Canceling Police Is the Worst Way to Prevent Violence
There Are More Productive Alternatives to Consider
A new development from the nationwide protests and riots surrounding the murder of George Floyd is the increased popularity of the call to ‘defund the police.’ Black Lives Matter, an organization connected with many of the protests, has adopted this slogan as well:
We call for a national defunding of police. We demand investment in our communities and the resources to ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive.
But the way BLM portrays this line actually communicates the two different interpretations of ‘defund the police,’ each of which has its own set of supporters.
The first way is to see the “national defunding of police” as literally cutting all money going to law enforcement, thus ending the current public law enforcement system. The Minneapolis City Council has decided to go this route, announcing that “This council is going to dismantle this police department.”
The second interpretation is as a more specific defunding that would keep police departments intact but just reduce their job responsibilities and reallocate money to “investment in our communities.” BLM co-founder Alicia Garza puts it like this:
So much of policing right now is generated and directed towards quality-of-life issues, homelessness, drug addiction, domestic violence,” Garza said. “What we do need is increased funding for housing, we need increased funding for education, we need increased funding for quality of life of communities who are over-policed and over-surveilled.
In this essay, I will tackle the terrible irresponsibility of the first policy and examine the potential merits of the second, but first I must express the premises I am using.
There is no evidence that the policing institution is systematically racist or that police officers kill black people disproportionately to other races, so those claims can’t be used as an excuse to defund anybody. It is clear that there are some instances of police officers being racist, and more instances of police officers being brutal without the racist motivation, but both of these situations are the exception, not the rule.
That being said, any injustice is too much injustice. Most people are in favor of looking into policing policies and trying out reforms, and I agree with many proposals such as required body-cams and increased reviews of officers’ conduct, but dismantling police departments isn’t reform, it’s a dangerous experiment that is guaranteed to make everything worse.
What’s so odd about the timing of this policy proposal is that it comes right in the middle of the best example of itself we could hope for. The riots America just experienced were complete lawlessness; people were destroying property, stealing, setting buildings on fire, assaulting others, and there were a number of murders as well. The reason the national guard and military were called into some states was that police couldn’t or weren’t allowed to control the violence.
There isn’t much direct evidence of what would happen without any police, probably because people are generally smart enough to know how dumb that idea is, but I did find one article from 1969:
Montrealers discovered last week what it is like to live in a city without police and firemen. The lesson was costly: six banks were robbed, more than 100 shops were looted, and there were twelve fires. Property damage came close to $3,000,000; at least 40 carloads of glass will be needed to replace shattered storefronts. Two men were shot dead. At that, Montreal was probably lucky to escape as lightly as it did.
I don’t have a TIME subscription so this is as much as I can read (someone let me know if the article goes on to say ‘it all turned out fine in the end’), but this sounds a lot like the riots that just happened.
Roland Fryer, a Harvard economist, also talked in an interview about an upcoming paper he and co-author Tanaya Devi are writing that concludes:
When police were investigated following incidents of deadly force that had gone viral, police activity declined and violent crime spiked.
In Chicago, there was a 90% drop in police-civilian contacts immediately after the announcement of an investigation, and “Baltimore literally went to zero” after a probe was announced there, he said. In cities where these contacts fell the most, homicides increased the most.
This illustrates the fact that less policing will result in more lawlessness, and crime is already a major problem in black communities, a much larger problem than police brutality. Despite only being about 13% of the population, in 2018 black people made up 43% of all violent crime offenders and 33% of all victims. The solution here is clearly not to do away with the only institution that combats crime. Thankfully, roughly 65% of Americans already know that.
Now to examine the second policy, focusing the job of policing more on fighting crime and outsourcing “quality-of-life issues” to other institutions. I think this is a good idea; it would improve police departments’ efficiency and effectiveness and increase community development funding and engagement.
There are specific reasons for the disproportionate amount of crime in black communities that have nothing to do with racism, and I think more investment in all “quality-of-life” institutions such as education, housing, and jobs could lower those numbers.
Another change that would lower those numbers is better and smarter policing; maybe it isn’t the best use of police departments’ crime-fighting abilities to break up homeless encampments or to keep hunting down the same drug-users instead of rehabilitating them.
In summary, the ‘defund the police’ slogan would be more accurate as ‘improve the police.’ Ending policing all together is unjustifiable madness, but strategic reorganization of police’s role in their community as solely a crime-fighting entity and increased investment in that community to lower the propensity for crime are both good proposals.
More on similar topics:
…equating a few racist cops with the entire law enforcement institution, or a few racist civilians with all of American society, is no different than equating a few black criminals with the entire black population…
…If your goal is to eliminate racism, then do not cheer on the burning. Condemn the rioters, the looters, and the insurrectionists because their actions are counterproductive to the dream of liberty and justice for all…
…we as a society already do cost-benefit analysis and have determined that there are certain amounts of death we will tolerate to allow some type of freedom…
