AMAC Exclusive by Clay Fuller
Anyone who was not sleeping through the difficult year of 2020 knows that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrat Party spent that year accusing America of “systemic racism” and giving rhetorical aid and comfort to the “Defund the Police” movement and other anti-law enforcement slogans of the radical left. Now, nearly a year has passed–and it is time to look at the results of all this Democrat rhetoric. What were the effects of Democrats spending an entire year slandering our police officers, gutting law enforcement budgets, and tying the hands of our men and women in blue?
Let’s look at the facts.
We can start in Minneapolis, where large swaths of the city were burned to the ground by rioters protesting the death of George Floyd as Democrat Party leaders from the incompetent governor to Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi appeared to egg them on. By the end of 2020, murders in Minneapolis had increased 72.3% over the previous year. Perhaps the city council voting to abolish the Minneapolis Police Department and subsequently slashing $8 million from the law enforcement budget wasn’t the smartest idea after all.
But that’s just the beginning. Murders in Seattle were up 74.1% in 2020. New Orleans—up 61.7%. Atlanta—57.9%. Chicago—up 55.5%. Milwaukee, Memphis, and Stockton, California—up 45% or more. During their presidential campaign, Biden and Harris used the rhetoric of systemic racism to attack law enforcement with the goal of dismantling law and order. Tragically, the data shows they have succeeded.
It’s not just Biden, Harris, and the Democrats in Washington who supported the insanity. Many Democrats have also been pushing the idea at the local level. Mike Schmidt is the recently elected district attorney for Multnomah County, where Portland is located. He campaigned for the office, offering voters a “bold, progressive vision” that looks to make “our criminal system fairer by Identifying and confronting historical and systemic racism.” He continued, “It is widely understood that many of our criminal laws and practices are rooted in prejudice, bigotry, and racism.” Yet, the progressive vision that Schmidt campaigned on and has since put into practice after being elected has gravely harmed his community. In 2020, Portland’s murder rate skyrocketed by more than 50%. By the spring of 2021, Portland was averaging two homicides a week. Fueling this rapid increase in violence and murder has been Oregon’s policy of no longer enforcing certain lower-level drug possession charges, a change undoubtedly rooted in the notion that drug enforcement is merely a means to imprison minority populations. Yet as enforcement dropped, the impact of the opioid and methamphetamine epidemics grew larger both nationwide and in Schmidt’s Oregon. For the twelve months prior to August 2020, there were 88,295 drug overdoses nationwide. This is the largest number of drug overdoses for a twelve-month period ever recorded. Fentanyl use more than doubled in Oregon in 2020. Mr. Schmidt flirted with the academic fiction of systemic racism in law enforcement while his city burned and the bodies piled up.
The legal notion of being a “party to a crime” means that every person concerned in the commission of an offense is a party to that offense—even if an individual did not directly commit the act. On the campaign trail and now in the White House, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are using the smear of systemic racism to incentivize the destruction of law and order in America. They are even seeking to define law and order as a racist term and policymakers who seek to advance the mission of law enforcement as simply trying to impose a white supremacist system of control. The truth is that the violence, death, and destruction in American cities are fueled by the anti-American rhetoric from Biden and Harris and their ideological acolytes like Mike Schmidt. They seek to demonize our founding ideals, our law enforcement heroes who are our only bulwark against chaos, and our criminal justice system—for sheer political gain. Biden, Harris, and the Democrats are a party to crimes against the very communities they insist that they are trying to help.
Conservatives must have the courage to indict Biden, Harris, and the Democrats on the issue of law and order. Conservatives must also have the guts to bring that case before communities that have not traditionally heard conservative ideas. We must be able to make our argument based on the facts, not the media narrative. Progressive policies are leading to more violence and more overdose deaths. And we must finish with a closing argument that we will tirelessly work for justice and equality for all Americans and ensure that America will remain as it always has been—a proclamation to mankind of the unalienable rights of all human beings.
Clay Fuller served as a White House Fellow from 2018-2019, advising senior Trump administration officials on special operations oversight at the Department of Defense and advising the Office of the Vice President on countering the opioid epidemic. He is an experienced federal, military, and local prosecutor as well as a military reserve officer with a decade of national security experience.