"Defund The Police": Maybe The Most Counter-Productive Progressive Policy Yet
/One of the big themes of this blog over the years has been chronicling the counter-productive results of various progressive government schemes for perfecting the world — everything from “anti-poverty” programs, to “affordable” housing, to energy restrictions in the name of the “climate,” to punitive tax rates on high earners, and so on and on. My general observation has been that all of these things inevitably fail to ameliorate the problem they are supposed to address, and instead bring about gradual economic and societal decline in the jurisdictions that try them. Decades into the effort, places that have continuously followed the progressive prescriptions have turned into what I have called the “basket case” cities — cities like Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and many more, that have seen a long term of premium taxes and large “caring” bureaucracies, but accompanied by inadequate private investment, shortage of good jobs, declining populations and high rates of crime and violence.
But at least the declines of these places have generally been gradual — often so gradual that the people living through the decline can barely perceive it. Not so with the latest progressive fad, the movement to “defund the police” and otherwise withdraw political support for assertive policing, theoretically replacing that with some kind of “new paradigm” of social workers or something. The defunding movement, and related initiatives, has been followed by sudden and dramatic jumps in the rates of violent crime, particularly murders, in the progressive jurisdictions. The overall result has been thousands of additional deaths, mostly of young black men. This could be the most counter-productive progressive policy yet.
It was only a year ago today — May 25, 2020 — that George Floyd died in Minneapolis, setting off the wave of protests that took “defund the police” as one of their main themes. Numerous Democrat-run cities — many of them among those already in the “basket case” category, and others vying for inclusion — promptly took the bait, reducing funding as well as other forms of support for law enforcement.
How has that gone? You know it has to be rather bad if the New York Times takes to warning its progressive allies about the consequences. And thus we have a piece in today’s Times, with the headline “A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime.” The piece has a dateline from Los Angeles, and focuses on that city. I would definitely not put LA in the “basket case” category, at least not yet, but as the Times reports, they are trying their best. The progressive regime of Mayor and City Council immediately embraced the “defund the police” mantra:
A year [ago,] streets echoed with calls to “defund” law enforcement, and city leaders embraced the message by agreeing to take $150 million away from the Los Angeles Police Department, or about 8 percent of the department’s budget. . . .
LA also got a new progressive prosecutor in the 2020 elections, and has moved strongly to restrain criminal enforcement in various ways. Results:
[V]iolent crime is up sharply — last year murders were up 36 percent in L.A. — and the city is awash in new guns.
That was rather quick. And the latest:
[T]he city last week agreed to increase the police budget to allow the department to hire about 250 officers. The increase essentially restores the cuts that followed the protests.
To put things in context, I’m going to translate murders for various cities into rates per 100,000 population. This piece from the Los Angeles Daily News gives the number of murders for LA for 2019 (253) and 2020 (349). Since LA has a population of just under 4 million, that means that the murder rate went from about 6.3 per 100,000 to about 8.7 per 100,000. As you will see, that’s still pretty good among Democrat-run cities.
The Times piece cites several other cities with sharply rising crime rates, all Democrat-run of course:
In New York, where homicides grew by nearly 45 percent last year, crime is dominating the discussion in the race for mayor. Last week in Philadelphia, where crime is up sharply, Democratic primary voters overwhelmingly backed the city’s progressive district attorney, despite opposition from police unions. Even smaller cities haven’t been spared the rise in violence: Louisville last year set a record for homicides, with 173, and this year is on pace to surpass that.
