The D.C. Police Union blames local government policies for soaring crime rates and a decline in public safety in an ad campaign launched Wednesday.
“The police union sought one legislative goal: protect the rights of police officers to collectively bargain like all unions in the public and private sectors. Labor officials from local unions stood with us,” D.C. Police Union Chairman Greggory Pemberton said in a written statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, D-At Large, and council member Charles Allen, D-Ward 6, “ignored our pleas,” Pemberton said.
“This week, the District lost another child to gunfire,” he added. “Enough is enough.”
The police union in the nation’s capital attacked the two D.C. Council members for cutting police funding and ignoring public safety experts amid a mass exodus of D.C. police officers in the 30-second ad, which was to run on television and in digital media.
“A mother and her child are abducted at knifepoint in yet another D.C. carjacking,” a caption reads in the opening scene of the ad, over what appears to be a video of the crime cited.
“Who’s to blame for this crime wave? D.C. Council members Charles Allen and Phil Mendelson,” the ad’s narrator says. “Their laws let criminals run free and prevent police from keeping us safe.”
Patrick Mara, chairman of the D.C. Republican Committee, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the D.C. Council is catering to political interests rather than addressing the city’s crime problem.
“Unfortunately, our D.C. Council continues to pander to national liberal special interests as children die,” Mara said. “It’s not their children, though, so tomorrow is yet another day for D.C. Council members to lean in to the far left on whatever new policy or idea they take up.”
Homicides rose 19% in the District during 2020, while carjacking cases tripled and gun-related crimes are mostly commited by a small number of repeat offenders.
The city’s crime problem drove D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, also a Democrat, to distance herself from the “defund the police” movement and emphasize hiring more police officers.
The union’s ad states that 670 officers left the Metropolitan Police Department from 2020 to 2021, and that the two council members cut police funding. It also says that carjackings, murders, and other violent crimes are at the worst rate in 20 years.
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