To be clear, "defunding" here doesn't mean to zero, just defunding most.
As the chart shows, reducing a city's police spending from 53.8% to 5.72%.
I mean... I'm actually shocked to hear that policing is a majority of the budget. That seems wild. Surely a twentieth of the budget is more in line with legitimate needs to fight crime?
I think the chart is misleading for those just seeing it in isolated form on social media. It doesn't include education budget because that is not discretionary. The school budget is 4x the police budget. I'm not exactly sure the right way to show what to include and not to include - but think it is a bit misleading to represent it this way.
If I was running a company and didn't show the cost spent on salaries or office space it might look like we were spending a ton of money on coffee.
(I am in favor of reducing militarization of police - just offended as a statistician!)
Again - I think this is misleading and I should have specified. In California, most of the money for schools comes from the state.
So, when I say school budget from LA is 4x the police budget, that is just covering the 21% and 12% part of this graph. Doubling the LA school budget would only increase the total school budget about ~33%
Again - if I was in charge I probably would lower police budgets and raise school budgets - but I think those sharing the slices without being informed are doing a disservice.
I would love to be corrected on some of these issues, but in general looking at just discretionary funds from a city and ignoring all other funds will lead you to some wild conclusions.
as you may be alluding, i suspect the education budget is even more bloated than the police budget. it could probably be reduced 80%, and if done sensibly, have no measurable effect on educational outcomes. a lot of that budget is probably spread across administrative overhead, security theater, and bandaiding other societal problems (food aid, healthcare, social/psychological services, etc.)
i'm not suggesting we shouldn't help the disadvantaged, but that it's inefficiently misallocated under education, masking the severity of those issues in some cases.
I'm really not suggesting education should be cut! I just think the chart is silly because it pretty much finds the smallest subdivision of the budget that includes all of the police budget but doesn't include things like education. The desired effect of the chart is clearly for people to think "Damn - half my tax dollars are going to the police and nothing to health services" when that isn't close to being true.
Additionally, while Los Angeles in particular could increase its budget for homeless shelters and a few particular resources, I don't see it as the city's job in particular to cover all social problems that can be better handled at a state or national level. Police everywhere are largely funded locally so again it is a bit comparing apples to oranges.
I was pretty surprised also, so I checked my city (Mt View, California). Police is 28% of the budget here. The next biggest category is the Fire. Department, which is 18%.
I think top level city concerns are police, fire, and community services (libraries, parks, etc.). Lowering police spending to under 10% seems a bit low.
Note that in California, school budgets are separate from the main city budget.
I'm starting to think responding to crime with police is the wrong approach. By the time police are involved, the crime has usually already been committed. It seems like there should be far more focus on preventing crime with social services and economic and health interventions. The police should be our last resort, not our first.
I don’t know. The city doesn’t have much else to spend money on. The next biggest thing is Fire Department, but we don’t have many fires. Then there are parks and libraries and such, but those are pretty low cost.
You could probably cut some funding from the police but it doesn’t seem like a huge misallocation.
Cities don't really have budget to give out cash. If you took the entire police budget (about $50M/yr), you'd only have enough money for $10k/yr for 5,000 individuals. If you have a $10k/year rent subsidy available in Mt View, lots of people from neighboring cities would want to move there to claim the subsidy.
It's not a solvable problem by a single city, even if you believe in cash transfers/UBI.
These objections don't seem as strong to me as they seem to you.
> you'd only have enough money for $10k/yr for 5,000 individuals
5,000 out of the 80,000 total individuals seems to be a sizable number, no? Even 2,500 seems like a lot when your population is so small. Nobody claimed the problem is solvable by a single city, but it seems like you could easily make a difference at the margin.
> lots of people from neighboring cities would want to move there to claim the subsidy.
You could have some process that gives preference to existing residents of a certain period of time, I doubt many poor people living in the area would move to a city and live there for a certain time just for a chance to get a rent subsidy.
This problem of "people moving here to claim benefits" is both generally overstated and pretty easily solved by a number of cities.
I mean... it's just not the responsibility of cities to redistribute income.
In addition to people moving in, you have people paying high taxes who will move out to neighboring cities without this tax. I don't want to pay a 5% wealth transfer tax.
This idea is based on some sort of pseudo-socialist view of the world, except implemented at the worst possible level (municipal). Cities deal with keeping crime down, building roads, etc. They're not here to implement a socialist wealth transfer program.
Mountain View police took more action against drug abuse than against robbery, rape, aggravated assault, and homicide combined by over a factor of 2. [0] They only cleared 60% of those violent crimes.
Maybe they should redirect more of their budget to investigating violent crime. What's the evidence for your conclusion?
It seems ridiculous to me that you would feel a need to disagree over the mere fact that OP has an opinion. It's just so dismissive to call a person's opinion naive without offering any counterpoint or constructive criticism.
>To be clear, "defunding" here doesn't mean to zero, just defunding most.
You should talk to some of the people advocating these policies. They mean what they say, which is the police budget should be zero. While I'm sure some thoughtful activists exist, and some referenced in the article seem to be, it's going to become impossible to control the fringe who just want "more".
People who advocate for "defunding" to zero generally want some sort of replacement violence/crime prevention force, but think rebuilding from the ground up is a better form of affecting that sort of change.
The problem is that none of it is consistently communicated. Maybe something like "let's replace the police with XYZ, this is why A, B and C" vs "defund the police".
Shortly after college I lived in The downtown area of a suburban town, now I live San Francisco. In the small town a cop would drive by every 30 min all night long. Sometimes the only thing driving by was the cop. The town had one Public murder in ten years. Here in SF I see the bus more often than a patrol car. Don’t under estimate white peoples ability to be scared about nothing.
It's far more than a swipe -- it's very relevant. If you look into the history of police, they started out as slavecatchers. Vigilantism quickly caught on and white folks were given implicit authority to question the origin, destination, and qualifications of any black person they happened to come across. You can follow the unbroken thread of this culture and attitude to today.
Police institutions today are a manifestation of the fragility of the white ego when confronted with black people with ambitions. They will ignore black folks who stay "in their place", i.e., don't leave their neighborhoods so white people don't see them. It is when black people attempt to assert socioeconomic mobility that the white folks quickly mobilize.
One of the impetuses for Brown v. Board of Education was that white administrators shut down the entire public school system so that "equality" was achieved in that both white and black students couldn't access public schools. Following vehement outcries from both black and white parents, they started handing out tax-funded vouchers to the white families only to attend private schools, which is how the charter school phenomenon became such a big idea. Betsy DeVos and her family are perpetuating this essentially segregationist system today, with tokenized and very public displays of "see it's not a racist system because sometimes black children win the lottery too!"
As we still operate in this society I had a kneejerk reaction and feel almost obligated to add a "not all white people" clause, which only reinforces the points made above.
Here are resources for the people who are reacting to the language I'm using:
As the chart shows, reducing a city's police spending from 53.8% to 5.72%.
I mean... I'm actually shocked to hear that policing is a majority of the budget. That seems wild. Surely a twentieth of the budget is more in line with legitimate needs to fight crime?