Let’s add more context:
New York City reached a low of murders for a year in 2018, with 289. With a population of about 8.4 million, that was under 3.5 murders per 100,000 — a fantastic achievement. (The rate had been over 25 per 100,000 as recently as the early 1990s.). Then we started to intentionally undo that achievement. The number of murders increased slightly, to 318, in 2019. But it was 2020, after the death of Floyd and subsequent protests, that the rate took off. In August 2020 the City announced a cut of the police department budget by $1 billion (about 16%) and the dismantling of certain anti-crime initiatives. The defunding has meshed with a major bail “reform” (enacted in 2019) and with prosecutors increasingly hesitant to prosecute many minor crimes, let alone the violence and looting in the 2020 demonstrations. The number of murders has soared, with the final number for 2020 coming in at 468. As the Times says, that represented a 45% increase over 2019. The rate per 100,000 had risen to 5.6. This year through May 16 we have 155 murders, compared to 127 at the same date last year, another 22% increase. If we keep up the pace, we will get to 571 murders and a rate of 6.8 per 100,000. That’s about a doubling in two years, which is quite shocking — almost 300 additional dead bodies in a year, the large majority of them young black men. But still, New York’s murder rate remains rather good among Democrat-run cities.
Philadelphia’s response to the “defund the police” movement was a relatively modest 4% cut in the department’s budget in June 2020. But Philadelphia has also been inflicted since January 2018 with a radical progressive prosecutor named Larry Krasner, who has gotten rid of most of the career prosecutors in his office and effectively decriminalized many minor offenses by refusing to prosecute them. The number of murders in Philadelphia, which was 353 in 2018 and 356 in 2019, suddenly went to 499 in 2020. In rates per 100,000, with a population of about 1.6 million, that would be 22, 22 and 31. Comparing those rates to New York and Los Angeles, you can see why Philadelphia belongs in the category of “basket case.”
Louisville did not cut its police budget in 2020. On the other hand, it was a focus of a good deal of 2020 rioting — having been the place where Breonna Taylor was killed by police — and relatively unassertive subsequent prosecution of the rioters. The number of murder victims in Louisville jumped from 92 in 2019 (about 15 per 100,000) to 173 in 2020 (about 28 per 100,000). Louisville’s population is about 620,000.
It’s also worth looking at what has occurred in some of the cities that clearly fall in the “basket case” category. What is occurring is quite shocking, and very much under-reported.
In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot largely resisted demands from community “activists” to defund the police department, although there were relatively modest reductions (about 2%) attributed to budget shortfalls from the pandemic. But, like other Democrat-run cities, Chicago is afflicted with a progressive prosecutor (Kim Foxx), famous among other things for essentially dropping the Jussie Smollett case. And Chicago again signaled its leniency to criminality by relatively light prosecution of rioters and looters in 2020. The number of murders in Chicago went from 506 in 2019 (about 19 per 100,000) to 774 in 2020 (about 29 per 100,000).
At this point, St. Louis is the unchallenged murder capital of the United States. That’s quite a feat, with places like Detroit and Baltimore vying for the title. St. Louis got one of the super-progressive prosecutors in the person of Kimberly Gardner back in 2017. She has notably spent her time chasing former (Republican) Governor Eric Greitens on trumped up charges, even as the crime rate, and particularly the number of murders, in St. Louis has soared. Just in the past month or so, St. Louis has elected itself an equally progressive Mayor, in the person of Tishaura Jones. Jones has joined forces with other progressives in St. Louis to push for defunding the police, and a current plan moving through the Board of Alderman would cut about $4 million from the police (about 3%) and transfer it to “affordable housing.” The number of murders in St. Louis was 194 in 2019 and 262 in 2020. For a city of only about 300,000 people, those numbers represent rates per 100,000 of 64.5 and 87.2.
The St. Louis police department puts out very useful statistics that show the effect of these remarkable murder rates on black lives, if those actually matter to anyone out there. Here are statistics for 2021 through May 25 (today). There have been 75 murders so far this year, meaning that they’re already at 25 per 100,000 and we’re not yet through May. Given that murders tend to concentrate in the warmer months, they are likely on track to equal or exceed last year’s carnage by the time this year is over. The official statistics include a racial breakdown of the 75 victims so far this year: 1 Asian, 1 Hispanic, 3 white, and 70 black. Slightly less than half of the city’s population is black. But it’s progressive fantasyland, and nobody is willing to do anything serious about it.