John Minchillo/AP Photo
People watch police in riot gear walk down a residential street, May 28, 2020, in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Local governments are struggling to respond to multiple urgent crises unfolding concurrently. Masses have taken to the streets to protest the lawless violence routinely inflicted upon black people by unaccountable police. A global pandemic has threatened to overwhelm our public-health infrastructure and necessitated disruptive changes to our daily lives. Those safety measures, combined with the absence of adequate federal support, have displaced tens of millions from their jobs and created an economic contraction that is already causing unprecedented revenue shortfalls.
One policy solution addresses each of these emergencies: significant, permanent reductions to existing policing and carceral infrastructures. It is time to start defunding our punishment bureaucracy.
When state and local finances were under similar strain during the Great Recession, policymakers had the opportunity to reassess our local budget priorities. But they got it wrong, on both sides of the ledger. Governments around the country enacted deep cuts to critical public investments—in schools and housing and social services and infrastructure—while opting to shield, and often increase, funding for bloated systems of punishment and social control. And they eschewed tax hikes on wealthy people and corporations—fearing political heat and capital flight—while dramatically scaling up financial extractions from disempowered poor people. As the Department of Justice documented in its investigation of the Ferguson, Missouri, police department, local governments’ reliance on revenue from criminal fines and fees has fueled the unconstitutional over-policing of segregated neighborhoods. All of these policy decisions have prevented human flourishing and entrenched unjust social and economic hierarchies.
We now approach a similar crossroads. This moment demands that we make a different set of choices. We must meet it by divesting from mass criminalization and punishment, replacing predatory fines and fees with progressive taxes on wealth, and protecting the public investments that help our communities thrive.
Governments around the country enacted deep cuts to critical public investments, while opting to shield, and often increase, funding for bloated systems of punishment and social control.
Between 1993 and 2012, real per capita spending on our punishment bureaucracy grew by 40 percent nationwide, according to an analysis of Bureau of Justice Statistics data by President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. That same report estimated that direct local government spending accounts for around half of the country’s combined costs of policing, courts, and corrections. Overlapping jurisdictional responsibilities make direct comparisons difficult, but in some cities—including Memphis and Oakland—police departments can account for around 40 percent of spending. A 2017 report analyzed budgets in 12 metropolitan jurisdictions and found that police spending “vastly outpaces expenditures in vital community resources and services”—amounting to as much as $772 annually per resident, in Baltimore.
We are now confronting a fiscal cycle in which revenue shortfalls are expected to total nearly a trillion dollars, according to one estimate—exceeding 25 percent of state budgets and over 20 percent of local budgets. But if you expected these pressures to challenge our policing leviathan, recent history offers a corrective. As Los Angeles prepares an austerity budget requiring significant cuts from every other agency, the LAPD has been exempted. As reported by The Intercept, the city’s police department in fact is slated to receive additional funds for overtime, even as other city workers are furloughed.
This dynamic is not unique. Under a “Citywide Savings Program” presented six weeks ago by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, police spending accounted for only 0.3 percent of out-year budget savings; by contrast, 34 percent of the spending reductions came from planned cuts to education. And of the police department “savings” achieved in the current fiscal year, over 40 percent is achieved not through budget reductions but rather from increased parking ticket revenue.
Although the case for reducing funding for our massive policing infrastructure is strengthened by the looming fiscal crisis, it also can be made on its own terms. Just this past week, we have witnessed horrifying scenes of unprovoked police violence, perpetuated—seemingly without second thought—on protesters assembled to demand accountability from those ostensibly entrusted with their safety. If it were not clear before, this truth no longer can be denied: The state of American policing is deeply rotten. Indeed, we must confront the likelihood that our system of paranoid, militarized policing often works to make the communities targeted by its enforcement less safe.
In the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, President Obama tasked a high-level task force with developing recommendations to “strengthen community policing and trust among law enforcement officers and the communities they serve.” Policing scholar Alex Vitale recently argued that the federal reform efforts following this framework, which focused on procedural justice, “failed to show any signs of creating positive changes in policing.” Although evidence suggests that such reforms can indeed reduce complaints and even use of force, they largely avoid deeper questions about the role police should have in our society—the substance of their responsibilities and the extent of their authority. Moreover, procedural justice and other institutional reforms (like implicit bias training and transparency requirements) need not conflict with divestment in the near term; stronger policies can be applied to a significantly reduced policing infrastructure.
There is no justification for sparing police functions from the same scrutiny to which policymakers are now subjecting other critical public goods and services.
