De Blasio’s NYC: ‘We’re Dismantling the NYPD Now, and Violence Has Gone up 200 Percent’

This is what the Americans will suffer if they vote Democrat in November. The choice is clear.

‘The protests were whiter than the police department’

Peter Moskos – sociologist and former Baltimore cop – talks to spiked about race, policing and mass incarceration.

By: Tom Slater, Spike, July 30, 2020:

‘If the goal is to save black lives, it’s not working. If the goal is to get rid of police, it’s working’, says Peter Moskos, professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and a former Baltimore cop.

In the wake of the brutal police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, protests have erupted nationwide, and politicians have responded by cutting and disempowering police.

Meanwhile, crime has spiralled in precisely the communities the Black Lives Matter movement hopes to defend. ‘We’re dismantling the NYPD now, and violence has gone up 200 per cent’, he says.

In the increasingly polarised debate around policing in America, Moskos offers a unique perspective. He calls himself a pro-cop liberal – ‘it’s a very small Venn diagram’, he jokes.

A Harvard-trained sociologist, Moskos spent 14 months working as a policeman in the ghettos of Baltimore’s Eastern District. He published a book about it in 2008, Cop in the Hood.

He has chronicled countless police killings, but that didn’t make the video of Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes any less disturbing for him.

‘It’s a different league’, Moskos says. ‘I have seen a lot of these and usually I’m like, well, is there a way I can see it from the cop’s perspective? But this one was just… I don’t get it. And no one really gets it… He killed the guy.’

The universal condemnation of that sadistic killing and the swift action taken against Chauvin were a rare example, he goes on, of the system actually working.

‘Everyone has condemned the killing, including police unions. I’ve never seen that before’, he says. ‘The guy was charged and arrested. That is our system of justice.’