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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is from a 2020 paper from Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...
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.
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.
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).
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-h...
> 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
> 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?
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?
> 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.
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.
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. :/