Nearly A Dozen Police Have Left City Department Amid National Wave Of Quitting Cops

 About 10 police officers have departed from a Western Massachusetts city following "defund the police" budget cuts over the summer.

And another 11 officers have put in an application for employment in other departments.
The exodus marks a problem with morale at the Northampton Police Department in the wake of calls to “defund the police,” subsequent budget cuts, and protests against law enforcement, Chief Jody Kasper told MassLive.

Cuts were announced in June when city officials were hammering out the annual budget. The police department’s proposed $6.7 million budget was reduced by 10 percent.
Since that time 7 officers have resigned and three were laid off, Kasper said.

A wave of police resignations has hit the United States in the wake of George Floyd’s killing and a call for changes in law enforcement that includes less money for traditional police budgets. The policy has been referred to as “defund the policy” and the idea is that money taken from the police budget could be used to buffer social services and allow police to focus on major crimes.

Many communities have reduced police budgets and created new policing policies in an effort to reduce police brutality and racial imbalance in how laws are enforced. However, the second part of the defund the police campaign - the added support from social services - does not appear to have materialized as quickly.

Anecdotal evidence from police departments from Seattle to Atlanta to Minneapolis to Buffalo have reported scores of police officers resigning, according to CNN and various media outlets.
In a survey of the nation’s 50 largest cities, at least 23 have seen chiefs or line officers resign, retire or take disability this year, according to City Journal.

Replacing officers has not been easy as recruiting is down as well.

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Rep. Bass Slams Kenosha County District Attorney For Allowing Man Who Shot Jacob Blake Seven Times In The Back To Walk Free

This week, Congressmember Karen Bass (D-CA) issued the following statement after Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley announced the Kenosha police officer who shot Jacob Blake seven times in the back in August of 2020 will not be criminally charged.

“Just as the world watched the killing of George Floyd on video, the world watched the shooting of Jacob Blake on video. Officers are rarely charged when they kill or injure Black people because the bar for prosecuting officers is too high. A victim has to prove that the officer intended to harm or kill the person involved in the incident. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act lowers the bar of prosecution to recklessness.

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Abbott-backed proposal would put Austin police under state control

A plan endorsed by Gov. Greg Abbott to place the Austin Police Department under state control would require Austin to foot the entire bill for policing in the city but have no say on how policing would be done.

Abbott hinted at the potential takeover Monday, posting on Twitter that the Texas  Legislative Council — a nonpartisan agency that assists legislators in drafting legislation — had crafted a plan to transfer Austin Police Department control to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

The governor did not provide details, and it was not clear from his tweet if he was referring to a proposal he had floated recently to have the state take over policing in only the middle part of Austin, including the downtown district and the area near the University of Texas. His spokesman said he did not know what Abbott meant in the tweet.

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Defund-police supporters tell Biden they're 'not going away'

 Supporters of defunding the police say they are "not going away" just because Joe Biden will be the next president.

"What we’ve heard so far from the Democratic Party is what they’re not going to do," defund advocate Andrea Ritchie told Mother Jones. "I don’t expect they will be supportive of the main demand from the streets ... It's gonna be a fight. We're not going away."

Biden embraced some calls for police reform during his presidential campaign, such as a ban on chokeholds and the creation of a national police oversight commission. But he opposed far-left efforts to defund the police, a catch-all term for anything from reducing police budgets to abolishing law enforcement completely. Biden instead pushed for $300 million in additional police funding, mainly for improved training.

"I’m very pessimistic about what we can expect, at least initially, from the Biden administration,” said Alex Vitale, a professor and author of a book about police abolition. “He’s made it very clear that he wants to put more resources into policing, that he supports the kind of superficial and ineffective procedural reforms that the Obama administration proposed.”

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