Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), a member of the radical left-wing "Squad," has been one of the Democratic Party's most vocal critics of law enforcement. She has called for an end to policing and incarceration in America. The country's police force, she has argued, is an "inherently and intentionally racist" institution that condones "government-funded murder" and "can't be reformed."
Alas, the congresswoman's allies in the movement to abolish the police and empty federal prisons will be outraged to learn that Tlaib recently snitched to the Detroit Police Department after checking her home security system and seeing that an individual fleeing the cops was hiding in her trash can.
"The congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, happened to look at her monitoring system and saw the guy in her backyard," one of her neighbors told the local Fox affiliate in Detroit. "So once we found out where he was located, she called us back and told us where he was and we relayed that information to the police."
The male suspect ended up in Tlaib's yard after leading police on a high-speed chase after witnesses reported an attempted kidnapping. A woman was also found hiding in a trashcan several houses down. The pair sped off in an SUV after police orchestrated a traffic stop. Perhaps they shared Tlaib's view that police officers are irredeemably violent and did not wish to become victims of "government-funded murder."
By ratting out the suspect to police, some would argue that Tlaib was exposing the innocent-until-proven-guilty citizen to a violent death at the hands of law enforcement. Body camera footage of the arrest shows at least an "inherently and intentionally racist" police officer pointing an assault rifle at the terrified suspect as he emerges from Tlaib's trash can.
Tlaib was a vocal proponent of the BREATHE Act in 2020. The legislative proposal called for "divesting federal resources from incarceration and policing," and the abolishment of federal prisons within 10 years. Her attacks on law enforcement did not go over well with James Craig, the former chief of the Detroit Police Department. Craig, who is black, slammed Tlaib's "disgusting" suggestion that police officers were racist murderers.
"To say policing should be abolished gives no consideration to the people who live in our neighborhoods who rely on police to provide service," he told the Detroit News in 2021. "The people who live in our city don't want to abolish the police, so the million-dollar question is: Who does [Tlaib] represent?" Craig added that he "would love to see [Tlaib] resign" and would even "throw her a goodbye party."
In addition to her anti-police activism, Tlaib is best known for being an outspoken anti-Semite whose frequent tirades against Israel have been condemned by her fellow Democrats. In May, the congresswoman spoke at a rally in Dearborn, Mich., alongside a pro-Hamas newspaper publisher who urged Arabs around the world to "fight within [their] means" to ensure that "Palestine would be liberated and restored."
Tlaib shared the stage with the publisher, Osama Siblani, who has an extensive history of praising the anti-Israel terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah."We are the Arabs who are going to lift Palestinians all the way to victory, whether we are in Michigan and whether we are in Jenin," he said at the rally. "They will fight with stones, others will fight with guns, others will fight with planes, drones, and rockets, others will fight with their voices, and others will fight with their hands and say: 'Free, free Palestine!'"