Anyone who actually believes that “black lives matter” ought to realize that the “defund the police” agenda is irredeemably hostile to black lives.
When police officers are forced to fight crime with one hand tied behind their backs, violent crime increases. More violent crime means more dead black people—end of story. The last time we went through a wave of anti-police hysteria—following the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015—the resulting pull-back in policing allowed criminals to kill more than 2,000 black people in the subsequent two years, 2015 and 2016.
If the 2014 crime rate had been maintained, those 2,000 black lives—about 100 times the number of unarmed African-Americans killed by police in a typical two-year period—could have been saved.
Unfortunately, to the anti-police crowd, black lives do not actually seem to matter that much. Thousands of black lives are worth sacrificing—they apparently believe—in the pursuit of their political vendetta against our local police.
That is the ideology with which Joe Biden has aligned himself by endorsing the ubiquitous yet entirely evidence-free dogma of “systemically racist” police in a “systemically racist” America, even as he carefully avoids openly signing on to the effort to defund and abolish police departments.
It’s no secret why Biden has tried to split that baby. “Defunding the police” is massively, wildly unpopular. At the same time, however, he is still beholden to the extremists who wish to use the “black lives matter” as a political cudgel without regard for the damage they inflict on the black community.
Luckily, there is another way—the one President Trump has followed from the very beginning of his administration. Contrary to the ineffective policies of the Obama-Biden administration, his policies reduced the homicide rate dramatically in his first two years in office, saving countless black lives.
He hasn’t wavered from that course amidst the recent civil unrest, either.
On June 16, the president issued his Executive Order on Safe Policing for Safe Communities. The order, unlike the ill-conceived effort to abolish law enforcement, aims to solve the problems that actually exist in American policing and save black lives.
The order uses the power of the federal purse to entice local police departments to adopt and certify best practices—such as prohibiting the use of chokehold techniques, except when officers’ lives are in danger. It also adds requirements for independent certification that police departments meet high standards, especially around use-of-force and de-escalation techniques. New incentives will encourage law enforcement agencies to use a nationwide database to track terminations, criminal convictions, and civil judgments against law enforcement officers for excessive use of force, ensuring that the minority of truly bad cops are not allowed to remain on the beat.
Encouragingly, the president’s order specifically targets the types of incidents that have too often resulted in excessive force from lack of training—those involving the mentally ill, addicted, and homeless—providing specific training programs to address these issues.
In direct contrast to Joe Biden’s empty sloganeering, President Trump’s record shows a real and ongoing commitment to keeping black communities safe and police officers professional.
Anyone can say that black lives matter to them, but Donald Trump has demonstrated through his actions that black lives really do matter to him.
This is a commentary submitted and published with the author’s permission. If you wish to submit a commentary to Texas Scorecard, please submit your article to submission@texasscorecard.com.
