The Cost of “Defund”

At the New York Times, Charles Blow announced that “Defund the Police” is dead. It’s not that it needed announcing, but that it died with such a whimper that few noticed, but with President Biden talking about putting more cops on the street, Blow made a political assessment.

Some said it was dumb.

Some thought it was politically disastrous.

Some thought it was being unfairly demonized and mischaracterized.

But whatever the case, Defund the Police, both the slogan and the substance of the issue, appears to be dead. Its opponents beat it to death, not that it was ever wildly popular.

That, of course, is as fair an assessment as Blow can make, given his perspective. Having awoken, there was no other way for him to see it, so he couldn’t have possibly appreciated that it was considered ridiculous, ignorant, childish, counterproductive, not just by conservatives or Republicans, but by Democrats, by liberals and by, you guessed it, black people like Blow, except who breathed real world air rather than the rarified air of the New York Times editorial board.

A poll published by the Pew Research Center in October found that support for reducing spending on the police had fallen significantly, from 25 percent in 2020 to just 15 percent in 2021. The numbers have always been low.

That poll also found a racial differential, but no race with a majority in support: 23 percent of Black people supported decreasing police funding, while only 13 percent of white people and 16 percent of Hispanics did.

Both Republican and Democrat black people agreed, they want cops, either at the same or increased levels. You know why? They have been robbed, beaten or killed, not by cops but by other black people. Why this happens is one debate, but that it happens is undebatable, and they know it far better than anyone else.

Blow’s concern is how this effected politics, election losses and chasing people away from the crazies on the left into the hands of the crazies on the right.

Activists have pushed back on whether the defund slogan harmed Democrats or to what degree, but it is clear that Republicans believe it harms Democrats and that Democrats are running scared from the slogan.

Activists are certainly passionate. That doesn’t make them knowledgeable, helpful or correct. While they may show up on street corners to yell as loud as they can and break some windows or spill some red paint, well-intended but utterly mindless and usually more destructive than anything else, they are good for capturing the hearts of other well-intended people with their simplistic slogans that require no thought to embrace and the promise of camaraderie to the lonely and disaffected, or social death by shunning if any doubt is raised. It’s a fun passion party as long as it lasts.

Fast forward to this week and the speech President Biden gave in Pennsylvania touting his “Safer America Plan.” It was the capstone in the crusade against the defund movement, and possibly the gravestone of the movement itself.

In it, Biden said of his plan: “It’s based on a simple notion: When it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not ‘defund the police,’ it’s ‘fund the police.’ ”

I hate to be the one to point this out, but the alternative to the idiotic “defund movement” didn’t have to be extra-fund the police. And Biden’s “answer,” it’s not “‘defund the police,’ it’s ‘fund the police,’” is just another platitude, devoid of any attempt to provide a reason, logical or otherwise, to justify it. These are certainly words, but just words. Nothing more.

If I sound a bit, oh, miffed about all this, it’s because I am. The past few years have seen an opportunity that comes around once in a lifetime to make fundamental reforms to the legal system that were never possible while we were in the throes of fear of crime or hero worship of police. And we blew it. And we blew it for all the wrong reasons.

Black Lives Matter could have been so amazingly useful in changing one of the worst transgressions of police culture, the assumption that all black people were prone to commit crime and be violent, and that treating black people as less than human was acceptable.

Instead, it completely lost focus on the misconduct of police and beatified every black person no matter what crime he committed, while demonizing every cop for doing the job properly when a black person was involved. It wasn’t merely absurd, but created the very anger, resentment and backlash that made changing cop culture impossible rather than the way we could all live together in peace.

But I have another question, particularly for liberals who rail against the movement: If not redistributing funding, then what?

The issue that launched the push to defund the police — police shootings — has not changed. According to The Washington Post, about 1,000 people have been shot and killed by the police every year since 2015, when the paper started tracking the data. Last year set a record with around 1,054 killings, and 2022 is on pace to be in that range.

This is where it’s noted that while the majority of people shot and killed by police are not black, black people are disproportionately shot and killed. Of course, they disproportionately kill too, which could explain some of it, and each of those 1000 or so shootings requires individualized consideration as to whether it was a good shoot or not. And, not to belabor the point, after millions of police interactions per year, hundreds of thousands of crimes, and 21,570 murders in 2020, that only about 1000 people are shot and killed is fairly miraculous, even if some are outrageously bad shoots.

Sadly, we might have had the chance, that once in a lifetime chance, to try new things like shifting certain intervention duties to mental health teams rather than cops, fixing bail and discovery so it works for everyone and isn’t a free ride for one side or the other, reducing the number of dumb, petty offenses giving rise to police interactions instead of electing progressive prosecutors to ignore the law and engage in their brand of lawlessness as opposed to the tough-on-crime DA’s flavor.

The price of such idiocy as “defund the police” wasn’t just its political cost in votes or hyper-partisanship, but the chance to actually fix things in a way that worked for everyone and we could all live with for the next century. And we blew it.