There's nothing more Foxian than Fox News putting a Black woman on (Harris Faulkner) with a really awful set of white folks (Joe Concha and Tomi Lahren) to lie about St. Louis' "rising crime rate" for the benefit of a bunch of scaredy-cat white aging bigots glued to their TV for the latest episode of "how to hate Democrats, especially Black Democrats". Monday's episode of Outnumbered was exactly that.
The topic: Fearmongering about crime rates and their claim that police are being "defunded." Their scapegoat of the day? Democratic mayor of St. Louis, Tishaura Jones, whom they chose to blame for rising crime rates in St. Louis without regard to the fact that she's been in office for a month.
Let's unpack the whole "rising crime rate" myth here and elsewhere. Anyone who compares 2020 with 2021 is a lying liar who wants to pretend there was no pandemic keeping people in the ICU, the morgue, or locked in their homes. That's not stopping right wing bloggers from dropping that nugget into the wingersphere so it can be picked up on Fox News for maximum fear effect.
Just ahead of this clip, Joe Concha shared the angst of his policemen buddies. Relating a story from one of them (which could certainly be a "sir story" in the same vein Trump tells), Concha quoted a cop as saying, "Here's a result: me and all my other friends and all across the country where you are seeing these high retirement rates, they can't backfill the positions, they are having trouble with recruitment and what's going to happen as a consequence as they are going to lower the standards in terms of who can be a police officer and then you're going to see a drop in the quality of law enforcement and more situations or misunderstandings where bad things happen."
As if cops shooting Black people in the back, in their beds asleep, or kneeling on their neck until they're dead is somehow great police work worthy of acclaim.
Tomi, on the other hand, wants to blame Democrats and parenting techniques.
"Well, this is what Democrats do when they don't want to actually solve a problem, they find a scapegoat and in this case they have chosen the police and chosen to talk about race ad nauseam as if that is the biggest problem facing our nation when we have much bigger problems," mewled Tomi.
"Why are these police officers having to play parent?" she wondered. To which I wonder back about where in the parenting manual it says it's cool to kill folks who are Black but let the white killers of Black folks head out to Burger King for some refreshment before they head off to jail for murdering 9 Black people in a church in a fit of hate.
Back to crime rates. St. Louis has had a high crime rate for years. In 2019, 164 people were murdered. NOTE TO FOX NEWS: Tishaura Jones was NOT Mayor in 2019. No police were defunded in 2019.
And speaking of that, no police have been defunded in St. Louis at all. USA Today has the debunkery:
In St. Louis, the "defunding" includes redirecting money to other social programs and eliminating vacancies within the police department.
[...]
In keeping with her campaign promises of reallocating police funds to social services, Mayor Tishaura Jones voted in favor of the proposed budget.
The Board of Aldermen now needs to vote on the budget. Nick Dunne, a spokesperson for the mayor's office, said the board's Ways and Means Committee will be voting on the budget May 19.
If it passes, the budget will then move on to the full board for approval.
The $1.15 billion city spending plan would cut roughly $4 million from the city's police budget and redirect the funds to four different programs, as well as eliminating 98 vacant officer positions. The cut amounts to about 2% of the department's originally proposed 2022 budget of $171 million.
Roughly $1.5 million of the redirected funding will go to the Affordable Housing Commission, and $1 million will go to a victim support services program. Another $1 million will go to the city's Health & Human Services Department to hire 15 caseworkers to assist the homeless population, and $500,000 will go toward an affirmative litigation unit.
Oh! Well, will you look at that! No defunding has happened yet!!!! Not even a penny of defunding. And by "defunding", I mean that there may be some cuts to fund social services so POLICE OFFICERS DON'T HAVE TO BE PARENTS!
SEE HOW THAT WORKS, TOMI?
Fox News is so damn desperate for something -- anything -- to stir hate and division while feeding their white supremacist audience more reasons to hate Black people. It's pathetic.
