No matter how many times I see the video of George Floyd being murdered, it sickens me. No matter how many times I watch peaceful gatherings all over the world protesting, it never fails to move me. But no matter how many times I hear “defund the police,” it scares me, politically for going too far and personally — because when something goes bump in the night, I want to call 911.
Call it white privilege, or missing the moment, but “defund” only works as a chant, a slogan or a bumper sticker, and in a rush at that. As a substitute for crafting a list of demands from the moral high ground recently captured, it’s an invitation to narrow the coalition for massive reform. Going too far is not going to get us far enough. It threatens to make those seeing for the first time just how much black lives don’t matter retreat.
Yes, it’s easy to see why the Minneapolis City Council, after what happened there to George Floyd, would vote by a veto-proof majority to dismantle its police department. Or why “Defund the Police” would be added to the mural on 16th St. in front of the White House that says “Black Lives Matter.” We’ve seen rot at the core of some departments, like the 57 Buffalo officers who resigned from a special squad in solidarity with the two officers charged for knocking over a 75-year-old man and leaving him, bleeding from his head, on the ground.
And fortunately, the other side is going off the edge with the equally fatuous cry of “law and order.” The president is calling a meeting at the White House today to double down on it.
Many Republicans only see 300 officers hurt at demonstrations — due in no small measure to using violence against the peaceful and looters alike — to justify coming down solely on the police side. It’s the reason given for clearing Lafayette Park of law-abiding protesters with pepper gas (which Attorney General William Barr says, despite a Justice Department definition otherwise, isn’t a chemical irritant, with no evidence of projectiles being thrown, and herding those arrested into small holding areas for many hours while there’s a virus still raging.
To amplify his message, Trump for good measure decided to reopen the wound the NFL is trying to close when it finally apologized to African-American players who gently protested police brutality in seasons past by taking a knee during the national anthem. We don’t yet know when football will resume, but we do know that when it does Trump has a presidential tweet ordering them to stand up straight and salute: “NO KNEELING.”
Trump’s position to the right leaves room for Democrats to reclaim the middle. Joe Biden tweeted that he supports the “urgent need for reform” but not defunding the police. Gov. Cuomo is going to have to do more, but he has moved to repeal a law that shielded bad cops’ records from going public. Congressional Democrats are meeting today to propose legislation that would remove other obstacles to prosecuting police misconduct — the rules that meant officer Floyd’s killer, Derek Chauvin, was not charged immediately with murder but put on administrative leave.
The legislation would allow those harmed by police to recover damages and would create a national registry to track misconduct so that rogue cops couldn’t move from department to department like bad priests assigned to new parishes. It would also ban certain chokeholds and other tactics, like the knee which killed Floyd.
This is just a start. Shelves at every think tank groan under the weight of reform plans. And there are real-world successes in cities like Camden that have undergone a radical overhaul.
Trump was so wrong to say that George Floyd is looking down happily on Friday’s economic numbers. Floyd, if he’s looking at all, and his family want his black life that didn’t matter to get closer to the promised land where all of them do. Mend the police departments around the country, don’t defund them.
Carlson is a political columnist.
