This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
To the extent police reform has historically worked, it’s been by rebooting a police department. (Think: replacing the Mets with the NYPD.) Not replacing police with a hippie circle.
Chesa Boudin. New York with cashless bail and non-prosecution of petty crimes. That fuck in Chicago.
Defund the police was a marquee policy and messaging failure that underlined why radical minorities capturing the Democratic Party cause it to lose elections.
What does that have to do with "defund the police"? Bail money doesn't go into their pockets.
In New York they were one and the same. The latter simply representing the most extreme expression of the former.
I remember dropping into a leftist conference in Philadelphia years ago where several folks who would become the face of post-Covid police reform were there, including Boudin. At the end of the day they all conceded that their goal was abolishing this, that and the other thing.
As a NY resident: lol.
I don't doubt you'll find activists espousing both "defund the police" and "end cash bail" policies at the same time. That doesn't make them the same policy.
Oh, they’re totally different policies. But they’re basically the same politics. And they both generated a backlash, one against messaging (because it was too stupid to implement) and one against policy (because it created more visible crime).
Roughly half a million people are in jail despite not being convicted of anything. That's roughly 25% of the incarcerated population in the US. 1/4 people behind bars are (presumed) innocent right now, even if they may later be found guilty.
That's a problem. Being in jail for a few weeks or even a few days can totally fuck someone's life over, costing them a job, a relationship, their health, or worse.
And that’s why I supported it. But for every one of the latter there are many of the former because they started cycling through arrests so fast.
Keep the recidivist bastard in jail, on the other hand, and they are incapacitated for the time being. I’ll admit I didn’t see the utility of that until it was too late.
>>This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
>Chesa Boudin.
Chesa Boudin is not a police budget, that's a completely unserious nonsequitor. SF's police budget rose throughout the defund the police movement, just not as high as initially allocated. https://abc7news.com/post/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-depa...
Not sure what this is adding to the discussion, but eliminating cash bail has been a success in Illinois. That’s why you don’t hear the right talking about it anymore. Crime in Chicago has fallen every year since it went into effect.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/cash-bail-illinois-one-...
Previously, if you had lots of liquid money, you could bail out for murder no problem.
I was locked up in Chicago with guys that had $50 bail and nobody to pay it for them.
I was trying to say that the system was previously unfair as it allowed violent crimes with long potential sentences bail (if you were rich), while those with petty offenses would be held (because they were poor).
I'm not sure if there is a perfect system, since everyone should be given the benefit of potential innocence, and jailing anyone who might end up being acquitted is a problem.
Murders didn’t rise. Petty crime and open-air drug use absolutely did.
> prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow
This is nonsense.
> Nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in facilities run by for-profit, private companies. Two of the largest, Geo Group and CoreCivic, are working to increase their ability to meet the administration's demand.
CoreCivic used to be called the "Corrections Corporation of America". GEO Group used to be "Wackenhut Corrections Corporation".
It should be unsurprising that the folks who make money building and running large, secure facilities to detain people would be interested in doing the same for ICE.
I'd imagine they do their fair share of lobbying and "crime scary!" PR, though.
(We see similar crime trends in other countries without BLM/George Floyd/police reform movements during that time period.)
Interesting to historians and public policy folks. Outside of that, the pearl clutching about it probably did more damage than the spike itself.
I'm glad the broader trend is that crime is improving, but there was actually a blip upwards in ~covid times, and JumpCrisscross is correct that Dems in charge during that time were punished for it.
Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas. In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with. Now that police officers are actually doing their jobs again, shockingly, crime is rapidly falling.
What has actually increased is sensationalist coverage in the media, which you're right, has created a significant political backlash.
If I recall correctly it was the DA refusing to prosecute just about anything.
SFPD hadn’t been doing their jobs for far, far longer than Chesa’s tenure. I moved here in 2013 and their non-enforcement practices were already legendary. Blaming Chesa for being in office for like 10 months in 2019-2020 is a hell of a cop out (pun intended).
Even if it were true, it wouldn’t in any way excuse the police for choosing not to do the job they’re paid to do.
The obvious cause of the increase was the pandemic job losses and general societal decay. Oh and the cops quiet quitting because they were upset people hate them.
Why would it be better if they were overtly fired?
When I drive I almost never see LEOs. I can go months on end without ever spotting a police car. Where are they? What are they doing? Evidently, they're not responding to crimes. And they're not on the roads. But their budget has increased quite a lot! Am I paying for people to sit on their asses and eat donuts? It kind of seems like it!
To me, it's very simple. If you want to avoid bad press you don't have to stop policing. You just have to stop executing innocent people in public. Seems easy, I do that every day and I don't even think about it.
It sort of gives me the impression the police are so morally bankrupt as a system that they just can't help themselves. So, they have to detach instead. Yikes... that's not good.
It turns out that simply patrolling the stations was enough to deter almost all crimes in the system, which makes everyone immediately wonder: WTF was LAPD during the last few decades?
It was a combination of the weird post-Covid crime boom. And the various police reform efforts cities experimented with in the wake of George Floyd.
Like, is your standard of proof legal citations?
Now we've pivoted to New York. Great! That's presumably somewhere you do have more context on but it's not somewhere I can speak credibly about. You claim that police reform has been a driver of increased crime there. Police reforms there are something I don't have insight into. So I am simply asking you to tell me what police reforms have occurred and why you think they've resulted in an increase in nuisance crimes. I did some basic Googling and saw a 3% drop in police officers between—IIRC—2020 and 2022, the post-COVID time period I assume we're talking about. That doesn't seem to me like a large enough change to make the kind of impact you're talking about, but you haven't given me much to go on either, only vibes.
