What's The MBTF For Cops?

That is, if you are a cop, what is the mean time between howls for racial justice from the politicians that run your city?

I've read quite a few essays like this one discussing candidate solutions for the loss of police in blue cities. New Orleans, for example, now has fewer than 500 officers on the beat. They need something on the order of 2,000. The city is disintegrating into lawlessness.

Dig this bit from Philly.

A large group of criminals ransacked a WaWa store tonight in Philadelphia pic.twitter.com/bviiexZJR2

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 25, 2022

It's chaos with no cops in sight.

The Democrats must keep blacks voting for them in the 85-90% range in order to have any chance of winning national elections. Their primary tool for this is racial paranoia. The message is simple: Whites are out to get them and their only protection is to vote blue.

In most blue cities, being a cop gives you a shot at a handsome pension after about 25 years of service. The trick is to survive to get your pension. Under optimal conditions, the job is sufficiently risky to make that less than a sure thing. Under modern conditions in blue cities, a dispassionate calculation of the odds makes it a risk not worth taking.

In short, someone entering the police force in a blue city needs to assess whether or not he can trust the Democrats running the place to not scream for his blood one or more times during a 25-year career. In 2020, the Democrats did just that, all over the country. With that in very recent memory, solutions like this, pulled from the essay linked above, won't work.

The obvious solution is to recruit and train new police officers to reduce overtime costs and stress on the thin blue line. But over the past two years, there has been a dramatic drop in police department applicants. Many young people who may have had an interest in taking the exam and going through the rigorous preemployment background investigation have witnessed the inaction of cities across the country to support their officers. Without a significant change in leadership and tone, these possible recruits may move on and never look back.

At issue isn't whether or not progressive politicians will say nice things about the cops this year, it's whether or not they're going to go full Ta-Nehisi Coates in the next ten to twenty years. A brief perusal of lefty media such as NPR, CNN and MSNBC says they almost certainly will. The recent release of the deranged, racial-vengeance movie, The Woman King, says that Hollywood isn't going to help, either.

Finally, there's the matter of scale. Watching the video above, what would one or two cops have been able to do against that mob? Given the level of hate whipped up by the progressives since George Floyd OD'd his way to immortality, you'd have to be suicidal to take that on without a platoon or more at your back.

Offer all the pay incentives you want, I don't see how you can even get to replacement level recruiting so long as your chances of surviving to reach retirement are doubtful at best.