In the fantasy world of defund police, a 7-year-old black girl doesn’t die from a bullet to the back of her head. Atlanta isn’t a fantasy world.
The random shooting death of a 7-year-old girl in Atlanta has prompted a coalition of politicians, police and businesses to ramp up calls to establish a private security force to supplement the Atlanta Police Department.
Seven year old Kennedy Maxie was fatally shot on Dec. 21 shortly after she had finished Christmas shopping with her family at the Phipps Plaza mall in Buckhead, an affluent residential and commercial neighborhood in Uptown Atlanta.
Not that it should matter, but it does to the extent that it blunts the false cries that had the child been white, her death would somehow be less tragic or horrible. When so many view incidents only through a racial lens, irrelevant factors like the race of the child are used as a wedge against reason. That’s harder to do in the killing of Kennedy Maxie, although her death happened in Buckhead, suggesting that there is still a gap to claim she was economically privileged such that her random murder is somehow less worthy of concern.
So what’s happening in Atlanta?
Atlanta police confirmed to NBC News that the girl’s shooting death was one of a record-breaking number of homicides investigated by the department in 2020.
“As of the end of the week 52 reporting period we are at 154 homicides compared with 99 for the same period of 2019,” Atlanta Police Officer Steve Avery said in a statement. “That is an increase of 61%.”
And where are the Atlanta cops? Wherever they are, and their ranks have been significantly depleted by attrition this year, the people of Buckhead aren’t prepared to give up their safety.
Jim Durrett, the Buckhead Coalition’s president and executive director of the Buckhead Community Improvement District, said in a press release that the Security Plan’s boosters “understand the urgency of the situation and are committed to responding in ways that meet the needs of this moment and put Buckhead on a solid footing for years to come.”
The security plan calls for a wider net of surveillance cameras and license plate readers throughout the popular commercial district. It also calls for crackdowns on drag racing, “party houses” and for a “Dedicated Buckhead Supplemental Security Force.”
The force would operate as “a coordinated security patrol consisting of extra-duty officers from the Atlanta Police Department, the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, the Georgia State Patrol, and private security firms, within the commercial and residential areas of Buckhead.”
If you don’t care for the way sworn police officers function, subject to some degree of civilian oversight, you’re really going to hate the way private security forces functioning as if they were cops deal with people. They are not being established to address concerns for equity and de-escalation, but to make sure the residents of Buckhead, “the Beverly Hills of the East,” feel safe in their neighborhood and enjoy their homes without concern about the noisy, violent or unpleasant crowds.
There will be police, one way or another, just as was clear from the few weeks of Utopia in CHAZ, which for a brief and shining moment had the highest murder rate in the nation while running the most repressive regime possible. This isn’t to say that the “official” police were doing such a great job, but that their absence, whether by retirements on the force or defunding, leaves a hole that people will be filled because they refuse to tolerate a 7-year-old girl being murdered by a random bullet to her head.
SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.
THIS IS SOMETHING.
THIS MUST BE DONE.
What did you think would happen, the nice folks who aren’t prepared to sacrifice their children on the altar of social justice would sit silently as bullets flew? Did you not realize that bullets will fly because people are real, not the cartoon characters of love and goodness that exist in your grievance studies class?
If you thought reforming the police was hard, if not impossible, imagine Blackwater patrolling the “nice” neighborhoods to make sure their lives are not disrupted by random gunfire. You might be willing to suffer for the cause, but you don’t get to decide that others should suffer along with you. They’re not going to let that happen, nor should they. Just as you get to hold certain values above others, so do they, and they will protect their homes and families no matter how passionately you feel about it.
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