A defund-the-police protest in downtown Charlottesville. Photo credit: The Daily Progress
by James A. Bacon
I’ve just returned from a week in Costa Rica. The country is beautiful and the people are friendly. More than that, they’re sane. I saw none of the zaniness that is routinely on display in Los Estados Unidos. By contrast, here at home the lunacy is so loco that it could emanate only from a people educated by a system bent upon extinguishing rational thought, and possessed by a naïveté so extreme that they believe in the social-justice equivalent of unicorns and leprechauns.
Costa Rica defunded its army back in 1948, a fact lauded by many on the left. But the country still has a police force. During my stay, the police were very much in evidence — pistol-packing guards in the airport, motorcycle cops enforcing the speed limit ($600 fines!), and agents who enforce the nation’s strict immigration laws. (Nicaraguans who overstay their visas are quickly booted out.) Maybe Costa Rican nut cases are calling for defunding the police, but they haven’t had much impact. According to Wikipedia, the number of police per 100,000 population in Costa Rica is 297 (2012 figures) — more than that of the U.S. at 242 (2019 figures).
In Charlottesville yesterday, a group calling itself SURJ, which is dedicated to ending “white supremacy,” held a protest downtown to defund the police… this in a small city where, even The Daily Progress acknowledges, gun violence is (pardon the pun) SURGing: nine homicides and 18 injuries since September. In 2021, the city had reported zero homicides, and only five the year before that.
The solution? “Loving and supporting one another,” according to one scribbler on the city’s free speech wall.
Consider the words of a certain Laura Sirgany to The Daily Progress. Her interactions with police have been negative, she said.
An ex refused to return my child and was making violent threats, and the police when contacted said, ‘That’s a domestic situation, and we don’t get involved.’” I’m very close to a person who was in a similar situation, and that situation ended in murder.
Get that? The police did not get involved in a domestic situation. So, Sirgany doesn’t like them, and she joined a protest to defund them. Perhaps it escaped her that if the police were defunded, and if there weren’t any police, the friggin’ non-existent police wouldn’t have gotten involved either! And they couldn’t get involved for anyone else, no matter how dire the situation!
A certain Maria Rincon suggested that police are worthless. ““They just show up after crimes. They don’t prevent anything from happening. And then they lock people up as if that’s going to solve anything.”
Well, actually, when you lock people up, they can’t commit crimes outside the jail or prison, so, actually, you do solve something… at least as long as the criminal stays locked up… which, unfortunately, they probably wouldn’t if SURJ had its way because the same people who want to defund the police also tend to want to empty the jails.
Apparently, the protesters think the best approach is firing the police and hiring psychologists or social workers to go in and defuse crimes before they happen.
Trouble is, the U.S. is experiencing a national mental breakdown and schools are hiring so many psychologists and social workers to deal with mayhem in the classrooms — where the policy of “loving and supporting one another” has not exactly been a resounding success — that there is now a national shortage of psychologists and social workers.
Sending in social workers might work if the crazies know there are police to back them up. What happens when the crazies figure out that the local police department has been defunded, there aren’t any police anymore, and crazies can do anything they want without fear of arrest?
Sheer lunacy.
