San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Refunding’ the police doesn’t work
Crime is increasing in places where budgets are expanding
Just weeks after the George Floyd protests began in earnest in May 2020 — and protesters’ calls to rein in police power and funding made their way into the mainstream — a reactionary movement to “refund” the police was already beginning to take shape.
An experiment was taking place, it told us. And in short time that experiment had already failed with deadly results.
Of course, the vast majority of cities did not cut police funding, and the handful that did almost immediately backtracked. But that didn’t stop a torrent of media coverage from echoing the burgeoning “refund” movement talking points, insisting that rises in crime — sometimes real, sometimes imagined — proved these cuts had failed. More definitive rises in crime in early 2021 were then paraded as further proof that police needed more money, not less.
These days, American media is flooded with “very concerned” articles and takes about how cities are “rethinking” defunding the police amid spikes in crime. (Note: for the purposes of this piece, I’m accepting the mainstream, state definition of crime. It is one that has been contested for centuries, but I will not here). Perhaps not surprisingly, police departments across the country have in turn received even more funding. Defunding was, in reality, incredibly rare.
And yet crime continues to rise. New York City boosted its Police Department budget by $465 million from 2021 to 2022, an increase of 4.7%. As of March 5, according to CNN, overall crime reported in New York, compared to the same period last year, has gone up 41%, including a 54% increase in robberies, a 56% increase in grand larceny incidents and a 22% increase in rape.
Chicago increased its 2022 police budget by $147.3 million, or 9.2%, and has seen a sizable spike in crime in 2022 as well, with an overall reported crime increase of 36% from 2021 to 2022 and a 29% increase in killings from pre-pandemic March 2020 figures.
Meanwhile, a Third Way study from March 15 showed that “tough on crime” red states, not allegedly lenient blue states, were seeing the highest increase in homicide rates.
We’ve heard plenty about the alleged rise in crime under San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s watch, but relatively little about nearby Sacramento County, where its district attorney, Anne Marie Schubert, is running for California Attorney General under a “tough on crime” banner. She frequents Fox News to bash “far left” “Soros” progressive prosecutors, and has made lowering crime by throwing the book at criminals her primary campaign theme. In service of this approach, the city of Sacramento increased its police budget a whopping 22% from 2020 to 2022. Yet, despite these increased funds and all the tough posturing from Schubert, Sacramento saw a sizable increase in reported crime from 2020 to 2021: a 31% increase in killings and a 12% increase in robberies. Early 2022 statistics aren’t fairing any better, with six killings; 25 non-fatal shooting incidents; 20 robberies involving guns or knives, assaults or violent threats; 13 assaults and two car-jackings in the first 18 days of the year.
So where are the calls to examine and reconsider the “refund the police” movement? Where are the front-page stories about cities “rethinking” the policy of pumping millions more into police in the face of increasing crime rates? Where are the hand-wringing takes about “tough on crime” prosecutors proving ineffective against spikes in crimes under their watch? About how much their approach is failing?
There won’t be any because this line of criticism only goes one way.
When street crime increases under “soft on crime” prosecutors or police budget cuts (even if these cuts are largely a phantom), it’s the fault of cutting resources and not throwing the book at enough bad guys. But when street crime increases under the watch of conservative prosecutors, and amid massive police budget increases, it’s proof that the public simply needs even tougher laws and enforcement, and even more money for the police.
It’s a rigged game. Carceral ideology, like all dogmas, cannot be disproven: It cannot fail, it can only be failed.
This all speaks to a central contradiction at the heart of the U.S. approach to street crime. For decades the U.S. has had the highest homicide rate — and one of the highest crime rates, in general — among rich countries. It has also had, far and away, the highest incarceration rate. Using 2010 data culled long before any recent criminal justice reforms, one study found that the average American was 25 times more likely to be shot and killed by another American than those in other wealthy nations. Yet, at the same time, the U.S. had (and still has) the largest incarceration rate in the world. Not just among rich countries, but among any country. And it’s not even close, according to the Prison Policy Initiative.
If all U.S. police budgets were combined, they would make the third largest military budget on Earth, behind only the U.S. and China, according to Security Policy Reform Institute. And with another $32 billion in federal funds recently proposed by the Biden administration, this number will no doubt balloon even more in 2023. And yet, the U.S. continues to have uniquely horrific levels of violence compared to other developed nations. U.S. police budgets, collectively, are almost double the size of the Russian military. Yet more is always needed.
More tools, more money, more power, more criminalization.
The U.S. incarceration rate is five times more than most countries in the world, but to solve this particular surge in crime, the carceral ideologues insist, it has to tick up to six times. None of this makes any moral or common sense, but it’s not supposed to.
No experiment in history has failed more at its nominal goals, with higher human stakes, than carceralism. There is no actual correlation between counties with progressive prosecutors and high crime, or “tough on crime” district attorneys and low crime, according to one analysis. Indeed, Sacramento shows the opposite.
But it doesn’t matter: A narrative has been cemented, and it feels vaguely true that throwing more people in our prison system will make us safer.
In our increasingly austerity-obsessed “post pandemic” economy, approaches to crime that focus on reducing inequality, staging community interventions and providing robust social welfare seem more distant than ever. More police and longer sentences are seen as the best option available because, just as throughout our country’s history, it’s the only option we’ve been offered — regardless of how many times it fails at its nominal goal of actually making us safer.