The ‘defund the police’ dilemma

What seemed like a crazy slogan on the far left — “Defund the Police” — is threatening to become a reality in some cities around the country. Last week the president of the Minneapolis City Council announced that a two-thirds majority of the council now supports “ending the Minneapolis Police Department.” Council members said they will be “taking intermediate steps toward ending the MPD through the budget process and other policy and budget decisions over the coming weeks and months.”

What would happen when a crime is committed? Say there is a murder, which happened 40 times in Minneapolis last year and 492 times in Chicago. Or say there is an armed robbery. Or an aggravated assault. What happens then? Does a social worker go to the scene? Do strategically reallocated resources solve the crime?

Some of the Defund the Police movement comes from a 2017 book “The End of Policing,” by a Brooklyn College sociology professor named Alex Vitale. In a recent appearance on NPR, he, too, did not seem eager to talk about what his policies might mean for victims of crime.

“People ask the question, without police, what do you do when someone gets murdered?” asked NPR’s Leah Donnella. “What do you do when someone’s house gets robbed? What do you say to those people who have those concerns?”

“Well, I’m certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police,” Vitale began. “What I’m talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. We have better alternatives for them.”

But if momentum continues to grow for defunding the police — and certainly if some bold municipality actually tries it — people will want to know what happens if a government defunds the police and crime still happens.

And Vitale never said what would happen in the event of a murder. Do social workers show up to solve the crime? What’s the “evidencebased alternative”? Byron York is chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner.