Democrats Must Kill Their Inner Cops

Who needs the National Guard when your state troopers are perfectly willing to crack protester skulls all on their own?

Listen, Illinois governor JB Pritzker is not perfect, but he's my guy. Or at least he was. I disagree with a lot about him, including his support for Israel, but I like that he views the marginalized people in his states as neighbors worth defending and sticking up for.

Pritzker has made a lot of headlines standing up to Trump's ridiculous military incursions into blue states. He and California governor Gavin Newsom have both made waves resisting Trump's plans to deploy national guard troops into blue state cities like Chicago and Portland, OR.

"Donald Trump is not a king — and his administration is not above the law. Today, the court confirmed what we all know: there is no credible evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois. And no place for the National Guard in the streets of American cities like Chicago," Pritzker wrote on X after a court ruled against the Trump administration's proposed Guard deployment.

But just this weekend, Illinois State Police descended upon the relatively peaceful protest at the Broadview ICE facility, unleashing batons and other less lethal crowd control measures. The state police are directly under the governor's purview.

The below video is just a snapshot, but you can clearly see the state police instruct the crowd to stay off the street, and throughout the video, protestors stay off the street. But nevertheless, the police violently push into the crowd. The only violent people in the video are Pritzker's state police.

Now again, it's just one video from one protest, but this has been a widespread pattern whenever liberals and lefties take protests to the streets. Largely peaceful protests begin, average citizens marching and chanting until they run into the police, who are dressed for and prepared for a riot, and lo and behold, a riot inevitably breaks out.

It's worth noting that right wing protests, including the attempted January 6th insurrection, rarely get this sort of violent treatment. To a cynical old journalist like me, I would say that's not an accident.

The police in the US have turned themselves into de facto wings of the Republican party. Just today, The Free Press and CBS News co-ran a story full of anonymous and unattributed New York City cops claiming they would leave the workforce if Democratic nominee for mayor Zohran Mamdani gets elected.

They won't of course. Being a cop is one of the most plum jobs available to your average American these days. You're not accountable to local civilian governments, and you get easy and plentiful overtime. Heck, you don't even have to be good at solving crime and yet you're still one of the most well funded positions in all of government, and feted by the public with admiration.

All that for being willing to be one of those people authorized to use physical force to protect the property of the wealth class.

But this piece isn't really about cops, it's about Democrats.

Ever since the passage of the 1994 crime bill, Democrats have been all in on policing. Crime has been in decline for decades now, and it sits at historic lows right now. Crime even goes down in areas where local police announce work slowdowns in protest of local oversight laws.

I'm still haunted by the images of Newsom taking part in "clearing" homeless encampments in California. Not content with a humiliating failure of state housing policy, the Dem governor just had to bring a camera crew out to personally film himself disposing of his poorest citizens' last remaining possessions.

We also live in a police state in the US. We incarcerate more people here in the US right now than any democracy in the history of Earth. There's no doubt that crime is a bad thing, but we've taken policing to an unsustainable level. Democrats must kill their inner cop if we are to move on and rebuild from the authoritarian bent of this Trump regime.

That means ending this practice of maxing out funding only for the military, the cops, and automobile roads. So much of that money would be better spent on other things, especially if you want to further reduce crime off of these historic lows. A lot of crime these days is driven by poverty and those issues can't be solved by throwing more money at cops, unless the goal is criminalizing poor people.

The biggest key to not having a redux of Trump authoritarianism is deflating the police state that he's depending on to target us all. But in doing so, that includes tackling the average Democratic politician's instincts to be "tough on crime" and pro-police.

That means no more Illinois state police cracking protestor skulls, JB. And no more gleeful photo shoots of you personally clearing homeless encampments and throwing away the last remaining personal belongings of the poor people you failed in California, Gavin.

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-Katelyn