To Defund The Police, Look Past The Democrats
On Sunday, House Majority Whip James Clyburn decried calls to “defund the police” as not only bad sloganeering for the ongoing social justice movement against police brutality, but also as a reason House Democrats lost seats in the recent elections. Clyburn, whose push for Joe Biden helped him to the Democratic nod earlier this year, isn’t only wrong, his words illustrate an obstacle to social justice: the Democrats’ allegiance to the police.
Efforts to redirect resources away from police didn’t simply emerge this year. There have been local battles against policing spending in Chicago, where activists have fought the construction of a $95 million dollar police training academy since 2017, and also here in NYC where some of us were a part of the #NoNewNYPD campaign against the increase of over 1,000 extra officers to the NYPD headcount in 2015. Both efforts demanded funds for those police expenditures be spent elsewhere.
In NYC, considered one of the most politically liberal cities, the police budget has grown by more than a billion annual dollars since 2014. Who controlled the City’s budget levers in that span? Democrats, who were represented overwhelmingly in the City Council (controlling 48 of the 51 Council seats), occupied the Council Speaker position, and had one their purportedly progressive champions in the form of Mayor Bill de Blasio (who has protected and enabled police power over and over and over and over).
At that time, almost no one — apart from grassroots activists — questioned the logic of growing the police budget to the nearly $6 billion (in reality, $10.9 billion) price tag we see today. The spending spree goes back further. Since 1994, the NYPD budget has nearly tripled. Mo’ money for police was the standard bipartisan operating procedure ever since Democrat David Dinkins set the stage to add thousands of extra cops to the department in the 1990’s and Republican Rudy Giuliani used them to unleash the era of Broken Windows policing.
There was no “fund the police” slogan because there didn’t need to be one — it was the political orthodoxy that no one questioned. From the Broken Windows to Stop & Frisk to the current spate of police scandals today, the money flowed to the police.
At the national level, Democrats in Congress did their part. One of the 1994 Crime Bill’s most everlasting consequences was its funding for more prisons and more cops. The bill allowed for the addition of about 100,000 officers across the country. It was Biden, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee then, who masterminded the omnibus bill (and bragged about liberal Democrats being as tough on crime as Republicans) as it worked its way to the desk of Democratic president Bill Clinton, who signed it into law. Clyburn was one of the many congressional Democrats who supported it.
This unfettered support for police, through taxpayer resources, was something that at the local and national level both parties saw as good politics. It’s therefore no surprise that Biden has said he is “totally opposed” to defunding the police because he has been a key funder.
What Biden and establishment Democrats prefer is the dead end of police “reform.” Reform efforts — like police-worn body cameras, “community policing,” police diversity, or even recent chokehold bans — have been so lackluster that “defund” has largely been a response against the reform culture. The endless loop of police reform, which is often accompanied by more police funding, approaches the definition of insanity. The “defund” movement can be seen as a blowback to all of this history and all of those policies. Conflict with the Democrats, therefore, is inevitable and in many ways crucial to fundamental change.
While Clyburn’s assessment of the “defund” movement makes sense once one understands those dynamics, his claims that they’ve hurt Democrats are demonstrably baseless. None of the House Democrats that lost their seats recently had defunding police as a policy position. In fact, some evidence suggests that voter registration spiked amid protests where “defund” was popularized, mostly amongst Democrats. High voter turnout most likely helped Biden win the presidential election.
And if public polling moves you, consider that a recent Gallup poll shows widespread support for reducing police budgets and reinvesting those funds elsewhere amongst not only Black Americans (70% strongly or somewhat support), but also amongst registered Democrats (78% strongly or somewhat support) of all races. Someone should tell Clyburn.
Still, some critics ask if “defund the police” is a good slogan. Does it fully explain all the nuances of how reinvesting our finite taxpayers dollars away from police and towards social programs, employment, sustainable housing or anti-violence programs help us achieve public safety without police? Of course not. No slogans explain the complexities of policy because they are only that, slogans. In fact, successful slogans do precisely what “defund” has done in a few short months: turn something once thought politically impossible into something we begin to talk about.
There should be, however, a clarification here. The notion of “defund,” some argue, isn’t to simply reduce police budgets in order to fund other programs, but to (hold on to your badges) abolish the police. The truth is that “defund” can actually encompass both and represents a continuum of politics with abolition towards the left end. That is frightening to Democrats, because that more inclusive view of “defund,” which allows for people to perhaps move leftward over time, could pull people away from traditional Democratic politics. That might spell trouble for not only Clyburn, but even local area Democrats who’ve lashed out against “defund” rhetoric.
While there is panic in the Democratic establishment, it’s important to note that more organizing, outreach and time is needed if “defund” is to gain more public support. Movements aren’t about snapshots of public opinion, but moving people. Thankfully, organizers don’t need to convince politicians, who are accustomed to devising budgets in backroom deals — they need to convince everyday people.
Evidence is probably on their side. Research doesn’t support the notion that more policing, or more funding of it, reduces crime. In Chicago, which has the most cops per capita nationally, violence continues to soar. Data should supersede fear mongering. Just a few years ago in NYC, we were told by local tabloids that with less stop and frisk, city streets would run red with blood — yet crime went down. A long view of police manpower in the city shows a precipitous decline of the NYPD headcount by several thousand cops from 2003 to 2013 — while crime went down. Arrests went down dramatically in NYC from 2010 to 2020 as, you guessed it, crime went down
The notion of “defund” can work if it asks the public to stop seeing the police budget as a political sacred cow. It can work if it creates the space for people in low-income communities of color to talk about their needs and the root causes of violence that have to be addressed. But most of all, “defund” can work best if it becomes more than a slogan or even a set of policies, but rather a new type of politics that are sustained year after year, local budget battle after local budget battle, in cities across America.
Democrats, by and large, don’t have an answer to any of this apart from left-punching and political gate-keeping. And while it’s easy to blame police unions (like the Trump-supporting Police Benevolent Association, which recently tweeted support for Clyburn’s analysis) or even de Blasio, it is the Demoratic establishment that has the most to lose as social justice works its way from protest signs to one of our most important expressions of our politics: our budgets.
