The problem of crime is such that no matter how many examples of true police brutality and racism can be produced, criminals still exist and therefore cops are necessary. The problem of crime has always been there to suffocate any notion of radical justice system reform. Crime as a social phenomenon resonates with people. Whether or not they have been the victim of a crime or simply fear becoming one. As long as crime exists, any potential reforms to policing must center that sobering fact. When progressive activists go too far and make it harder for police to do their jobs then crime goes up. As we now are seeing with post-pandemic spikes in homicides and assaults.
There’s a problem with that.
There have been no police departments that have been completely or even meaningfully defunded. A little less than half of the country's 50 largest cities did reduce their police budgets, some to reallocate funds toward marginalized communities. A little more than half increased their police budgets. In aggregate, the cuts were deeper than the increases, there has been a 5.2% net decrease in police funding for the largest cities. Big whoop.
There are caveats on caveats. A decent chunk of the cities that cut police spending did so as part of broader budget cuts due to the economic losses incurred by the pandemic. Because most cities cut their budgets across the board, police spending as a percentage of total municipal budgets went up a hair from 13.6% to 13.7%. New York, Austin, and Minneapolis had the largest percentage decreases to their police budgets. New York’s one billion dollar cut to its police budget sounds good on paper until you realize that the annual budget still hovers around 5 billion and that doesn’t include funds allocated to the NYPD that for some reason don’t count as direct funding to police, but still adds another 5 billion to the total. Don’t worry, the NYPD still spends more money than most country's defense budgets.
Austin did a bit of a sneaky move cutting 142 million from their police operating budget, a reduction of over 32%. However, the bulk of that 142 million is going right back into the police coffers for maintaining certain units and operations that the Austin city council is hoping will be eventually removed from the purview of the APD. When accounting for this “transition budget” the actual cut to the police budget is around 20 million for a 5% decrease. Stay weird Austin.
Minneapolis’ proposed drastic cuts stalled out and ultimately a compromise was reached where 7.7 million was diverted from the police budget, but police were allowed to maintain the number of officers on the force and request access to 5 million in overtime funds from the city council at a later date. Remember that Minneapolis’s legislative fight over-policing started with the city council voting unanimously to completely disband their police department in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
During the George Floyd protests, progressive mayors were more than happy to talk about police reform. They demonstrated remarkable ability in using the words “systemic” and “racism”. Mayor Miriam Bowser of Washington D.C. had Black Lives Matter painted on the street leading to the White House. She followed up her commitment to the protesters by cutting 10 million from the D.C. police department’s operating budget. Or to be more precise she cut 10 million from the operating budget she proposed earlier which had a 19 million dollar increase from the year before. All in all, the approved police budget was a net 9 million increase. The city later cut a 20 million dollar contract that the police had for school security, transferring that money to the school system. But since that money always ends up being spent on private contractors who manage security for D.C.'s schools, it doesn’t represent a cut to their operating budget.
In January, Boston University conducted a survey of mayors across the country, 80 percent of the 130 respondents said they did not support cutting or reallocating money from their police departments.
I don’t want to be completely unfair and dismiss the work of activists and legislators who fought and bled for these modest cuts to our law enforcement apparatus. Real money did get reallocated and in the cases where funding for police went to EMS and pandemic response, lives were undoubtedly saved. But the truth is that the bulk of money taken from police has yet to be committed to helping communities and even if it had, it still would not be enough to see sustained wide-scale improvement. When we are talking about the recent crime wave, it's important to understand that the defund movement hasn’t taken that large a bite out of police wallets. We can’t in good faith blame Defund the Police for spikes in violent crime.
On the whole, the cuts to police budgets have not been nearly as radical as public perception might believe. It’s important to remember what the point of defunding the police is. Having more police on the street increases the opportunities for needlessly violent altercations between police and citizens. There is ample evidence that having more police out on patrol or responding to calls doesn’t reduce crime. A simple comparison will show that violent crime has risen both in cities that cut their police budgets and those who increased it. The murder of 50 to 100 unarmed people each year is not worth a non-existent reduction of crime.
The number of police per 1000 citizens has been declining for decades as the population has grown and police struggle to replace officers who leave the force. There are several explanations as to why police have had trouble filling their ranks but none of them are due to a lack of funding. If the 23,000 officers lost from 2013 to 2016 didn’t result in a rise in crime then why would the recent mass exodus of police from the job cause a spike now?
