CPAC 2021- Same Badge, Different Beat: To Protect and Serve or Socialist Social Workers?

I'm going to focus on law enforcement and the challenges that law enforcement is facing in 2021 here. For those of you who don't know, I'm Matt Bonilla. I'm a politics editor at Breitbart News. So, we are one of the, probably the few media organizations out there that will actually try to act vulnerable and try to dig into any of these different instances. One of the stories that we see repeatedly, and we've been seeing this for many years, is whenever there's a police-involved shooting, the left and the media go after police officers viciously. They try to destroy their reputation. They go after their families. And almost always, without fail, the media narrative, the leftist narrative that you see, they put forward to try to drag these police officers into the light, ends up not being true. Facts change as more and more information comes out. And so, we see this as a major story. Meanwhile, this all fits together with the left's defund-the-police agenda. So, that's why I'm excited to be joined by all these guys. These guys are the real experts. So, we've got Commissioner Bernie Parrott, former NYPD Commissioner. So, I'll just throw it to you guys. Let's just go down the line here. I'll let you guys kind of give an opening statement, what your thoughts are. I'm Bernie Parrott. I was the 40th police commissioner in the city of New York. I was the police commissioner for the attack on September 11th. Prior to that, I was the New York City Correctional Commissioner. I ran right through violence for close to six years. I had the opportunity to run the largest jail system and the largest police department in the country. And I was the police commissioner during the renaissance of the war in 1939, when we took a city that was crime infested and completely obliterated with crime, dirt, and filth, and changed that into one of the safest large cities in the world. And unfortunately, today, we have a city that has flipped 30 years backwards as a result of Mayor de Blasio's leadership. And we're seeing the same exact thing happen all around the country, and that's sort of what we'll talk about today. Rob O'Donnell, former NYPD detective, sir. Thank you. My name is Rob O'Donnell. I'm a retired New York City detective. I've worked everything from organized crime to narcotics to the precinct detective squad to the homicide task force. Throughout my 30 years of public safety, I have the experience of being one of the only first responders in America directly related to four domestic terrorist attacks on our country. When I was a rookie police officer, the 93 World Trade Center bombing, 9-11 spent the year down there, response and recovery for that. After I retired due to injuries in the line of duty and a couple of surgeries, I moved to Pennsylvania. I ended up dealing with the Fort Dix terror plot individuals and testifying against them in the district court. And most recently, the Naval Air Station shooting in Pensacola, where my son's a student, a naval aviator down in Pensacola, and was in the building when that shooting took place and called me, looking for guidance on what he should do in that active shooter. As Commissioner Carrick said, that broken windows, quality of life enforcement that turned New York City around and became the model nationally for policing, what to do. That blueprint is written. And to see what's happening now in these cities, where they're just throwing that playbook out and trying to rewrite it with stuff that they've been proven not to work. For a career law enforcement like myself, Commissioner Carrick and Tim, to see that deterioration, to see that lack of gains that we made just get thrown by the wayside and relive it, it's disheartening to say the least. So, thank you for coming. We're glad to be here and looking forward to today's panel. And Tim Parrish from We Back Blue. So, thanks. My name's Tim Parrish. I'm from We Back Blue. I'm actually the Director of Government Affairs for We Back Blue. We are a national police advocacy organization that travels around the country talking to legislators. We do a lot of work in our communities with rallies and marches, but I, in particular, get to work with legislators and policy leaders all around the country to ensure that we are enacting policies that allow our law enforcement officers to have their jobs be easier, right, to protect each and every one of us. So, we ensure that, from a policy perspective, that the policies going forward are effective and efficient measures for our police officers to do a great job of protecting us, which we know they love doing. So, because we are from We Back Blue, I want to just give a round of applause for all the law enforcement officers around the country, especially the ones, Orange County Sheriff's Office and OPD that are protecting us today. So, if you guys could give a round of applause for those guys. Okay, so, one of the things, and I'll start with you, Commissioner Carrick. So, we've now seen the Democrats take complete control in Washington after the November elections. Joe Biden is the President. Kamala Harris is the Vice President. You've got Democrats in the House and the Senate. There is a big push by the left, nationally and in cities across the country, to defund police departments. Can you tell us about where that stands? I know that they're trying to do it more in New York. They've been doing it in many other cities. Minneapolis, we've seen that happen. We've seen it happen in Seattle. Give us the big picture here on the left's effort to try to defund police and where things stand and how do we fight back against it? I guess over the past six months, close to a year maybe, really, and I would say they're Marxist left-wing radicals