• Brian Lande, an officer in the Richmond, Calif., police department, had to draw his gun to stop two drunk men from clobbering each other to death with metal rods, and another time to stop a fight between two more drunk men, one of whom was armed with a hatchet.
• The Richmond police department has seen resignations jump by 18 percent and retirements by 45 percent over the previous year, with hiring decreasing by five percent.
• The shift in police officers’ perception of how they’re viewed by the public happened gradually, starting with the first Black Lives Matter protests of 2013, and culminating with the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
• In response to the racial reckoning, some cities set up police review boards with the power to subpoena police records and oversee day-to-day policing, while other states tightened use-of-force standards.
• It became popular for politicians in progressive circles to flaunt their anti-police credentials, and the Richmond City Council cut the police budget, forcing hiring freezes and threatening to slash officers’ salaries by 20 percent.
• Many officers left Richmond for smaller, suburban departments, where they wouldn’t have to fear getting laid off or having their salaries and benefits reduced.
• Brian Lande left Richmond for Kensington, a 15-minute drive away, where he is now Sergeant Lande and his job involves far fewer risks.
• In August 2022, President Biden announced his Safer America Plan in response to rising crime, which includes plans to hire 100,000 more police officers, but this has been met with criticism from the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
• Peter Moskos, the former Baltimore police officer now teaching at John Jay College, has called for legalizing drugs in response to the drug war’s ineffectiveness and its disproportionate impact on young black men, and is mystified by progressives who insist that the single greatest threat faced by black Americans is systemic racism.
Published January 19, 2023
Visit The Free Press to read Leighton Woodhouse’s original post America’s Police Exodus
