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Be careful what you wish for - highlights mine ....
Social justice activist Kelsea Bond spends a lot of time canvassing Atlanta’s highest-crime neighborhoods.
Her mission: Convince residents that, if core social and economic inequities were resolved, crime would abate and the city wouldn’t need a police department.
Less than a year ago, amid massive social justice protests across the United States, the idea of fundamentally reducing the role of police rose from nonstarter to distinct possibility.
Minneapolis voters will in November consider whether to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety, which would include some component of law enforcement. New York cut $1 billion from the nation’s largest police force. Atlanta came within one city council vote of cutting $72 million from its police department.
Today, however, that momentum has almost completely reversed. Ms. Bond says there has been “a doubling down on policing, increasing surveillance, and building a massive training center, which is in such stark contrast to the conversation we were trying to begin over the summer. What happened? What changed?”
The simple answer is crime. Like other cities, Atlanta has witnessed a new crime wave – bad enough that one affluent part of the city is considering secession. Yet in talking to residents across Atlanta, even those sympathetic to the defund movement now say it overreached. The way forward, many say, is not in getting rid of the police, but helping them do a better job ...