This post was published in Rochester’s daily newspaper, The Democrat & Chronicle, on June 21, 2020
Will Hurd is the only black Republican in the House of Representatives. In a Wall Street

Journal op-ed, he laid out his proposal for reforming the police. Included was the implementation of best practices for police departments to be eligible to receive their portion of the $2 billion the federal government provides to police departments annually. Implicitly, Rep. Hurd is saying Congress will defund police departments that don’t meet federal standards.
The clarion call to defund the police sounds like one end of a binary choice: either eliminate police department budgets or leave things as they are. Of course, neither of those options are acceptable.
At a local level, defunding the police will take a different form in every community. In 2013, the city of Camden NJ dissolved its unionized police department and signed a Continue reading “The Conservative Approach to Defunding the Police”