Kayleigh McEnany is claiming that any movement toward defunding the police will cause an immediate and even retroactive increase in murders. The White House press secretary cited year over year homicide statistics in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and New York City, directly blaming recent remarks by local elected officials for the increase in murders going back to January.
Calling it a “troubling trend” in “Democrat cities” at Tuesday afternoon’s press briefing McEnany told reporters that “in Los Angeles you had L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti proposing a cut of $150 million from the LAPD. L.A. Mayor said this: ‘It starts someplace, and we say we are going to be who we want to be or we’re going to continue being the killers that we are,’ was his quote in support of the Defund movement and as a result we saw a 14% rise in homicides this year over last year.”
McEnany did not mention that Garcetti made that comment two months ago, on June 5.
And that 14% increase is for the entire year to date, versus the same time period last year.
But McEnany says the murder rate increase is the “result” of Garcetti’s comment.
She also made a similar claim for the city of Minneapolis, where the murder rate increased 94%.
McEnany cites a vote “by the city council to dismantle the police.”
That vote was taken at the end of June. It puts the issue before the voters in November.
But McEnany is blaming the 94% homicide increase on that single vote.
“it did not keep people safe,” McEnany charged.
In New York City a June 30 vote to move $1 billion out of the NYPD’s budget (kind of) is responsible for a 177% increase in shootings from January to July of 2019 to 2020, McEnany said.
Murders don’t happen retroactively, or as a result of a city council vote, or as the result of a single comment by an elected official.