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Police Call It Quits
In Portland, the police are leaving the force. More have left in the last month than in the whole of the previous year. A backlog in paperwork probably conceals that many more have filed for retirement. The reason for this lies in the cowardly, detestable, and fickle political leadership of the city, which has refused to do anything as the city is torn apart by rioting. Politicians running against the current mayor are, if anything, even crazier than he is. The front runner is avowed Antifa.
The police chief there, Jami Resch, resigned amid criticism of her department coming from the city council. It seems they didn’t like Resch’s attempts to crack down on rioting.
One wonders what will be left of Portland in another year or so. The fact that they are poised to elect an Antifa member as mayor bespeaks a city-wide suicide pact.
In fact, police all across the country are resigning. Minneapolis, Atlanta, South Florida, and Buffalo have all seen police leaving, in some cases in explicit protest of policy. Unlike Portland, the numbers leaving are not high enough to cause problems for their departments so far except perhaps for Buffalo, which had to completely reconstitute their emergency response team.
In Dallas, the police chief, Ulysha Hall, resigned subsequent to criticism from the city council which complained about her crackdown on violent protests. Hall’s response to riots was vigorous with 647 arrested and tear gas used freely. She probably kept the rioters from overtaking the city. City council members whined about her being too rough, but at least Dallas isn’t burned out. We wait to find out whether the new leadership will be as faithful to the citizens of Dallas as Hall was.
Erika Shields, police chief of Atlanta, resigned after extensive efforts on her part to be understanding toward protesters. She left after a black man was shot resisting arrest. This was the infamous man-asleep-in-the-drive-through incident in which the perp attempted to shoot an officer with that officer’s Tazer. Under ordinary circumstances, this event would be unremarkable and the police would be held blameless, but these are not ordinary times.
Carmen Best, Seattle’s first black female police chief, resigned at the beginning of September after sparring with the city council. She did so partly in response to the city council going through with plans to defund police. Here again, the police chief wanted to enforce the law and the politicians didn’t like that.
In all these cases the police chiefs had previously been praised for their progressive policies and efforts to reform the police and improve community relations.
Published in Policing
I don’t blame them, I wouldn’t want the job in the best of times and this ain’t the best of times…….
It can take centuries to build a city, and only a few months to destroy it. Detroit has not come back from 1967, yet. It went from a city of more than a million-and-a-half people to about one-third its former population. We’ll watch as other cities follow the Detroit path.
The job of police patrolling and responding to calls involving potential violence as well as traffic and other routine encounters that can escalate must be one of the most stressful occupations we have. I don’t view these moves as positive in any way.
The policing issues supposedly causing these protests are essentially local government issues. They are real but not in the context being addressed. The issues are management issues, albeit difficult to solve, but are being used by a Marxist organization to sow nationwide discord and turn a national election to favor extreme Leftists policies not part of the American concepts supporting individual liberty.
Resignations of blacks in management roles will now be used to further the narrative that remaining police forces are racists.
So, I’ll speak to only the South Florida piece of this mosaic.
This has been a long time coming, and the current unrest and lack of political support for the police is not, in my view, the primary cause of the mass resigning of the SWAT team. First note that the team walked off of the SWAT job, but did not resign from the police force.
When one reads of the “mass resignation” of the SWAT team of Hallandale city, the immediate emotional response of a civic minded reader is “Oh, my goodness, this whole city lost its SWAT team in these trying times.” Not exactly. Hallandale could well be called North Miami. Within Miami-Dade, and what would justifiably one would think of as The City Of Miami, the last 10-15 years has seen a fracturing of neighborhoods that can be considered part of the city proper into their own municipalities.
Hallandale Beach, Hallandale, Hialeah, Doral, Brickell, Kendall, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove (I think), Miami Beach, South Beach (I think) and more have all splintered into stand alone municipalities. Note the quote from the former Hallandale Beach SWAT officer:
This is a sadly predictable, but now considered unintended consequence of this metropolitan splintering.
Also, South Florida has changed the meaning of “police academy.”
