To Defund, or not to Defund

Draft in Progress

I've discussed defunding police with conservatives and liberals, and I usually find a somewhat common ground with policy, not philosophically, but in a practical sense. I'm finally getting around to research. The sections below are my findings and sources.

First off, I realized I didn't know the definition of defund. Here it is: defund- prevent from continuing to receive funds.

I've discussed the use of the word defund too. I have high confidence that the word defund was strategically chosen. If you think of it, defund sounds way better than terminate, eliminate, abolish, etc. If fact, I bet there is an anchoring effect as well with pairing defund campaigns with the more extreme abolish campaigns. What is the best way to sell a $30 wine, anchor it next to a $70. What is the best way to sell people on defunding police, anchor it next to abolish police and whatever the far right is selling.

Police have a grueling job, and people are blaming too much of America's racial and judicial problems on cops. With that said, cops are not trained the way I would want police to handle violent or aggressive situations. In addition they would benefit from studying psychology, understanding their and other people's biases, and learning the historically discriminate policies and laws that affect people today.


The following I found worth sharing. I added links to all my sources. I tried to leave my opinions out, and save my ideas for my final thoughts in the conclusion.

Police Spending

The following is from a fortune.com article titled "What U.S. police spending looks like in 3 charts"

"State and local governments spent a combined total of $115 billion on police in fiscal 2017, according to the Urban Institute, equal to about 4% of their cumulative expenditures. While that total was up from $42 billion in 1977 (calculated in inflation-adjusted dollars), the 4% portion of total spending is approximately the same and has remained consistent over the past four decades."(fortune.com)

Here are more graphs that help understand funding of police by the Urban.com article titled, "What Police Spending Data Can (and Cannot) Explain amid Calls to Defund the Police"







 

US vs the World

 

There is a cool Wiki page on police per capita for close to 150 countries. Here is the link. The info is nothing special or game changing. I thought it was fun enough to share. The Vatican is the most police heavy country with a little over 1.5 police officers per citizen, haha.

Police Polls

So what do cops think about all this?

FiveThirtyEight, a media company, has a nice summary or poll findings titled, "How The Police See Issues Of Race And Policing." I'd recommend reading the bolded headlines and then the details if you're interested.

Pew has a few polls on race and police. Here are recent conclusions from 2020. Here are 2017 conclusions. Here is a 2017 police vs the public views. There are a lot of overlap in these articles.

Defund the police is "unpopular with most demographic groups, too, with two notable exceptions: Black Americans and Democrats." (How Americans Feel About ‘Defunding The Police’)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Increase Police, Decrease Crime

COPS (Community Orientated Policing Strategies), an agency under The Department of Justice, has a program that gives police departments grants to hire more police. Results from COPS's grants and studies on crime provide evidence that when you increase the quantity of police officers, it decreases crime. (More Cops, less Crime; The Relationship Between Economic Conditions, Policing, and Crime)

"The effects are driven by large and statistically significant effects of police on robbery, larceny, and auto theft, with suggestive evidence that police reduce murders as well. Crime reductions associated with additional police were more pronounced in areas most affected by the Great Recession. The results highlight that fiscal support to local governments for crime prevention may offer large returns, especially during bad macroeconomic times." (More Cops, less Crime)

I'm not interested in crime rates. For many reasons, crime rates are incomplete evidence of a functional and or health society. I wasn't looking for crime rates, but came across these. I wouldn't be surprised if other studies found opposing evidence. Or if increased police, can influence people's likelihood of reporting crimes. I could also see a benefit in increased crime rates due do to more police available.

 

Economic Impacts of Policing

First problem,

"It is difficult to reliably demonstrate a causal relationship between the economy, the number of police, and crime, and attempts to focus on those relationships run the risk of missing the true value that police can bring to our communities—which cannot simply be measured through crime rates alone. The challenges in understanding these multi-directional relationships only expand for attempting to look at them on a national level; public safety is an inherently local condition. The health of the economy will likely always have both direct and indirect effects on crime and safety, but to differing extents across communities and neighborhoods." (The Relationship Between Economic Conditions, Policing, and Crime Trends An Addendum to The Impact of the Economic Downturn on American Police Agencies by Matthew C. Scheider Ph.D., Deborah L. Spence, and Jessica Mansourian)

"Efforts to measure [police reform] are highly flawed... Defund the police is exposing gaping holes in how we measure what good police work really is, and how we gauge a reform’s success. Because after decades of research on policing and police reform, we still don’t know that much about what police are doing, how their presence actually affects the people who experience police violence, and what people in those communities want from reform." (Is Police Reform A Fundamentally Flawed Idea?)

In Is Police Reform A Fundamentally Flawed Idea?, Emily Owens, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine, added, "We don’t really have the data or the studies right now for me to say with confidence, ‘We know that these reforms work and these don’t.’"

Mesa, Arizona did a study comparing the greater Phoenix area's police spending, publish in 2010. Mesa identified a need for police reform. Here is their conclusion:

"Police departments today have to develop a new and different kind of bottom line, one that resonates with the communities most in need of safety and justice. The steps outlined here for man­aging that process — reducing costs, managing demand, revaluing policing and re-engineering operations — may not solve all of the emerg­ing problems of affordability in policing. Surely there is no blueprint or universal formula for the re-engineering of police departments in a coun­try with such a decentralized system for policing and public safety. But these four steps provide a framework for more deliberate experimentation within individual departments." (Making Policing More Affordable Managing Costs and Measuring Value in Policing by George Gascón and Todd Foglesong)