I don't need legal citations. I just need an actual claim to examine. "Police reforms caused an increase in crime, but also unrelated COVID stuff had an effect too" is more or less impossible to evaluate. "Police budgets dropped X%, overtime hours dropped Y% as a result, and over the following two years crimes A, B, and C increased by Z%" includes facts and an opinion of cause and effect that can be evaluated in the context of that fact.
This is what a good-faith argument is. Making a falsifiable claim and giving others an opportunity to assess that claim. Making generic statements and backing out when someone asks for more information is not.
Is it a crime to be mentally ill in public in your world?
Yes, yelling in a residential neighbourhood in the middle of the night is a disturbance of peace. The fact that it’s caused by unchecked mental health is somewhat separate. (In many cases, I don’t think it was a mental health issue. I think Rob on the corner got drunk.)
https://missionlocal.org/2022/05/the-case-for-recalling-da-c...
You have to look past the hype. Media on a national scale ran a character assassination program against that DA for trying to rebalance his organization's efforts against the organizers of crime instead of individual delinquents.
It doesn’t absolve Chesa’s various failures to enforce the law. (I say this as someone who started on the police reform side.)
People love repeating this point with absolutely no evidence and then asking the world of those who disagree. Beware, selective calls for rigor.
> Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas.
This is basically untrue. The decrease in crime that began in the mid 80s more or less bottomed out in the early 2010s at rates much higher than comparably rich nations. This doesn't include the huge reporting issues with non-violent crimes that manifests in low property and drug crime data juxtaposed with crackheads clearing out any products not behind plexiglass in major American cities.
Police forces across the US have never seen higher funding rates.
With "the left" you mean the SF DA?
We don’t send the police for medical emergencies or house fires. We send personnel with dedicated training for those types of events.
And frankly, the folks who turned "liberal" into a dirty word can make any branding into a branding fuckup. That's what they have Fox News for.
Anyone against concentration camps now gets the "liberal" slur thrown at them. Why is that?
You'll have to pardon me for rolling my eyes at the notion that modern liberals have somehow made the term a bad word given the general path of conservatism over the last several decades, not to mention the last eight years specifically.
Like, more proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy.
Making them sound naive is so easy. Especially if you choose the protagonists.
No, we can judge by the actions and results. Police reform in New York was a failure. Education priorities in San Francisco were a failure. The entire activist-interest group orientation is broken.
> proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy
It’s not. But the people who attempted it were lunatics.
Defunding the police is dumb. Rebuilding police departments from the ground up is not. Unfortunately the latter requires being realistic about the occurrence of crime and criminals in a population. (They’re not all victims of circumstance. And they can’t all be community organised into a sculpting job or whatever.)
Any way, I think you are correct in that reducing short term solutions before long term solutions are in effect doesn't play out very well.
Isn’t this a No True Scotsmen problem?
Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut. Police remit, in the form of decriminalisation, was reduced. No jurisdiction abolished law enforcement (though San Francisco de facto got close). But I’d say those count as defunding the police to an extent.
Even then, we got disaster. Shockingly quickly. Shockingly powerfully. There is no threshold theory that suggests you get magical results cutting the police force by 30% instead of 3%; it’s thus reasonable to extrapolate and assume you get more of the bad.
What year did that occur on their budget chart?
(Also, your own chart shows a ‘20 dip.)
Cops throwing a tantrum over a dip would seem to prove a point, too.
You can’t advocate for abolishing cops and also complain about cops self abolishing.
If we pretend the spike didn't happen during COVID and in other countries, sure.
> You can’t advocate for abolishing cops and also complain about cops self abolishing.
Sure you can, for the same reason I can get mad at my neighbor if they demolish a shed with a nuke rather than a screwdriver.
No, this is a "this didn't actually happen."
> Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut.
Where were police budgets trimmed and forces cut? They weren't; that's the crucial thing you're describing that did not happen. Otherwise, I agree -- lots of reform changes that sounded good on paper led to bad outcomes. But there's no need to inaccurately call other reforms "defunding."
NYPD’s budget was slashed by over 5% [1]. It was restored by ‘22.
[1] https://cbcny.org/research/was-nypd-budget-cut-1-billion
This is pretty good evidence that high crime rates in cities with large police forces are directly related to the police force not actually doing the job it's already being paid to do.
(LA Metro was forced to use LAPD for security a few decades ago, at which point crime rates went from very low to skyrocketing. LAPD serviced the Metro contract exclusively with officers that were in overtime hours (1.5x pay) so at best could only provide 2/3rd of the contracted manpower. That changed earlier this year; the contract was terminated for cause and LAPD was replaced with contract security guards. The contract security guards make substantially less than LAPD officers, so Metro is currently able to field a security presence about 5x the size as the LAPD force. Metro reported this that crime has fallen dramatically in just 2 months.)
There is a vocal minority of idiots who want no police. At all.
I seriously hope what is happening right now finally radicalizes the rest of the population that law enforcement as it is right now does not work for the public interest.
That's why you don't just go to the cops and say "find $1B in your budget to cut". You give specifics.
All the more reason to reduce their funding!
As another commenter posted, its about not allowing the creation of the data set in the first place.
We really need everyone in this country to go read "Nothing to Hide" by Daniel Solove, because thats how this crazy shit gets through in the first place: innocuous citizens go "Sure, I got nothing to hide"
The reality was a surveillance state, and questionable policies on data sharing between agencies, and private installations (HOA, etc.), and a CEO with a weirdly literal belief on how Flock should "eliminate all crime". Not "visionary", but far more literal. Way too Minority Report for my liking.
They have a public "disclosure" site that supposedly shows the agencies using Flock that is absolutely inaccurate (there are three agencies in my County alone using it that are not listed there).