San Diego Police Shortage, Defund Debate, and Political Fallout Explained

Ajouté : 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Welcome to California under a Democratic mayor who has led with a narrative the Democratic politicians of defund the police and slash their budget. And if somebody needs to call 911, they'll send a social worker. So, in this case, the northern subdivision, which is in the neighborhood where the Islamic center was located, was understaffed by seven sworn officers that day. The only reason the officers were able to respond so quickly to the shooting was because one of the officers was interviewing the mom who had called the police and had been on hold for nearly 2 hours. So, they were able to get to the Islamic center within minutes.

[00:00:47]The understaffing issue, why is that a long long-going and ongoing issue with San Diego city? Why is there a a staffing issue for the San Diego Police Department?

[00:01:00]When the Democrats got in power, they decided to make the police the enemy.

[00:01:04]And it's it's been for a while now just been slashing their budget and slashing their budget. But, in 2020, of course, we had the George Floyd riots and the defund the police movement. But, then we also had the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. And the city of San Diego passed an ordinance saying that if you're a cop or you're a firefighter, and you didn't want to comply with getting the shot, they wanted to fire you. My group, Reopen San Diego, sued in federal court, and we won, and we got that ordinance overturned. But, what happened was there were dozens of officers who left the San Diego PD in protest.

[00:01:47]When they left, I mean, wasn't there news that, you know, policies may have changed, or was there fear that leadership wasn't quite on board with supporting police?

[00:01:58]They did not feel supported by their leadership, that is for sure. Many people just left the state as they often do. And this is not just a Democratic mayors in California. This is Gavin Newsom who is disastrous policies which have been driving out conservatives from California to states like Texas, Tennessee, and Florida.

[00:02:23]This is such an under reported angle of this story and obviously as as I laid out in my monologue, I mean this is going to be a story that gets buried.

[00:02:31]There are way too many arms and legs to this thing that are just too inconvenient for too many groups and they won't want to talk about it. But I think that this defund police angle is really also a shocking angle that I don't see getting a lot of attention. If that if it is in fact true that San Diego PD has a chronic shortage of officers, isn't there a way for citizens to respond here to put pressure and get the budget in order, get police officers in those substations?

[00:03:05]Well, something phenomenal is happening right now, Chanel, and what we're seeing is the early ballot returns. We don't know who people are voting for, but we can see that Republicans are over performing their registration average by 13 points. It's Republicans voting with a vengeance to save the city and state save the state. So we could see change very quickly here. The election is just 2 weeks away.

[00:03:34]But that can you put that in perspective though? I mean a 13-point swing seems large, but I mean in in terms of San Diego as a as a city, how how unusual is that?

[00:03:47]Great point. So in the state of California, it's 45% registered Dems and 25% Republicans. And what you normally see is you see sometimes Republicans stay home and Democrats will sometimes over perform. But this is happening statewide right now. It's not just San Diego. Republicans are coming out to vote and Democrats are staying home. We saw a similar pattern in 2024 when 2 million California Democrats stayed home because they were not excited about Kamala Harris. So, I really do have hope that the pendulum is swinging back to the right place and we can get these people out of office who all they want to do is defund the police.

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