“Not Acceptable”: Sheriff Blasts L.A. County For Defunding the Police

Shortly after the Minneapolis City Council voted to move forward with disbanding the police and New York City officials announced that they could slash the NYPD’s budget to appease the racial justice protesters, Los Angeles County followed right in line with the Great Capitulation. Last week, Los Angeles County CEO Sachi Hamai came forward with a new budget that would strip the L.A. Sheriff’s Department of $145 million in funding and eliminate six units entirely: the gang enforcement squad, the Special Victims Bureau, and the Community Partnership Bureau among them.

This news may have been pleasing to the degenerate Marxists who run Black Lives Matter, but it didn’t sit too well with Los Angeles Sheriff Alex Villanueva. He released a statement lashing out at Hamai and accusing her of surrendering to the ignorant mob.

“The budget cuts are targeted specifically to hurt public safety while sparing virtually every other function of county government from any reductions,” Villanueva said. “These cuts come at a time when jails were de-populated of over five thousand inmates in order to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Now that restrictions are lifting, violent crimes, such as murder, are on the rise across the County. Now is not the time to cut vital law enforcement services, that should be the last thing cut.

“The CEO and the Board have embraced the ‘Defund the Police’ movement and are cynically hiding behind accounting maneuvers, knowing well that loss of revenue in sales tax can be made up by equitably distributing more stable revenue streams like property taxes,” he continued. “This is not acceptable and a willful abandonment of one of the top priorities of all local government, keeping people safe. Curiously, the bloated county bureaucracy remains virtually intact, which should always be the first to suffer reductions. The priorities of the Board of Supervisors are not the priorities of the good people of Los Angeles County.”

We get that most politicians have a hard time seeing things beyond the end of the day, much less any further into the future, but how is anyone so blind as to not realize how badly this is going to backfire? What do people like Hamai think is going to happen when he defund the police and make it more difficult for them to do their jobs? Fewer black people will be killed? Think again. Fewer of them may be killed by the police, but while that makes a huge difference to the grifters in the BLM movement, we’re not so sure it matters to the families of the deceased. Death is death, and removing cops from the streets is going to lead to a lot more of it.

If police reform is needed – and we’re not quite convinced that it is – then we need to be putting even more money into law enforcement, not less. This seems like a fairly basic, fundamental concept. No surprise, then, that Democrats are unable to grasp it.