within the next few years. What’s even more worrisome is that municipal police agencies are now reporting that officers who are a decade or less from earning their full retirement benefits are walking away with ever greater frequency. Until 2020, such a thing was virtually unheard of. Leaving a few years early will cost these officers hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement earnings. They’re leaving anyway.
It's hard to see this turning around. The problem began long before 2020’s Summer of Love. By then George Soros and his idiot allies had already spent tens of millions to elect pro-crime District Attorneys all across the country, and bought hundreds more local and state officials to forward their asinine, anti-police agenda. But Soros – with the avid assistance of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division – did something else in those years leading up to the George Floyd riots. They paid for thousands of professional anti-police activists, too. That’s right, in addition to the millions Soros and his misguided minions have dumped into making America’s cities less safe, the Department of Justice has contributed millions more. Your tax dollars have been used to assault and assail police across the country via Consent Decrees issued by the DOJ against police departments in 26 cities including Portland, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, and Chicago.
That’s why no matter how many accommodations cities make to the cop haters, it is and never will be enough. If they admitted it was, all those hundreds and thousands of professional protestors would be out of a job. The pressure is constant and un-ending. And politicians keep caving to them, in part because many of those politicians are being funded by the same forces of chaos.
What’s the end game for this assault on law and order? Two things. First, money. Public safety is the single biggest line item on every city’s budget, and the left wants to redirect those funds away from law and order and into their own pockets via a never-ending list of spending programs that grow like Jack’s bean stalk. Second, control. Local police departments tend to be staffed by people who are more conservative than the population at large. As we’ve seen, the agents of leftist chaos have found much more fertile ground in our national law enforcement and intelligence agencies. If the breakdown of law and order continues, and departments remain unable to recruit the numbers they need, how long before calls for a nationalized police force move from the fringes of the left, to the mainstream?
Given the abuses that keep coming to light in the FBI, CIA, DOJ and a host of other federal agencies and their evident desire for ever more power and control over our population, my guess is not very long.
Sam Stone is a candidate for the Phoenix City Council. You can learn more about him at www.SamStone.vote
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