Real-Time Proof In Oakland That ‘Defunding The Police’ Is A White Issue

Authored by Andrea Widburg via AmericanThinker.com,

Eric Adams won the Democrat primary for mayor in New York City because he campaigned on a law-and-order platform. The New York Times found his popularity mystifying and disturbing because he refused to play to the stereotype that Blacks hate the police. If that wasn’t a strong enough signal that the Defund the Police movement is hostile to people living in crime-ridden neighborhoods, Black families in Oakland stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the police against Antifa’s “defund the police” madness.

Make no mistake about Eric Adams: He’s a leftist. However, he’s a leftist who understands that even socialism needs a functioning infrastructure, and that cannot exist when anarchy is the name of the game in a community.

Already before the primary anointing Adams as the Democrat candidate for mayor, the New York Times struggled to understand why minorities would flock to a candidate who promised to put more cops on the streets. After all, aren’t all minorities supposed to hate the police? Not so much, according to Adams, who said that policies such as “defend the police” were the purview of “a lot of young, White, affluent people.”

Even the Times figured out that there was

a disconnect between progressive activists and the rank-and-file Black and Latino voters who they [i.e., progressive activists] say have the most to gain from their agenda. As liberal activists orient their policies to combat white supremacy and call for racial justice, progressives are finding that many voters of color seem to think about the issues quite a bit differently.

It doesn’t speak well for the thinkers and writers at the New York Times that they hadn’t noticed that the White leftists pushing the whole package of criminal justice reform – defunding the police, ending bail, electing non-prosecuting prosecutors – aren’t affected by those policies. They live in gracious suburban enclaves or pricey urban neighborhoods far removed from the criminals who benefit from these policies. Minorities aren’t so lucky.  

The fact that minorities suffer from the policies that White leftists impose on them was vividly illustrated in Oakland, California, a city in which the activists on the City Council had voted to defund the police. As a result, violence in Oakland has shot into the stratosphere. Indeed, all over California crime has soared.

Sane people, when looking at 2020 and the start of the crime surge in urban America, concluded that it happened because of leftist “criminal justice reform,” courtesy of those White wokesters and Black race hustlers. The San Francisco Chronicle, though, is confused:

California officials recently released data showing that homicides in the state were up 31% in 2020. But the reasons for the spike — the largest percentage increase in years — are still unclear.

The surge — while not unique to California — comes after a yearslong downward trend in the state’s homicide rate. But 2020 was an exceptional year, and crime experts, government officials and advocates alike wonder whether the spike can be attributed to the economic and social strain caused by the pandemic.

Oakland, of course, is part of this violent trend and the City Council just can’t figure it out:

Oakland City Council Member Loren Taylor — whose district has been affected by violent crime — also said he thinks several factors have contributed to last year’s increase in violence, including worsening economic and mental health conditions, isolation and lack of access to social services due to the pandemic.

On Oakland’s streets, though, Blacks and Hispanics caught in the crossfire aren’t confused at all. On Saturday, a perplexed journalist for the leftist Intercept, described what he saw as a “surreal moment in Oakland”: Minority victims of crime joined with police, with White Antifa protesters facing off against them:

Dramatic confrontation before I got there. A lot of the anti-violence activists from East Oakland said they were disappointed in the white anti-police antifa protesters, said they seemed close minded and disconnected from the actual violence in the city. https://t.co/UEByf9WH5E

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) July 10, 2021

As Glenn Greenwald tweeted:

“Few things make the liberal-left angrier than when Lee Fang goes out on the street in the place where he live and reports on what he sees and gives voice to those you’re supposed to pretend don’t exist. They think reporting is only reporting if it advances their agenda.”

We are looking at a great realignment in America, one that explains huge minority support for Trump. White leftists and minority race-hustlers, secure in their affluent fortresses, what communism. Meanwhile, ordinary people across America, no matter their color, what good governance: sound economic policies, law-and-order, national security priorities, and the freedom to make their way in the world.