Yes, “Defund the Police” was a terrible idea and a genuinely stupid slogan. Any true believers in it are deserving of whatever comeuppance they get.
But the fact is, the unjust linking of the term to political adversaries has turned into the latest political smear. It’s McCarthyism on steroids — right up there with a previous era’s “Soft on Communism.”
A solid piece of fact-checking by The Commercial Appeal’s Katherine Burgess conclusively made the case against County Mayor candidate Worth Morgan’s allegation that incumbent County Mayor Lee Harris, whom he opposes, defunded Sheriff Floyd Bonner’s budget, to the tune of some $4½ million. The accusation turned out to be so much jiggling of budget numbers, and Morgan has since owned up to having made an “error.” The clincher is that the Sheriff himself disowns any such complaint.
The “defund-the-police” smear has meanwhile become an increasingly prominent aspect of incumbent District Attorney Amy Weirich’s campaign against her Democratic challenger, Steve Mulroy.
It is the linchpin of a currently playing TV commercial on Weirich’s behalf, one in which Mulroy is not only accused of having advocated defunding the police — something which he denies and for which no credible record exists — but is represented, through a highly creative juxtaposition of images, as having marched in a parade with activists carrying “Defund the Police” signs.
Fact: a still photo of Mulroy holding a picket sign (but obscuring what the sign says) quickly segues into a video of the aforesaid defunders’ march. The reality is that his sign (and his march) belonged not to that affair but to a wholly different one, on behalf of Starbucks employees’ efforts, ultimately successful, to unionize their workplace.
Similarly, the same commercial misrepresents Mulroy’s support, during a severe phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, of ongoing litigation to secure improved safety precautions for at-risk jail inmates. The ad would have us believe the suit, by Mulroy himself as the litigant of record, was against Bonner for the simple purpose of releasing criminals — any and all criminals, it would seem — from jail.
This is not to suggest that Mulroy himself, or his own ad-makers, are wholly innocent of misrepresentation. An ad on his behalf yoked Weirich together with Donald Trump and the ex-president’s “mobs” on the occasion of Trump’s recent appearance in nearby Southaven. Yes, Weirich is running for reelection as the Republican nominee, but there is little in her record to suggest that she is a party-line Republican, much less a Trumpian fanatic.
The balance of Mulroy’s ad is more defensible. He alleges, correctly, that violent crime has risen during Weirich’s tenure as D.A., and viewers of the ad can decide for themselves whether that upsurge has occurred because of, or in spite of, her crime-fighting techniques. It is also true, as the ad suggests, that Weirich has been accused by official tribunals more than once of professional misconduct.
On a recent prime-time evening, the two ads ran back-to-back on local television — Weirich’s first, followed without a break by Mulroy’s. To say the least, the combined effect did not add up to an ideal instance of the Socratic method at work. (Not that TV advertising of any kind is totemic with regard to truth.) And, in fairness to the two candidates, head-banging distortions of the sort described here seem to be the rule, not the exception, for political advertising in particular.
POSTSCRIPT: Despite the fact-checking in the CA, a TV ad continues to push Morgan’s claim that County Mayor Harris “defunded the police.” The “defunding the police” claim put forth by Weirich against Mulroy is still extant as well. Meanwhile, the Mulroy ad mentioned above continues to appear, though both he and Morgan have aired new commercials.
