What Are The Benefits Of Defunding The Police
Defunding police departments successfully would create a virtuous cycle, in which communities reap social and political benefits that translate into economic benefits for cities, states, and the communities themselves. An example might be found in one of the ways police departments do bring in money.
Limit Contact With Police
A key way to reduce police violence and racism perpetuated against Black and Brown communities is to reduce contact between the public and police. To do that, we must shrink the size and power of the police force and re-assign responsibilities for social interventions away from police.
We must understand that police officers are not the solution to the challenges that our communities face. Instead, we need non-law enforcement first responders with training and expertise, not officers with guns. That means culturally competent clinicians with lived experiences respond to people in mental health crises, trained counselors intervene in domestic violence situations, and drug treatment specialists support those with substance abuse problems. We must be intentional about not recreating the system of policing in other sectors.
And we must continue to fight programs and policies that increase public contact with the police, including mass surveillance, stop-and-frisk, and the enforcement of low-level offenses.
What Does It Mean To Defund The Police
Defunding the police does not necessarily mean getting rid of the police altogether. Rather, it would mean reducing police budgets and reallocating those funds to crucial and oft-neglected areas like education, public health, housing, and youth services. Its predicated on the belief that investing in communities would act as a better deterrent to crime by directly addressing societal problems like poverty, mental illness, and homelessness issues that advocates say police are poorly equipped to handle, and yet are often tasked with. According to some estimates, law enforcement spends 21 percent of its time responding to and transporting people with mental illnesses. Police are also frequently dispatched to deal with people experiencing homelessness, causing them to be incarcerated at a disproportionate rate.
Even some cops resent societys overreliance on them. Were just asking us to do too much, said former Dallas police chief David Brown in a 2016 interview. Every societal failure, we put it off for the cops to solve. Thats too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems. And the outcome can be deadly: In 2015, the Washington Postfound that one in four people killed by a police officer suffered from a serious mental illness at the time of their death.
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Alternatives To Defunding The Police
In the wake of civil unrest, many politicians, including presumptive Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden, have advocated for reforming police departments over defunding them.
There are many different policies being circulated, but one popular form is community policing, which is when officers are assigned to engage more frequently within certain neighborhoods in non-policing capacities, like attending community meetings, in the hopes that they will form stronger bonds. Many of these reform initiatives would actually increase police budgets, because they would not reallocate any of the funds already going to police departments, but instead give more for training and buying new gear like body cameras.
Congressional Democrats recently introduced a bill that would ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants in drug cases by police, among other measures. It does not call to defund police, but it also does not provide any additional funding to police departments.
Biden supports giving more funds to departments for body cameras and training on community policing.
“I support conditioning federal aid to police based on whether or not they meet certain basic standards of decency and honorableness,” Biden said in an interview with CBS Evening News last week. “And, in fact, are able to demonstrate they can protect the community and everybody in the community.”
A Police Officer Will Never Walk Away
Some police proponents warn diminishing their role could be a risky move.
“We’re talking about switching responsibilities from the police officer on the corner to other agencies,” said Patrick Lynch, the president of the largest police officers’ union, the New York City Police Benevolent Association. “Why were those responsibilities placed on the shoulder of the police officers in the first place?” He answered his own question: “Because those other agencies failed at their job, and a police officer will never walk away from a crime victim.”
In situations arising from homelessness and mental illness, Lynch said he agrees in principle that the responsibility shouldn’t be in the hands of police officers but that no viable alternative currently exists.
“So to say you don’t need police officers, OK, I don’t agree. I think we do. We do in my neighborhood,” he added. And he warned that major budget cuts could lead to a repeat of the 1970s, when “crime was out of control.”
The backlash against defunding includes initiatives like one proposed by Texas state Senator Dawn Buckingham, who filed a bill that would withhold state grants from communities that cut their police budgets more than 5%.
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Policing In The Us Was Established To Maintain White Supremacy
The police are not a neutral body, and the institution is inherently biased. In the U.S. slave patrols and night watches were the beginning of a racially directed system of law enforcement designed to secure capital for white settlers.
Over the past 40 years, the expansion of racially targeted policing and policies such as stop-and-frisk and the war on drugs have helped fuel mass incarceration in the U.S., with African-Americans incarcerated at more than five times the rate of white people. Black and Brown people are disproportionately targeted from a young age, with hundreds of thousands of children ages six to 14 arrested, often by police officers stationed in schools as school resource officers.
