With Zoran Mamdani poised to win the New York mayor’s race, the red herring of “defunding the police” is rearing its head again.
I say “red herring” because almost nobody wants to actually defund policy. That’s silly. But Republicans love being able to hit Democrats over the head with it.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) said in a congressional hearing that, once police departments are “defunded,” Democrats can “call a crackhead” when somebody breaks into their houses. He made sure to repeat the phrase for a political ad.
The issue is that “Defund the Police,” which is probably inappropriately named, actually calls for transferring resources from the tactical focus of most police departments and transferring it to things like de-escalation training, i.e., training how to handle people who haven’t committed any obvious crime, but who are in the midst of a mental health crisis.
Remember, it was a decision by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1967 to create the country’s first SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics, previously Special Weapons Attack Team) unit and begin dressing like G.I. Joe heading into combat. Many of us believe that that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Things only got worse from there. In 1989, as a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress allowed the U.S. Department of Defense to begin transferring surplus military hardware to local police departments.
The Atlantic Monthly put things in perspective just weeks after the start of the so-called Global War on Terror, when it wrote that this transfer from the Defense Department to local police departments included everything from combat-capable body armor to armored personnel vehicles to attack helicopters.
Serious think tanks like the Brookings Institution also have weighed in on the damage that these hyper-militarized police departments have done in local communities.
The bottom line, really, is, as one example, “Does Ohio State University really need a tank?” Incidentally, that’s not a question that I came up with. It’s a question posed by the school’s student newspaper in an article published when the Ohio State Police Department took delivery of a fully armored Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle.
As the article’s author noted, the vehicle was “an incredibly overpowered and over-armored machine of war.” The university’s police chief agreed that that’s exactly what it was, and added that the university, “is frequently like a war zone, and it requires an equal, if not escalated, response.”
We’re talking about Ohio State University here, in the center of Columbus, Ohio. The university’s police chief is either deluded, lying, or an idiot.
Hellbound and Down 
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