The defund-the-police movement fueled violence and distrust among Black youth, and community-level police engagement is needed to repair the damage
Source: "I watched the defund police movement poison a generation of Black children | Fox News." October 20, 2026. www.foxnews.com
The Gist
The author, a Chicago pastor, argues that years of anti-police messaging from Black Lives Matter and the defund movement made police pull back, which led to more killings in Black neighborhoods and left kids afraid of the officers meant to protect them. He believes the way to fix this is to bring police and community members face to face, as he does at his community center.
Conclusion
The defund-the-police movement and its antecedent anti-police narrative harmed Black communities by increasing deadly violence and teaching a generation of children to fear and distrust police, and the damage should be repaired through direct, personal engagement between police and community members.
Premises
- For over a decade, Black Lives Matter and its allies promoted a narrative (built on cases like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, including the false 'hands up, don't shoot' slogan) that police are hunting Black people and are an occupying force.
- After George Floyd's death in 2020, activists, media and officials (e.g., the NYT 'No More Money for the Police' piece and the Minneapolis council pledge) pushed to cut or abolish police rather than seeking training and accountability reforms.
- In response, officers pulled back: staffing fell through retirements and resignations, morale collapsed, and arrests and proactive policing dropped.
- Homicides then spiked, in Chicago from about 500 in 2019 to 781 in 2020 and 804 in 2021, and nationally murders rose nearly 30% in 2020, with Black Americans and Chicago's South and West Sides hit hardest.
- Years of being told police are the enemy taught children to assume hostility from police and not to call them when something bad is happening.
- Bringing police into a community center to sit with, listen to, and answer questions from kids and adults lets them see officers as people and begins to repair that distrust.
Assumptions
- The rise in homicides in 2020-21 was caused mainly by reduced policing driven by the anti-police movement, rather than by other factors such as the pandemic, economic disruption, or gun sales.
- Anti-police rhetoric, not actual police conduct or lived experience, is the main source of fear of police among Black children.
- Activists' motives were self-serving ('to advance their own activist agendas') rather than sincere concern.
- Police pullback was a response to the movement's rhetoric rather than to other pressures.
- Small-scale, personal encounters can shift deep-seated attitudes and scale up to meaningful community-wide change.
- BLM and the defund movement can be treated as one continuous, unified movement with a single message.