Can we talk? No, of course not, because that might lead to someone saying something that would be unacceptable. Now that a consensus has formed around the vague understanding that racism is real, that cops are serious problem and that the problems criminal defense lawyers have been raising for decades aren’t figments of our fertile lefty imaginations, a sufficient percentage of Americans are ready to accept the fact that change is not merely needed, but required.
Cool, right? Maybe not as cool as one would think.
Crime data and research support calls to defund.
We examined nationwide data on municipal expenditures and crime rates from 1990 to 2017, and found that crime rates — and thus the need for policing — precipitously declined, while cities’ expenditures on policing significantly increased. In 1990, the U.S. experienced 12 violent crimes per 1,000 people, and cities spent an average of $182 (in today’s dollars) per resident on the police. Compare this to 2017, the latest year with comparable data. The violent crime rate had decreased by 56% to five crimes per 1,000, but the average police budget had increased by 59%, to $292 per resident. Across the 1,088 largest municipalities in the U.S., that change amounted to an aggregate police budget increase of over $17 billion per year.
On a cost/benefit basis, the price of police has skyrocketed. But the increase isn’t due to cops buying tanks, but increased staffing and salary and pension increases. But the cry “defund” isn’t cut back, and the rationalizations that defund doesn’t mean defund is belied by the fact that it does mean exactly that, except to the million people to whom it means something else that it doesn’t mean.
Or to be it less absurdly, the activists demanding the police be defunded and those “explaining” it because the activists’ demands are too ridiculous for anyone to take seriously have little to do with one another. They’re using the same word, but that’s as close as they get.
The back-end solution to what we do to “re-imagine” policing suffers from similar confusion.
Police funds can also be redistributed to schools, job training programs, rape-crisis centers, and housing. Programs that improve prenatal health care and provide free preschool have been shown to have large, long-term crime reducing effects. Providing support services to youth in lieu of arrest reduces crime. Keeping young people who have been arrested out of jail, even without providing services, also does.
This all sounds kind of great, and even if it fails to eliminate crime, it seems as if it will surely be beneficial to society and improve matters. But this, too, involves parsing of actual programs, as the simplistic “throw money at it” doesn’t make it work. If we put more money into education, we get better paid teachers. Not different teachers. Just the same teachers, but making more money. We don’t need to build 1000 more classrooms because there aren’t students to fill those classrooms.
We’ve had job training programs for a long time, which are wonderful for people who want and need jobs, but having them doesn’t make anybody go to them, train for new jobs, or create jobs for when they’re done training. Free preschool programs are an important means of freeing up parents to work, but open a new basket of problems, from quality of services and sexual abuse claims to uncontrolled costs, as proponents not only want the service, but want the providers of the service to be paid like their masters-level teachers, even if they don’t have high school diplomas.
This isn’t to say that any of these ideas, save “rape-crisis centers” which has little to do with anything and appears to have been tossed into the mix because of collateral politics, aren’t good and worthy. It’s to say that there’s a ton of ideas being thrown against the wall, but almost no actual thought being put into whether any of this will accomplish any useful goal. And the quoted op-ed is entitled, “Facts About Defunding” by two academics.
Here we are, at this fascinating juncture where a majority of Americans are ready to acknowledge that the blue wall they supporting building for all these years got too high, too strong, too impenetrable, and needs to change. But tear it down, lower it, create some weepholes? Actually do things to fix the problem? That requires knowledge, experience and painfully honest thought. There’s a dearth of that at the moment.
“We” is right: 76% of Americans and 71% of white people now call racism “a big problem” in the U.S., up from 50% in 2015. More than two-thirds of Americans say that Floyd’s murder represents a broader problem within law enforcement, and 74% support the protests. That includes 76% of Independents and 53% of Republicans. It’s a seismic shift that sociologists attribute mainly to change among white conservatives.
That people who were blind to, or just didn’t care about, the excesses of law enforcement or racism are finally watching the video, seeing a problem, recognizing that we need to fix a system that’s grown dangerously out of control. Great? Yes, and no.
But what we’re seeing today in the wake of the George Floyd protests is a systematic adoption of this new theory of racism across multiple industries; at a time when Americans have made a huge leap towards recognizing the great scourge of our nation and finally wanting to do something about it, this penchant for looking behind the mask of people who believe they hate racism to find malintent to harm minorities has become the new normal. And it’s metastasizing into something dangerous, not on the streets where righteous Americans are protesting actual police brutality, but in the media and on Twitter, where we are experiencing a full-on moral panic.
We’re a fickle people, rushing from one extreme to another, flush with the passion of our newfound righteousness and desperate to fix it, even if we’ve got no clue what the problem is or how to do so. We’ve gone from zero to a million miles an hour, whizzing right past that inflection point where serious and viable reforms can finally be accomplished, to wild radical vagaries that make no sense and will be as disastrous as their predecessors.
Some random person called me a conservative lawyer on twitter. In a sense, he was right, as this is the time to hit the brakes, slow down, think hard and honestly about the problems and even harder and more honestly about the solutions. But when we’re going through a moral panic, the syllogism kicks in and we need to get there as fast as we can. The passionately outraged demand change now, and so they kicked it into overdrive and are driving at that big blue wall as fast as they can. Surely we’ll break through this time and not crash and burn.
No comments:
Post a Comment