The Morning Dispatch: Is the Era of Radical Police Reform Over?

Happy Tuesday! On the one hand, President Joe Biden’s net approval rating is nearly 9 points underwater, his legislative agenda is stalled, and several members of his cabinet are not-so-subtly angling to replace him in 2024.

On the other hand, he just adopted an adorable new German Shepherd puppy named Commander.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Omicron is now the dominant variant in the United States, with new Centers for Disease Control data released yesterday showing the variant was responsible for slightly more than 73 percent of the COVID-19 infections recorded last week. Two weeks ago, Omicron accounted for slightly less than 13 percent of all COVID-19 cases.

• Moderna announced Monday that a third dose of its COVID-19 vaccine increased Omicron neutralizing antibody levels 37-fold compared to pre-boost levels, a preliminary sign that a booster dose of its vaccine is likely to provide significant protection against the new variant. The biotechnology company said it will continue developing an Omicron-specific vaccine, but that, for now, the existing booster will serve as its “first line of defense” against the variant.

• In a letter to his Democratic colleagues on Monday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pledged that the Senate will consider the Build Back Better Act “very early” in 2022 despite Sen. Joe Manchin’s opposition. Manchin, meanwhile, in an interview with MetroNews in West Virginia, expressed frustration with progressives and Democratic Party leaders who believe “they can just beat the living crap out of people and think they’ll be submissive,” adding that White House staffers “put some things out that were absolutely inexcusable.”

• Former President Donald Trump confirmed Sunday that he received a COVID-19 vaccine booster dose and encouraged his supporters to “take credit” for his administration’s development of the vaccines—which he claimed will likely save tens of millions of lives worldwide. “You’re playing right into their hands” when you doubt the vaccine, he told the crowd.

• The January 6 Select Committee on Monday requested information from GOP Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania about his role in installing former Department of Justice official Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general in the waning days of the Trump administration. Perry—set to chair the House Freedom Caucus next year—is the first sitting lawmaker the select committee has asked to testify.

• Two more House Democrats—Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida and Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard of California—announced they will not seek reelection in 2022, becoming the 21st and 22nd members to do so this year. 

Are the Days of ‘Defund the Police’ Over?

On June 11, 2020—less than three weeks after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly 10 minutes—San Francisco Mayor London Breed announced a group of reforms to the San Francisco Police Department aimed at “demilitarizing” the force, ending the use of police as a response to “non-criminal activity,” addressing bias among its ranks, and “redirecting” an unspecified amount of funding—later revealed to be $120 million over two years—away from the police department and toward the city’s African American community.

What a difference a year and a half makes.

Breed, who is black, delivered a blistering speech in San Francisco’s City Hall last week announcing her administration will be “asking our police department to do more” to address what she described as a “problem that has persisted in the city for some time now,” but has “gotten worse” in recent months.

“The reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end,” she said, outlining a series of new public safety initiatives. “And it comes to an end when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city.”

They were strong words—and the mayor caught flak for them from progressives in the city. “Arresting people who are addicted to drugs, jailing people who have mental health struggles, putting folks who are vending hot dogs or other food on the streets in cages will not solve these problems, and they are certainly not the only tools available,” Chesa Boudin—San Francisco’s ultra-progressive district attorney who is facing a recall election next year—said in response.

But the mayor sought to preempt such criticisms in her Tuesday remarks. “San Francisco is a compassionate city, we are a city that prides ourself on second chances and rehabilitation. But we’re not a city where anything goes,” she said. “What I am proposing today—and what I will be proposing in the future—will make a lot of people uncomfortable. And I don’t care. At the end of the day, the safety of the people of San Francisco is the most important thing to me. And we are past the point where what we see is even remotely acceptable.”

San Francisco has long served as a punching bag for critics of progressive local governance, as—in part because California’s generous welfare benefits attract lower-income individuals—the city routinely ranks among the country’s worst on metrics like homelessness and drug overdoses. In October, Walgreens cited retail theft—which has steadily increased since California’s Proposition 47 passed in 2014, reclassifying thefts of up to $950 as a misdemeanor—as its justification for closing another five San Francisco stores (though the company announced in 2019 it planned to close hundreds of stores nationwide to save costs), and some residents have told local media in recent weeks they are leaving their car trunks open when parked to let would-be burglars know there’s nothing inside worth stealing.

