Federal government gives millions to group that supports defunding the police
The federal government provides tens of millions of dollars each year to a nonprofit group that supports the movement to defund police departments and dismantle the criminal justice system.
Officials with the Brooklyn-based Vera Institute of Justice have urged the government to “radically dismantle” police departments in order to fix a system they say dehumanizes people of color. The institute is heavily funded by the federal government. So far this fiscal year, the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and other agencies have awarded the Vera Institute more than $89 million in contracts and grants. The organization has received $811 million in federal funding since 2008, according to USA Spending, a federal budget database.
Vera’s support for the “defund the police” movement comes amid a contentious political debate over policing in America. Democrats see the issue as a political third rail and have tried to distance the party from anti-police rhetoric popular on the left. While members of the Democratic Party have embraced the defund movement, President Joe Biden claimed this month that Republicans are “lying” when they say Democrats support the concept.
The Vera Institute, which calls itself a “justice reform change agent,” also received stipends from traditional progressive donors, such as George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. The billionaire’s philanthropy gave more than $10 million to Vera from 2016 to 2019. …
In addition to harboring radical views on policing, Vera has thrown its weight behind a pack of left-wing prosecutors, many of them backed by Soros, that swept into office across the United States on the promise to reform the criminal justice system. Their policies have come under intense scrutiny as crime rates surge across the country.
One such prosecutor is Kimberly Foxx, the district attorney in Chicago. The Vera Institute is hosting an event this week with Foxx and Angela Davis, the Communist Party USA member who supports the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement. Foxx was reprimanded last year over her handling of the investigation into actor Jussie Smollett’s false claim that he was the victim of a hate crime. An independent prosecutor said Foxx displayed “substantial abuses of discretion” during the investigation, in which she dropped charges against Smollett for filing a false police report.
As Trumpet executive editor Stephen Flurry explained earlier in the year, the movement to defund the police is part of a deliberate agenda to take over America’s police forces. He wrote:
When politicians like Rashida Tlaib claim that policing in the United States is “inherently and intentionally racist” and “can’t be reformed,” they are implying that policing in the United States must be abolished.
So do they want a society with no police? No. They want control of the police!
These are the same left-wing authoritarians who used a mere coronavirus outbreak to force mass shutdowns of businesses and schools, to force people to even stay in their homes. Their goal isn’t to deprive the government of power. It’s to deprive local governments of power.
The founders of the United States specifically avoided establishing a national policing power: Local police departments and sheriff’s offices cannot be used by the national government as weapons against the people. Agents of the federal government exist only to combat interstate crimes, such as counterfeiting, treason and piracy. The vast majority of the law enforcement power that would affect an American’s day-to-day life is left to the states and to the people. That is why Americans elect their local sheriffs and city officials appoint police chiefs. This constitutional provision exists to prevent tyranny.
Discrediting, disheartening, disarming and defunding local police departments across America is only a first step toward establishing exactly what the founders blocked: a national policing authority. The character and purpose of that agency will be to carry out the will not of Americans, but of “deep state” bureaucrats.
The department head of Criminology and Justice Studies at Drexel University summarized this plan to get control of policing power in an article last year titled “What Current Police Reform Efforts Lack: A Call to Federalize.” “Suppose we reimagined the nature of American policing.” he wrote. “And suppose we started by acknowledging that local policing has been a failure in this country since its origins in the 19th century. From slave patrols in the South, to controlling the ‘dangerous classes’ in the North, the foundations of local policing were built on the assumption that state-sanctioned coercion was to be weaponized by the white and wealthy against the poor, black and brown. … And so, at this crossroads, I pose the radical question: Why not disband most local police forces and federalize them?”
Left-wing politicians hate the fact that there are 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies that they cannot control from Washington, D.C. They want a centralized federal policing authority that they can control, and they are willing to incite riots until they get it. After all, you have to completely tear down the old system before you can replace it with a new one.
The Bible reveals that the radical left’s efforts to tear down the system will spiral out of control. Isaiah 1:7 says that America’s cities will be “burned with fire,” and Ezekiel 5:12 says that “a third part of thee shall die with the pestilence.” The racially charged rhetoric being hurled by politicians is intended to stir up negative emotions and anger that the radical left can exploit in their quest to fundamentally transform that nation. But by tearing down the police, radical leftists are actually tearing down the nation’s last line of defense.
