BOSTON — In the summer of 2020, after the death of George Floyd and the protests that followed, the far left decided cops were the problem. Their theory? Armed officers escalate mental health crises. Send social workers and clinicians instead, and people would stop getting hurt. On Saturday in Boston, one of those clinicians was attacked with a sword.

The clinician was knocked to the ground inside an apartment building on Hemenway Street, steps from Northeastern University's campus. A police officer was stabbed in the arm. The man who attacked them, apparently in the grip of paranoid delusions, was shot by other officers and later died at a hospital. He had spent close to 45 minutes talking to the clinician through his locked door before he opened it.

The clinician did everything the activists said would work. It didn't.

The suspect, who has not been publicly identified, had called 911 that morning claiming four armed people were coming to kill him, a threat that didn't exist. Officers arrived at 212 Hemenway Street and found nobody in the hallway. Just a locked door and a man behind it.

What those activists rarely mentioned is that CAHOOTS doesn't take calls involving weapons, violence, or anything remotely dangerous. Out of 24,000 calls in 2019, their teams requested police backup just 311 times. In other words, the program works because it only shows up when there's no real danger. The man on Hemenway Street had a sword. CAHOOTS would never have taken that call. But the activists who held CAHOOTS up as the model didn't build in that distinction, and city councils didn't ask.

Mayor Michelle Wu made the philosophy her own. Her campaign platform called for diverting 911 mental health calls away from police, and she committed $21 million over five years to behavioral health programs after taking office. Acting Mayor Kim Janey had already launched a pilot to shift those calls away from law enforcement in 2021. Wu picked up the baton and ran with it.

The Hemenway Street clinician isn't the first person to get hurt following this playbook. In November 2020, housing case manager Kristin Benson was stabbed to death by a client in Seattle. Days later, behavioral health worker Travis Knight was shot dead outside a treatment facility in Melbourne, Florida, by a former patient who came back specifically to murder him. The promise, repeated endlessly by activists and politicians who would never be the ones knocking on that door, was that de-escalation would keep everyone safe.

Within hours of Saturday's attack, the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association made clear who they blame.

'The overzealous DA should take a bow now that cops are waiting to get stabbed before taking steps to protect themselves,' the BPPA wrote.

That DA is Kevin Hayden, who just over two weeks earlier, on March 19, sent officers to arrest Nicholas O'Malley at his home. Not at the station. At his front door. O'Malley is a 33-year-old cop with a wife, a toddler, and a six-month-old baby. His attorney said he wasn't allowed to turn himself in. The charge was manslaughter — for shooting a carjacker who had rammed a police cruiser and had 47 prior charges. Hayden said it wasn't self-defense. The message to every cop in the city was unmistakable: act, and we'll come for you.

Sixteen days later, those same officers stood outside a door and talked for 45 minutes while the man on the other side decided when the conversation was over.

Meanwhile, one of the activists who marched under the George Floyd banner in Boston is now running for state senate. Latoya Gayle, who co-founded "March Like a Mother for Black Lives" in the summer of 2020, is challenging popular Democratic incumbent Nick Collins in the 1st Suffolk District primary this September.

The same far-left ideology that put an unarmed clinician at a stranger's door on Saturday morning now wants a seat at the State House.

Wu has not commented on Saturday's attack. Hayden has not responded to the union. Northeastern's police chief already assured everyone there's nothing to worry about. The activists who wrote the playbook are nowhere to be found.

Not one of them was on Hemenway Street on Saturday morning.