I think that was close to the original intent of "defund", as in reallocate funding for policing into different areas (and in some cases, I've heard more specifically splitting up police work into more granular area i.e. responding to mental health incidents vs. domestic abuse vs. a break in).

But the "defund" quickly ran away into "remove all funding", which of course is a lot more radical and less palatable for any but the further left. Also doesn't help that it made an easy strawman for opponents to this kind of reform to prop up and spread.

Definitely curious if anyone else has a different experience/chronology of events.

Defund was probably a bad choice of word, and reform a better one ? But if people can only deal with single-word manifestos, then you re bound to misinterpret.

I think this is ahistorical. Progressives were pretty clear that they believed American policing was fundamentally, irredeemably, and universally racist--that was the whole crux of the BLM movement, and if you believe that, then you aren't going to content yourself with mere reform (if you think police are racist, then you probably aren't going to advocate for "requiring more training for dealing with mentally ill citizens" or similar reforms). Moreover, when moderate Democrats (fearing for the upcoming election cycle) tried to say "what progressives really mean is 'reform'", progressives responded with "no, we really mean defund/abolish".

"Reform" is too easy to silently crush. Oodles of police "reforms" have achieved precisely nothing at mitigating the widespread use of violence by police against the people. "Defund" argues that the institution itself is fundamentally broken and that we should be solving many of the problems that police are tasked with today through organizations that don't have the authority to execute people.

If the judicial and legislative branches were doing their jobs properly, and if the public had some due diligence about knowing what is the proper role of government, and if the media were truly aimed at educating people on the pertinent facts, then these agencies wouldn't be a problem, they'd be properly checked. But assuming we're not going to fix any of those things, then certainly it can hypothetically be an improvement to abolish this or that agency, if it's become even more corrupt than the surrounding political infrastructure.

"Defined the police" usually means "fund social welfare" with a side of "disarm the beat cops so they learn to deescalate".

"Abolish the police" is the message of a much smaller group.

And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law.

How many organizations have been improved throughout history via removal of funding? Will better qualified police officers get hired with less funding?

> Will better qualified police officers get hired with less funding?

The idea is that you remove half the police work load, hire half the officers, and use that savings to assign that removed work load to more appropriate people like social workers, unarmed traffic enforcement, etc.

Cost per officer doesn't have to change.

The point that some of these groups were trying to make (but failed miserably in their messaging) was that cities with well funded police departments often skimp on social services.

Indeed. ACAB and Defund The Police advocates have sullied a very real and reasonable response to a very real problem through aggressive messaging :/

It was a stupid chant that resulted in a stupider outcome.

It has been fully adopted and distorted by right wing commentators. As the people actually yelling about “defund the police” are poorly organize and have no message, they are drowned out by the people criticizing them, and enabling union action like work to rule stuff in places like NYC.

People in high crime areas don’t want to be abused by police. Police need to behave to professional standards. Pandering to activists and not enforcing the law doesn’t benefit the actual people living with crime.

So now in many places we have police not acting on crime because Johnny Crackhead can trivially jam them up with frivolous complaints, yet police departments obviously struggle with self-policing. Good old fashioned audit and accountability is the oblivious, non-sexy solution.

Completely agree. There's a huge swath of moderate "non-sexy" solutions that the public could get behind--in 2020, something like 90% of Americans favored police reforms according to Gallup, which necessarily includes a bunch of Republicans. We could have got some combination of "require more police training", "reorganize internal affairs", "weaken police unions", "end qualified immunity", etc but instead progressives prioritized their personal catharsis to the detriment of everyone, but especially the communities of color who have to suffer the most from the crime surge, who never wanted a decrease of policing in the first place (80% of black Americans opposed de-policing in 2020), and in whose name progressives demanded a reduction in policing.

No doubt "defund the police" implies using some of the funds for social programs, but you have to do some mental gymnastics to believe that it doesn't mean "reduce the amount of policing" particularly when the slogan was chanted in tandem with demands to remove or reduce police from communities of color and so on. The main thrust of "defund the police" was to reduce the amount of policing, which is what we got, and crime has surged as predicted (especially in communities of color, 80% of whom didn't want less policing, but it was demanded in their name anyway). Moreover "disarm cops so they learn to deescalate" is not markedly better than "reduce the amount of policing", but rather it seems differently predictably awful.

Granted, social program funds haven't increased, but there's no world in which we invest more in education or mental health services or anything else and it makes up for the drop in policing with respect to deterring crime. If you keep policing in tact and invest more in public services, maybe over decades you'll see a significant improvement (because investing in public services doesn't pay out immediately), but if we divest ourselves of policing, then crime becomes a much more powerful and immediate drag on underserved communities than the lift afforded by investment in (non-policing) public services. We need policing and public services.

> And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law.

Even if you count every police shooting as an unjustifiable homicide (on the order of hundreds), they are completely dwarfed by the non-police homicides (on the order of tens of thousands). Indeed, the increase in annual homicides is about 10k since the pre-BLM era (a ~60% increase)--the increase alone completely dwarfs all officer-involved shootings.

> (homicides are up like 60% compared to the pre-BLM days).

Where are you getting this statistic? A quick google search doesn’t show any such surge in the murder rate in the United States. 60% is a very large increase. I would expect this stat to have huge ripple effects if it were true.

The FBI has a nice analysis front end at https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/home

Here is the murder rate graph - note that the most recent year is flagged as not fully reported yet.

https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...

