Project Safe Neighborhood Grants Awarded in Alabama

Alabama is a state that takes a lot of grief from mainstream society. Like most southern states, the media that's based almost entirely out of New York and DC views southerners as backward and bigoted, and they never fail to run negative stories on states like Alabama. For instance, during the height of the "Defund the Police" movement last year, which rode in on the back of the Black Lives Matter protests for George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Alabama was insulted as a racist, white supremacist police state for not wanting to defund or entirely abolish their police force. Though rather than caving to an angry reactionary mob over policing, Alabama has steadfastly attempted to make their state safer, and most recently awarded law enforcement grants to various counties through the "Project Safe Neighborhoods" initiative.

New York can smugly look down on states like Alabama, while New York's crime is spiking through the roof and they refuse to even keep criminals locked up and instead let them out through bail reform. Sociologists have concluded that if not for New York's stay at home orders, crime would have risen over 2000% in the city. As it stands, crime is up in the aggregate about 400%, though just imagine millions of more people outside and thousands of more businesses open. Alabama is a state that does not want to share that fate. "We understand that liberals believe their violent cities are one policy away from being 'utopia,'" a spokesperson for Madison County said. "Call us crazy, but we would rather enforce the law than not. Let [them] have their utopia and leave us alone."

Project Safe Neighborhoods is not an Alabama state-based grant program. It's actually a little-known federal initiative. Why do so few people know about it? It's because all that makes the news are the big cities calling for less police funding. San Francisco, LA, NYC, Chicago, etc; these cities are demanding money be taken away entirely from law enforcement. Though the Congressional districts outside of cities passed a federal supplement that will help boost law enforcement funding on a state level for those who request it. Alabama did, and they will be receiving grants to help with three different counties.

These grants will help provide a lot of necessary equipment for law enforcement officers in the state. It's not a fortune, to be sure. All told, the grants will total just over $140,000, and that money is expected to be spent right away on things that different departments need.

For instance, one of the county's narcotics units needs new ballistic vests, which will take up a little over $16,000 to purchase. There's also an offender re-entry plan, so that people leaving jail will not become recidivists and commit more crime. And along with over $50,000 spent on license plate recognition software, this money is basically already spent before the Alabama counties are going to receive it. The three counties receiving the funding have experienced some uptick in crime, and the law enforcement officers in Alabama claim that new equipment and some upgrades to their policing can help get those numbers back down.

Crime Does Not Stop on its Own

There is a huge disconnect between crime in America and how it's handled in the mainstream. Thankfully for America in the aggregate, New York, Minnesota and California are the exceptions to the rule. These are places where crime is running so incredibly rampant that the state cracks down on in-state news organizations even reporting on it factually, as it scares away tourism and threatens to have ordinary citizens revolt. No politician wants to spend every waking moment on the phone, speaking with disgruntled constituents about how supporting BLM and taking away police money doesn't magically stop people from committing crime.

In these areas, it's not just basic shoplifting and drug use that's on the rise. Actual hate crime attacks are soaring through the roof in New York and California. Thousands of innocent Asian people have been specifically and violently targeted over the course of the past eight months, and the media overall refuses to even acknowledge what's happening, while most of the suspects apprehended are allowed right back out without bail due to the Democratic reforms in the states.

The bottom line here: While a few states in America are going out of their way to ignore the rise of crime, states like Alabama are attempting to do something about it through grant spending.