Portland among U.S. cities adding funds to police
“Defund” calls were made to reallocate money
Night after night, hundreds of people marched the streets of Oregon’s largest city, demanding racial justice after the murder of George Floyd by a white officer.
Among the rallying cries were “defund the police” — a call for elected officials to reallocate some law enforcement funding elsewhere. In June 2020, the Portland City Council and the mayor answered by cutting millions from the police budget.
Now, a year and a half later, officials partially restored the cut funds. On Wednesday, the Portland City Council unanimously passed a fall budget bump that included increasing the current $230 million police budget by an additional $5.2 million. The added police spending is occurring amid a year of a record number of homicides, the city’s greatest police staffing shortage in decades and reform recommendations made by the U.S. Department of Justice.
“Many Portlanders no longer feel safe,” Mayor Ted Wheeler said. “And it is our duty, as leaders of this city, to take action and deliver better results within our crisis response system.”
Portland isn’t the only liberal city doing an about-face on police spending. From New York City to Los Angeles — in cities that had some of the largest Black Lives Matter protests, and some with an extensive history of police brutality — police departments are seeing their finances partially restored in response to rising homicides, an officer exodus and political pressures.
In recent mayoral elections, some winning candidates have pledged to bolster public safety budgets. In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, voters rejected a proposal to replace the police department with a new Department of Public Safety.
Although the threeword call to action was the jumping-off point for communities to talk about how they want to be policed, experts say the goals of “defund the police” are debatable. To some it means abolishing police departments, for others it is about cutting law enforcement budgets and to others it is about reform and accountability.
“The defund-thepolice movement spearheaded an opportunity for historically disenfranchised and historically under-resourced communities to express their continued discontent with policing,” said Howard Henderson, the Center for Justice Research director at Texas Southern University.