Indeed, there is no justification for sparing police functions from—at minimum—the same scrutiny to which policymakers are now subjecting other critical public goods and services. Although policing is sometimes imagined to correlate directly with safety, there is evidence that the opposite can be true: In New York, measures of crime fell both after a court ended stop-and-frisk policing and when officers organized a work stoppage to protest attempted accountability for Eric Garner’s death. Confident that public safety is not undermined by divestment, cities could look immediately to pause hiring, eliminate new overtime, and cancel unnecessary equipment purchases. Other local school districts can follow the lead of Minneapolis Public Schools by acting immediately to end their contracts with police. And splintered municipalities could reduce the imprint of policing while saving money by merging agencies now separated across jurisdictional boundaries.
These direct funding cuts must be paired with aggressive decriminalization—unwinding the mess of misdemeanors, ordinance violations, and other small charges that consume so much of contemporary policing without making communities any safer. The goal in all this is not simply to dismantle existing systems—but to replace them with new supports and alternative interventions that help people thrive.
Advocates around the country are showing the way. Consider a proposal, from No New Jails NYC, demonstrating how the city could reroute $11 billion “away from jail construction and towards the needs of our communities”—including unarmed medics and crisis workers as well as drop-in centers for people experiencing housing insecurity. In California, a statewide coalition organizing under the name Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB) has combined with JusticeLA to propose a “COVID-19 Public Health & Safety Budget,” with specific decarceral changes designed to protect public health, while also addressing persistent crises like chronic houselessness. California Assemblymember Sydney Kamlager has introduced legislation to support community organizations providing emergency response for vulnerable populations that face significant barriers to engaging with law enforcement. This sort of measure can help communities begin moving away from using policing as our primary response to all various problems.
In addition to being better social policy, these forms of reinvestment are almost certainly more cost-effective than using policing and arrests to handle social problems. Our current approach creates avoidable costs—from misconduct payouts to unnecessary incarceration—and economically destabilizes entire communities. Alternative responses to our social ills would be better targeted and more likely to succeed—and allow remaining law enforcement resources to focus on problems that community members now feel are not taken seriously by police.
The revenue side should not be overlooked as well. As Joe Soss has noted, criminal punishment functions “that were paid for in the past through public taxes—often progressive taxes—have been turned into procedures that extract resources from poor communities, and disproportionately from poor communities of color.” Just as they were during the Great Recession, policymakers are going to face tremendous pressure to ramp up financial assessments from vulnerable people—whether through monetary sanctions (like court fines and fees), regressive “user fee” funding structures, or forms of cost-shifting privatization.
By contrast, our federal government can easily capture the tremendous wealth our economy has produced. Both to plug near-term budget gaps and as a catalyst for enduring reform, Congress must enact a robust program of federal fiscal support for states and municipalities. Instead of sending armored tanks to local police departments, the government could include money for alternative responses like (unarmed) public-health responders.
The goal in all this is not simply to dismantle existing systems—but to replace them with new supports and alternative interventions that help people thrive.
In addition to creating the economic conditions for reassessing budget priorities, the coronavirus pandemic is demonstrating important truths about our policing and punishment systems. Lacking other forms of support, many cities entrusted their police departments to enforce public-health measures like social distancing. What happened when we created this new pretext for police engagement? Wealthy white enclaves were largely left to their own, while enforcement seemed to target poor communities of color. (One video circulating on Twitter captured a squad of ten officers forcibly removing a black man from a public bus in Philadelphia for not having a mask.)
Somewhat more optimistically, jurisdictions around the country are taking meaningful steps to reduce jail populations in order to slow down the continued spread of the virus. Los Angeles’s jail population has now reached its lowest levels since 1990, while community pressure in San Francisco—along with the election of a new reformist district attorney—has propelled an approximately 40 percent decrease in the county jail population. These measures are rare and have not gone far enough. But they also demonstrate the promise of decarceration as a public-health response. Even after this pandemic recedes, there is no reason to return to the previous status quo.
Unfortunately, few elected officials are calling for structural reforms that would significantly reduce American policing and punishment. Indeed, this is one of many reasons why “Vote!” is an infuriatingly empty rejoinder to these protests. Those offering this slogan fail to acknowledge that enduring solutions to our policing crisis—policy responses commensurate to the scale of the problem—are not currently on the ballot, for the simple reason that most of our leaders have lacked the courage to propose them. Even those who promised boldness have shied away from confrontation once in office with a powerful incumbent policing bureaucracy. Until they do better, they should expect entreaties for electoral engagement to fall flat.
The American system of unaccountable over-policing and mass punishment reflects deliberate policy choices; alternatives do exist. Abolitionist organizers that have long urged jurisdictions to unwind their punishment infrastructure are not simply shouting empty slogans; they have proposed specific steps—and alternative systems—that we could adopt today, if the political will existed. It is time to take seriously these demands, by reallocating public dollars toward productive investments in our communities and different systems for responding to human needs. We should fund what works to improve public health and safety—and shift resources away from the infrastructures that traumatize generations and present constant threats of lethal violence.
This story has been updated.
