Ilhan Omar Promises Your Neighborhood Will Be “Safe” With No Police

The United States has dedicated a large portion of the yearly budget to defense for decades now. And in light of the police brutality that has once again been exposed in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, critics and activists are starting to ask if there is room for America to spend less of its budget on defense and more of it on empowering the people who live within these American communities.

On the surface, the answer to this question seems obvious. It makes sense to invest in the country’s citizens by giving them access to better education and opportunities. There would be less crime and more productivity. However, would the country be as safe as it is now if America made a move to defund its police departments and military? Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar believes that cops are not needed to keep America safe.

“I think that’s really where the conversation is going wrong because no one is saying that the community is not going to be kept safe,” Omar told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday morning.

Omar represents the state where George Floyd was killed. This means that she is required to take a very hard stance against funding the police department if she wants to remain popular among her progressive constituency. In her ideal scenario, crimes would be investigated by a “proper response when community members are in danger.”

Despite demanding the total defunding of the police, Omar did not offer a replacement for the protection police offer. But since it has been shown that police departments do not treat people of different races the same, it could be said that police departments were never protecting and serving communities of color.

“What we are saying is, the current infrastructure that exists as policing in our city should not exist anymore,” the influential politician said. “And we can’t go about creating a different process with the same infrastructure in place. And so dismantling it, and then looking at what funding priorities should look like as we reimagine a new way forward is what needs to happen.”

A reporter asked Omar directly if police should be defunded and disbanded. Instead of answering the difficult question directly, Omar avoided it and suggested rebuilding police departments instead of doing away with it entirely. Because the “defund the police” chant is a call to action for politicians to start siphoning money that goes into the police departments to departments like education and mental health services that need a stimulus of funds.

She confirmed that Congress would be going through “a one-year process of what happens as we go through the process of dismantling the department and starting anew.”

She did speak about the Minneapolis police department, saying: “You can’t really reform a department that is rotten to the root. What you can do is rebuild.”

She added, “This is our opportunity, you know, as a city, to come together, have the conversation of what public safety looks like, who enforces the most dangerous crimes that take place in our community.”