Sadly, this is no longer a hypothetical question after the Vice Chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, an affiliate of the broader Democrat Party and an advocate for defund the police, was carjacked outside her house and savagely beaten in front of her children.
First, let me begin by stating that one of my core philosophies in life is best summed up by a single line from Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. Gene Hackman’s Little Bill Daggett lies bleeding on the floor as Eastwood’s William Munny looms over him with a shotgun, ready to blow his head off. Little Bill protests his fate, “I don’t deserve this” and Munny responds in classic Eastwood deadpan, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it,” before pulling the trigger. Few short sequences encapsulate how unfair life can be so succinctly and powerfully, and yet there is also a sense that some people simply do deserve to reap the disastrous outcome of their actions. When a person proceeds down a path they are repeatedly warned against, doing what flies in the face of logic and reason, only to have that path turn around and subject them to some horror, many might well say they deserve it. Deserve, however, remains a difficult concept to clearly define, especially when it comes to violence. As compassionate human beings, we should not wish harm on anyone for any reason, even as we understand certain harms will come and are justified. A cold-blooded killer gunned down by the police while brutalizing their latest victim can clearly be said to deserve it, but what about a politician who let that killer back out on the street in the first place? What is their culpability if the killer’s violence is then perpetrated on them? Can we say with a reasonable ethical and moral justification that they deserved it or, as compassionate human beings, should we be loath to go there even as we experience a little schadenfreude?
Sadly, this is no longer a hypothetical question after events in Minneapolis last week when Shivanthi Sathanandan, the Vice Chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, an affiliate of the broader Democrat Party, was carjacked outside her house and savagely beaten in front of her children. She detailed the unprovoked attack in a Facebook post. “Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids. The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight.” “Look at my face in the picture,” she continued. “This is the face of a mother who just had the sh$t beaten out of her. A mother whose only thought was, ‘let me run far enough and fight hard enough so that my kids have a chance to get away.’ This is the face of a mother who just listened to her four-year-old daughter screaming non-stop, her seven-year-old son wailing for someone to come help because bad guys are murdering his Mama in the backyard, her neighbors screaming in outrage … all while being beaten with guns and kicks and fists.” No medical report has been released, but she is believed to have suffered a broken leg, deep lacerations on her face and head, and assorted cuts and bruises. Ms. Sathanandan was justifiably upset about the incident, and expressed her rage on Facebook as well. “And I have rage. These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot erase. With no hesitation and no remorse. We need to get illegal guns off of our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM. Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS.”
I think we can all sympathize with Ms. Sathanandan and her desire to rid the streets of criminals, especially repeat offenders, after being attacked outside her own home, but there is a little more to the story that makes the overall picture a lot more complicated. Previously, Ms. Sathanandan championed the “defund the police” movement, arguing for less police and less accountability, not more, even as riots ransacked Minneapolis and other cities resulting in wanton death and destruction. In June 2020, she declared, emphatically and unequivocally, “We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Say it with me.” She repeated the phrase in all caps, and then continued, “As allies, what can we do right now? LISTEN and LEARN from our Black siblings. And then AMPLIFY this message right now, in this moment. MPD has systematically failed the Black Community, they have failed ALL OF US . It’s time to build a new infrastructure that works for ALL communities. If you are still disagreeing with that BASIC fact, I’m not sure what to say to you.” She continued to praise the efforts of two city council members actively working to dismantle the police. As one of them, Jeremiah Ellison, put it, “we’re not simply gonna glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink the way we approach public safety and emergency response. It’s really past due.” The other, Phillipe Cunningham, put the new philosophy this way. They would take “a public health approach” to public safety, treating “violence as disease that spreads.” The Minneapolis City Council in general supported some form of defund the police, with a majority appearing on stage with a large banner proclaiming exactly that. A survey in 2020 found that more than half would not answer yes or no to the simple question “Do you support abolishing the Minneapolis police department entirely?” Every council member said, to quote MPR News, “they do believe that police officers are necessary to respond to violent incidents, which is in line with state statutes requiring licensed officers to respond to certain incidents. No council members who responded to the survey directly opposed moving some services out of the Police Department and reallocating funds to other public safety services.” It was this sort of thinking that prompted Ms. Sathanandan to proclaim, “I’m proud of the radical leadership and organizing of Jeremiah Bey Ellison and Philippe Cunningham. We need to support them and all City Council Members and electeds who are working alongside them…If you live in Minneapolis, call or email your City Council Members to voice your support. If you don’t live in Minneapolis, be LOUD. Spread this message. Show your support. NOW is the moment for change.”
