Stacia Hylton, former director of the U.S. Marshals Service, described the “defund the police” campaign pushed by Democrats and the left as an opening for organized crime, offering her remarks on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.
Hylton warned that self-censorship on matters of politics prevents Americans from engaging in productive discourse towards understanding and addressing social and economic issues.
“I think people are getting very conflicted in a moment where we’ve developed these racial tensions,” Hylton said. “They’re getting very conflicted on whether to speak or not speak because they’re going to get identified as left or right, so to speak, instead of what’s right or what’s wrong.”
Hylton continued, “I think that political charge behind this — which is a dynamic that’s kind of been creating this divide — it’s kind of forcing people to be quiet, you know. And I think that we have to be better than that. What I’d loved to be able to say is, ‘We need to have the race equality conversation.'”
“We need to talk about ensuring that police officers know how to de-escalate a situation. We need to talk about how we can have better funding for community policing and the real social problems as it gets down to opioids and drugs because it’s really a social-economic problem. How do we create jobs for disenfranchised areas?”
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Hylton described organized crime and gangs as beneficiaries of a lack of implementation of effective policy measures to address socio-economic problems caused by a public too fearful to discuss political matters.
“There’s such a big political platform discussion that we can no longer have, unfortunately, and it’s getting lost,” Hylton remarked. “And then what’s happening is opportunists are taking advantage of this and they are escalating it intentionally.”
Hylton linked “defund the police” proposals to the erosion of the rule of law. She said, “Understand how precious our rule of law is. Visit a country that has no rule of law and look at the organized crime that’s in there. These opportunists form organized crime, gangs, that element just looks for these opportunities to take advantage of vulnerable people and vulnerable situations. That’s what we don’t want to happen.”
Hylton went on, “The people that live in these communities that are gang-riddled [and] are opioid infested. They don’t want to lose the police. At the same time, they don’t want to appear to their own racial group that they’re not supporting the cause to have a voice and that is what’s getting mixed here.”
Hylton added, “We can’t become Mexico or some of these countries that have no rule of law. Organized crime will come in and seize the moment.”
Political campaigns denigrating law enforcement are harming recruitment and discouraging talented persons from applying to serve, Hylton shared.
“I fear that young men and women will no longer want to go into law enforcement and serve, and that is very disheartening to me because I truly believe it’s in your DNA and a call,” Hylton remarked. “I think there will be some very conflicted individuals that think, ‘I don’t know if I want to go into law enforcement, any longer,’ and that will have a downstream impact on all of us.”
Howard Safir, former New York City police commissioner, similarly warned that political hostility towards law enforcement — which he described as an “anti-police mentality” — has damaged police recruitment.
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