in various cities throughout the country. They've called for the defunding of the police departments, of their police departments. They've called for the dismantling of the police departments. They've called for the elimination of their police departments. The bottom line is, when you defund a police department, like in New York City, Mayor de Blasio has defunded the $6 billion budget by a billion dollars. When you do that, you take away manpower, resources, training, equipment, and everything those cops need to do their job. If you think about it, what have we done for the last 30 years? Rob, as a detective, would understand this and know this better than most. For the last 30 years, we wanted to make the police departments better. You want to give them more training. You want to give them de-escalation training. You want to make sure that they don't go and use deadly force when they don't have to. You've got to give them other tools, non-lethal tools, to use in the field. When you defund the police, you know what you're doing? You're taking all that stuff, everything we've given them over the last 30 years, you're taking that away. You're taking away that training. Most importantly, you're taking the manpower. Minneapolis started it. They've called for defunding in Atlanta, in Baltimore, in New York City, in Seattle, in Portland. What's the catalyst between all of those? Every one of those cities are run by a Democrat. Every single one of them. Minneapolis defunded. They lost over 400 cops. They lost their most experienced cops. And what happened last month, three weeks ago? They called. They had a unanimous decision by the city council to refund the police to bring back 200 cops. Why? Because their murder rate shot through the roof. Shootings are up. Murders are up. Robberies are up. Violent crime overall is up. Here's the bottom line. Nobody wants to live, visit, work, or go to school in a place that's not safe. You defund the police. You make those cities unsafe. Nobody wants to live there. So the people that's been calling and screaming and yelling to defund the police 90% of the time, they're not the people from those communities. The people from those communities, the real advocates, real community leaders today, what are they doing? We need cops. We need them back and we need them now because our communities are dying. I couldn't have said it any better myself there. So, Rob, we were talking about this in the lead-up to here. Police have hundreds of millions of contacts with the community every year and very, very few incidents of where deadly force is actually used. Can you give us some of the statistics? I think you have some of these numbers. Break down for us just how wrong the left's narrative that they're pushing this whole defund the police push, the core of their narrative is. Give us the real statistics. There's approximately 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the nation that have 300 million police community contacts annually, 30 million criminal violent felony contacts, investigative contacts, 1.2 million violent felonies as per the FBI's uniform crime reporting. In 2019, police used deadly physical force under 1,000 times. That's a 0.0004% chance of being shot by the police. Having deadly physical force used against you, does deadly force used against you. And when you break that down, you're more likely in America to be struck by lightning than to be unarmed and shot by the police. Those are the facts, those are the narratives out there. In 2019, in the NYPD with 35,000 officers, with the tens of thousands of crimes that they have, rise in murders, rise in shootings, they fired their weapons in the line of duty 34 times. That's 35,000 police officers. In Chicago, they also fired their weapon 34 times for a department of 13,000. Anyone who watches the news knows the status of Chicago and their gun crime. Baltimore, we hear a lot about Baltimore. In 2019, out of the thousands of violent gun crimes that they dealt with, they fired their weapon four times in the line of duty. Here are the major cities that are stemming this defund movement that the police are out there indiscriminately using deadly force against people. And when you break down the data, it's just absolutely not true. When you look at the facts of the matter, 99.99% of these police officers leave their doors every day to go out there and they do that job properly. No profession is perfect. No profession will ever be perfect. Look at medical malpractice, look at the things that we deal with that are on tens of thousands of deaths. There's a conversation to be had about improving law enforcement, but that conversation needs to start from a place of fact, not fiction. Because when you start it from a place of fiction, there's really nowhere to go from there. We can work on the perception, we can work on those community relations, but when you start defunding stuff, when you start playing this shell game, and these politicians know what they do. The whole anti-police rhetoric is your typical tale-of-all-time shell game. They want to create the police as this boogeyman up here, and they want you to look at this boogeyman and they want to tell their voters, you need to elect me, you need to keep me here to protect you from that boogeyman. Because while you're looking here at this false monster that they created, they're not doing things here, like helping education, like helping jobs, like building their infrastructure, like building their transportation. That's what they're doing. That's all that is. And it's the same thing with the defund movement. They're taking millions of dollars, billions of dollars in New York, and they're funding all these social service pet projects that they've wanted to fund all along. They know crime's going