Bernie’s Burlington VT realizes that they do in fact need police after defunding them

Burlington, VT, the quaint small town in northern Vermont is known for many things. It’s home to the University of Vermont, is where Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) got his political start (and as mayor of said city traveled to the USSR in 1988 to take his honeymoon and forge a sister city relationship with Yaroslavl in Russia), and has been at the forefront of “progressive” politics for decades. It should surprise nobody then that when the “Defund the Police” movement swept the nation they went all-in on the ill-conceived idea.

Where city councils like Minneapolis voted their intent to defund their police, they didn’t follow through. In places where they did vocally and exuberantly did cut police funding, it’s quietly been brought back. Big shock that when there’s no cops (or no prosecution for crime as in that terrorist-spawn, communist Chesa Boudin’s district in California), crime goes up. The victims of crime are the very people the woke mafia proclaim to want to help.

Now even Burlington is having to admit that defunding the police was a bad idea, only a year after cutting nearly a third of their department.

From NBC News;

One evening in June 2020, a City Council budget meeting in this college town near the Canadian border stretched past midnight after hundreds of locals had logged on to Zoom to speak. Over nine hours, bleary-eyed councilors heard a message that had rippled across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

“Enough performing,” said one citizen. “Defund the Burlington police department.”

The council would ultimately pass a resolution that upended the way policing was done in the city.

Other cities with similar profiles — majority white college towns — “defunded” their police. Norman, Oklahoma, diverted 4 percent of the police budget to community services. Northampton, Massachusetts, cut 10 percent from the police budget.

Burlington, however, decided to slash almost 30 percent of its police force by attrition. Since then, city leaders have been forced to reckon with the unintended consequences of that decision, including problems with public safety and quality of life, according to police and residents.

Almost a year and a half later, no one, it seems, is happy. Not even the councilor who proposed the resolution.

“We’re in a situation that I think nobody wanted us to get to,” said Councilor Zoraya Hightower, a member of the locally dominant Progressive Party.

The mayor, who didn’t support cutting the force, agrees.

“There’s a lot of damage that has been done in the last 16 months,” said Mayor Miro Weinberger, a Democrat.

The source article contains much more, most of it race-baiting drivel. Suffice to say, most of the pragmatists around here will say this is a case of “You got what you asked for.” Sadly for all these misguided souls, getting rid of police is a lot easier than it is to find, hire, and train new police officers.

Category: "Teh Stoopid", BLM, Dumbass Bullshit, Police, Politics