In their quest to win back working class voters, several liberal pundits are suggesting that Democrats need to take on the issue of the rise in violent crime. After pointing to polls showing that voters – especially people of color – see this as a major issue, the claim is that the whole “defund the police” movement that arose during the George Floyd protests is hurting the party.
While as a slogan, “defund the police” is clearly problematic politically, it is important to keep in mind what it actually represents.
Only in rare instances are liberal advocates calling for the outright elimination of police departments. Proponents by and large want to redirect some funds now spent on police forces to items such as education, public health, housing and youth services. The idea is that low-income communities would become stronger — and less in need of policing tactics — if root problems were addressed.
It is therefore important, when referring to the slogan “defund the police,” to indicate whether it is being used as liberal activists meant it, or as a right wing talking point used by Republicans to lie about Democrats.
The pundits who are worried about how the slogan is affecting voters don’t tend to bother with making that distinction. Instead, they pose it in the outdated false dichotomy of “tough on crime” vs “soft on crime,” as we see from Ruy Teixeira.
The former UK prime minister, Tony Blair, had a very successful slogan: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Democrats would be well-advised to adopt a similar approach.
Nowhere in that piece does Teixeira mention that President Biden rejected the false notion of defunding the police. He might have addressed these facts:
In his fiscal 2022 budget, Biden kept his campaign promise and proposed to more than double the funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Hiring Program. Funding is provided to state and local governments to hire law enforcement officers, thus inflating the size of police departments. In Trump’s last year, $156.5 million was provided for COPS Hiring, while Biden would boost that to $388 million, Justice Department documents say. In fact, Biden would boost funding for all COPS grant programs to $651 million, up from $386 million under Trump.
Moreover, Biden announced on June 23 that he was urging cities experiencing an increase in crime to tap funds in his coronavirus relief bill “to hire police officers needed for community policing and to pay their overtime.” He added that they also “can use the funding to scale up wraparound services for the residents as well, including substance abuse and mental health services that we know will make a difference in prevention of crime.”
Interestingly enough, it was Vice President Kamala Harris who originally offered a way out of the “tough on crime,” vs. “soft on crime” dichotomy. In 2008, while serving as the District Attorney of San Francisco, she published a book titled “Smart on Crime.” In 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder took up the theme with a report titled “Smart on Crime: Reforming the Criminal Justice System for the 21st Century.” It identified five goals.
- To ensure finite resources are devoted to the most important law enforcement priorities;
- To promote fairer enforcement of the laws and alleviate disparate impacts of the criminal justice system;
- To ensure just punishments for low-level, nonviolent convictions;
- To bolster prevention and reentry efforts to deter crime and reduce recidivism;
- To strengthen protections for vulnerable populations.
The first one is critical in that it specifically addresses an issue with policing. As David Simon pointed out so powerfully in the HBO series, The Wire, the war on drugs distorted policing with a focus on chasing after statistics that only looked “tough on crime,” but were heavily weighted with minor arrests for possession and trafficking, depleting resources that otherwise could have been devoted to violent crime.
Not too long ago, I noted that Simon had been vindicated when State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby announced that, during the pandemic, Baltimore would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the coronavirus.
And then crime went down in Baltimore. A lot. While violent crime and homicides skyrocketed in most other big American cities last year, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20 percent from last March to this month, property crime decreased 36 percent, and there were 13 fewer homicides compared with the previous year. This happened while 39 percent fewer people entered the city’s criminal justice system in the one-year period, and 20 percent fewer people landed in jail after Mosby’s office dismissed more than 1,400 pending cases and tossed out more than 1,400 warrants for nonviolent crimes.
Following the 2016 shooting that killed five police officers in Dallas, the chief articulated the problem as it exists today, suggesting that we’re asking law enforcement to do too much.
Asking law enforcement to solve all of our problems is not only a diversion of resources. It doesn’t work, but is a sure-fire way to take steps towards becoming a police state.
After four years of dog whistles from Donald Trump about being the “law and order” president followed by a racist backlash against the movement to reform policing, it is important for Democrats to be clear. We remain the party committed to reforming police abuses. But just as importantly, we reject the false notion that we have to chose between “defund the police” and being “tough on crime.” Instead, we can proactively be “smart on crime.”