to skyrocket, but like Commissioner Carrick said, they don't live in these communities. They live in their gated communities. They live in their private high-rises with security. They're not in the Bronx or Brooklyn projects, where back in the early 90s and late 80s, where these people were coming to town hall meetings and saying, I can't sleep with my grandson in the cast-iron bathtub anymore because of the gunfire. You need to help me. These were the inner-city people that demanded more police, that demanded more help. And it wasn't until leadership like Rudy Giuliani and Commissioner Bratton and then Commissioner Carrick, who took it as the national platform, like we said, they're never going to take that money away from these social pet projects they had. They're just going to increase your taxes now, because crime is such off the charts, to fund the police again. That's all this is. They're just using this money and this opportunity, because never let an opportunity go to waste, that's a democratic motto, to fund all these projects that they've always wanted to fund all along and just couldn't justify it. But when crime is skyrocketing, when murders are off the chart again, they have no choice but to increase your taxes to put that funding back there. Right. So now, Tim, can you tell us, what effect does this have on the law enforcement community? This leftist push to defund police, just nonstop attacks in the media by Democrat politicians. We're seeing in some places a lot of police officers maybe retire early or leave the profession. There's a lot of folks that maybe wouldn't go into law enforcement that would have otherwise. What's the morale out there? I mean, I know that we saw a lot of law enforcement unions endorse President Trump in this last election that kind of viewed him as their last hope to get out there and fight for them. Without Trump there in the Oval Office, where do things stand? Tell us, where do people stand in the law enforcement community right now? Are they scared? Are they terrified that this leftist push to defund police? That's a good question, Matt, and I think there's a few different things that we could talk about with that question. One, the police are absolutely demoralized, and that's why the work that we do at We Back Blue is so important. We go into these communities and we let our police officers know, hey, we appreciate you, we see what you do, and we absolutely appreciate it. Our founder, Melissa Roby, during the inauguration spent hundreds of dollars just feeding officers during the inauguration. They were coming in, they were cold, they'd been standing on their feet for 12, 13 hours, and just a small act of feeding them and getting them together to break bread as brothers was a big thing, right? Because they talked about how demoralized they are. They don't feel supported in what they do every single day, and I think what that causes is, you know, I'm sharing the stage with law enforcement giants right now, so I know that they will agree and can appreciate a lot of this, but there is a proactive element to policing, right? We say in the civilian sector, say something right, on the police side, the law enforcement side, it's see something, do something. Our police officers see a crime, they see something happening or a lead-up to a crime, and they have to do something about it before the crime is committed in most cases. Well, police aren't doing that anymore. A lot of police officers are not being as proactive because, you know, just like an accountant or other jobs, law enforcement is a job. It's their employment. They feed their families doing this work, and so they're not going to do anything they think is going to get them in trouble, even though they are, in most cases, acting in the best interest of the community and in the law enforcement profession. They're not going to be as proactive in taking those proactive steps to stop crime if they think they're going to get in trouble, and so there's a lot of factors with morale. There's a lot of factors with retention. Police officers are not staying on the job. I know here in Florida and some other states they had like a drop program, right, where police officers could retire, they could come back. That seniority and those folks that stayed there were able to mentor the newer officers, right? They were able to mentor guys coming on. If guys are leaving the job because there's no morale there, you lose that mentorship. You lose that experience for those guys to be able to talk back to the younger generation of officers and get them prepped, and so there's several factors that we see where this defund movement and this, you know, treat the police like they're less than has an absolute impact on policing, and I'll say to the earlier point too, Matt, that the first thing with the defund that we have to do is unmask, right? When I talk to policy leaders, I unmask the idea that this is about reallocation of funds, right, that defunding the police is only about moving funds over to here. It's not. Like the commissioner said, it is about the fundamental dismantling of American law enforcement, and so I think that we have to look at it from that perspective when we push back on this. This is not reallocation of funds. It's not give more money to the school nurses. It is dismantling American law enforcement, and the cool Band-Aid name that we put on it is reallocation of funds. You know, that's the way that the left policy leaders have tried to, you know, make an excuse or present this to, you know, community members in saying, well, no, we're not defunding the police. We're just reallocating funds. It's not true. It's not factual like the commissioner said and like Robin has said up there. So now, Commissioner, as you mentioned, the commonality