“We’re asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. Here in Dallas, we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. … That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”
-David Brown, Chicago Police Superintendent, former Dallas Police Chief
Defund the police? It has been a slogan circulating social media, but it has no consistent platform. The phrase itself calls to mind images of anarchy. Many who have espoused the view say it only means reallocating some of the dollars in police budgets away from there to other methods of promoting public safety. That is not what the message implies, though, and it’s not where it started. A fringe movement to ‘abolish’ police sowed those seeds.
The leaders of the movement seem to mean something completely different than all but the most ardently ‘progressive.’ When Minneapolis’s city council president was interviewed on CNN to talk about the city council’s vote to dismantle their police department (it remains unclear what this will mean in practice), she responded to a question about a hypothetical scenario of a person’s house being burgled by calling the ability to call the police in such a situation a ‘privilege.’ In an opinion piece published to the New York Times, a community organizer makes clear the movement does literally mean abolish the police. She claims that police only make communities more dangerous using a couple anecdotes while failing to city any data.
I’ll fill in that gap for her. Steve Levitt, a University of Chicago economist (and deliverer of my favorite lectures when I was there), conducted a study on the effect more police officers had on crime. If you don’t want to read a paper, I’ll sum it up for you: more police translates to fewer crimes committed. Common sense prevails!
It was unsurprising, then, that Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president and leader of the party, quickly distanced himself from the calls for defunding. The messaging needs more work because it is off-putting to a majority of voters. People calling for defunding the police when they really mean reallocating some of the police budget to new teams of practitioners in social work or the like so that police can focus on crime should find a new slogan. The current one is self-defeating.