Police forces have also become more militarized. Since 1990, the federal government has transferred $6 billion of excess military equipment to local law enforcement agencies under its 1033 Program, giving police access to mine-resistant vehicles, assault rifles, and grenade launchers. For years police have also undergone warrior training that teaches them to see every encounter as potentially life-threatening, especially when those encounters involve people of color. Every year on-duty police kill an estimated 1,000 people.
Whats more, a recent study revealed that hundreds of active duty officers from across the country are members of racist and anti-government groups on Facebook.
Understand The Trials Stemming From George Floyd’s Death
The murder of George Floyd.On May 25, 2020, police officers in Minneapolis arrested Mr. Floyd, a Black man, on a report that he had used a fake $20 bill. Mr. Floyd died after Derek Chauvin, one of the officers, pinned him to the ground with his knee, an episode that was captured on video.
Four defendants.Along with Mr. Chauvin, three other officers were accused of playing a role in Mr. Floyds death. Tou Thao, a veteran officer who was Mr. Chauvins partner, held back a group of bystanders. J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane helped pin down Mr. Floyd. The four men have been involved in several proceedings.
Mr. Chauvins criminal trial.In April 2021, a jury in state court found Mr. Chauvin, who is white, guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. In June 2021, he was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison he has appealed his conviction.
Civil rights trial.In February, Mr. Kueng, Mr. Lane and Mr. Thao were found guilty of willfully violating Mr. Floyds constitutional rights in federal court. Mr. Lane was sentenced to two and a half years, Mr. Kueng to three and Mr. Thao to three years and half years in prison. Mr. Chauvin, who had also been charged with violating Mr. Floyds rights, reached a plea agreement in December 2021 and was later sentenced to 21 years in federal prison. His federal and state sentences are to be served concurrently.
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Where The Money Would Go Instead
Activists pushing to defund police departments are advocating for the money to be invested in other types of programs in marginalized communities, like alternative emergency response services. Rather than dial 911 and have a police officer respond to an overdose, for example, a medical professional would respond.
Those in favor of reform say this could prevent the use of unnecessary force and violence, and potentially death, from police first responders who are not necessarily trained to handle social issues including domestic violence, substance abuse, homelessness or a mental health crisis effectively. Instead, community workers and others trained in de-escalation techniques would respond.
“So much of policing right now is generated and directed toward quality-of-life issues, homelessness, drug addiction, domestic violence,” Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza told NBC’s “Meet the Press” last week. “What we do need is increased funding for housing, we need increased funding for education, we need increased funding for quality of life of communities who are over-policed and over-surveilled.”
Reasons Why Its Time To Defund The Police
| By , Oct 15, 2020
In the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, protests erupted in Minneapolis and across the U.S., with activists and community members demanding that Black lives matterand with many calling to defund the police.
Many of usparticularly white peoplehave been taught to equate policing with public safety and cant imagine alternatives to a punitive law enforcement model. But our criminal legal system was built to reinforce deep structural racism in our society. For most individuals and communities of color, policing has brought terror rather than safety.
The murders of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, and countless other Black and Brown people at the hands of police are not anomalies. They are evidence of a racist system that disproportionately targets people of color for violence, imprisonment, and death.
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Wouldn’t Defunding The Police Mean More Crime
Though this is a common argument from opponents of defunding the police, many activists counter with evidence that demonstrates that less policing would not actually lead to rising crime. In fact, several examples suggest that defunding the police would actually lead to less crime, rather than more a 2017 report, for instance, studied a period of time from 2014 to 2015 during which the NYPD pulled back on “proactive policing,” and found that there was a significant decrease in civilian complaints of major crimes during this time.
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Moreover, several other examples demonstrate that investing in social services and providing more resources for the community decrease crime on its own. A 2016 report from the Obama White Houses Council of Economic Advisers, for example, found that a 10 percent increase in wages for non-college educated men results in approximately a 10 to 20 percent reduction in crime rates.”Other studies have shown that increases in the number of nonprofit community organizations effectively lead to reduction in crime rates across 264 cities, demonstrating the value of reallocating police funds to community resources and social programs.
How Is The Money Used
The ways departments spend their money varies, but the largest chunk goes toward officers’ paychecks, which includes full- and part-time pay, benefits, and overtime pay for all employees. Nationally, the average salary for police officers ranges from $36,290 in Mississippi to $105,220 in California.
As an example, in 2017 the metropolitan police department for Washington, D.C. spent $476 million of its $555 million budget on personnel services, leaving the remaining $79 million for expenses such as interdepartmental charges, contractual services, depreciation, material services, and other expenditures. In Cincinnati, Ohio, the trend continued, with $86.7 million of the citys $132.7 million budget doled out to department employees in 2017.
