In response to calls to ‘defund’ the MPD (Minneapolis Police Department) there’s been all sorts of reactions, from Are you nuts! to It’s about time!
But it might help if we knew what police generally do and how they spend their time. Jerry Ratcliffe has illustrated this for the Philadelphia Police:
1. Policing is overwhelmingly a social service
Graph no. 1. This is from the second edition of my book “Intelligence-Led Policing“. The area of each box represents the volume of incidents in 2015 in the City of Philadelphia (about 1.5m in total). These incidents can come from verified calls for service from the public (something really took place as confirmed by a police officer), or from officer-initiated events (such as drug incidents).
What is clear from the graphic is that violent crime plays such a small part in the day-to-day demands on police departments, even in Philadelphia, one of the more troubled cities in the U.S. While the media frets over homicide, it can be seen in the lower right as one of the least noticeable boxes in the graph. The majority of the police department’s workload is the day-to-day minutiae of life in a big city.
WaPo’s Philip Bump remarks:
Relatively little of what’s shown necessarily demands the presence of an armed individual.
But can this be known prior to sending someone to check the call?
Bump also make available a similar chart for New Orleans, 2019:
It’s interesting to see how police are called to many incidents that don’t warrant an armed person. And even more interesting, contra-Trump and his claims about crime going up and up and up, is this chart, again from Bump’s article:
Of course, it’d be an error to interpret this chart as showing independent variables, because it’s not hard to make the assertion that more spent on police results in less crime. I’m not a crime researcher, so I don’t know how much evidence there is for this assertion, vs how much for the alternate interpretation, which is that we’re wasting money on funding the police when crime is going down.
I’ll take just a moment to remind my reader of my personal interpretive mechanism of applying bell curves where it appears appropriate. That is, many or even most situations involving the health of humans and/or human society will, I believe, reflect a bell curve. For example, plot the intake of H2O (water) against the health of an individual. None leads to death, which we’ll arbitrarily label a poor outcome, but water intoxication, brought on by the intake of too much water, also leads to death. Between these two paths, though, the individual’s health may be measured as more or less good – thus, a bell curve.
So how do we determine the end points of the bell curve that applies, I believe, to the question of the funding of police? That’s in the domain of elected officials, and I’d hope that they’d see a graph such as the above and cogitate on whether or not the police truly need more resources, like, say MPD’s request for more officers, three years prior to the George Floyd homicide:
The Minneapolis police chief wants to add some 400 new patrol officers to the force by the year 2025.
Chief Medaria Arradondo told the City Council’s Public Safety and Emergency Management Committee Wednesday that the current number of about 600 patrol officers cannot keep up with demands for service.
“And because our staffing needs have not been properly addressed for many years, it has resulted in our current MPD resources being strained to capacity, and quite frankly we are hemorrhaging,” he said. “I am not blaming this Council or even previous police administrations. The MPD funding model has been broken, quite frankly, for decades.”
Arradondo will ask for 30 new positions in the upcoming budget cycle. A department spokesperson said although the chief has set the target for 400 more patrol officers, it’s a long-term goal and may change. [Minnesota Public Radio]
I believe I remember a year or two ago Mayor Frey suggesting that four new positions might be added.
Minneapolis has apparently been working on the problem of overly burdened police since at least last year:
The city of Minneapolis should consider expanding the roles of counselors, traffic officers and community service patrols in certain low-risk 911 calls, according to a group tasked with finding alternatives to police involvement in some emergency responses.
The city’s 911/Police Department Workgroup, made up of city officials and community members, presented its findings at this week’s meeting of the Public Safety and Emergency Management Committee, which accepted the recommendations without saying how it planned to proceed. Some in the coalition asked for more time to study other options.
The group made several recommendations this week. One was to explore a crisis intervention team developed in Eugene, Ore., that pairs paramedics with counselors on certain mental health calls.
Other recommendations included having community service officers, who are unarmed, respond to low-risk traffic calls and other urgent, but nonemergency situations; directing theft reports to 311 or the department’s website; and developing a nonemergency mental health help line. [StarTribune]
So it appears the City has been investigating how to focus the police on dangerous situations and put different experts on other problems. I wish I could have found similar reports for Minneapolis as those cited above for Philadelphia and New Orleans, but I’m inclined to believe they’d be similar.
I present this data not in support of any particular conclusion, but simply as information my reader might not have run across prior to this. Do with it what you will.
