The Democrats are still fighting each other over whether we’re supposed to defund the police, abolish them or just lock them all up preemptively. (Okay… nobody has actually suggested that last option… yet.) This general uproar against the members of our thin blue line have long since gotten out of control. The next chapter in this saga comes to us from Massachusettes, where protesters are not only calling for removing funding from law enforcement agencies, but they want school security officers to be removed from the state’s campuses. If must be nice to have your crime situation so well under control that the only thing you need to worry about is the cops, eh? (Boston Globe)

Hundreds of youths marched from Nubian Square in Roxbury to City Hall Plaza Wednesday, demanding that the city remove police officers from public schools and reallocate 10 percent of the police budget to community and educational needs.

The march offered a powerful display of the energy and purpose taking shape among young Black and brown activists in Boston following nearly two weeks of daily protests against police brutality and structural racism — and as the City Council debated major changes in the Police Department’s budget.

Wednesday’s event started coming together just days earlier, on a Friday evening conference call among about 20 organizers, some of whom didn’t know one another. All wanted to see a transformation in Boston’s approach to public safety, said Vikiana Petit-Homme, 18, an organizer.

The “reasonable protesters” making these demands were filmed marching down the street chanting “FTP,” which the Globe generously describes as “an acronym for … a denouncement of police first popularized by the rap group N.W.A.” (It stands for F*** The Police, in case you really need it spelled out for you.) They were also carrying posters showing a smashed piggy bank with the pig wearing a police cap. This is apparently who the municipal government of Boston is supposed to have as a negotiating partner.

This is a campaign of convenience and opportunism, similarly to what we’re seeing all over the country right now. People with a grudge against the police are using the unrest in Minneapolis as an excuse to go after cops everywhere, regardless of what their own experiences with law enforcement have been. I went back through the archives looking for instances of claims of excessive use of force by the police in the greater Boston area and it’s pretty slim pickings. There were a couple of examples from 2019, including claims that a cop punched a suspect in the face during a fight in an apartment complex parking lot. There was also an accusation of false arrest using excessive force in 2014. I did find a couple of recent police shootings, but they involved suspects who were either armed and attacking the cops or in a vehicle trying to ram them.

These calls to pull the funding for security officers in schools also ignore everything that was said after a spate of school shootings gripped the nation. Weren’t we all supposed to be outraged over that? But now it’s apparently not a problem anymore, at least if an excuse can be found to slash the police budget. If Boston bows to these social justice warriors’ demands, I await the howls of despair the next time some student decides to shoot up a school and it takes the municipal police more than five minutes to arrive on the scene.