Have We Really Defunded The Police?
No!! This doesn't stop Republicans from spouting this narrative. Every time a violent crime or theft happens, Republicans will say: “Good thing the Liberals defunded the police.” They also talk about the soaring crime rate that magically started when Biden became president. As usual the Republicans are full of shit.
In reality, “Defund the police” was never proposed on a federal level. Police funding is a local issue no matter where you live. Although the ideas existed for decades, the term came out after George Floyd's death. When Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was caught on video applying an 8 Minute 40-second Chokehold killing George Floyd, a massive protest was sparked throughout the country. There was a group of Black Lives Matter protesters that suggested a defunding of police.
To be clear, “Defunding the police” is not, and has never been about eliminating funding for police departments. It is about reinvesting funds towards Community programs that the community needs. The concept is nothing new. It also has been proven to work.
The country's drug laws would be a good example. Although they're still idiotic in many ways they have improved over the last 30 years. At the beginning of Richard Nixon's “War on Drugs", the idea was harsh sentences “unless the offenders were rich and white” to deter drug users, and an overfunded network of well-armed government organizations (DEA, Metro, Narcotics units) to break-up drug networks. While these organizations have had success in arresting drug dealers, drug use, and its devastation to the communities has risen year by year. People on the left pointed out that rehabilitation centers would lower the rate of drug addiction a lot more than the threat of imprisonment.
Further steps such as legalizing marijuana have also made a difference. Similar steps have been taken in some prison systems using the same logic. If you take an inmate with a 5 year sentence and get him or her a degree and or a trade with helping getting a job it will reduce the chance of them reoffending.
“Defund the Police’ Is a horrible idiotic way to phrase a very good idea. However, the idea of getting rid of cops was never on the table. The only legislators to support the defunding of the police were Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamal Bowman who hardly represented the entire democratic platform.
In reality, we haven't defunded most police budgets at all. Of course, funding might go up or down by a certain amount each fiscal year as with everything else in the budget. None of these cuts would come close to being considered defunding.
That hasn't stopped Republicans from claiming otherwise. After the five Memphis police officers beat Tyrone Nichols, a black man, to death, another discussion about police reform was brought up. For some unknown reason, NBC's “Meet the Press” had Ohio Republican and first-class dumbass Jim Jordan to offer his intelligent insight. When asked if reform was needed, Jordan dodged the question before going into a rant about “disparaging rhetoric” and how “it was deterring good people from applying for the job.” He went on “We shouldn't have the whole attitude about defund the police, I got a list of 20 jurisdictions that defunded the police to the tune of over 1 billion dollars total. That's a problem when you're trying to attract the best to protect our communities.”
Jordan's office provided a 2020-2021 List of the cuts in 21 cities, what he left out was these were proposed cuts. For example, New York City agreed to cut 1 billion in police spending; this was the largest cut on the list. The Final Cut was actually 317 million Which is less than a third of the billion-dollar cut proposed. In Austin, Texas, officials cut 1/3 of the police department's 2021 budget, but in 2022 increased it by a record 442 million. The same happened with Baltimore, Portland, Oregon, and Minneapolis. all had cuts in 2021 but increased in 2022.
The list he gave to prove his point included 21 cities that proposed cuts that never came close to a billion dollars per city, huge shock the Republicans lied. Anytime a critic proposed any kind of cut to a police department the Republicans would wait for the first violent crime and say “Gotcha, you cut money, now this is the result.” This kind of propaganda goes throughout the country. In a 2022 article by Grace Manthley, Frank Espisto, and Amanda Hernandez, police funding was discussed. After analyzing 109 police budgets, 91 agencies have upped police funding by at least 2% since 2022.
LA County Sheriff's Adam Villanueva said that “crime is up and defunding has its consequences” even though the budget has gone up 250 million since 2019. This is one of many examples of cops, influencers, and conservative politicians all claiming their budgets have been defunded when they haven’t. Austin leaders cut the police budget by 30% in 2021. They planned on allocating the money to programs like Family Violence Prevention, Mental Health responders, and police oversight. This lasted a year. The Texas state legislator voted to bar cities in the state from decreasing police budgets, so Austin boosted police spending by 80% in 2022.
Even if the cuts were real, criminal justice experts agree that lowered police spending doesn't lead to increased crime and there's lots of data to back that up. An ABC analysis of state and local police funding found no relationship between year-to-year police spending and crime rates. A Washington Post investigation found similar results from 1960 to 2018. Kimberly Dodson, a retired law enforcement officer and now criminologist at the University of Houston-Clear Lake said “Police largely respond to crime; they don't deter it. Crime happens, somebody calls, they (the police) take a report then they try to solve the crime, after the fact. So saying that police deter crime is not actually accurate because they're more of a reactive agency.” This is not to blame the police, this is simply reality.
This exposes a general flaw in our American “Quick Fix” political system. When a crime happens citizens want arrests, understandably. So since the “defund the police” narrative there is a built-in excuse to blame the Democrats. As long as people have this bad information we will continue to increase police funding at the expense of social programs that have been proven to make positive long-term changes. The words are “long-term.” Social programs take time, as in longer than one fiscal year. you can't fix problems resulting from centuries of racism Decades of declining full-time employment and a piss-poor drug policy in 12 months.
As long as important policy decisions are based around campaign slogans and election cycles we're not likely to see any real change anytime soon. Unless Republicans are injected with a truth serum the Democrats will continuously be blamed anytime there's a crime problem. A politician who tells the public that realistic long-term change will not happen in their first or maybe even second term, is a politician worth voting for.