How Democrats went from defund to refund the police

As crime rates rise ahead of the midterms, Black mayors of the nation’s largest cities are leading the call to crack down on lawlessness.

WASHINGTON — A young Democratic member of Congress declared the “defund the police” movement “dead” on Thursday, and Black Democratic mayors from San Francisco to New York, Chicago to Washington, D.C., are moving to increase police budgets and end “the reign of criminals.”

Nutter, who is Black, has been on something of a crusade against Philadelphia’s reformist district attorney, Larry Krassner, who is white, after the top prosecutor said at a December news conference that “We don’t have a crisis of lawlessness, we don’t have a crisis of crime, we don’t have a crisis of violence.”

In a Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed, Nutter wrote that “it takes a certain audacity of ignorance and white privilege to say that right now,” noting that people of color living in struggling parts of the city were often the ones most victimized by crime.

“We have to disabuse people of this flawed premise that Black and brown people are against the police. Black and brown people are against police abuse,” Nutter said. “As Democrats we have to do two complicated things at the same time. We have to ensure public safety and reform the abuses of the criminal justice system.”

Some Democrats privately acknowledge that law-and-order messaging still feels unnatural to some in the party, whose views and temperaments are more aligned with activists than officers.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/democrats-went-defund-refund-police-rcna14796