Defund the police? Here’s what happened next...
A US city counts the cost of cutting officer numbers in the wake of the George Floyd murder
When Mark Bouchett’s 28-yearold daughter asked him if he would escort her on an errand, he realised something was amiss in their home town of Burlington, Vermont.
A sleepy college town close to the Canadian border, Mr Bouchett had seen little trouble in 35 years of running a homeware shop in Burlington’s picturesque centre.
But his concerns were piqued when first his daughter, and then several other female employees, said they had been repeatedly harassed as they walked along the street.
The scale of the problem became apparent to him when his staff began refusing to work beyond 6pm.
“They said: ‘We’re getting harassed. It’s not safe at night’,” he said. Shop owners shared similar tales. The cause, they believed, was the drastic fall in police officers following an abortive attempt to “defund the police” in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
Home to the campaigning ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s and the liberal senator Bernie Sanders, Burlington is a cradle of progressive politics.
So when chants of “defund the police” rang out across US cities in the wake of Floyd’s murder in 2020, Burlington, which had its own history of police brutality against black men, led the way. Just a month after Mr Floyd’s killing, the city council had voted to reduce its police force by almost 30 per cent, one of the most drastic cuts in the country.
The resolution to reduce the number of active officers from 105 to 74 was intended to happen through attrition, with the funding gradually diverted to social and racial justice initiatives.
But police officers began to quit or retire en masse. Almost 18 months on, the force now has 63, with just five able to patrol the town of 44,000 at night. Burlington Police’s own figures suggest that while overall crime has fallen by roughly 11 per cent in the last year, incidents of violent crime have increased.
Of particular concern is the rise in gunfire in the city – which increased 367 per cent from 2019. Aggressive assaults are up by 24 per cent. In response, the city council reversed its course, voting to raise officers numbers to 79. It approved $15,000 (£11,080) incentives for hires, and $10,000 bonuses to stop officers quitting.
Many other cities that targeted police resources have also backtracked in response to rising crime. Residents in Minneapolis, where Floyd’s death gave rise to the defund movement, voted down calls to abolish their police departments. Atlanta, which had discussed withholding more than $70million from its police force, later moved to increase funds by 15 per cent amid a rise in crime.
New York City, in the grip of its own crime wave, allocated a $200 million budget increase to its police department last summer.
In Burlington, the move to reverse the caps has done little to improve morale. “We’ve had detectives that have master’s degrees not only leaving the department but leaving the profession,” said officers Joseph Congdon and Oren Byrne, from the Burlington Police Association.
They said many have opted to take on lower-paid roles, including a 10-year veteran who has returned to studying and is washing dishes in a brewery to make ends meet.
They admitted there had been “good intentions” and legitimate grievances. “But if you want a better product, you can’t defund. That’s kind of the irony of this whole movement.”
Zoraya Hightower, the Progressive Party councillor who introduced the resolution to cap officer numbers, acknowledged the changes had been “painful” for the city. She later voted in favour of increasing officer numbers when a city-commission report suggested Burlington needed at least 80 officers. But she questioned the claim that the cap on officers was the cause of rising crime rates.
“There were a lot of things going on at the same time: a global pandemic and economic depression,” she said.
Despite the impact of the officer cap, Ms Hightower, the first black woman to serve on the city council, does not regret taking swift action in the wake of Floyd’s murder. “It was a moment in time. There was pressure to do something,” she said.
Ali Dieng, another of the city’s few black officials, took a very different view. “Yes, there are issues of racism within policing. But cutting the police department was a big mistake,” he said.
Back in the city’s downtown district, Mr Bouchett says this is a view shared by many business owners behind closed doors.
The “jewel in the crown” of the Queen City, as residents refer to Burlington, is the chocolate-box marketplace where hipster shops selling local jewellery and upmarket boutiques sit side-by-side. Many carry signs reading “black lives matter”. The flagship Ben & Jerry’s store carries a sign reading: “We must dismantle white supremacy.”
After seeing shoplifting rates in his store increase four-fold, Mr Bouchett and a handful of local businesses wrote an open letter calling for more police resources. It was met with an immediate backlash.
“A group called Decolonise Vermont named us all by name on Facebook and said ‘these businesses want to criminalise homelessness’,” he said.
Mr Bouchett says he fears the implications of being criticised for voicing legitimate concerns. “We find ourselves in a uniquely intense moment of vilifying those who disagree with us,” he said.
‘If you want a better product, you can’t defund. That’s kind of the irony of this whole movement’