'Defund the Police' is a media fantasy

A new, exhaustive study by Gallup and the Knight Foundation 
found that Americans across the board are losing trust in the 
media. Some people might be shocked by this finding, but I 
suspect more people will be shocked to learn that the media had 
any trust left to lose.

Either way, I think a separate poll conducted by Gallup might 
illuminate the problem.

If you’ve paid any attention to the news, particularly cable 
news, over the last couple of months since George Floyd’s 
killing by police in Minneapolis, you might think “defunding” or 
“abolishing” the police is a widely held and even somewhat 
mainstream desire.

Gallup suggests this is untrue. The vast majority of Americans 
of all races and ethnicities don’t want the police to leave 
their communities.

Respondents were asked: “Would you rather the police spend more 
time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently 
spend in your area?” Sixty-one percent of black respondents said 
they wanted the same amount of time; 20 percent said more. 
Hispanics had similar numbers (59 percent same, 24 percent more).

Has anything close to that reality been reflected in the 
“national conversation” about race and policing? How many 
softball interviews did CNN or MSNBC conduct with ­activists 
claiming to speak for “communities of color,” in which 
“defunding the police” was not only taken seriously but 
sympathetically?

My point isn’t that all is great with policing in America. But 
“defund the police” or “abolish the police” — slogans that got 
wide traction in the elite media for much of the summer, buoyed 
by polished academics and activists with ready-made talking 
points — was always an absurd idea, politically and practically. 
Politically, because even the most victimized populations don’t 
want to get rid of the police, and practically, because a police-
free modern society is simply unworkable. (Just ask the former 
denizens of that “autonomous zone” in Seattle.)

The Gallup/Knight study found that nearly 8 in 10 Americans 
think the media is trying to convince people “to adopt a certain 
opinion.” Well, for much of this year, skepticism toward “defund-
the-police” rhetoric has been quickly dismissed as just another 
manifestation of white privilege. Except, as the Gallup poll 
suggests, black people don’t view police the same way the 
activists and journalists who dominate the debate do.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 50 
million Americans have at least one interaction with police in a 
given year. Most of those were traffic stops of one kind or 
another. Eighty-five percent of black people reported that 
traffic stops they were involved in were conducted properly.

Again, my point isn’t that all is fine with race and policing in 
America. Any unjustified killing by a police officer should be 
condemned and prosecuted for all of the obvious reasons. And the 
evidence that black people are disproportionately and unfairly 
singled out for traffic stops seems compelling to me.

But the narrative pushed by the media is almost allegorical when 
held up against reality. I lost track of the number of times 
reporters and interviewers said, or allowed people to get away 
with saying, that policing originated as “slave patrols.” 
­Policing is thousands of years old, and while some police 
departments in slave states had antecedents in such patrols, 
those in, say, Boston and Minneapolis didn’t.

More important, the purpose of this talking point is to buttress 
an almost biblical narrative of some original sin that 
supposedly animates police departments today. I would bet that 
not one cop in 10,000 had ever heard that policing was the 
legacy of slave patrols until this year.

The debate over policing is just one facet of this complex 
problem. For instance, journalists at elite outlets often use 
“Latinx” to describe a diverse Hispanic or Latino population to 
avoid gendered or colonial connotations. Never mind that 98 
percent of American Latinos told pollsters at ThinkNow ­Research 
that they don’t like, know or use the term.

This isn’t just about liberal media bias. (The right-wing media 
has biases, too). It reflects a tendency for American media 
outlets to speak to audiences that are unrepresentative of 
America as a whole. Why they do it can’t be reduced to a single 
explanation. That they do it is obvious to a lot of Americans.

https://nypost.com/2020/08/09/defund-the-police-is-a-media-
fantasy/