Defending the police … so they can defend us

In mid-May, finally free from nearly a year of lockdown that cancelled all my speaking engagements, I spoke to three Legatus chapters: Lexington, Louisville, and Indianapolis. The people were great, the interaction stimulating and fun. I was struck at how our conversations touched on not just matters from COVID to the culture to the Church, but the social unrest in the streets the year before.

This was particularly the case in Louisville, where the Breonna Taylor incident had taken place, which spilled protesters into the streets, many of them backing Black Lives Matter and demanding the defunding of police. There were also demonstrations in Lexington, a university town. And likewise, protests had shaken downtown Indianapolis.

For many of the protesters, defunding the police meant precisely that. For some, even that wasn’t enough. They have called for abolishing the police, and more.

“Abolition is the getting rid of police, prisons and jails, surveillance, and courts,” states Patrisse Cullors, founder of Black Lives Matter.
She’s far from alone.

BLM activist Miski Noor insists that when fellow activists say they want to abolish the police, they “100 percent” mean they want no more police.
They’ve pursued just that.

“We call for a national defunding of police,” states Black Lives Matter on its website, under its hashtag #DefundThePolice. Under the tab “What Defunding the Police Really Means,” BLM leads with this outrageous claim: “We know that police don’t keep us safe.”

That’s an alarming assertion that angers police (including black officers) as well as black residents in communities who feel the police do keep them safe.

Asked about defunding, David Clarke, the former sheriff of Milwaukee County, WI, (and African American), states emphatically: “The biggest losers in all this will be poor black people in crime-ridden ghettos. The police are the only thing standing between them and violent criminal predators. You’d have to loathe black people to do that to them.”

Of course, cities that have cut police funding, like Portland and Seattle, have seen an explosion in crime and civil unrest. And the police feel embattled.
This brings me back to my three recent talks to Legatus chapters. I finished up in Indianapolis, where a former student of mine is a police officer. I’ll call him “Joe.”

“As a police officer I see firsthand the damage that Black Lives Matter is causing,” Joe told me. He’s suddenly facing suspicion and hostility from a black community he worked hard to establish friendships with. His fellow police officers (many if not mostly black) jokingly call him “the philosopher” because he engages in philosophical-theological conversations with street guys, black and white.

“I talk to them,” Joe told me. “I treat them with dignity. I tell them that I want to go home tonight and see my family. We talk about race. We talk about religion.”

He has worked to form bonds. But now, it’s getting harder.
“For the first time in my 15-plus-year career,” Joe said to me, “I feel I can understand what the soldiers returning from Vietnam experienced upon returning to a thankless country.”

All Joe wanted to be was a policeman. While other students of mine went to law school or medical school, Joe went to police school to learn how to chase down bad guys. He viewed police heroically, but now he feels helpless.

Of course, I totally understand that there are abusive police. I’ve personally witnessed it. Friends of mine, white friends, have experienced police abuse. But you don’t make the streets safer by defunding or abolishing the police.
Bad police need to be stopped, but good police need to be defended.

PAUL KENGOR is professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, PA. He is author of more than a dozen books, including The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism’s Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration, and A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century.