NYPD sees 49 percent spike in officers filing for retirement amid calls to defund police
Peter Kirsanow, member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, says Black communities suffer most when police departments suffer.
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights member Peter Kirsanow said on Tuesday that black people would be most affected if the push to defund police departments is successful.
“Defunding cops, especially in this environment, transcends your garden variety political stupidity and irresponsibility and starts to veer toward insanity and almost criminal negligence,” Kirsanow told “Fox & Friends.”
“It’s almost tantamount to saying defunding hospital ICU’s in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. After Ferguson, we had police withdraw from active policing again for some reason due to political programs and also because of consent and we saw a significant spike in crimes after a 30-year decline in overall crimes,” Kirsanow said.
DE BLASIO PROPOSES MASSIVE NYPD BUDGET CUT
As unrest over the death of George Floyd and racial inequality in general reverberates across the United States, local politicians are facing an intense new wave of pressure from protesters demanding police budget cuts as they attempt to balance keeping order in their cities and enacting reforms.
In the latest development, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is grappling with protesters who refuse to leave an encampment in front of New York's City Hall, as they demand $1 billion be cut from the police department's budget. The department's budget is about $6 billion, and the city has a July 1 budget deadline.
"The #DefundNYPD for #NYCBudgetJustice campaign is demanding at least $1 billion dollars be cut from the NYPD’s budget – and this money must be reinvested for services, programs and infrastructure that directly benefits Black, Latinx and other communities of color most devastated by COVID-19," the website for Communities United for Police Reform says.
De Blasio, in turn, proposed a plan that would cede to the protesters' demand for the $1 billion cut in police funding.
"My office presented to City Council a plan that would achieve the billion in savings for the NYPD and shift resources to young people, to communities in a way that would help address a lot of the underlying issues that we know are the cause of so many problems in our society," he said Monday.
Across the country, Seattle officials have been in their own standoff with the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP), a multiple-block area of the city's Capitol Hill neighborhood that has been occupied for weeks by activists seeking the defunding of the city's police department.
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Kirsanow said the people who are going to be affected by defunding the police are not the “theater majors who would scramble back to the suburbs after a fun night of protesting and virtue signaling.”
“It’s going to be the people in black neighborhoods. We’ve got the data on this. You can almost predict to a decimal point how many more people are going to die. We’ve already seen significant increases in Chicago, New York and L.A.,” Kirsanow said.
“People get killed and if black lives matter, you want to fund the cops."
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