The Growing Appetite for Police Protection
Criminal justice reform and defunding police seem to have lost widespread appeal overnight. Why?
A major report about police misconduct was just released detailing troubling incidents ranging from lying about criminal suspects to planting evidence and worse.
If a report about police misconduct is released, and no one cares, does it make a sound?
In growing bewilderment, progressives who have been pushing for police reform over the past year and a half are noticing that the steam has utterly gone from their sails recently. Politicians and political candidates who were open to the subject are fleeing from them, as are many former supporters.
A serious reformation of U.S. policing practices and the criminal justice system was suddenly mainstream in 2020. In 2021, it’s back on the fringe.
What happened?
The nation was ready to talk about all kinds of things with regards to criminal justice system reform in 2020, even long before that. A Republican President, with a mostly Republican Congress, managed to pass the first meaningful criminal justice reform effort in over a decade in 2018.
That they did so while President Donald Trump admitted, in a White House first, that sentencing in the U.S. legal system is racially biased…