Perry Bacon, Jr. is dismayed that the Democrats are improperly blaming, in his opinion, progressives and their policies for jumps in the crime rate:
It’s clear, though, that two things did not cause this increase: “reform prosecutors” like Boudin and the “defund the police” movement. Few cities have actually reduced their police budgets, and homicide rate increases happened in many cities that increased spending. [WaPo]
Questions that do not reduce to simple laboratory setups are tough to work on, and I say that as a software engineer that occasionally has to work on problems that only my customer sees because of some customization they have developed and applied.
What to do?
Restate the question. The question is, Does defunding the police lead to higher crime rates? Well, in at least some locations, we have higher crime rates. So is there anything interesting about any of these locations that we can connect to the question we’re asking?
Remember that actions often have unstated goals. This is not to say that they’re always covert, because sometimes, in a political arena, a bit of snappiness in the verbiage is often an advantage. Defund the police was snappy until it wasn’t.
So what is the covert goal of this slogan? The decidedly longer and less snappy Reduce police presence on the street! Yes, including the exclamation point.
At this point, I’ll note that I’m located in a first ring suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, with Minneapolis just across the river. We get crime reports on the local news every night; the local major paper, the StarTribune, carries more detailed reports and historical data, as does Minnesota Public Radio (MPR). But I can’t speak for other cities, and don’t.
Minneapolis is known to have decisively rejected a Defund the police! proposal in its last election cycle. But Minneapolis, and St. Paul, are also known for exhibiting a depleted police force. Me from somewhat more than a year ago:
And this at a time when, in Minneapolis, the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) appears to be struggling with morale in the wake of the George Floyd riots and a city council that tried, but failed, to “defund” it in the wake of the George Floyd homicide. Officers have retired or gone on disability in the wake of the riots, and they’re not being replaced at a comparable rate. Here’s MPR News:
There are far fewer police officers patrolling the streets of Minneapolis so far this year than city officials anticipated. Members of a City Council committee Thursday approved $6.4 million for the city’s Police Department to hire dozens more officers this year.
Chief Medaria Arradondo told the committee that 105 officers left the department last year, which is more than double the average attrition rate. And so far this year, 155 officers are on leave and are not available for duty.
Ominously:
“This presents operational challenges for me as chief,” said Arradondo, adding that the department is becoming one-dimensional, meaning officers mostly respond to 911 calls instead of doing what he calls proactive policing.
Minneapolis may not have defunded the police, but it’s beyond dispute that the goal of the slogan was achieved – with disastrous consequences.
I’m not going to claim that Bacon is being deceptive or disingenuous, because analysis of this sort isn’t always obvious. Much like grifters, wordsmiths can be taken in by the very craft in which they’re trained. Defund the police!, for all its charisma, turns out to be a lot less attractive when it’s goal is stated, instead: Reduce police presence on the street!, because residents who must face the consequences have rejected it. Here in the Twin Cities, after an appalling couple of years, we seem to be just starting to edge out of the crime wave. I’ll be interested to see if there’s a correlation between police on the street and the flattening out, even beginning to dip again, of crime rates.
