This isn’t strictly true. Remember that rally in Minneapolis in early June, not long after George Floyd’s death, when the mayor showed up to express solidarity and then had to do the walk of shame after he refused to pledge that he’d abolish the police?

The activists who made that demand of him didn’t look like “latte liberals” to me.

But Sharpton has a point. As of mid-August, a majority of Minneapolis voters supported redistributing some of PD’s money to other agencies to handle non-criminal duties like mental health. But even in the city where Floyd was killed, a plurality of 44 percent opposed reducing the police force. And black voters were more reluctant to do so than whites were:

A Gallup poll taken in late June and early July, amid national protests against racism and police brutality, found just 19 percent of black Americans wanted police to spend less time in the area where they live. Less than a month ago, the Times noted that various minority lawmakers on the New York City Council and elsewhere in the tri-state area strongly opposed defunding the police. Some of them used language to describe their disagreement with white progressives that was reminiscent of Sharpton’s in the clip below:

Laurie Cumbo, a Black councilwoman from Brooklyn who is majority leader, compared calls to defund the police to “colonization” pushed by white progressives. Robert Cornegy Jr., a Black councilman also from Brooklyn, called the movement “political gentrification.”…

Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, N.J., called defunding the police a “bourgeois liberal” solution for addressing systemic racism…

“You can’t just say, imagine if half the police force was gone,” [Councilman Carlos] Menchaca said. “You have to think about the things you get because of that.”

Lotta privilege involved in these “defund the police” calculations by the woke white left, to borrow one of their favorite terms. In fact, Sharpton got off on this tangent on “Morning Joe” today because co-host Willie Geist claimed that he didn’t “feel” that New York City had grown more dangerous this year despite the crime data that says otherwise. Right, said Sharpton, but that’s because you’re not stuck living in poorer neighborhoods like many black New Yorkers are. A certain racial and economic myopia is blinding the political and media classes to the growing threat, including members whose job it is to take this sort of thing seriously:

https://twitter.com/SohrabAhmari/status/1303414489031860231

Their interest in securing a Biden victory this fall is also leading them to downplay the problem. Karol Markowicz has watched with horror on social media as reporters glibly tweet that there’s no violence outside their windows in their well-to-do urban neighborhoods despite the footage from Portland, Chicago, and elsewhere this summer.

“I went for a belated NYC run this morning and am sorry to report that I saw very few black-clad anarchists,” New York Times columnist Paul Krugman sarcastically wrote in a multi-part tweet thread. He added: “Also, the city is not yet in flames.” Because you see, Krugman’s anecdotal claims trump what you see on the news every night.

Crime is out of control in Gotham. A two-week window this summer saw 205 percent more gunfire incidents than the same period last year. With four months left to go, the city has already surpassed last year’s shootings total…

CNN correspondent Josh Campbell tweeted about eating his breakfast burrito in “wonderful Portland, where the city is not under siege, and buildings are not burning to the ground.”

It didn’t help that the night ­before a riot was declared in Portland after a mob marched on the mayor’s home and set a fire to a nearby building. Don’t believe your lying eyes, though: Josh Campbell is doing just fine.

As long as the local Starbucks is serving up those lattes, how much of a crisis can there really be, right?

God help us but this tool is now officially (if temporarily) a voice of reason. You’re the worst, 2020.

Sharpton: Defunding the NYPD is "something a Latte Liberal may go for as they sit around the Hamptons discussing this as an academic problem. But people living on the ground need proper policing." pic.twitter.com/TkXnVgUBEq

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 8, 2020