Police officers are less likely to “make split-second decisions to save lives” to use force if they fear being falsely accused “of being racist,” Ken Blackwell, former mayor of Cincinnati and the former secretary of state of Ohio, said on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.
Democrat and left-wing denigration of law enforcement undermines the quality of policing, Blackwell held. He linked political narratives of “defunding police” to rising rates of violent crime in Democrat-run cities over the past year.
“When they attack [police] and criticize them falsely and talk about defunding … two things happen,” he stated, “You make it very difficult to recruit folks, and you have situations where police officers don’t make split-second decisions to save lives because they think that they might in fact find themselves falsely accused of being racist.”
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Insecurity and unrest drive business away from cities, Blackwell added.
“Capital is a coward,” he said. “It runs away from disorder and violence, and what we’ve seen in city after city is net taxpayers — people who pay more in taxes than they demand in services — moving out of our cities that are crime-ridden, and as a consequence, you’ve seen those cities lose capital [and] become not fields of dreams, but killing fields.”
He continued, “You know who’s hurt the most? The lower-income residents who can’t afford to move, and in most cases they happen to be minorities. So if you go to Chicago, you go to Columbus, you go to Cleveland, L.A., Detroit, what you find is that these cities are killing fields, and as a consequence, they are in need of responsive and responsible police and safety forces.”
Pollak asked about U.N. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s recent framing of “white supremacy” and “racism” as foundational components of America. She said, “The original sin of slavery weaved white supremacy into our founding documents and principles.”
Blackwell replied, “This representative of the Biden administration has said — before the world at the United Nations — that we’re locked into that snapshot of history of 1619. She, in fact, has stepped on the legacy of this country that has pushed us through the change of where we are a country that had institutional slavery but we now have mayors and senators, and we now have captains of industry.”
Constant disparagement of America as a “racist” nation stultifies the country’s development, Blackwell maintained.
“We actually have an opportunity to continue to work to get better and that’s where we are as a positive force,” he continued. “You can lock us into this notion of calling people names and basically telling them that they should be canceled out and that our school systems should teach folks that they have to be sort of washed pure of their inherent racism, and we’ll find ourselves marching in place and the world will pass us by.”
Blackwell said millions of foreigners would not be seeking life in the United States if Democrats’ characterizations of America were accurate.
“It’s no accident that there are people who are breaking our laws [and] ignoring our boundaries to get in this country if we, in fact, were all that they claim that we are,” he concluded. “[People] trying to get into this country … understand what is working and what is getting better and what is a standard of human rights and freedom for all the world.”
Pollak agreed, “It doesn’t make sense to call American systemically racist when so many people are trying to get into our country. Why would they flock to a systemically racist country?”
Breitbart News Sunday broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Eastern.