Terrific piece, thank-you.
It’s so good, in fact, that I hesitate to bring up this tiny concern, but I do anyway because living for years in America’s largest college town (TM) has made me sensitive (and, I acknowledge, perhaps overly sensitive) to it.
That concern is the use of “smart”. “Smart” cars, “smart” phones, “smart” doorbells, “smart” appliances, “smart” tvs, “smart” homes, “smart” on crime, etc.
“Smart” implies its the existence of its opposite, “dumb”. And in a country where most people don’t have college degrees—and even many who do have painfully bad memories of their experiences with “smart” professors and classmates—calling a policy “smart” may not be good “branding”. Especially for the political party already known (for many decades now) for its pointy-headed intellectualism and “we know better than you” attitude.
P. S. Sorry, I don’t have a constructive alternative. Anyone else?
P. S. S. I do think there’s a way to get at this. We ask our police to do too much. The rest of us need to step up and do more. That includes, for example, having trained non-police teams ready and able to deal with mental health crises so that it’s not routine for four armed police officers to be the first responders to a failed suicide attempt (as is the case in some jurisdictions). (Patrick Skinner has an enormously valuable perspective on this.)
If you are explaining you are losing. The instant I first heard “defund the police” I shuddered. As slogans go, it is an own goal of the first order.
Exactly. ‘Defund’ was a whole new level of stupid. Trying to defend it by differentiating between ‘what we meant’ and ‘what is understood’ is, in political terms, ridiculous. Sort of like MAGAts explaining that white power is just innocent ethnic pride. The net result will be political losses for liberals, and more funding for cops. White progressives seized ‘Black Lives Matter’, made it into something politically toxic, and in the process left Black victims of police in the lurch. Time to own that.
Would you also condemn the the response Teixeira is suggesting: a “tough on crime” approach? My point was to say that we should reject both.
Democrats spent decades trying to dig out from under the ‘soft on crime’ charge. Last time we accomplished that by supporting some appalling laws. Three strikes laws in California, for example. We should absolutely not do that because it is morally reprehensible. And we certainly should not abandon our strong opposition to police brutality.
But standing pat on Defund is just a political surrender in every city and every state. How about we start by openly admitting the obvious: Defund was a stupid slogan we should have strangled at birth. Then, we should propose a policy that rewards good policing, that embodies what we say we meant by ‘defund.’ Rather than the knee-jerk ‘not enough,’ or, ‘more, much much more,’ praise departments that are making an effort, and push funds to those departments. We should engage police unions, which have created much of the problem with their blind support of any officer no matter how rotten, and show that we are interested in working with them and through them to achieve more accountability. We should be and could be natural allies with the unions.
The current leaders of the Democratic Party – including the president and the vice president (as well as their appointees at DOJ) – do not support defunding the police (as it is defined by right wingers to smear Democrats). As such, giving the slogan oxygen feeds right into right wing smears. I’d suggest that it is better to be proactive and talk about moving forward with a “smart on crime” approach.
I agree. We should be able to craft policies which are in favor of, ‘good policing.’ What we want is highly professional police, trained and paid like professionals, assisted where practical, by social workers and mental health professionals. (What we claimed Defund really meant.) We want to insert a wedge between the bad cops and the good cops. One approach is to talk to unions about ways we can make life better for beat cops by giving some of their onerous duties to allied professionals. Higher pay, less work, more respect, less confrontation, is a message that should resonate with at least some union locals.
The Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Vanita Gupta as associate attorney general in the Biden administration. Here’s what the president of that organization said about her in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee: “In executing the duties of her office, Ms. Gupta was in regular contact with the FOP on matters of mutual concern or interest. She always worked with us to find common ground even when that seemed impossible. Although in some instances our disagreements remain, her open and candid approach has created a working relationship that is grounded in mutual respect and understanding.”
I tend to agree. But the point I wanted to make is that it is equally problematic to attempt to solve the problem of a politically damaging slogan by resorting to the “tough on crime” approach – as people like Teixeira are suggesting. That is equally as toxic. We don’t have to chose between the two.