among all these different cities where this is happening is one thing. It's Democrat. They're Democrat-led. Now, when you were commissioner of New York City Police Department, you had a Republican mayor, and Rudy Giuliani seems kind of far-fetched to see Republicans getting elected, and a lot of these cities across the country have drifted very far left. What's it going to take to get Republican mayors back in where you then can have commissioners like yourself in positions where they're going to be able to do these things that law enforcement are going to need to actually secure their communities? In the history of New York City prior to Rudy Giuliani, Mayor Dinkins was the mayor before him. Mayor Koch was the mayor before him, and Koch was there for 12 years. The bottom line is crime continued to rise. In 1990, we had almost 2,400 murders in New York City. We actually had more murders in New York than they have today in L.A., Baltimore, Atlanta, and Minneapolis combined. That's how many homicides you had in New York City in 1990. I was a cop at the time. I had a footpost on 42nd Street between 7th and 8th Avenue, and for eight hours a day, all I did was run from one end of that block to the other. Man with a gun, robbery in progress, somebody got stabbed, somebody pushed somebody on their train. For eight hours a day, that's what crime was like in New York City. You know what it took for it to change? Basically, the implosion of New York City. When crime was completely out of control, and in every one of the minority black communities in the city where the crime was the highest, they were taking it the worst. That's where the shootings were the highest. That's where the robberies and the murders were the highest. That is where those community leaders started coming out saying, enough is enough. We've got to get somebody in here to change this. That is exactly how Rudy Giuliani got elected in 1993, came into office in 1994, and within six months, we saw close to a 25% reduction in violent crime. At the end of Giuliani's term, I was his last police commissioner. I was his correction commissioner for almost six years. I was the police commissioner for the last two, and at the conclusion of his term in office, he had dropped violent crime by some 65%, and he dropped murder by 70%. Those reductions in violent crime and murder, they were unparalleled before, and they've been unparalleled since. But here's the reality. Nobody can tell me and nobody can tell him that this can't be done. So when I see all these cities out there, when I see the mayor of Atlanta or the mayor of Chicago where they have 60 shootings in a weekend, 10 dead, don't tell me that can't be fixed. I've done it. Don't tell me you can't reduce those murder rates and those violent crime rates. I've done it. He's done it. He's been a part of it. The reality is you need different leadership. You need Republican leadership. You need leaders that's not going to cower to this far left radical Marxist mentality. Then that stuff will change. Yeah, I couldn't agree more, Commissioner. I think the Republicans need to put candidates out there in every single city and for every single mayorship in the country. The Republicans need to stop standing down, and they need to fight back on this. Yeah, just to follow up on what the commissioner said, detectives, police officers out on the street don't go out there looking for that murder suspect. They don't go out there looking for that robbery suspect. They come across them by dealing with quality of life fences. They've taken away the tools of stop, question, frisk. They've taken away the tools of theft of service where someone jumps the turnstile in transit. Now I started my career as a transit police officer. Do you know how many murderers, robbery suspects, warrants, I think we had a 92 percent warrant hit rate for someone who just simply jumped the turnstile because the theory was if you're entering the subway system to commit a robbery, to commit a crime, you're not going to pay the $1.25, the $1.50, the $3 to get on that subway to commit that crime. You're going to jump the turnstile. Stop, question, and frisk, where someone's jaywalking across the street, you see the bulge. These are professional police officers. They know what they're looking for. They're trained to know what they're looking for. When you're wearing sweatpants that are being weighed down on one side and you're constantly pulling them up, that professional aspect of you says there's something weighing that down. There's something there that they're hiding or they're turning away from the police. That's where stop, question, frisk was a great tool, that they leave out that question. Stop and frisk. They're just indiscriminately grabbing people and frisking them. That's not what it was. These professionally trained police officers that notice something out of the ordinary, that notice something that fits a crime pattern, that notice something that their intuition tells them they're up to no good, and you can walk up to these people and question them. That's how the murder rates, the guns were taken off the street, the robbery suspects were prevented from doing it. That broken windows deal with the small problems, deal with the small incidents, and you're going to catch the bigger fish out of that. You're going to catch the larger crimes out of that, and that's what they've lost. Look at these Democratic-run cities. What have they attacked? Stop, question, frisk. Common right of inquiry, where you walk up to ask someone a question, it's F the police, and that's acceptable now where it's never been in the past. Those small quality of life crimes that led to that mass reduction of crime is what they're tackling. You'll never have one of these politicians tell you, we don't