The City of Brotherly Love is facing an approximately $100 million budget shortfall due to the COVID-19 lockdowns, and the City Council is finalizing it’s FY2021 budget. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philly budget deal cancels $19 million increase in police funding, moves another $14 million elsewhere

by Laura McCrystal | Thursday, June 18, 2020 | Updated: 8:35 AM EDT

Philadelphia City Council cut $33 million in proposed funding for the city’s Police Department Wednesday night as it took a step toward approving a budget for the next fiscal year.

Council also restored some of the money that Mayor Jim Kenney had proposed cutting from affordable housing, arts and culture, adult education, and the city’s African American Museum in a preliminary vote on a spending plan for the next fiscal year.

Kenney agreed last week to eliminate a proposed $19 million increase to the Police Department, after facing criticism amid protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Council on Wednesday cut an additional $14 million from the proposed police budget simply by moving crossing guards and public safety enforcement officers out of the department. Those employees will now report directly to the managing director’s office.

So, they’re just moving money around, right? Or will the city start cutting crossing guards and public safety enforcement officers or cutting their pay by having someone other than the Police Department doing it?

The Police Department budget, despite funding cuts, includes money for a number of reforms, according to council’s news release, including body cameras, implicit bias training, and an equity manager for the department. The city will also add a deputy inspector general for police-related investigations.

What, body cameras hadn’t already been done? That’s something I support, because in the vast majority of cases, such will support the police in their actions, rather than the protests from the #woke.

But with a steeply rising murder rate,¹ the victims of which are mostly young black males, cutting anything from the Police Department is simply making the city safer for the predators. The Police Department does not need “implicit bias training and an equity manager for the department;” the city needs more police officers!

Of course, Philadelphia also needs a District Attorney who will do something really radical like prosecute crimes! Larry Kramer was elected to that job in 2018, after promising to not go after small-time criminals and drug offenders. He would rather wait until they’ve become more hardened criminals through continually getting away with less serious offenses, and then prosecute them after they’ve shot a police officer.

Oh, well, at least Philadelphia isn’t going to ‘defund the police,’ the way so many of the woke are demanding.
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¹ – 187 as of June 17^th, a 23% increase over the same date in 2019, and 2019 saw the highest number of murders in Philadelphia since 2007. If the increase remains at 23%, the total number of murders in foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia would be 438, leaving 2007’s number of 391 in the dust.
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