Used to be, a prospective officer had to get an offer of employment by an LEO, contingent upon passing the academy, then attend a basic Training-like 12 week academy. Standards were high and centralized. If a prospective officer were screwing up in the academy, he’d get a call from (usually a sergeant) from the LEO that sponsored– and paid for–his attendance telling him he better shape up.
Now, the “police academy” experience has been privatized. A kid pays out of pocket to attend a 9 to 5 “academy.” Once he gets his certification, he begins applying for LEO jobs. All the local community colleges and major universities offer a program; what do you think they’re going to do if having to choose between dropping a paying student or passing a problem on to the LEO that will eventually hire him.
Still, Hallandale Beach will not be unsupported by a SWAT-capable unit if they need it. There are some outstanding units available to support. I’ve worked with the Miami-Dade SRT, who could potentially support Hallandale Beach, and they are nothing short of superb.
One of the ironies of this is many of the police officials resigning are Black, in fact a number of Black female police chiefs have resigned recently.
Making the classic NYT headline
“Women and minorities hardest hit” a reality….
That is just wrong.
Concur.
It makes you wonder how many cities were protected from rioting despite the local political leadership. If the better police chiefs surrender to political harrassment and lack of support, Round 2 or 3 (such as following November elections) could be a more widespread problem.
Good post Roderic. The City Councils, Mayors and DA’s in way too many of these cities are basically on the side of the “mostly peaceful protestors”. Latest example, Portland just enacted a ban on the use of facial recognition technology including by the police – this in the midst of night after night of riots and arson.
I hope I can get this thought out coherently. There is a pattern among leftist idiots such as DeBlasio of talking about people’s rights. The example that comes to mind is his response to the question of whether people have a constitutional right to own firearms as a means of self-defense. He refused to answer – who was surprised by that refusal? – and said only that people “have a right to be safe”. To borrow from Jefferson, how do people “secure those rights”? They institute governments and also police forces. The police help secure the right to be safe by enforcing laws and preserving some social order. Then leftist idiots destroy the effectiveness of the police forces, and in doing so, destroy the right to be safe.
Same story in Rochester: https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2020/09/09/rochester-ny-police-resign-what-we-know-about-chief-singletary-morabito-departure/5756270002/
Isn’t it interesting that the same people who are anti-gun and have argued (among other arguments) that there’s no need for citizens to have firearms when there are police (i. e. government experts in firearms) around to defend the citizens, are the same people now getting on board the Defund the Police lunacy.
A message that needs to get out to all Americans is that the issue of local police interaction with citizens is a local one for local management. The President in his executive role has a responsibility to enforce federal law. State and local law enforcement is the responsibility of state and local officials, that would be governors, mayors, and city and county managers. Why are local citizens letting local officials get away with disregarding their responsibilities and then trying to blame their failures on those who have no responsibility? President Trump is not the actual and real cause of anything we are seeing in these local riots.
Well, they’re hiring in Houston. The Houston chief (I think it was) said, essentially – if you have a good record and are looking to leave a bad city, we want to talk to you.
*****
And speaking of Houston:
In the early 1980’s, Houston hired Atlanta Public Safety Commissioner Lee Brown to be Chief of Police. Brown was not popular in Atlanta because of his abysmal performance as he oversaw the investigation of the Atlanta Child Murders case. My uncle intoned, “Atlanta’s loss is…….Houston’s loss.”
From DFW radio talk the day after she resigned, the Democrat mayor is actually supporting full funding for the police and calling for cutting the pay of the top civilian employees in the city to give the citizens some relief from the tax burden in a hard year. The police union leader said the chief had failed to communicate clearly with the rank and file over her tenure and did not have people in place between her and the rank and file who knew the department well enough to help her. That is not to say that the city council is on the right side. Indeed, the city council is pushing police defunding, resisted by the Democrat mayor.
The Portland, Multnomah County, and state elected officials on the westside of the Cascades are not capable of governing on a good day, much less during an insurrection.
