Activist Brittany Packnett-Cunningham scolds those who blame violence on the #DefundThePolice movement with an inconvenient truth.
Violence not caused by #DefundThePolice
Activist responded to Stephanie Ruhle with the following prescient statement. It says it all.
“So Stephanie, I think it’s important to begin with the simple fact that all of us, and I do mean all of us, want safer communities,” Packnett-Cunningham said. “Everyone wants and deserves to be able to walk out of their home, walk freely on the street, play with their child, and ensure that everyone is safe while doing so. But what we also know to be true is that defunding the police is not just about taking money out of an institution that continues to prove ineffective. It’s also about refunding the people. It’s about ensuring that the services that people need to ensure safe communities from the ground up are actually being funded and resourced to their full capacity.”
But Packnett-Cunningham was not done.
“I think that there are a lot of police unions and GOP operatives that would like for us to believe that this recent crime wave has everything to do with this idea of defunding the police,” Brittany continued. “But guess what, Stephanie? The police haven’t been defunded. You actually look at the 50 largest cities, law enforcement spending as a share of the general expenditure in each of those cities actually rose slightly from 13.6% to 13.7%. And many of the cities that have talked about removing that money, like Minneapolis and Seattle, they’ve actually paused or slowed how they were thinking about moving that money. So this rising crime is not the fault of the movement. It’s actually the fault of the police, and this has been our point all along. Why should we keep funding systems and institutions that keep rendering themselves ineffective? We should be talking about gun control, livable wages, fair housing, education. That’s where we should be moving the money to, to ensure truly safe streets.”
So yes. It is the current police structure responsible for ineffectively controlling crime. Their incompetence is evidenced by the results and outcomes.
