John Walsh: Laying Off the People We Need the Most is Criminal

John Walsh

I met John Walsh once.

I didn’t really talk to him, actually – I shook his hand as he was entering an office in our State Capitol Building and I was leaving. This was in the early 1980s, before “America’s Most Wanted,” his anti-crime show on FOX, made him a household name but after his six-year-old son, Adam, was murdered in South Florida. I remember him not being the friendliest man I’d ever met but I might be projecting. If my six-year-old had been abducted and decapitated, I doubt I’d feel like turning on the charm while shaking hands with strangers.

I subsequently caught a few episodes of “America’s Most Wanted” but found the show’s testosterone levels too high for regular viewing. I respect the fact that the show – which featured dramatic re-enactments of crimes and demanded that viewers contact the police with whatever information they may have “so we can put these jerks in jail where they belong” – contributed to the capture of more than 1,000 fugitives during its 23-year run (1988–2011) but Walsh’s hard-hitting, pro-cop demeanor always made me a little uncomfortable. Sure, I oppose crime as much as the next person. But Walsh’s show seemed to reduce complex human beings into one-dimensional caricatures, with the police always portrayed as dedicated, selfless, beyond-reproach “good guys” and the criminals always being scary, rabid bogeymen, unscrupulous, deficient vermin to be locked up in cages as soon as more prisons can be built.

So I hadn’t seen the guy in years until I ran across a video (posted below) in Facebook in which he defends teachers, cops, firefighters and paramedics, expresses opposition to the wholesale layoffs taking place in municipalities across America, and points out if we’re being burglarized, we’re not gonna get help from Citigroup or Wells Fargo; it’s the police upon whom we rely when we're in a fix.

Walsh also objects to how some Fortune 500 companies pay no state taxes at all, says the increase in crime is because of poverty, and declares that laying off these public servants is a quick fix, maybe, but not a good fix. He closes by encouraging viewers to “speak up, call your legislators, write ‘em, e-mail ‘em.” (I’m not sure what crime increase he’s talking about since our crime rate in 2009 was roughly the same as in 1968, according to the FBI, with the homicide rate being at its lowest since 1964. Maybe he has access to newer statistics.)

Walsh is at his most persuasive in my opinion when he mentions Cleveland, Ohio, which let 321 people go, more than a third of whom were cops; Patterson, New Jersey, which laid off 125 police officers and saw a 15 percent spike in crime; and “lovely” Flint, Michigan, which laid off two-thirds of its police force and has become “one of the small-city murder capitals of the U.S.”

John Walsh is the latest addition to my “People I Dig” list for speaking out against penny-wise and pound-foolish efforts to balance budgets by decimating essential public services so that “companies,” as he refers to the large corporate monsters that have screwed us without lubricant, can enjoy record profits at our expense.

Before you call and write your legislators, watch this video: