by James A. Bacon
The Defund-the-Police movement in Virginia has passed its peak. Indeed, it may have disappeared, leaving barely a trace. People still may have concerns about the criminal justice system, but that doesn’t mean they want to throw out the good with the bad. Consider three stories in the news clips today.
SROs in schools. The City of Alexandria voted last year to end the School Resource Officer program in the city’s four middle and high schools. After a series of incidents involving students and guns, Council reversed course in October. Now, reports The Washington Post, school officials, while “reimagining” their relationship with police, are saying that safety considerations require keeping a police presence inside schools as the work continues.
The school system of 16,000 started the 2021-2022 school year without SROs for the first time in three decades. Police were called to schools 96 times in the first half of the 2021-2022 school year and made 18 arrests.
Police patrols in downtown Norfolk. In the wake of a shooting that killed two nightclub patrons and injured three, Norfolk Police Chief Larry Boone told local media that the police department will assign officers to patrol downtown Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, in the words of WAVY-TV, “to quell the violence.”
Boone said he is working with the city manager to find ways to create more police presence. “We don’t want to look like the military and that we’re occupying Granby Street, but we need to find a healthy balance,” he said.
Boone did join a Black Lives Matter march in 2020, and he canned a police lieutenant for donating money to Kyle Rittenhouse, who then had been charged in the shootings of three men during riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Boone also said in 2020 that he would be willing to give up part of his budget to pay other employees better suited for certain encounters. He didn’t want his officers dealing with people going through mental health crises, drug abuse or homelessness. Whether such a sentiment can be classified as “defund the police” can be debated. But Boone’s recent statements leave no doubt: a bigger police presence is appropriate when the issue is maintaining public order.
Security guards for public housing. Virginia Public Media has a lengthy story about the reinvention of public housing in the City of Richmond. Old crime-ridden housing projects are being torn down and replaced by mixed-use housing projects with nice new housing units — and better security. Reports VPM (my bold):
One woman was heading to her job but stopped to share that “this is something totally different from over there in Creighton [Court]…. It’s more spacious. I have three floors. Everything in here is brand new. It’s a lot of things that you can’t do over there that you can do here. And my kids love it.” She goes on to tell me that when she lived in Creighton, she didn’t go outside or allow her children to play outside, because of the threat of crime. But here, as the security guard passes on patrol, she says she feels safe and it’s no problem for her children to play outdoors.
VPM mentions the safety factor only in passing. But the passage reminds us that poor people living in public housing want to feel safe — and security guards make them feel safer. Admittedly, security guards aren’t police. But I’m betting that she’d be happy to see more police, not fewer. Perhaps VPM should ask her.
Straws in the wind. These are random anecdotes pulled from one day’s worth of news clips. Maybe they’re significant, maybe they’re not. But after two years of increases in violent crime, we’re just not hearing the defund-the-police rhetoric here in Virginia that we did at the height of the George Floyd protests. Indeed, flush with revenue, Democrat and Republican lawmakers competed in 2022 General Assembly budget deliberations to see who could provide the biggest funding increases for law enforcement.
The activist wing of the Democratic Party still may want to slash police funding, but mainstream politicians aren’t buying it. As Senator Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, told the Virginia Mercury a month ago: “If you look at my city, Portsmouth, where there’s a high crime rate and shootings on an almost daily basis, I realize we need to beef up our police departments to kind of get a handle on that gang violence. And we can’t do that if we’re cutting police departments.”
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