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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 think for people like De Blasio the “right to be safe” is about the “right” to force others to wear masks and pay for your health care/insurance.
Up here in the Great White North, when Trudeau père brought in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms back in 1982 he snuck in a fundamental right to “security of the person”. Those four little undefined words have been the impetus for copious terrible legislation and court decisions. e.g. Liability waivers aren’t worth much up here because one cannot waive a “fundamental” constitutional right.
I like your comment, but one thing that is unsettling is that everyone now uses the expression “health care” in place of the normal, legitimate term “medical care”. It’s as if the conversation was greatly shifted deliberately from the scientific, functional utilization and provision of medical science to one of the provision of a general and vague healthiness. One is almost entirely responsible for one’s health, in diet, exercise, smoking, drinking, driving, associations and relationships one keeps, etc., and these things don’t have to be paid for by anyone else. But medical care is a specific subset of the pursuit of healthiness — and this is only what needs to be provided and paid for, whether by commercial insurance or government supplying it universally.
It’s as if the government wants people to place more and more reliance on healthiness as something supplied by others — even as an inalienable right.
Part of the problem with “healthiness” is that – especially if other people are paying for it – it leads to a belief that it’s valid for government to insist that people not smoke, etc.
I remember when I first started working full-time in the 1950’s my employer shared the cost of a hospitalization insurance plan. I cannot recall details but I’m sure most routine health issues were individual matters and that insurance was mainly to help if a hospitalization was required.
Or drink. Or speed. Or ride without seat belts. Or ride without helmets. Or eat sugar. Or salt. Or meat. Or fart.
I stopped eating farts a looong time ago.
Yes, when I was a kid with a sore throat my mother would take me to the doctor and pay a percentage (we had Blue Cross). In decades past, doctors have told me, everyone paid directly for their medical care; this it would seem give people skin in the game for taking care at least marginally for their own health and life choices, sort of like buying an affordable car according to your budget, and paying for maintaining it. And back then, doctors wrote off unpaid patient debts and gave a portion of their medical practice services for free.
But now, mostly due to decades of the government’s involvement, people pay through the nose for broad coverage of medical care, and pay minimal co-pays, and argue about even these small payments. I can’t blame them exclusively. But “health care being a right” and the older “pay for service” are worlds apart.
One difference too is that technology has lead to treatments and cures for things that in the past had to be just let go to see what happened. And people want those treatments and cures, whether they can afford them or not. Acting like those treatments and cures are “rights” is one way of getting them without paying themselves.
I have no printable response to this.
Off topic from the post, and I’m partially responsible for bringing up rights in my earlier comment, but have you ever noticed that none of these twits bother to elaborate on what would constitute a violation of the supposed right to health care, or what actions they could take in response to a violation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETxmCCsMoD0
So you say! 😂
Whether it ought to be called a “right” or not the state and local governments have the authority to tax us to pay for health care and mandate things like wearing masks. That’s why who is elected to state and local governments is pretty important. The days when some complete nut job, an avowed Antifa member, for example, can be elected to city council by a small minority of citizens who are also nut cases, a la Portland, have to come to an end.
Why do New Yorkers keep electing people like De Blasio, Cuomo, and AOC? Probably because very few of them vote.
It’s the city’s history, going all the way back to before World War I, to elect progressive Democrat mayors who fark things up, and then, and usually only when there’s no higher-up Republican on the state or national level to blame for the city’s problems, the city voters put a Republican reformer into office to fix the mess. That in turn makes the city far more livable about a half a decade later …. which then attracts a new crop of progressives to New York who have no idea about the bad old days, while others get complacent and think the bad old days can’t return.
That opens the door for the angry progressives, who either never thought the bad old days were all that bad, because they were in charge, or try to come up with every reason why the reforms put in by the Republican mayor had zero to with why the quality-of-life improved. Because they’re energized to get back into power, you ended up with a William O’Dwyer after LaGuardia or a Bill de Blasio after Giuliani and Bloomberg (who kept Rudy’s police reforms, but only got elected because 9/11 was a temporary game-changer).