A lot of the money cut from police budgets was earmarked for overtime pay but the overtime system is often abused by cops. We should also mention that police are failing miserably at what theoretically is the central purpose of their job - solving crimes. The national homicide clearance rate is 60%, for aggravated assault, it’s 47% and for rape, it’s 33%. And like most things, when disaggregated the data shows a large discrepancy between clearance rates in affluent, mostly white communities and poor, mostly Black ones.
The idea that more police doesn’t equal less crime isn’t confined to the darkest corners of lefty Twitter and YouTube. There is a whole cottage industry of police staffing experts that consult with police departments to determine optimal staffing levels. For these experts, the problem with policing isn’t the raw numbers of cops but rather inefficiencies in how they are deployed. A 2019 report by The Marshall Project and USA Today found that a D.C. law enforcement think tank was once hired to consult the city of Memphis, which at the time had a higher murder rate than Chicago. Among other inefficiencies, it was found that there were almost seven times more officers assigned to tourist areas of the city than areas with high violent crime rates. They exposed the fact that the main job of cops in Memphis was to protect capital and not citizens.
Okay but what about bail reform?
Across the country, several progressive D.A.’s and mayors have made changes to their bail system. If the only thing that keeps a person accused (but not convicted) of a crime out of jail before their trial is how much money they have, then we essentially have a two-tiered justice system. Also, water is wet. In all seriousness, we should really understand the effects of cash bail on people who find themselves in the criminal justice system. The tragic story of Kalief Browder is singularly disturbing but also illustrative of the problem at large. At seventeen Kalief was sent to Rikers Island for allegedly stealing a backpack. Unable to make bail he would stay there for three years while awaiting trial. The prosecution kept pushing his trial date back, probably because of his accuser's shifting story and lack of physical evidence. The case against Browder was eventually dropped when the man accusing him of assault and theft left the country. But in three years, an incalculable amount of damage was done and two years after his release, Kalief Browder took his own life.
Cities like New York and Philadelphia have instituted changes to how bail is set and when prosecutors are even allowed to request it. Police and self-proclaimed defenders of law and order make the case that allowing violent offenders back on the street while awaiting trial allows them to commit more crimes, crimes that wouldn’t have occurred if they had been kept behind bars. And yes, one could point to anecdotal evidence of accused perpetrators released under bail reform measures, going on to commit crimes while free.
The data paints a different picture. First of all, like declining police numbers, bail reform has been around in some cities for a few years now, since 1992 in the case of Washington D.C. and crime still stayed on a declining trend until recently. Similarly, crime has spiked both in cities that did bail reform and those that did not. A report commissioned by a Cook County circuit court found no appreciable increase in crime caused by Chicago’s bail reform initiative. A University of Utah study critiqued the court’s report and used their own methodology to show that bail reform had increased the raw number of crimes that occurred. A subsequent follow-up report from Loyola University found the critique from Utah lacking as it was shown that in reality bail reform had a limited effect on who was released pretrial. Only about 500 additional defendants (mostly non-violent) were allowed to go home and among those, there was no statistical difference in the number of crimes added to the tally.
So if police budget cuts, lower numbers of officers, and bail reform cannot be reasonably blamed for the recent spike in crime, then what is the cause? Well, it's important to note that only certain crimes are on the rise. Specifically, crimes relating to gun violence, while most other crimes like larceny and even rape are staying around their low pandemic levels. The headlines around the spike in homicides are largely based on the percentage increase from the previous year. This means relatively small raw number increases in gun homicides and shootings translate to large percentage increases. The fact is that these shootings and murders are primarily taking place in poor and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods that have always had problems with gun crime. And even as these percentage increases make for scary chyrons on the evening news, you are still much less likely to be the victim of such violent crime as you were in the ’90s.
And we should talk a bit about the ’90s because that decade was pretty important in shaping our current conversation around crime. The late ’80s and ’90s were known for the rampant violent crime that plagued the streets of major cities. This is where the Republican party cemented their status as the “tough on crime” party and the Democrats became the “tough on crime but with more school funding” party. Critics of the left’s perception of crime cite these years as proof that the success or failure of the economy isn’t the principal driver of criminal violence, as the economy as measured by GDP was growing at this time. However, research has shown that it isn’t the raw economic output of society that affects crime rates but rather inequalities in how the profit from that output is distributed.
