ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Two years ago, the world watched as protests erupted on the streets of American cities. Tens of thousands marched, prayed and rallied, championing a Black man killed in Minneapolis by a white officer and calling for the officer’s imprisonment. A few, taking advantage of the chaos, burned and looted.
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That officer now sits behind bars, a short-term victory that few believed was unjust. Some activists say they’re waiting for longer-term progress they were promised.
“You never change anything, but you spent a lot of taxpayer dollars telling us that you were going to do better,” Lawanna Gelzer mused.
Gelzer, a community activist and former City Commission candidate from Parramore, was sitting in her makeshift office in her mid-renovation house. A poster calling for the resignation of a state attorney who recently declined to prosecute a deputy who killed a 22-year-old Black man, Salaythis Melvin, was on the floor. A notice for a virtual vigil for Amir Locke, who was shot during a no-knock warrant execution in Minnesota, sat next to her computer.
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“You’re still killing us and you’re getting away with it,” she said. “No other profession is allowed to do that to human beings, but law enforcement is.”
The ground is changing under people like Gelzer. In the early protest days, “defund the police” was a popular slogan among progressive Americans and many chiefs spoke about looking inward at their departments’ cultures. Some cities cut funding.
Ever since, violence has been on the rise in urban areas. Orlando itself saw a 17% increase in violent crime from 2019 to 2020, the latest year FBI statistics were available for, and a 24% increase in homicides. It has fueled calls to increase police budgets, rather than defund them, and hire more officers nationwide.
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That includes Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis has inserted bonuses for current and potential officers into this year’s budgets.
“The pendulum is shifting back in the appropriate direction toward the center,” Rev. Markel Hutchins, CEO of police-community relations organization MovementForward, said, adding that police must continue to deal with systemic racism and officer-involved shooting deaths. “There is no harm in supporting law enforcement. This idea that Black and brown communities don’t want good policing is just not true.”
Hutchins said most officers were doing a good job policing their communities and a better job understanding community members and habits. He offered support for the Biden administration’s attempts to encourage more police funding using stimulus money and said departments needed to allocate more resources toward community policing.
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Police officers themselves say relations are better than they were before, though the industry continues to be plagued by understaffing.
“Folks are unhappy with the current state of crime rates in their community,” Florida FOP Vice President Shawn Dunlap said. “They’re realizing there’s a direct correlation between that and the defund movement.”
At the same time, community activists are waiting for a long-promised reform bill that President Biden has attempted, and failed, to get through Congress. They’re also looking for a seat at the table.
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“We actually can give you things that have worked in the communities,” Glazer said. “You keep picking and choosing who you want to be at the table, you will continue to get the same results.”
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