want you questioning murders or going after robbery suspects, but we don't want you questioning people, we don't want you stopping people, jaywalking's fine, minor drug use is fine in public view. These are the things that made that crime better, the targeting of that. Like the commissioner said, to be part of that fix, to see it firsthand, that development, the change, that was used as a national and worldwide model for policing, to see it totally destroyed, to see it go not only reverse but throw out the car keys and just leave the car on the side of the road, is disheartening because, like the commissioner said, it's been done. There's the model for it to do it. There's the playbook to do it. You just need political leadership with the fortitude to do it. So, Tim, one of the things that occurs to me, from a media perspective, when we see these stories that happen, every time there's an incident, the media piles on a police officer and there's a big national outcry, there's major protests, sometimes they get bad, they turn into violence and looting and riots. Usually what ends up happening is the media's original narrative about a police officer, about an incident, usually ends up not being true. There's a lot of facts that come out later and evidence that ends up backing up the police officer, but the police officer, they can't talk about it during the whole time. Because they're a good police officer, they're not allowed to talk about the case. We at Breitbart, we try to tell the truth about these things and we'll do our best to do that, but who is the voice for that officer when they're under attack nonstop by the media? Any one of these incidents, and again, a lot of them, it turns out, that the narrative that the media is putting forward originally is not necessarily true. And the reason why this is important is because it's these incidents and narratives that are being used to fuel this broader leftist push to target law enforcement. So who are those officers' voices? Another great question, Matt. I think that police officers are silent professionals. They will go out every single day, do the job, we all three did it, we didn't get paid much, didn't look for an attaboy, didn't look for a thank you, just went and did the job. And so a lot of police officers aren't looking for anybody to, you know, they know what they're doing. Like Rob said, they're professionals and they know what they're doing, so they're not looking for anybody to correct the story. A lot of what we do at We Back Blue is we try and get the information out there correctly that our police officers are working hard. Sometimes they're going to slip up, right, but the stats that Rob gave you absolutely align and the narrative is in support that the police are out here just messing up on purpose. Let me give you a quick example of why police don't talk and why maybe we don't even need someone to set the record straight until it gets played out in court. So in Atlanta, I don't remember the exact date and time, but in Atlanta, there was a case where an officer used his taser on a subject who refused to get out of a car, was resisting arrest, and they fired the officer and they said, hey, this police officer, he used deadly force because a taser is deadly force now, right? The police officer should have never tased this person. It's deadly force to use a taser. Okay, great. So this played out in the media. The attorney that prosecuted the officer said that that's why they were doing it. Just a few weeks later at the Wendy's with the impaired driver, that person got a hold of the officer's taser. He took the officer's taser and pointed at him and said, you know, and the attorney said, well, the police officer didn't have to shoot him. That wasn't deadly force. But we said a few weeks ago that it was deadly force, so where's the narrative? Where's the story? What are we doing? He's talking about the same prosecutor. Same prosecutor, same city. The same prosecutor. Same prosecutor, same city. Again, perfect example of the facts never back up and never end up being right. Right, and so that's why we don't jump out prematurely and put the facts out there and say what happened is because you can make yourself look like an idiot, A, right, like this prosecutor certainly did, but also you get into a situation where if it does go to trial, you might have a jury that's now not, doesn't have the capability to be impartial because they've had all this media stuff, you know, being thrown at them, and it affects, and that's why you see trials sometimes get moved to other neighborhoods or other communities, but also you have to allow for thorough investigations. I mean, Rob can tell you as a detective, as an investigator, these guys leave no leaf unturned when they do investigations. IA and all these guys, Internal Affairs and all these guys that conduct these investigations do a very good job and they're thorough, and that stuff takes time. They have to go through the entire process, and so I don't think that necessarily the officers always want the story to be out there immediately, right? And maybe it's a good thing that we let people look like idiots sometimes, like this attorney in Atlanta who, you know, just talks out of the side of their mouth, and then the same mouth, the other side, though, they're saying something else, right? And so I think that the officers may not always want the story out there until all the leaves have been unturned, right, and the investigation's done, and that is when our police officers will be liberated and it will be shown that, hey, they actually acted within their training and within policy and within what was right in that moment to keep the public and themselves and their federal officers safe. And look at the layers of investigation. When