What comes after the "defund" fad?

What comes after the "defund" fad?

(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

I think the May 14 New York Times article “The Spike in Shootings During the Pandemic May Outlast the Virus” by Troy Closson was a kind of watershed moment in the crime discourse.

Not because the article was so amazing, but because it represented an interpretive pivot on how progressives are perceiving the 2020 murder surge. It has long been orthodox in certain circles to insist that the huge increase in shootings last year was caused by the Covid-19 pandemic (something that I am open-minded about), which you see continued in Closson’s headline which describes it as a spike “during the pandemic.”

This idea of a pandemic-violence link was typically wielded to brush aside any consideration of issues related to policing and law enforcement. But in Closson’s piece, people who uncritically accept the pandemic framing are also telling you that the end of the pandemic doesn’t mean the tide of violence will recede.

As a journalist, I am frankly more interested in forward-looking policy solutions than backward-looking causal analysis. People often engage in rhetoric where the presumption is that “how do we fix Y” is very tightly linked to “X was the cause of Y,” but the real world often doesn’t work like that. If there’s shaving cream on the floor, you don’t jam it back into the canister. Ending the pandemic would be a good idea whether or not it was the cause of the crime surge. If even now even believers in Covid-Induced Crime Theory don’t think the end of the pandemic will reverse the crime surge, then I think we can agree that it’s time to start talking about solutions.

A backlash or not

I referred to defunding the police as a “fad” last fall, which I believe helped inspire my former colleague Fabiola Cineas to write this article arguing that it’s not a fad. People sometimes accuse me of not reading or understanding activist perspectives on this, but I promise that I have read them — I simply disagree. But, curious people should read her piece as it conveys those perspectives better than I possibly could.

Nonetheless, defunding the police was a fad, and I believe it’s now a fad that is ending.

Andrew Yang has been leading most polls for the New York City mayoral race despite criticism from wildly unrepresentative activist groups who are mad that he supports a police response to anti-Asian hate crimes and that his campaign is full of ties to the Bloomberg administration and the NYPD union. But the real kill shot for defunding is that more recent polling suggests Yang may lose after all — to Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former police officer who is running the most straightforwardly tough on crime campaign in the race.

New York voters rate public safety and crime as their top concern. In Portland, voters say downtown has become “much less safe” after the past twelve months and want an increased police presence.

Now on the other hand, Larry Krasner, perhaps the most famous of the new wave of reform DAs, won reelection in Philadelphia despite a high-profile effort to unseat him. I think I’m probably glad that he won. Handing out long prison sentences is a high-cruelty, low-efficacy means of fighting crime. The fact that the local police union got beaten so badly also suggests to me that some concern trolling ought to be aimed at these institutions. I get that cops liked Donald Trump, but for New York City union leader Patrick Lynch to give a prominent and highly-public endorsement to Trump is just political malpractice, the sort of which they try to drum out of you in the labor movement. The people who rep big city cops in blue and purple states need to get a grip and try to cater somewhat to the opinions of the people they work for.

Meanwhile, one thing about Philadelphia is that while they had 123 more murders in 2020 than in 2019, which is horrifying, that’s a slightly smaller-than-average increase for an American city in percentage terms. In general, the murder surge was uncorrelated with whether or not a county has elected a reformist prosecutor.

Mostly, though, I don’t want to hang the case for taking crime seriously purely on the basis of fear of backlash. Crime victimization is very highly concentrated, and an absence of backlash could simply indicate indifference to or isolation from suffering communities. The problem with the huge increase in murders is that it’s bad for people to be killed.

Murder is really bad

Not to be too much of a troll, but this huge increase in bloodshed is a very serious problem.

To get a sense of the scale, according to Mapping Police Violence, there were 1,126 people killed by police officers in 2020. By contrast, the increase in murders in 2020 added 1,907 victims just in the 51 big cities that we have data on. Mapping Police Violence puts on their website that “Black people were 28% of those killed by police in 2020 despite being only 13% of the population” in big text. That is a lot. But nearly half of homicide victims are Black, a greater disproportionality.

I had Morgan Williams, Jr. on The Weeds on Friday talking about some research he has done on race and crime:

When Missouri repealed an old Prohibition-era gun control law, there was a big increase in Black murder victimization in Kansas City and St. Louis, with no change in white victimization.

There was also an increase in the rate of police officers getting shot at, and a decline in aggravated assault arrests and weapons arrests.

Conversely, every incremental addition of 10police officers abates about one homicide and also a bunch of other violent crimes. In per capita terms, the effects are twice as large for Black victims as for white ones.

The extra officers also generate a lot of arrests on low-level “quality of life” charges for things like liquor law violations.

A point that runs through our conversation is that murder victimization is highly concentrated. Some of that has to do with residential segregation and concentrated poverty. But the other point that Williams makes about this is that you have a lot of “preemptive violence.” In other words, how a person responds to a given situation is, in part, a function of his estimate of the other person’s response — when your perception is that a lot of people are shooting guns and killing people, then you are more likely to want to arm yourself and use deadly force.

