“The crime is out of control and getting worse by the day. We must declare an emergency regarding the crime and violence in our neighborhoods and act urgently. It may be time to call on the National Guard to protect the children and innocent people that are losing their lives to this senselessness,” White said, according to WUSA-9.

The councilman added he is “tired of burying our children” and said residents are “too comfortable with the state of our city.”

He held a press conference at the location of a Saturday shooting that resulted in three dead and many people injured.

Homicides are up 28% in D.C. and violent crime overall is up by 37% over last year.

White said it will take more than just the police to handle public safety issues.

“I am calling on the community and its stakeholders to join us for a shooting response to speak out against the violence in our city. Elected officials cannot solve this alone,” White said. “This effort requires the input and cooperation of parents, students, churches, businesses, civic associations, and even those responsible for the violence. We all must do this together. I stand ready to make our streets safe for all who walk them, not only in Ward 8, but across the District.”

Sure, the defund the police movement is all fun and games until the deadly consequences of that action start becoming reality in everyday life. Who could have possibly predicted that crime would spiral out of control if fewer police were available to stop it?

In the first five days of August, there were 13 shooting deaths recorded. That is up from the 10 that were recorded in the first five days of July. There have been at least 158 killings so far in 2023. That is a 22% increase from 2022.

Who could have known that less police and an anti-police attitude from public officials would lead to an increase in crime as time goes on? The city embraced Black Lives Matter’s Summer of Love and all that went with it, including calling for doing away with police. The police were painted as the bad guys, not the criminals.

Federal prosecutors in Washington, D.C. did not prosecute 67% of people arrested last year. Those people would have been tried in D.C. Superior Court. The Metro Police Department is dealing with an understaffing problem it has not seen in decades.

If prosecutors don’t bring those charged with crimes to court, and bail reform means the bad guys are turned back out on the streets without posting bail, and Superior Court judges are releasing murder suspects on their own recognizance without bail, what did rational people think would happen? Are there no rational people left in Washington, D.C. or any other city that is still defunding its police departments? Crime is up everywhere. It isn’t a coincidence.

Others have asked Mayor Bowser to bring in the National Guard to help with the violence in the city but Bowser is not generally supportive of that idea. She said “National Guard don’t typically do law enforcement.”

“If we had a specific mission that was in the mission of the National Guard, we wouldn’t hesitate to call on them. What the National Guard, they’re not law enforcement, keep in mind. They don’t know our local laws. They don’t typically make local arrests. What we have used the National Guard for, to perform a very critical public safety function, has been in more traffic posts and we use traffic posts very statically,” said Bowser.

The city council voted to slash millions of dollars from the police budget in the summer of 2020, the infamous Summer of Love. Now the liberal council members want more police.

After D.C. saw 13 homicides in just the first five days of August, left-wing council members Brianne Nadeau and Phil Mendelson touted their efforts to secure more resources for police, with Nadeau especially stressing the city’s “hot spots.” Those efforts mark a stark turnaround for the council members, both of whom voted to cut $15 million from the city’s police budget at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. Nadeau at the time endorsed “calls to defund MPD” and “get police out of schools,” while Mendelson praised a 2021 police reform report that lamented D.C.’s “harmful over-reliance on policing and incarceration” and called for a “realignment and reduction of MPD’s size, responsibilities, and budget.”

Nadeau and Mendelson’s sudden support for additional policing reflects the political toxicity of the “defund the police” movement, which swept liberal cities following George Floyd’s death but has since prompted backlash. City officials in New York and Los Angeles, for example, cut funding for police in 2020 only to restore law enforcement budgets a year later, citing spikes in violent crime.

D.C. Police Union chairman Gregg Pemberton calls out the council members who now ask for more law enforcement. The hypocrisy is real. He calls it a flip-flop. The truth is that the policies put forth by the city council have brought this problem to the city.

“Councilmember Nadeau should be ashamed of herself for what she has done to the MPD during her tenure,” Pemberton told the Washington Free Beacon. “If councilmember Nadeau actually cares about public safety, as she stated in her press release, she should move to repeal the two dozen [policies] … that have decimated the MPD over the past three years.”

With an assist from the demented president we have in the White House, a bipartisan effort to repeal the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Act was blocked with a veto. That act makes it easier to fire police officers. Even Mayor Bowser had problems with some portions of that bill, especially the part that subjects off-duty police officers to more government scrutiny.

Nadeau and Mendelson voted in favor of defunding the police while expressing support for first responders. Council member Brooke Pinto bragged about her work to ensure “police have the tools they need to keep communities safe.” That’s fine but in 2020 Pinto groused about D.C.’s “over reliance on policing,” which burdens the city residents. Pinto said it doesn’t help the council resolve its pressing issues. That sounds like typical leftist talk. Do they not realize that police are first responders? You don’t show support for them if you are cutting their budgets. That means lay-offs and fewer resources available to stop crime.

It is no wonder that the city’s police department is understaffed. Morale has to be low at this point. Cities around the country that have been victims of the defund the police lunatics see poor morale among police officers and an increase in early retirement. It is difficult to recruit new police officers in most cities. This can all be directly traced back to the Black Live Matter movement and the defund the police movement that grew from the BLM protests. Marxists ruin everything.