In today’s social media age, a handful of viral anecdotes can easily be stitched together to create an oversimplified narrative, and San Francisco’s defenders will be quick to point to SFPD data showing that robbery, rape, assault, and larceny theft are actually down from pre-pandemic levels. But that same data also indicates homicides, burglary, motor vehicle theft, and arson have increased to varying degrees over that same time period. And as Breed pointed out last week, narratives—even if oversimplified—affect a city’s reputation and its residents’ behavior.  

“The data doesn’t matter when somebody randomly walks up to you who is on crystal meth and socks you in the face and puts you in the hospital,” she told the New York Times. “The data doesn’t matter when you are here in San Francisco on vacation and all your belongings were stolen because someone broke into a car right in front of you.”

Clark Neily—a senior vice president at the Cato Institute who researches criminal justice, incarceration, and policing—agreed. “It almost doesn’t matter how well-grounded the perception is,” he told The Dispatch. “If people feel that they are not being protected, and they can’t go out and feel safe on the streets, and small business owners … feel that they can’t even afford to operate in the city anymore, it’s going to inevitably prompt a demand for action.”

Breed’s about-face is just the latest indication that mainstream Democrats’ 2020 tryst with radical criminal justice reforms has come to an end. President Biden signed three bipartisan bills into law last month intended to support police. New York City’s Mayor-elect Eric Adams won a crowded Democratic primary over the summer running on his record as a retired police captain who fought NYPD racism from within and pledging to keep the city from backsliding into the “lawlessness” of the 1990s. Voters rejected a ballot measure in Minneapolis that would have replaced the city’s police department with a “Department of Public Safety,” and deep-blue Seattle elected a Republican city attorney in November because her opponent was aggressively anti-police. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi commended Breed’s remarks last week, decrying San Francisco’s crime problems as “absolutely outrageous.”

“There is an attitude of lawlessness in our country that springs from I don’t know where,” Pelosi continued. “We cannot have that lawlessness become the norm.”

What changed? At the risk of oversimplifying, violent crime went up in cities across the country. As we wrote in late September:

The FBI released its long-awaited 2020 crime data on Monday, and the results were grim. Property crime fell nearly 8 percent from 2019 to 2020, but violent crime increased 5.6 percent year-over-year—headlined by an unprecedented 29.4 percent spike in murder and nonnegligent manslaughter. 

Monday’s report—based on data from 15,875 of the 18,623 law enforcement agencies in the country—makes it official: Violent crime worsened last year for the first time since 2016, and murder in particular rose at the steepest one-year pace on record—nearly 2.5 times the increase from 1967 to 1968. Aggravated assault and motor vehicle theft increased year-over-year, while larceny, robbery, and burglary continued to fall.

…

Various criminologists have zeroed in on three main drivers of the uptick: A record number of gun sales in 2020, pandemic-induced economic hardship and stress, and various degrees of de-policing in the wake of last summer’s George Floyd protests. 

Historically speaking, it’s not at all uncommon for public opinion on policing and incarceration to shift as crime rates fluctuate. “Americans in general have a low tolerance for crime,” Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute’s Policing and Public Safety Initiative, told The Dispatch. “People like the idea of a less severe criminal justice system, except insofar as it affects their own safety, in which case they are very much not on board with it.” 

A Pew Research Center survey conducted this fall found 47 percent of Americans want police spending in their area to be increased by a lot or a little, compared to just 31 percent who said the same a year earlier. Support for cutting police funding fell from 26 percent to 15 percent over the same time period.

An Afghan Lawmaker on Women’s Rights and Humanitarian Aid Under Taliban Control

The world has, in many ways, only just begun to grapple with the many troublesome implications of the Taliban controlling Afghanistan. But chief among those concerns is what the country’s return to Islamic fundamentalism will mean for the country’s women. In a piece for the site today, Charlotte speaks with Naheed Farid, who in 2010 became the youngest person to ever be elected to Afghanistan’s national assembly and, earlier this year, fled her home country a week before Kabul fell to the Taliban.

Farid wasn’t the first or only woman to serve in the Wolesi Jirga, but quickly made a name for herself as a staunch defender of gender equality.

During her two years heading the Human Rights, Civil Society, and Women Affairs committee, Farid worked to protect voting rights, bolster prohibitions against polygamy and child marriage, advocate for gender diversity in the workplace, and expand maternity leave. The commission also helped women and girls on an individual basis, assisting victims of domestic violence and wives seeking divorces from their husbands.

