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Forget Defunding the Police: End Asset Forfeiture

Dr. Munr Kazmir
5 min readMay 16, 2022

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“Defund the Police” has never been done. “End Asset Forfeiture” is an undoing.

Photo by Gianandrea Villa on Unsplash.

Ok, so “Defund the Police” was a massive face-plant, an unqualified disaster, an unserious, ill-conceived offshoot that went exactly nowhere and likely set good-faith criminal justice reform efforts back decades.

“Defund the Police,” is also, fair or not, a sunk cost for far-left progressives at this point. When you notice you’re in a hole, stop digging and move on.

“The only way to have a great idea is to have lots of ideas,” said inventor Thomas Edison, and he would know. They can’t all be winners.

The movement to Defund the Police was deeply flawed from the outset.

It was guaranteed to inspire an equal and opposite reaction against it, produce unintended consequences, and make progressives an easy target for anyone looking for easy answers about rising crime rates. That Defund coincided with a sharp rise in crime is unfortunate for the movement, even if it’s hard to prove that Defund caused rising crime. Correlation is not causation.

On the other hand, it is impossible to prove Defund the Police didn’t have anything to do with rates of rising crime.

The ultimate aim of Defund the Police- criminal justice and policing reforms…

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