Three years after Washington, D.C.’s city council voted to decrease the police budget by millions of dollars, council members are desperate for a larger police presence. According to the Washington Free Beacon, as homicide rates have spiked, seeing 13 cases in the first few days of August alone, council members who previously spoke against police funding have changed their tune and are now trying to secure more police resources.
Left-wing council members Brianne Nadeau and Phil Mendelson are among those who flipped from defending the police to funding them significantly. During the summer of 2020, Nadeau and Mendelson voted to slash the city’s police budget by $15 million, with Mendelson speaking out against D.C.’s “harmful over-reliance on policing and incarceration.” Another council member, Brooke Pinto, also changed her stance from slashing the police budget to ensure “police have the tools they need to keep communities safe.”
As part of the city council’s push to defund the police, lawmakers passed the controversial Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Act last year. The act would “make it easier to fire police officers.” While a bipartisan congressional group tried to repeal the act, President Biden blocked the effort with a veto.
D.C. is not the only city seeing the dangerous effects of defunding the police, a movement that took a strong hold over cities across the country during the Black Lives Matter protests. City officials in New York and Los Angeles also restored police budgets that were cut back in 2020. While crime still remains a significant issue for many of these issues, the change in attitude toward funding the police reveals that those calling to cut their budgets will only come to regret it.