Ouch.

To appreciate this, it helps to know who Mayor Ras Baraka is. He’s the son of Amiri Baraka, a staunch black nationalist radical, formerly associated with the Nation of Islam, who was also violently antisemitic and racist. The media describes Ras Baraka as a progressive, some conservatives call him a Marxist or a Communist. He’s tried to run a universal basic income in Newark where he took over from Cory Booker. What does Baraka think of police defunding?

 The mayor of New Jersey’s largest city on Thursday labeled ongoing efforts to abolish police departments a “bourgeois liberal” solution for addressing systemic problems that extend far beyond city police departments.

Bourgeois is a hell of a slam coming from a guy who’s been accused of being a Communist.

It’s essentially Baraka out-lefting BLM and the new lefty trend, while dismissing the notion as the work of privileged people out of touch with Newark.

“I think it’s kind of a knee-jerk reaction,” said Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, a progressive Democrat, during a telephone press conference. “I think there needs to be significant reforms … [but] to get rid of the police department — who would respond to calls for service for violence and domestic abuse?”

Common sense question.

“At the end of the day, I think that the city and the residents here need police officers in their communities,” said the mayor, adding that questions about how officers are deployed and how they engage residents should be scrutinized.

Before being elected mayor in 2014, Baraka was an educator and longtime Newark activist who once compared the majority-minority city’s long-troubled police department to an “occupying army.”

Stripping the department of its funding wouldn’t address underlying problems of structural racism and poverty, said Baraka, adding that “all of America’s institutions have the same problems the police department has.”

“The police just have guns.”

That just shows you how insane the Left has become. Guys like Chomsky and Baraka are starting to call them crazy.