But it took only a few short days in August to dash Farid’s hopes that her life’s work would yield lasting change for Afghanistan’s women and minorities.

The Taliban’s swift takeover of the country’s provinces, aided by al-Qaeda-aligned fighters, reversed the nearly 20 years of progress that followed the toppling of the first Islamic Emirate in 2001. 

“Like me, so many women traveled a very bumpy and uneven road toward introducing a new Afghanistan,” Farid said in an interview with The Dispatch. “But now, as we look back, it has just disappeared. All the roads that we drew, all the paths, all the achievements, we just see nothing.” 

For Farid, the reversal was all too familiar. “The day that the Taliban came to my city, in 1995, I was a teenage girl,” she said. “On that day, I asked my mother to take me to the school. She said, ‘no, the school is closed.’ I insisted, and so she took me to the school and asked me to cover my face for the first time in my life. I went to my school and saw a man with a gun sitting in front. They burned so many things inside of the school—chairs, books, so many things. And that day, they burned my hopes.” 

Despite Taliban assurances that the country’s schools would remain open to women and girls this time around, girls in Afghanistan have now been barred from secondary school for nearly 100 days.

The stratified system—which Farid described as a “gender apartheid”—confines school-aged girls to their homes and, particularly amid an unfolding humanitarian crisis, encourages parents to sell their female children into forced marriages. According to some reports, girls as young as 20 days old have been auctioned off as child brides as Afghan families struggle against starvation.

Today, one of Farid’s biggest concerns is whether humanitarian organizations will be able to funnel food and medicine to those who remain in Afghanistan.

A United Nations World Food Program and Food and Agriculture report from October projected that 22.8 million people—more than half of Afghanistan’s population—face acute food insecurity between November 2021 and March 2022. An estimated 8.7 million of them are at risk of famine amid skyrocketing food prices, low crop yields, and diminished external support. 

“There has to be a response to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan through a trusted corridor and that has to be established as soon as possible. For this, we don’t have months. We don’t even have days,” Farid said. “The winter is coming and it’s very cold in Afghanistan.”

In testimony before the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Farid stressed the importance of local non-governmental organizations and civil society groups in the absence of a government able and willing to provide education, health care, and food aid. “Without outside assistance, more Afghans will suffer, more Afghans will die,” she told the committee. “But the Taliban cannot be allowed to set terms and conditions on how this humanitarian assistance is delivered and who it is delivered to.” 

Worth Your Time

• In his latest Slack Tide newsletter, Matt Labash writes about the importance of graciousness—also known as “not being an angry jerk”—in today’s world. “Jacob’s graciousness might be a small thing, but it’s so uncharacteristic of the way People of the Rage-isphere come at each other now, that it left a big impression on me,” Labash writes of a Wall Street Journal reporter whose work he criticized. “He repaid my unkindness with kindness, and even a generosity of spirit. Not only did he not condemn or argue with what I did in print, but he took the time to see what I was trying to do—even if it came at his expense. And he did so on the very day that my piece, making sport of his piece, traveled around the world as he caught the dreaded plague.”

• Elected Democrats have spent much of the past two days blaming Sen. Joe Manchin for President Biden’s agenda stalling out, but Ramesh Ponnuru argues for some introspection in his latest piece for Bloomberg. “Democrats should have agreed to what [Manchin] wanted. He was, after all, right about the best way to structure the bill, as even some progressives conceded,” he writes. “[Former President Bill] Clinton managed to get re-elected after his health-care initiative collapsed — and that was a long-drawn-out collapse, complete with an address to a joint session of Congress. Clinton’s comeback, however, involved moving rightward and scaling back his ambitions. His greatest legislative accomplishment following the health debacle was a center-right retrenchment of welfare policy. He said the era of big government was over, which was not really true but signaled that he would not repeat his mistakes.”

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• On Monday’s episode of Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah discuss the latest on vaccine and testing mandates with two of the Biden administration’s rules likely headed to the Supreme Court. Plus: A First Amendment case that touches on … communism and Bruce Springsteen?

Let Us Know

Do you think there is a middle ground to be had on policing and criminal justice where cities incorporate some—but not all—of the points raised by protesters and activists during summer 2020? What would that look like?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).