Up 60% isn't far off, depending on when "pre-BLM days" starts, but it takes a big leap to connect it to BLM.

Also, if you look at the rate since the early 90's we are doing quite a bit better, so you get to pick your favorite trend line.

In some US cities there was a spike.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-h...

It’s a complete fabrication of course.

Two mis-informations don't make a truth.

According to the FBI, there were 22,900 homicides in 2021 and 14,249 in 2014. If a ~60% increase isn't the right figure, what do you think it is, and how did you arrive at your conclusion?

The stat has had huge ripple effects, especially in poorer urban communities. Checking the homicide rates on the FBI data explorer shows an increase of 50% which gels with my 60% ballpark figure (rates accounts for population increases in a way my homicide increases figure doesn't).

My 60% figure was grabbing the homicide count in 2014 from the FBI UCR (14,249 per https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-....) and comparing it with the stats from 2021 (22,900).

Are you dreaming? Cops are more present then ever

As an example... I was standing in the street to meet my kids... my wife called the cops for no reason and 4 cars showed up in about 60 seconds... they ended up giving me a criminal trespassing warning even if I was on public property

They do like to hide though so you can't see their presence

The previous city I lived in had a population of about 20k and they had two armored military vehicles (mrap / Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles)

They are trying to get to a police state without the majority of people noticing... In the end, it will break the economy.

> The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.

This is from a 2020 paper from Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...

It's probably because the number of crimes keep decreasing... not because there is less police officers...

This doesn't make sense. Why would "crimes keep decreasing" explain a surge in "homicide and total crime"? Are you sure you understood the linked paper correctly?

Which municipalities in the US enacted "defund the police" programs?

Hi Aaron, let me quote myself:

> Not that we actually defunded them, but we have sharply reduced the quantity of policing (not usually through official policy as much as pressure on police departments to sharply reduce discretionary, proactive policing) which is what 'defund the police' aimed to do

I don't think there's any evidence of that occurring.

There's plenty of evidence of this occurring.

> The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.

This is from a 2020 paper from Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...

I've read similar in other papers as well, but I can't recall them off the top of my head.

Maybe you mean "there isn't evidence that the reduction in policing is caused by 'pressure'", which seems kind of absurd considering the near-decade of nationwide protests. What's the alternative hypothesis? That police around the country spontaneously and abruptly reduced their discretionary policing and it's merely a coincidence that it happened following major protests aimed at reducing the quantity of policing?

Can you name the cities that actually defunded the police? Blaming post-COVID crime trends on BLM is just lazy interpretation of data. Most of what you’re saying here is blatantly wrong, there is no post-2014 crime surge, in fact crime was much worse in the decade before and has been oscillating around a mean since: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/crim.... Why lie when the data is public?

EDIT: even more, unfiltered data directly from the FBI crime DB: https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...

It is impossible to see 2014 as anything but a deviation from the mean rather than some bizarre starting point for BLM ruining the country when you look at the data for more than 5 minutes.

As for your proposed solutions, every single drop of funding sent to police departments goes towards their further militarization. There are many small rural towns with tanks now. Anti poverty programs have never been popular in the U.S. No neighborhood wants to host the abuse prevention or mental health centers. So where do we go?

Criminologists disagree with you. Not only did homicides increase following 2014, criminologists believe it is caused by BLM protests.

> For nearly a year, Richard Rosenfeld’s research on crime trends has been used to debunk the existence of a “Ferguson effect”, a suggested link between protests over police killings of black Americans and an increase in crime and murder. Now, the St Louis criminologist says, a deeper analysis of the increase in homicides in 2015 has convinced him that “some version” of the Ferguson effect may be real.

> “These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase,” he said. “It was worrisome. We need to figure out why it happened.”

> All 10 cities that saw sudden increases in homicide had large African American populations, he said. While it’s not clear what drove the increases, he said, he believes there is some connection between high-profile protests over police killings of unarmed black men, a further breakdown in black citizens’ trust of the police, and an increase in community violence.

> “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said. Now, he said, that’s his “leading hypothesis”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-eff...

I have more links, but I don't have time at the moment to dig them up.

A single criminologist whose work has mostly focused on his own cities crime is now being used to establish that "criminologists disagree." You would have a great career in TV journalism!

You're taking a data source that is already known and acknowledged to be flawed by the publisher, cherrypicking years that seem significant to you, and using it to draw conclusions about trends across the country when the data set itself acknowledges that individual cities and even blocks within those cities skews data all the time. Again, it's lazy data analysis.

I'm not sure what you're talking about, Rosenfeld is far from the only researcher observing this phenomenon.

Here's Vox on Travis Campbell's research:

> Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.

Source: https://www.vox.com/22360290/black-lives-matter-protest-crim...

Here's Harvard's Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi

> We estimate that these [police shooting protests] caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.

Source: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...

Note that these are both nationwide studies. I'm not sure what you mean by "cherrypicking years that seem significant to me", but yeah, looking at policing and crime before and after BLM protests seems pretty germane to understanding the effect those protests have on policing and crime.

> you're taking a data source that is already known and acknowledged to be flawed by the publisher

I think it's more likely that crime researchers better understand the limits of crime data sources than you do, and they probably aren't as lazy as you propose. But by all means, publish your rebuttal (and please link it here so I can read it)!

> You would have a great career in TV journalism!

Tragically, I have a face for radio. :/