Mayoral candidates can’t run away fast enough from BLM rhetoric

There’s at least a week’s worth of good news in this one Washington Post article about the backlash against the “defund the police” campaign. However, I think the Post overstates the extent to which Democrats are truly moving away from anti-police views and policies.

Let’s start, though, with the good news. It begins in the first three paragraphs:

Mayoral candidates across the country are closing out their campaigns pledging to restore law and order, a major setback for racial justice protesters who only a year ago thought they had permanently reshaped the debate on policing in American cities.

As voters head to the polls Tuesday, local elections are dominated by discussions about safety and law enforcement amid a surge in violent crime. The tone of the debate, even in many liberal urban communities, highlights how major policing reforms have stalled.

From Buffalo to Seattle, Democratic politicians who once championed significant reductions or reallocations of police department budgets are backtracking. In other cities, including Cleveland, liberal candidates are being hammered over their stances on public safety.

The shift, of course, is driven by voter revulsion at the results of anti-police and other soft-on-crime policies:

A Pew Research Center poll published Tuesday shows that 47 percent of Americans want to increase funding for police, compared to 15 percent who want to decrease funding. In June 2020, when the racial justice protests were at their peak, 31 percent of Americans wanted to increase funding, while 25 percent supported a decrease. Three-fourths of Black Americans, who form a decisive voting bloc in many mayoral contests, either support increasing or keeping spending on police the same, Pew found.

The shift in public opinion comes after large U.S. cities experienced a 30 percent jump in killings in 2020, the biggest one-year increase since the federal government began compiling national figures in the 1960s.

(Emphasis added)

We keep hearing about a “racial reckoning.” Maybe the media should start talking about a law and order reckoning.

Here’s some good news from Buffalo, New York:

Community activist India Walton is attempting Tuesday to become the country’s first socialist mayor in decades after she defeated the incumbent mayor, Byron Brown, in the June Democratic primary. Walton’s bid for public office grew out of the racial justice protests that swept the nation following Floyd’s murder, and she had been a fixture at Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

Before her campaign for mayor, Walton embraced calls to shift resources away from police. According to the Buffalo News, Walton used expletive-laden anti-police chants at a rally. Her affiliation with the Black Lives Matter movement has become fodder for Brown, who is mounting a write-in campaign.

On the campaign trail, Walton has largely stopped talking about cutting funding for police and instead stresses the need for accountability for police misconduct and a greater role for mental health professionals in responding to residents in distress.

The socialist has transitioned from insane to merely clueless.

I love this passage:

Jesse Myerson, a spokesman for the Walton campaign, said Walton does not recall using profanity on the campaign trail last year. Myerson added Walton has shifted away from the “slogans of activists” during moments of “searing injustice” and is now focused on becoming an effective mayor.

A poll released Tuesday by WIVB-TV and Emerson College showed Mayor Brown holds a 17-point lead over forgetful Walton.

We’ve discussed how “defund the police” has lost its panache, and then some, in Seattle’s mayoral race. The Post brings us up-to-date:

In Seattle, a city that experienced a 73 percent increase in homicides last year, city council president and mayoral candidate M. Lorena González is also on the defensive over her past support for reducing police funding in that city by as much as 50 percent and diverting that money to social programs.

González’s chief opponent in the race, former council member Bruce Harrell, is hammering González for that stance, arguing homeowners and businesses are clamoring for safer streets in a city that has lost about 300 police officers in the last year.

“Make no mistake about it, I am not defunding the police,” Harrell charged in a debate on Thursday night. “My opponent has made it clearly a purpose-driven part [of her campaign] to defund the police.”

González responded by saying she still wants to “invest in community-based safety and non-law-enforcement systems” but will also “fully support hiring plans” to add more officers to the Seattle Police Department.

Several recent polls suggest Harrell now leads González.

(Emphasis added)

Justin Hansford, executive director of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard University, finds it “surprising how quickly Democrats are back to a law-and-order narrative.” Maybe. But it’s more surprising that the death of George Floyd induced temporary insanity in the form of a strong “defund” campaign.

Hanford blames the waning of that campaign on its diffuse leadership structure, most notably the fact that the movement never established a clear leader or political arm. There’s no limit to the cluelessness of many on the left.

At the same time, conservatives shouldn’t be so clueless as to take the rhetoric of suddenly law-and-order conscious Democrats at full face value. There’s some truth — more than a little, I fear — in this observation by one of the Post’s sources:

Mayoral candidates are being compelled to respond to realities on the ground. But the response to those realities is going to be dramatically informed by what happened to George Floyd, and it will not be the response we would have seen in 2018 or 2019.

The problem for Democratic mayors is that the more their response to the reality of mounting violent crime is “informed by what happened to George Floyd,” the more the hands of police officers will be tied and the more difficult it will be even to staff a police force with enough manpower to combat the wave of violent crime.

Going forward, voters are likely to want sincere law-and-order mayors, not just law-and-order poseurs.