something like this happens, when there's a police incident where the media and these activist prosecutors jump out there to get in front of it, there is no multiple-layer investigation in any other line of work that I know of that has such thorough investigations. You know, a police officer gets into an incident, say a shooting, say it's a deadly physical force incident, you know, you'll have the immediate supervision do their investigation. You have internal affairs come and do the investigation. You have the district attorney do the investigation. You have the state's attorney do the investigation, and sometimes you have the Department of Justice doing the investigation. These are all independent investigations that make their own findings and compare them after the fact. You know, when a doctor makes a medical malpractice issue, there's not eight layers of investigation that goes on there. It might go to the district attorney, you know, eventually or something like that. You know, a hospital administrator might look into it, but there's no peer level as, you know, your direct supervisors, your internal affairs, and such like that. And like Tim said, you know, let the investigation, let the facts work out. You know, something we learned in the George Floyd incident, where you had a state's attorney jump in front of what everybody can agree on was an abhorrent video. But let the facts, let the investigation work through. You had a prosecutor that jumped in front of it, you know, wanted to charge the max, wanted to appease the mob crowd rather than let the investigation work. And then you had the toxicology come out. Then you had the department policy, which allows certain kind of, you know, holds that were allowed. And you're setting yourself up for failure. You're setting the community up to burn again because they overcharged, because they jumped the gun and didn't wait for those investigations to get done. When there's an acquittal, when there's a lesser charge of guilty, we're going to go through Minnesota all again. You know, you're going to have cities burned because of these activist prosecutors that wanted to jump in front of it to say, oh, look what I did. You know, I went after those police. We're going to reform them, you know, criminally. That's not how investigations work. You let the facts guide you. You let the witness statements guide you. And then you let the law guide you. And they've thrown that out the window, regardless of the law, like Commissioner Carrick just said. The same weapon by the same prosecutor weeks apart was deadly physical force and wasn't deadly physical force. So that's what needs to change in America. So, okay, guys, we could talk about this all night, but the CPAC crowd has given me five minutes left. So one of the things about CPAC, the A in CPAC stands for action. So what is your guys' advice? I mean, look, there's clearly a lot of people here in the room. There's a lot of people watching online around the country that want to help law enforcement. They are supporters of you guys. What is your advice to them for something that they can do to get involved and walk away from this without ‑‑ walk away from this panel, having watched it here in person or online at home, and go do something to help out their local police departments and police officers around the country? Let's just go down the line here and we'll wrap with that. What is the action item that you guys have for people? This is something that I don't think anybody's thinking about or they haven't thought about for the last few years. And only after this last election, people are now looking at it and looking seriously. Who do we focus on when we go to the polls? We really focus on them. We focus on members of the House. We focus on the Senate, vice president, president. That's who we're looking at. You know what the problem is? You know where they came from? They came from local, lower level political positions that people voted for. Smaller communities voted for them. They may have been a city councilman. They may have been a freeholder. They may have been a local mayor of a town that has 1,000 people. That's where their careers started. And guess what? Today, we're not focused on those local elections. And it's killing us. I went out to Oklahoma about three weeks ago, about a month ago. And I went to a small community in Oklahoma that was a completely red community for 100 years. And they are scared to death. Because in two elections ago, they voted two people into their city council that nobody had a clue who they were. And they are two of the most radical left-wing Marxists that I've ever heard talk. They're in the middle of this Oklahoma town. That stuff is happening all over the country. We need to focus on the lower level local elections to make sure that those types of people are not getting elected as mayors, school board officials, city council members, freeholders. Because when they do, they climb that ladder. And today, we have two of them sitting in the White House. Rob? Yeah. Just to jump on what Commissioner Carrick said, school board. You know, when they look to defund the police and remove school, you know, school resource officers years ago were the big trend. You know, let's get these kids safe. Let's get school resource officers. You run for something like your school board, which has become an indoctrination farm as far as our children go, anyone who has children in public school. You know, run for those offices. Run for your local school board. Get involved. So when they say, hey, we're going to defund your school resource officers, stand up at that level and say, no, no, no, you're not. Absolutely not. Because now you're representing the children of that school district, the children of your community, your