Are People Finally Coming to Their Senses?

Several news stories that came out during the Labor Day holiday caught my attention. Several school districts are asking for a return to cops in schools as resource officers after they kicked them out in an overreaction to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. That incident had absolutely nothing to do with schools or resource officers. Now Minnesota schools have a different problem.

The Minnesota state legislature is being forced back into session after numerous police agencies pulled their officers from schools one week before classes begin. The reason for the decision comes after a new state law that limits physical restraints that can be used on students. Officers now are prohibited from using any type of restraint that impacts on a violent student's ability to breathe, including holds that put a student face down on the ground. One legislator said, “and we want to make sure they are being handled in a way that respects the fact that they are young, they’re children.” Let me stop there. First of all, we are not talking about “children”. For the most part we are talking about students in their teens. And second, there is this: What about the fact that these students have no respect for the fact that their behavior is disrupting the other students who are being denied learning time and that it might endanger other students in the immediate area? And what about injury to the officer trying to get the miscreant under control?

This creates a dilemma for responding officers. Any officer who has had to restrain somebody resisting arrest knows how difficult this can be and that you cannot predict the actions of the person they are trying to get under control. Officers have to be able to use all reasonable force under the circumstances to effect an arrest. The U.S. Supreme Court says so. Trying in the moment to decide how much and what kind of physical force to use cannot be based on some sterile how-to instruction sheet. Not to mention that this subjects officers to legal peril for not doing enough and sooner to gain control of a situation if other students or teachers are injured as a result. The legislature is still trying to resolve the concerns of this expanded policy with law enforcement executives. Too bad they didn’t have the foresight of getting law enforcement trainers involved when they were crafting this policy. This could have been avoided. Then again, this is what happens when politicians involve themselves in a science they know nothing about.

Next, let’s turn to a situation plaguing law enforcement for the last at least five years: the inability of agencies to fill vacancies. The exodus of officers taking early retirement or flat-out leaving the profession due to a number of reasons including defunding, lack of respect for the police, no support from the political class or law enforcement executives is exceeding the ability to hire replacements. Larger urban agencies are having a harder time with this than are smaller agencies that hire one officer at a time and can lure them from larger agencies by offering better pay and benefits. Hiring a cop is a lot more complex than hiring someone to work at Amazon, for instance. If agencies start lowering their hiring standards, they will pay for that down the road. History has shown that to be the case. California and Illinois have recently passed legislation to allow illegal aliens to apply for law enforcement positions. What the hell are they thinking about? How in the heck are they going to do a thorough background check? There is no way that they are going to be able to research this applicant's history. Many South and Central American countries do not have the record-keeping systems that we have on people. In fact, we are not going to be sure that the applicant is who they say they are, especially if they use an alias to apply.

That leads me to the situation with the Austin, Texas, police department. They are the latest to be hit with the vacancy dilemma. This was a city whose political class caved to the defund police advocates. The Austin Police Department had its budget cut by $150 million in 2020. The city council engaged in the left’s social engineering experiment of reimagining policing. Combine that with an overzealous political activist prosecutor who has indicted 20, yes 20 Austin police officers since 2020 and you can guess what the result has been: a mass stampede of officers leaving the department. And the hiring has not kept up, resulting in a vacancy gap. Since 2017, they have lost 800 officers. A crime surge has predictably followed, with car thefts up 77%, murders up 30% and aggravated assaults up 18% since the budget cuts in 2020. Wow, I never could have guessed that. You can plug and play any large urban area into this situation. Most are dealing with the same garbage, yet many political officials continue down the same path and make the same mindless decisions.

Austin police have been forced to pull detectives off of cases to answer 911 calls, meaning serious crimes go unsolved leaving perpetrators on the street to continue wreaking havoc. City residents and businesses are experiencing longer response times for serious calls for service. One business owner said he had to wait 10 days for police to respond to take a report for a non-emergency incident. The store owner said, “This isn’t working. You take away the police force and then ask us not to have weapons or anything in our stores to protect ourselves.” My attitude as a former sheriff was to remind citizens that they are the first line of defense in their own safety. I reminded them that they have a duty to protect themselves and that calling 911 may not always be their best option.

Law-abiding people have had it with this crap. More are taking matters into their own hands. Good for them. There is a growing sense of resignation in people’s confidence that government is adequately doing what is their most important responsibility, that being the personal safety of citizens.

It is going to take a long time to reverse this damage done to public safety. My message to law-abiding citizens is that you are being abandoned by your government when it comes to law and order. Their message through inaction is that you are on your own. I won’t tell you what to do, but I know I am prepared to protect myself. I have a sign in the front window of my home that depicts a handgun and a Rottweiler, and it reads: We don’t dial 911.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is the former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com