Ambrose: Seattle experiment of police-free zone shows cops are needed

It was on June 8 that the protesters stormed the Bastille and soon, with no holds barred by police maintaining their distance, defaced the Bastille as the streets became trash bins.

Just 12 days later, shooting began and then there was shooting on another day and another day and another day. Two teenagers were killed and five people injured, one critically. Cops were pretty well stymied in trying to intervene and rescue vehicles stayed safely away. During the mayhem, the mayor said, the time has come for protesters to leave. They didn’t, and so the mayor signed an order telling police to evict them and recover the police headquarters.

The protesters did not nod their heads, pack their bags and politely exit their adventure, but yelled and shoved and waved signs even though, this time, the police shoved back, resuming a duty that saves lives.

It has been my hope that the Durkan experiment would help wake people up as so many other communities around the country have in effect put handcuffs on police while protesters have done enormous damage and crime in some cities has risen dramatically as police disparagement leaves police less proactive.

Defund the police? Some cities are still considering budget reductions as you wonder about emotions of the moment intervening with rationality and cannot help noticing the leftist overreach of Mayor Bill De Blasio of New York. He is planning to reduce the budget of what likely is the country’s best big-city police force by $1 billion as he takes 600 plainclothes cops off the streets. Spending helped make the police force what it is, but first and foremost, New York police have used computer data to send police where the crime is.

They also got thousands of guns off the streets without letting any crime pass by as an oh-so-what incident that was ignored.

Such tactics helped deter crime to the extent of reducing murders by 7,382 over an 11-year period with thousands fewer people being sent to prison.

It is true, at the same time, that police unions have wrapped some police with protections that thwart wise administration and, in some instances, leave bad cops on the payroll. George Floyd’s killer had a terrible record, for instance, but he hung around long enough to make Hitlerian history.

Democrats in Congress are avoiding debate, but a national mayors group is studying what the best reforms might be, and, one assumes, it will recognize what a tough job they have and the good they do. The data of two exhaustive studies, for instance, indicate police shootings are mostly the consequence of real endangerment with no evidence of racism. Most police are not guilty.