The election polling must be bad for congressional Democrats because this week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ranks, who have spent more than two years chanting the mantra “defund the police,” cobbled together four bills that toss billions of taxpayers’ dollars at local communities to supposedly make them safer.
The bills would create federal grant programs so local departments could do the following:
- Hire more detectives to clear murder and non-fatal shooting cases and provide victims and their family members with mental health resources and financial aid for shelter, wages, and relocation costs.
- Create “mental health first-responder” units that would arrive at the scene alongside, or even before, cops to put criminals in mental health programs.
- Establish teams of “crime intervention and prevention specialists” who, as one Democratic summary put it, “have established relationships, relatable lived experiences, and credibility with individuals in their communities at high risk of violence and connect them with intensive counseling, mediation, peer support, and social services in order to reduce their risk” of committing violence.
- Improve training, mental health support, recruitment, and retention, primarily for small departments, and buy body cameras.
The last bill had significant GOP support, with 153 Republicans, including most from FLorida, voting for it. The other three passed largely along party lines.
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But in an email to constituents Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz explained that he rejected all of them because opposed efforts to “further federalize our police in America.”
“It is head-spinning that House Democrats either want to defund the police or federalize the police. I’m against both, and here’s why,” said Gaetz, a Fort Walton Beach Republican.
“In my community, people in one of the reddest counties in Florida voted to raise their own taxes to fund school resource officers protecting our schools. We understood that law enforcement was the responsibility of our community. Now, as places like Detroit, Chicago, and nearly every major metropolitan area defund their police. They sacrifice the safety of their constituents on the altar of Wokeism.”
“These four bills on the House floor [on Thursday] legislate that Florida constituents and other law-abiding Americans are subsidizing these woke decisions made at the state and local levels. Both constitutionally and practically.”
“The police power is not a power of the federal government; it is the power of our state and local governments,” Gaetz continued.
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“Democrats don’t want to fund the police; they want to addict the police to the federal dollar. I voted against these federal police bills because they ensure more centralized decision-making, not the localized decision-making that our Constitution has promised this country for generations.”
“The best thing we can do for law enforcement is to get out of their way, have their back, and call out the politicians in Congress who keep trying to defund the police and devalue the commitment they make to our communities,” he concluded.
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