I’ve listed the training model for the Portland Police Bureau:
A lot of time and money is invested in training. Experienced officers are leaving, and hiring competent officers will be extremely difficult due to a George Soros DA in Multnomah County. Candidates will seek out an agency in a community that is supportive of officers.
Tuesday’s video of Al Sharpton on “Morning Joe” is telling, because you’re now in a position where even someone like Reverend Al, who made his career on attacking law enforcement in the years prior to Rudy Guilani’s police reforms, is saying the police cutbacks put in place by Bill de Blasio is causing the spike in the city’s crime rate.
Sharpton puts the blame on “Latte Liberals”, which is pretty much the 21st Century version of the “Limousine Liberals” who were to blame for the spike in crime rates in the 1960s that lasted for the better part of three decades, and he’s not wrong here, just selective in not also pointing the finger at #BLM activists for pushing to defund the police, along with the angry white progressive Antifa backers….
The one thing this has done, though, is shown that the left’s claims from the late 1990s on that improved and increased police enforcement had nothing to do with the drop in crime rates, was false. Because they refused to admit those mid-1990s reforms improved the quality-of-life in cities like New York, they came up with all sorts of alternative explanations, like less crack cocaine use, or the Baby Boomer demographic aging out of their high-crime years — anything but give credit to Giuliani, William Bratton and others who pushed against the 1960s-70s-80s progressive beliefs that the police were part of the problem, not the solution.
Two decades of low crime rates have allowed people to forget why those rates were low, and led to the election of progressive mayors and district attorneys, because too many voters either ignored recalling, or weren’t around for the bad old days, and didn’t think having woke elected officials would make a difference. The past three-plus months have been working to prove those people and officials wrong, but only the voters in the affected cities can change things next election day, and some may hate the right more than they love having safer neighborhoods.
Agree, but also have to note:
Crazy leftist policies put people in danger –> People react against absence of logic/sense –> 2020 Election
I went to school with a guy who had been a police officer in a small city in California (let’s call it “Personville,” though that may be a slight exaggeration in that I’m not sure there was that much gang rivalry, just one gang) back in the ’70s. He told us that the department didn’t send you to the academy until you’d been on the job for a year.
It ain’t just the Portland city pols who are seditious.
Using the Ace of Spades translation engine:
But not to worry. Her boss wants to de-enforce or eliminate the law she was arrested for violating.
Because Democrats are for mostly peaceful protests.
The minorities and women who have have their businesses burned down and their communities plagued by crime have it worse than the retiring police chiefs.
How about what Detroit’s council?told the police? No tear gas, no rubber bullets, no batons, etc., while confronting ‘peaceful protesters! Oh, wait, that’s ‘mostly peaceful protesters’…
I can’t help thinking this is one of the times when people who think they know what they want, deserve to get it… good and hard!
Do you think that when Portland and Seattle became like Detroit, some of the yellow dog democrats will have second thoughts.
I don’t know how many of the left – the white left, anyway – actually lives IN PORTLAND, rather than the higher-income suburbs such as Gresham etc. They may not think it’s a big deal if “Downtown” Portland burns, in the name of “equality” or whatever, since those are not THEIR homes or businesses. And not really their police department either.
I find it odd that I can make a strong social justice warrior case against social justice warriors. But as time goes by, it seems less and less odd.
Brown went to Atlanta from Portland, where he was Multnomah County Sheriff. And my boss. We were happy to pawn him off on Atlanta.
The mayor also just forbade the police using CS.
He also went from Houston to New York, where he was David Dinkins police commissioner when the murder rate peaked at 6 1/2 per day in the early 90s, and was eventually forced to resign after the police basically stood down during the Crown Heights riot (after Korean grocers also were attacked in Brooklyn with very little protection provided by NYPD). The fact that Brown then went back to Houston and got himself elected mayor may either have been a sign of Houstonians having way too much respect for law enforcement titles over achievements, or it could explain why Shelia Jackson Lee keeps getting re-elected by the same voters.
That was completely coherent but not to someone like DeBlasio. Be safe = having a well trained and functioning police force – the police force = people being forced to arm themselves – taking away those rights because of political views = further anarchy………..