neighbors, your friends' kids, your own kids, and saying, you know, not on my watch. So it starts there. And that's 100% accurate what the commissioner said. You know, the community or New York City now, you know, we were just talking earlier about, you know, who's going to be that next mayor of New York that rebuilds and gives the police the support that they need. The reason I was allowed to do my job as a detective is because of men like Commissioner Carrick, Commissioner Bratton before him, someone like a Chief Anamone, chief of the department, who said, you go out there and do this job. You do it properly. If you misuse that authority, you're going to answer to me, and I'm going to make you pay for it. But if you do right, I'm going to back you 100%, and I don't care to what level that goes to. I will stand by you. I will support you. And those cops went out there and literally walked through gunfire because they had that support. That support structure is cut off at its knees now in these Democratic-run cities. Nationally, you have good, you know, chiefs that would like to support their people. Their jobs are on the line. You know, these politically appointed chiefs are hired by their mayors and obviously have a like-minded political mindset. Job security is more important than backing that beat officer who did things, so they're letting the mainstream media throw them under the bus with their rhetoric, with their headlines. You know, police officer kills unarmed person who just happened to have a bat, by the way, but, you know, he was unarmed. Those headlines that spark that fire, the protests with social media are mobilizing within minutes. Rochester, New York, they were overtaking the barriers outside of the police station, you know, within minutes. That's what we've come down to, and until that leadership is there, until regular citizens say it may not be happening on my block now, but sooner or later it's going to because look at the mayors on the West Coast. They were fine with all the riots until it started happening in front of their house, then all of a sudden they were shut down. The community needs to speak up now. The community needs to support their local officers, needs to support the hiring of leadership, the political fortitude to stand by the police. And again, in my years in the police department, I've been in tragic situations. I explained some of them at the start. If you have the right leadership that will support you but will hold you accountable, that means everything. That's what saved New York City. That's what saved the nation model in law enforcement. And like I said, that structure has been cut off at the knees, and we need to replace that before it's too late. And Tim, same question to you. What's our action? So I'll make it super quick and really simple. You guys can pull out your phones right now and you can go to WeBackBlue.com. You can look us up on Facebook. We are in your neighborhood. We've got 50 state groups all around the country. We're going to come to your state. We're going to do something in your neighborhood. Whether it be our founder, Melissa, doing a coffee drive for officers in the cold of your state, or whether it be us serving lunch or dinner somewhere to your officers, show your appreciation. The officers write to her every single day and tell her, hey, I saw someone with a WeBackBlue thing, and they gave me a cup of coffee at 7-Eleven, and it made my night that much better. We've had officers talk to us about, I was going to go home and commit suicide because this job is just that bad, but you brought me a coffee and said thanks, and I didn't do it. So that's the simple way. Go on our website. There's resources there. We've got state groups across the country, and look us up on social media. We've got the resources and the training and the tools to allow you to support police officers right in your own communities. The last thing I'll say is a mantra that I've taken everywhere around the country when we talk. Most elections are in November, and I tell people at our rallies, remember in November. When you go to the polls, like the commissioner said, remember the politicians that will tell you they support your law enforcement. One of the things that we did where we're from is we looked at the police benevolent associations and the unions that had endorsed Democrat politicians. If their actions and their legislation was not worthy of that endorsement, we wrote a letter and said, these people that you endorsed in November when they were running, they don't support you anymore. Pull your endorsement. Write a public statement. Put it on your Twitter and your social media that we no longer support Democrats such and such because they don't support us. It's that simple. And we tell every politician that we talk to, if you aren't willing to stand behind our police officers, then feel free to stand in front of them. And so that's what people can do. They can remember in November, and they can support their law enforcement officers. And just really want to thank all you guys for joining us up here. And just a little moderator's prerogative to close out. While you've got your phones out and you're going to We Back Blue, go to Breitbart.com. No, just WeBackBlue.com. So go to Breitbart.com and subscribe. Make sure you go to our website. Make it your home page if you can. And also go to all of our social networks. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, et cetera. That will really help us out too as we continue to go out there and tell the truth. And we're one of the few media outlets. We've got a great team of reporters around the country chasing all these stories. So thank all you guys, and thanks CPAC for having this discussion. Really important. Thank you guys all for being here.