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Let us suppose (hypothetically) that you hired a maid with the expectation that she would clean the place – but instead of cleaning, she would do all kinds of things that made a mess of the place. To make matters worse, let us assume that you did not have the authority to fire her yourself, but needed permission from a board to fire her – and the board was reluctant to approve of such an action.
What would you do? You would continue lobbying the board for permission to fire the maid who is not doing her job. However, for as long as you are stuck with that maid, you would still continue pleading with her to do her job. It would be absurd to think that these two aspects of your reaction are in any way in conflict with another.
Now, let us translate this to the scenario that many minority communities in real life face with the police.
For much longer than any of us have been alive, police have failed to provide adequate protection to many minority communities, especially communities of African descent. Instead, they have overpoliced them, and furthermore, subjected them to disproportionate amounts of police brutality (something that would already be unacceptable even if it were not disproportionately dished out to minority communities).
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Given all this, such communities are well within reason to demand that the police be defunded – and that many tasks in society previously allocated to the police be relegated to other institutions more capable of handling them.
However, though these groups are demanding that the police be defunded, such defunding has not occurred yet – and as such, it is ludicrous to suggest that those demanding such things should be denied even whatever inadequate protection they have previously been receiving.
Some people, however, do not seem to realize this. They seem to think that when a group is trying to hold the police accountable for wrong-doing, the police are well within their right to allow the group to be violently attacked by whoever wants to attack them – an attitude that was tragically put into action in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when Kyle Rittenhouse was allowed to waltz off the scene after having shot three BLM protestors, two of them fatally.
And in Tacoma, Washington, another officer recorded a video in which he suggested that he found it somehow humorous that people organizing a Defund the Police protest might ask for police protection at the event.
In this episode of Red Angel Sophia, I explain why it is, actually, perfectly reasonable for people to demand police protection at an event – even when the whole purpose of the event is to hold the police accountable.
