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DEFUNDING THE DEFUNDERS: It was a terrible headline from the New York Times: “A Violent August in NYC: Shootings Double, and Murder is up by 50%.” A year ago, in August 2019, the paper reported, there were 91 shootings in the city. This August, there were 242. Murders rose from 36 in August 2019 to 53 this August.
There’s little doubt the carnage is the result of policies pursued by Mayor Bill de Blasio, Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the city’s progressive Democratic government. New York freed thousands of inmates from Rikers Island after the arrival of coronavirus. (The city and state government’s mismanagement of the pandemic is another story.) De Blasio, in thrall to the “defund the police” movement, cut $1 billion from the police budget. He disbanded a key anti-crime unit. And what happened? Amazingly, crime went up.
Other cities, particularly those led by progressive Democrats, are experiencing similar increases in crime. And that’s before discussing the rioting and unrest that have plagued Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Kenosha, and elsewhere. So now President Trump has issued a memo to the Attorney General and the Office of Management and Budget entitled “Reviewing Funding to State and Local Government Recipients of Federal Funds That Are Permitting Anarchy, Violence, and Destruction in American Cities.”
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“The federal government provides states and localities with hundreds of billions of dollars every year, which fund a wide array of programs, such as housing, public transportation, job training, and social services,” Trump noted. “My administration will not allow federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones.” He ordered Justice and OMB to review the funding that goes to some of the most violence-plagued cities.
The target is not the violence itself, but the local and state policies that encourage the violence. So Trump asked his administration to identify localities that “forbid the police from intervening to restore order amid widespread or sustained violence or destruction.” He ordered a review of jurisdictions that allow lawless zones to develop — an apparent reference to Seattle’s CHAZ/CHOP zone, in which city officials looked the other way while anarchists took over part of the city and created a dystopian horror story.
Trump is also targeting jurisdictions that “disempower or defund police departments” and those that “refuse to accept offers of law enforcement assistance from the federal government.” That last category includes many areas where Democratic officials have refused Trump’s offers to help. In the memo, Trump specifically mentioned New York: “In light of [the city’s] unconscionable rise in violence, I have offered to provide federal law enforcement assistance, but both Mayor de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo have rejected my offer,” Trump wrote.
With that, Cuomo dashed to the nearest microphone — with a threat. “The president “better have an army if he think’s he’s gonna walk down the street in New York,” the governor said. “New Yorkers don’t want to have anything to do with him…He can’t have enough bodyguards to walk through New York City.” Other Democratic officials have requested the president not visit their state or city. Cuomo issued a physical threat.
Trump has been deeply frustrated by local officials’ refusal of his offers to help control violence in their areas. It’s as if they would rather suffer the violence than even recognize that Trump is the president. But that is what is happening now. And in the federalist system, states and cities govern themselves; the President of the United States is not the Mayor of Portland.
Trump knows that. But he also knows the states and cities are highly dependent on federal dollars. Will his new review of funding actually result in cuts? That’s highly unlikely. But the review is one more bit of pressure on those officials who would rather see their homes burn than accept federal help when Donald Trump is president.