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Outside The United States
In Canada, politicians in major cities have expressed interest in diverting some police funds. In Toronto, city councilors Josh Matlow and Kristyn Wong-Tam have planned to propose a 10% cut to the police budget. Doctors for Defunding the Police have advocated for widespread reforms. In Montreal, Mayor Valérie Plante has said she is in talks about the police budget.
In Scotland, a violence reduction unit run by Police was set up in 2005, which aims to prevent violence with educational and outreach programs.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair criticized defund the police in a 2021 article for the New Statesman, describing it as “voter-repellent” and “the left’s most damaging political slogan since ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat.'” Blair furthermore claimed that the slogan “leaves the right with an economic message which seems more practical and a powerful cultural message around defending flag, family and fireside traditional values.” Both the leaderships of the British Labour Party and the Conservative Party have pledged not to defund the police force.
Why Not Just Reform The Police
Though many advocate for measures to increase police training, accountability, and transparency rather than defunding law enforcement altogether, supporters of defunding the police argue that efforts to reform have largely failed to combat police violence in any meaningful or effective way.
Indeed, despite increased measures to reform the police over recent years, police violence and brutality have still persisted, as many activists point out. According toThe Washington Post, police have fatally shot approximately 1,000 people a year since 2015 with the rate that police kill Black people being more than twice the rate for white people. In Minneapolis, MN, where George Floyd was killed, police had already tried implementing a series of reforms, including bias and de-escalating training along with the use of body cameras and yet have continually been involved in multiple deadly encounters.
In a recent interview with WBUR, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors explained that defunding police is the central demand of how society can actually achieve “real accountability and justice.””We have spent the last seven years asking for training, asking for body cameras. The body cameras have done nothing more than show us whats happened over and over again,” she said. “The training has done nothing but show us that law enforcement and the culture of law enforcement is incapable of changing.”
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Why Defund The Police
Today’s police are tasked with responding to a vast variety of social issues and crises, from homelessness to mental illness yet they’re often not trained to handle such tasks on the daily. Proponents of defunding the police argue that investing in public health and social services, rather than in police, is a more appropriate and effective means to meet the public safety needs of a community specifically, these social services would address societal issues such as poverty, homelessness, and mental health more directly, therefore acting as a better deterrent to crime than law enforcement, which activists point out have historically been a harmful institution of systemic racism.
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Despite the fact that police are often poorly equipped to address such societal problems, police department budgets commonly make up a large portion of many cities’ overall budgets, and often significantly exceed funds for education, employment, and other critical social services. In fact, it’s estimated that over $100 billion is spent on policing nationwide every year. Last year, New York City allocated $6 billion to its police department a budget that exceeded more than that of the health department, homeless services, youth and community development, and workforce development combined.
Shouldnt We Increase Police Pay In Marginalized Communities To Help Those Communities More
Overfunded police departments already struggle to make arrests for violent crimes in marginalized communities. Bell points out that a lot of police in these areas do not love their jobs.
Its a difficult job for police to function as this facet of social control, especially while caught up in a toxic structure. Many officers work difficult jobs while still losing in the world of capitalism. Even though they might not be bad people themselves, they are part of a bad system. The answer is not to pay them more to stay in the bad system but to find other ways for them to do work in public safety.
We ultimately have to think about where investments should and shouldnt go. If officers are motivated to the defund cause, says Bell, they should be brought on as advocates of abolitionism, because they arent winning in the current system. As allies, officers motivated to do public service could be given better pay to do more for their communities in a potentially safer environment.
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State And Local Budgets Are In Crisis
Economic downturns always hurt state and local government budgets.
But the widespread business closures of this spring were a particularly intense and devastating form of downturn. And certain forms of activity that tend to be particularly highly taxed in particular, drinking in bars, staying in hotels, and renting cars is likely to stay depressed for a long time even under very optimistic pandemic scenarios.
The result is that politicians are now facing tough budgetary trade-offs. The decision that mayors in even liberal cities like Los Angeles and New York were making as of early May was to propose deep cuts in essentially every major category except the police.
But its not as though huge cuts in youth services, housing, public health, or education are popular, either. Even in a world where broad ideological hostility to spending money on police departments is relatively rare, a situation in which cutting police spending is the only way to save funding for other agencies naturally creates a broader coalition for spending less on the cops.
We dont yet really know what national opinion thinks of the protests and disorder that have engulfed the country since those initial proposals were made. But we do know that theres a widespread sentiment in left-of-center circles see my colleagues Dylan Scott and Ezra Klein for illustrative examples that police departments conduct during the past week has mostly reflected poorly on them.