After the all-Democrat city council voted to cut nearly 18 million from the city’s police budget amid a severe crime surge, Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong gave an impassioned statement.
Here’s some of what Armstrong had to say:
“Today we find ourselves in a crisis. We find ourselves reeling from a weekend of violence where we’ve seen four homicides over a three day period. It now has us currently at 65 homicides for the year. That’s a 90% increase compared to last year. Our shootings are up over 70% this year. Our robberies are up 11% this year. There’ve been 1,300 robberies in this city already this year. Our carjackings are up nearly 88%. So we see clearly that crime is out of control in the city of Oakland and our response was for less policing resources.”
He then addressed a comment by one of the city council members, who suggested this crime surge was just a ‘speed bump’, that there would be challenges but everything would be okay:
Well for me, those speed bumps are 65 lives so far this year, victims who have suffered at the hands of violence whether it’s shootings, robberies, carjackings, sexual assaults. All of these crimes are not speed bumps. These are people. Far too often in these meetings we are talking about numbers, money and cost. I don’t know what the cost of life is, but I know not having resources makes our city less safe. It concerns me that we would ever consider that to be a bump in the road, that when you look at this screen and you see these are true people, these are people who lost their lives in this city.
Armstrong continues, even pausing after he presumably felt himself getting choked up at the people he’s had to deal with after these violent crimes, which a city council member suggests are just speed bumps.
Meanwhile, examine the setting for yesterday’s address by this police commander. Jen Psaki of the White House defended the myth that Republicans are defunding police departments because they refused to vote for Biden’s ridiculous spending package earlier this year. When it is genuinely Democratic city councils voting to defund police, Biden and his cronies are attempting to contort reality into some strange, ludicrous, woke version of itself that they want to sell to the public.
