“We would like to continue to break the law ... and oh, by the way, can we get federal funds to help us crack down on people who break the law?”
If what we’re seeing in Obama/Emmanuel Ville is an example of police fighting violent crime, then denying funds to the city, ostensibly for “public safety,” can’t possibly make things any worse.
Targeting public safety, the police, and schools, is always the democrat answer to proposed tax cuts or fund cutoffs. The idea is to make it so painful, and so endanger the citizens that any cut would fail due to public outcry. It’s a very old, time-tested tactic.