Systemic income inequality began taking off in the ’80s as conservative neoclassical economics became the go-to solution for stagflation. People at the top earned way more money as people at the bottom earned much less than their parents. Violent crime peaked in the '80s and ’90s and only began to fall again coinciding with when major technological advancements (think computers and the internet) allowed more people to enter relatively stable economic brackets. However, the gap in incomes still increased. So why did crime fall as inequality rose? It might have something to do with the explosion of finance capital and easy credit. The effects of inequality were blunted by the ability of people on modest incomes to still afford the goods and services associated with a comfortable life. By incurring debt.
And then the debt bubble burst. As financial markets proved to be unable to handle the stresses of an American labor force with stagnant incomes at the bottom, inequality became harder to ignore. As that happened, crime began to slowly tick back upwards. Nowhere near their historic highs in the ’80s and ’90s but a significant increase still. An interesting part of this phenomenon seems to be that it’s not the fact of inequality that seems to drive crime but the transparent expression of it. The poor can’t see just how much money is in the bank accounts of the wealthy, but they know what it means when they can’t pay rent and Jeff Bezos just spent 5.5 billion on a four-minute space flight. This may be what is happening in a place like San Francisco, one of the few places where theft is rising alongside violent crime. Due to the gentrifying effects of Silicon Valley which were exacerbated by the pandemic, the gap between rich and poor has exploded, even as investment in the area continues to pour in. Wealthy urban professionals now know not to leave so much as a cell phone charger in their car as even the most minor indication of wealth makes one a target.
Interestingly enough, the perception of inequality doesn’t affect theft all that much. Research has shown that the strongest economic predictor of property crimes is consumer sentiment rather than traditional markers of inequality like unemployment and GDP per capita. Inequality is shown to be more correlated with violent crime than property crime. Like when several cities experiencing serious pandemic-induced economic recessions also saw a sharp rise in the rate of murders and assaults but not in other crimes.
What all this suggests is that crime isn’t a naturally occurring phenomenon that can only be suppressed through state-sanctioned violence but is the result of people's perceptions of society. If people believe that society is more or less fair and headed in a good direction, crime goes down. If people believe that society is unfair and headed toward calamity, crime goes up. And of course, there will always be maladjusted individuals who break the social contract for reasons unrelated to external factors, but it's a reasonable expectation that a more equitable society would also provide more resources for mental health and diversion programs.
There isn’t a good reason for us not to actively reduce inequality as a method of crime prevention, other than an unequal society being great conditions for capital accumulation. Capital accumulation is the principal engine of a capitalist economy. The problem of crime isn’t that criminals exist, it’s that capitalism needs them to exist. It doesn’t make sense that we fund and empower police the way we do when at best it’s questionable that they have any control over crime whatsoever. But it does make sense if you see it as a necessary investment in protecting capital from the social repercussions of obscene accumulation.
Debates over officer morale, adequate staffing, bail reform, and budgets are a screen on which the American public can project our collective conception of criminality, informed by countless hours of copaganda in TV and movies and by the endless (and racially biased) stream of crime reporting on local news networks. It’s a narrative though, not the reality. It’s a useful narrative to cling to if you are invested in maintaining an economy that demands rising inequality. But if you care about the problem of crime, the evidence suggests that houses, jobs, and healthcare would be much more effective than more cops.
Solidarity forever.
On the Problem of Crime:
We have always been told that we can achieve whatever we want... if we work hard and persevere. But when you don't succeed even after working hard for years, you start to lose faith in your beliefs... and may feel that you are no longer in charge of your destiny... I believe the less fortunate are victims of a society that no longer considers their pain of struggling, but looks at them as if they are the problem... Many folks who are police have prejudices against the very people they have agreed to serve... Policing around the Country has taken a turn for the worse by allowing the police to hire the very people who want to harm others that don't look like them and differ in their beliefs... What can be done to get rid of that policeman or woman who seeks to destroy rather than help to build better communities? “If you don’t condition yourself positively,
the world will condition you negatively”-Lalla Brutoco SOLIDARITY FOREVER!!
The things you identify as the "real" causes of crime require money to be spent in areas that are taboo to people who already have enough and have a promise of more.
Has there ever been a culture or society in human history that did not have a lower level of human existence? And therefore is increased equity and equality even possible? This leads to the ever-present existence of crime. I guess the question is how much crime is acceptable?
https://inequality.stanford.edu/publications/20-facts-about-us-inequality-everyone-should-know