As many pointed out at the time, the change she sought would result in less public safety, not more. Combined with other reform efforts such as the elimination of cash bail, there would be more repeat offenders on the streets, terrorizing more people with more impunity. This obvious outcome is exactly what happened, leading however directly or indirectly to four men with guns carjacking Ms. Sathanandan, who she believes must be repeat offenders that shouldn’t be running free to wreak havoc. Conservatives like myself certainly appreciate her sudden awakening to the danger of pulling police back from troubled neighborhoods and allowing criminals free reign, but precisely how far should we push her culpability in the matter in general? David Strom, himself a resident of Minneapolis, writing for HotAir.com argued that “The Democrats did that. Sathanandan did that. Of course that doesn’t mean she ‘deserved’ what happened, just as New York City doesn’t deserve to be destroyed by the influx of illegal aliens. But they did ASK for it, claiming that following the policies they proposed would make things better and viciously attacking those of us who cried in anguish as they did so. Time and again the Left pushes policies that ruin things and kill people. Life gets worse. And they never repent. They continue to claim their superior wisdom and virtue as they leave a path of destruction in their wake.” I understand the impulse to avoid saying anyone deserved a violent beating in front of their children, but it seems to me Mr. Strom is splitting ever thinner and less easily defined hairs to escape the obvious conclusion. If she asked for it and didn’t repent (so far she has not made any statement of regret about her previous positions), why would we not fairly say she deserved it? Isn’t that what deserve means?
This strikes me as doubly true when you consider that neither Ms. Sathanandan nor any other progressive has ever acknowledged the reality that aggressive policing has saved thousands upon thousands of lives over the past thirty years. The murder rate in the United States, for example, peaked in 1991 before the passage of the federal crime bill now lambasted as racist and before Mayor Rudy Guiliani in New York City and others around the country began reorganizing and mobilizing police forces to protect people from an out of control criminal element. There were 9.82 murders per 100,000 people that year for a total of some 23,760 homicides or nonnegligent manslaughter. Radical changes in policy in the subsequent two decades drove that rate down to 4.4 in 2014 for a total of around 14,000, almost 10,000 lives saved in a single year. Throughout the 1990s, 2000s, and early 2010s, there are huge number of people living that would have been dead – until rates started ticking up again, currently standing at a startling 6.1 per 100,000. The murder rate declined in sync with other violent crimes including assault and rape, which not surprisingly have also started rising again. It is certainly fair to argue that some measures like stop and frisk might have gone too far or even violated some citizen’s fundamental rights. Everyone is also free suggest that any unintended consequences need be addressed given all human endeavors always have room for improvement, but to pretend that these policies did not have a dramatic positive impact on thousands of people and their families, much less were rooted entirely in racism and the desire to punish the black man simply for being black as many progressives have done, is unconscionable. To do this in the Summer of 2020 when fire and blood were literally on television every night across the country, is another level entirely. The defund the police movement did not care at all who was hurt then. This blood is on their hands and their hands alone, and it is the blood of innocents who might still be alive today were it not for their own politics and policies.
They were warned, nor did it take a gifted policy visionary to realize that less cops, policing less aggressively, and more criminals out on bail would result in more crimes, making ignorance no excuse. Now that Ms. Sathanandan has been bloodied herself, I would like to think we are better than that and the better angels of our nature will intervene, but as the old saying goes, we get the government we voted for, and this is precisely what she wanted, except I suspect as is often the case, she never stopped to consider that the carnage would come back on her and her own family. This does not mean we cannot wish her a speedy recovery and welcome her to the brave new world of recognizing the importance of the police, but it does mean she bears at least some of the blame for her own misfortune and has been hoisted on her own petard as another old saying goes. Conservatives should certainly not be afraid of pointing this out, carefully and with compassion, especially after being savaged as racists for accurately identifying the flaw in the defund the police thinking.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 