Retired Police Chief Sounds the Alarm, Claims Defund the Police “Isn’t Dead”

(UnitedVoice.com) – Leading Democrats have backed away from the “defund the police” movement in the face of growing public anger at rising crime. However, a retired police chief is warning that the idea hasn’t gone away. Instead, extreme liberals are still pushing it — they’re just doing it more discreetly — by blocking the police from doing their job.

After the death of George Floyd in 2020, “defund the police” quickly became the rallying cry of the far left. Radicals in city governments tried to push through cuts to police budgets, aiming to redirect the money to “alternative” ways of preventing crime. Most of these efforts failed in the face of public opposition — polls showed that just 20% of the public supported the movement — and senior Democrat politicians slammed the idea, with then-House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-SC) saying the slogan was “killing our party, and we’ve got to stop it.”

Clyburn and his allies got their way; cities that had cut police funding restored it, usually too late to prevent crime rates exploding, and nobody’s talking about defunding the police anymore, but are extremists working to achieve the same goal in a different way? Former Riverside, Illinois, police chief Tom Weitzel thinks they are.

Talking to Fox News Digital recently, Weitzel warned that “Defund the police isn’t dead… it’s gaining speed again.” He said leftists aren’t openly protesting about police budgets anymore. Instead, liberal officials are restricting what the police are allowed to do. For example, in February, Pittsburgh officials announced that lower-priority calls don’t need an in-person response, so the police won’t be responding to them anymore.

According to Weitzel, the city wants to reduce patrols and cut calls for police service from 200,000 a year to 50,000. “Non-emergency” crimes like theft, harassment, and burglary will be handled online or by telephone instead of an active police response. That means less police on the streets — precisely what the “defund the police” extremists were looking for.