Will Ilhan Omar's "Blame The Police" Argument Win In Minneapolis?

AP Photo/Jim Mone

Rep. Ilhan Omar is not a fan of the police. Last year, she was very vocal about defunding them. In particular, she wanted to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department.

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Now, the department there has some serious issues and it sure looks like they’re in dire need of reform, but dismantling a police department is a serious thing and shouldn’t be entered into lightly.

Of course, this is Omar we’re talking about here.

Regardless, now she’s blasting the very department she wanted to dismantle for not doing enough.

Fox News host Trey Gowdy joined the chorus of critics tearing into Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., after she blamed police for the recent rise in crime in her district, accusing the city’s “dysfunctional” police department of not fulfilling their oath of office.

Omar upped her anti-police rhetoric during a town hall last week when she blamed the surging “lawlessness” in Minneapolis on the fact that “the police have chosen to not fulfill their oath of office and to provide the public safety they are owed to the citizens they serve.”

Gowdy, on his show Sunday, fired back at the radical ‘Squad’ member for what he called “mindless hypocrisy” based on the “utter illogic” with which she structures her arguments.

“The police are apparently to blame for the murder, rape and carjacking,” an outraged Gowdy told “Sunday Night in America” viewers. “Don’t blame the perpetrator, don’t blame the person actually committing the crime, blame the police.

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Gowdy is right, though. Omar is following the old liberal line of blaming everyone but the criminal who breaks the law.

However, I will say there’s another party to blame, one Gowdy appears to have ignored himself, and that’s Ilhan Omar.

Omar, a sitting member of Congress, wanted to dismantle the Minneapolis police force following the death of George Floyd. That created a chilling effect on the police who remained on the job. No one wants to step up and be proactive out of fear that their actions will lead to a situation where those cries get even louder.

Let’s remember that Black Lives Matter made a martyr out of Michael Brown in Ferguson, a man who charged a police officer and tried to take his gun. Many still pretend Brown was just an innocent black man gunned down.

They still act like Trayvon Martin was just an innocent kid who was shot by a racist white guy rather than a person trying to cave another person’s skull in on a concrete sidewalk.

Even a justified shooting has the potential to be an absolute disaster for a department, and Rep. Ilhan Omar is part of why those officers are reticent to actually be more proactive about trying to prevent crime in the first place.

Frankly, though, Omar lashing out over this is extremely hypocritical, to say the least.

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She wants the department dismantled. She’s a fan of “defund the police,” or at least was. She’s backing a voter referendum to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a new, softer, “Department of Public Safety”, but she’s also complaining because the same department she accused of just about every sin she could think of isn’t doing more after she wanted them disbanded? Sorry, it just seems like something of a contradiction.

And yes, I do think there’s a bit of responsibility for what’s going on in Minneapolis that rests on Omar’s shoulders, though the odds of her ever acknowledging that are about as good as Amy Schumer actually being funny.

The odds of Minneapolis voters siding with Omar’s attempt to “reimagine policing” in the city, unfortunately, are a lot higher, and that’s no laughing matter, particularly for the law-abiding residents living in high-crime neighborhoods.

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