Below is a map I made on an interactive tool the D.C. government has for visualizing crime geography. What you’ll see is that violence is heavily concentrated in a few parts of the city — especially east of the Anacostia River and around North Capitol Street. Murders in the past two years are indicated with a red dot.

In any other context, these kinds of disparities would be considered a first-order social justice priority, and frankly I think they deserve to be in this context, too.

I read Randall Kennedy’s book, “Race, Crime, and the Law” over 20 years ago and strongly recommend it to others. One of the things he details is that part of the historical tradition of racially biased policing in the United States was essentially ignoring crime in Black neighborhoods as long as it was seen as contained and not afflicting the white community.

Addressing police staffing

In terms of “defunding the police,” the good news and bad news is that relatively few cities actually enacted meaningful cuts in police spending. That’s good news in the sense that it’s a bad idea. It’s bad news in the sense that if the spike in murders was clearly attributable solely to spending cuts, we could reverse the cuts and fix the problem. But in fact, the surge was much broader and more general than that.

What is true, however, is that the number of police officers per capita has been dwindling since the aughts.

State and local governments came under a lot of fiscal pressures thanks to the Great Recession and the fact that a lot of cops who were hired in the 1990s started hitting their 20-year retirement thresholds. With crime rates mostly falling, I think city governments reasonably did not see this as a big problem.

But if crime is rising, then turning it around makes sense.

During the 2020 campaign, I made the point several times that Democrats were pushing for state and local aid money that Donald Trump was trying to block. When Biden won, that aid money passed — over the objections of Republicans. State and local money are what police are made of, and I think Democrats should talk about that during the midterms. And if Trump runs again in 2024, Biden should talk about the many times Trump proposed cutting police funding.

The opportunity of summer jobs

Of course there are lots of non-policing ideas for reducing crime.

Raising alcohol taxes, as I suggested yesterday, deserves to be high on that list.

There are also several high-quality studies showing that youth summer job programs reduce violent crime. This one I think is particularly relevant given all the “labor shortage” buzz that’s been circulating since the great reopening of the economy got underway.

Twitter avatar for @jenniferdoleac

March 18th 2018

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Whether you think Unemployment Insurance, child care responsibility, or fear of Covid is what’s making it hard to fill job openings, teenagers are good candidates. They are at less risk of Covid, less likely to have child care responsibilities, and not normally eligible for Unemployment Insurance. So the circumstances are right for cities and counties to run unusually successful summer job programs that connect kids to work.

Paying for quality

Rafael Mangual from the Manhattan Institute parallels my argument about police staffing levels but adds two other “tough on crime” points.

One is that he criticizes recent criminal justice reform moves on bail and pretrial detention. Here, I think it’s important to distinguish between two different ideas. One is that there’s been a move away from money bail, in which your ability to avoid pretrial detention is essentially a function of the financial resources at your disposal. Two is that there’s been a move to engage in less overall pretrial detention. These are related, and in many cases both reforms have been made at once — but, they are conceptually separate. The alternative to money bail is pretrial detention based on some form of risk assessment.

It seems plausible that some jurisdictions have miscalibrated the risk environment and are letting too many people back out on the streets. That’s different from saying that we should make people’s ability to avoid pretrial detention conditional on having money at their disposal.

The other thing Mangual argues is that we have gotten too harsh on police misconduct, and this is making it too difficult to recruit and retain officers.

I do not love this idea. Police misconduct is a serious problem. If you go back to the Ferguson protests, the context there was a longstanding crisis of police legitimacy in Black communities that, thanks to social media and lower crime rates, was now spreading to white liberals. It’s true that higher crime and backlash to protest-adjacent looters have now delegitimized the delegitimizers in the eyes of many people. But to have a functional criminal justice system, you need to address the root causes of that legitimation crisis and hold officers to a higher standard of conduct.

That being said, I think you need to be attentive to the point Mangual is raising, which is that even if all your reform ideas are good, you are still making cops’ lives more difficult. If you want to raise the standard for conduct without making the job less attractive, you probably need to pay more — higher entry-level salaries at least, and then with a flatter pay structure over time — or else you’re going to have problems.

Everyone hates this analogy, but the basic situation with police officers is parallel to the one with public school teachers, yet with the partisan alignments reversed. A lot of conservatives got it in their heads that if you just cracked down on “bad teachers,” better teachers would magically appear to fill the void. The real world doesn’t work like that, and actually, after all the fierce Bush and early-Obama fights about weakening teachers’ job protections, very few were fired with cause because principals hate being stuck with vacancies to fill. What you would need to do is actually give them much bigger budgets to work with so you’d have fewer voluntary departures and more applicants.

I think the same applies to the police. And a very natural version of left-right disagreement about law enforcement would be for tax-averse conservatives to be stingy with financial compensation and say we should let cops be abusive toward marginalized communities in lieu of paying them, while progressives argue that quality public services are worthy of investment. I take the progressive side of that debate. But getting there requires acknowledgment that violence in the streets is a serious problem, and that while bad policing is seriously bad, good policing is vitally important.