The move to defund, even abolish, police departments across the country was initiated by far-left groups Antifa and Black Lives Matter, following the engineered George Floyd riots. In response to the massive rioting, many cities with Democratic mayors and Democratic-majority city councils – Seattle, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and New York City – have all begun to remove funding from their respective police departments. Some, like the New York Police Department, received a staggeringly-high budget reduction of $1 billion.
“Defund the police” unpopular nationwide
According to the poll, 61 percent of respondents opposed the call to defund the police, while only 24 percent expressed their support. Furthermore, the poll found that support for the Black Lives Matter movement is decreasing. Only around 42 percent of respondents reported a favorable view of the organization. Forty-one percent had an unfavorable view, 15 percent said they had no opinion about the movement and two percent said they had never heard of the organization at all.
According to The Epoch Times' data, this represents a steady shift in opinion regarding the supposedly anti-racist organization. Several other polls that they previously conducted show that the amount of support the Black Lives Matter movement is getting from their respondents is decreasing. In a poll conducted from Aug. 26 to 28, 43 percent of respondents had a favorable view of the movement compared to 40 percent that had an unfavorable view.
This lack of popularity extends to the Black Lives Matter movement's radical leftist allies, Antifa. The current poll found that 53 percent of respondents had an unfavorable view of them. Twenty percent said they had no opinion of Antifa, 17 percent said they had never heard of the domestic terrorist organization and only 11 percent held a favorable view of them. (Related: FACT CHECK: According to alt media in America, if Antifa shoots you dead, you didn't actually die from the gunshot if you also had an underlying medical condition like diabetes.)
The online survey was held from Aug. 26 to 30. It interviewed 2,169 likely voters nationwide. Thirty-six percent of the respondents identified as Democrats, 32 percent Republican and 32 percent as independent or other.
Polling company Morning Consult also held a nationwide poll that showed results similar to that taken by The Epoch Times. According to their poll, which contacted 1,987 registered voters, 58 percent were opposed to the “defund the police” movement. Only 28 percent said they supported the movement, while 14 percent had no opinion.
The lack of popularity with the Democrat-backed plan to defund the police shows that the Democratic Party is going down. Listen to this episode of the Health Ranger Report, a podcast by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and listen to the good news of how the Democrats are on a path of self-destruction and will no doubt collapse in 2021.
Democrat-cities suffering from rioting and mass looting also not in favor of defunding police
The lack of support and enthusiasm for defunding the police can also be seen in surveys conducted in cities that have seen the worst of the mass looting, rioting and violence, such as Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland.
In Minneapolis, where the nationwide wave of engineered rioting began in late May, a poll of 800 registered voters conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling found that 44 percent of respondents do not want the funding of the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) to be reduced. Forty percent wanted the MPD to be defunded, and 16 percent were not sure.
Furthermore, an overwhelming majority of the voters polled said that they were very happy with the way their first African American chief of police, Medaria Arradondo, was running the MPD. Sixty-three percent of respondents said they had a favorable view of the police chief, while only 15 percent had an unfavorable opinion of him.
This does not mean that Minneapolis voters, who are mostly Democrats, are opposed to police reforms. For instance, many believe that the city's current arbitration process helps keep bad cops in the force and needs to be overhauled. An overwhelming majority of respondents – 67 percent, including 80 percent of African Americans polled – believe that the MPD needs to require its officers to be actual residents of the city. This, many believe, will help them develop better relationships with the people in their communities.
A majority of respondents also believe that the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, the main police union that represents rank-and-file MPD officers, is too powerful and their ability to intervene in the firing of erring officers needs to be reined in.
In Seattle, a telephone survey of 500 people conducted by EMC Research found that only 32 percent of respondents supported a plan put forward by the Seattle City Council – composed entirely of Democrats and socialists – that would defund the Seattle police by 50 percent.
When this poll first came out, mainstream media outlets quickly picked up on the fact that 53 percent of respondents were in favor of a slight budget reduction for the Seattle police. What these news outlets failed to point out is that a vast majority of the survey participants are supportive of other police reforms, including very modest cuts to the police budget. For instance, a significant plurality – 43 percent – were in favor of Mayor Jenny Durkhan's proposal to reduce the police budget by 5 percent.
This poll further states that, out of all of the public figures in Seattle, the city's residents trust former police chief Carmen Best the most – 61 percent – when it comes to tackling police reform. Interestingly, the Seattle City Council, which has more power to legislate reforms to policing, only recorded a 47 percent trust rating.
In Portland, which has seen nonstop rioting and mass violence since the beginning of the wave of civil unrest, only 39 percent of the 603 respondents were supportive of some of the police reforms being proposed – such as defunding the police – and believed that these could address the issues of police brutality and racism in the Portland police.
At least a dozen major cities nationwide are considering – or have already implemented – deep cuts to the budgets of their respective police departments, including Seattle, New York City, Chicago and Portland. What all of these polls show is that the public officials who run those cities, most likely Democrats, are not implementing popular police reform policies, while completely ignoring possible reforms that might actually resonate with their constituents, such as banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants, amending qualified immunity, hiring independent prosecutors to investigate police abuses, mandating the use of body cameras and creating a national registry for police misconduct cases.
Learn more about why people all over the country are not in favor of massive cuts to police department budgets by reading the articles at PoliceViolence.news.
Sources include:
PublicConsultation.org [PDF]
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