© Bonnie Cash
MSNBC's Al Sharpton said Tuesday that defunding the New York City Police Department is an idea "a latte liberal" may advocate,
but not by those "Blacker and poorer" who have seen shootings and homicides surge in New York over the summer.
Sharpton's comments on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" come as the NYPD reported
a 166 percent increase in shootings in August compared to the same month last year.
Overall in 2020, New York has seen an 87 percent increase in shooting incidents across the city,
with more than 1,000 reported compared to 541 at the same time in 2019."We've always heard about the tale of two cities. On the side of the city that I come from, which is Blacker and poorer, we've seen more in terms of gun usage. I got a lot of attention when I did the eulogy for George Floyd's funeral, but I also, a month later, preached [at] a 1-year-old kid's funeral in Brooklyn who was killed by a stray bullet," Sharpton said.
"Six people were shot over Labor Day weekend at a festival in Brooklyn, so I would say statistically we're not much higher than where we were,
but on the ground it is certainly feeling more violent, feeling more unsafe in unsafe communities," he continued.
"We need to reimagine how we do policing," Sharpton later added. "
But to take all policing off 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."
Comment: The ugly face of dictatorship has shamelessly reared its head throughout the Western world: