Defunding The Police Doesn’t Necessarily Mean What You Think
And it creates strange political bedfellows...
An increasingly popular topic on both sides of the aisle right now is defunding the police. While there are a lot of different versions of this in public discourse, a few options have become the most talked about. On the Republican side, this idea has come to be viewed as the elimination of police entirely. On the Democrat side, this has come to be viewed as reducing some funding for the police and redistributing it to other social programs that are in need. There are, of course, a wide sub variety of options with this. This is a relatively new concept within American cities, as police budgets have ballooned in major cities for years. Chicago has more police today than it ever has. New York saw a major surge in the size of the police department under Mayor Giuliani. Countless more examples abound. Sometimes cities saw a major decline in crime (New York) and sometimes they didn’t (Chicago).
Defunding the police is a hot topic for obvious reasons. The recent death of George Floyd has brought attention to issues of race in policing, police brutality and general abuse of authority. His death has ignited a string of protests that have further revealed issues of aggressive tactics and racism within the ranks of some police departments. One city has been brought up repeatedly as something of a model for what defunding the police means and whether it works. While many cities and neighborhoods have experienced rioting and violence, Camden, New Jersey, has experienced far less despite fitting the demographics of those cities and having protests. In my lifetime, Camden has long had an association with both violence and crime, until recently (2014), when it revamped its police force through “defunding the police.” As you will see, I put that in quotations for a reason. Still, the results have seen both a dramatic reduction in crime and major reductions in accusations of police brutality.
Camden didn’t do what you think it did. From the recent articles I have read, the impression you get is that they disbanded the police department, reorganized a county wide force, and put savings into public programs. That isn’t what happened. A look back around the time of the change reveals what really happened. The city disbanded the police force. Effectively, this dissolved the union. At the time, this decision was branded “union busting”. Once the union was eliminated, they rehired about 2/3rd of the force (at a discount) that was let go. A focus was placed on training new methods of policing and modernizing the force. With the union removed, discipline and firing were suddenly on the table. Slowly, with the new department and policies, the city added to the force. At the time of the defunding, there were less than 200 officers in the department. Now there are close to four hundred. The budget for police has correspondingly gone up significantly.
What does this mean? I am not going to pretend to know what percentage of the massive improvement and peace in Camden is due to new policies, forcing police to have accountability or simply having more police. Everyone in the argument will pick out one of these at random and claim it as the reason to support their agenda with no way to verify this. What I will say is that this has created a strange political climate around this situation. One of the main things I hear coming from the left is how removing police unions will force officers to be accountable. One of the things I hear coming from the right is the need to protect police unions to ensure officers have separate representation and support. This is… not the normal party line. For decades, the Democratic Party has been the party of the union. From CSEA, to teachers to teamsters, unions were (and are) an enormous part of their support. To suddenly see Democrats labeling a union as a haven for poor performance and a protector of bad parties is jarring. Meanwhile Republicans, seemingly blind to the irony, have raced to defend the union, praising its protection of the working man and its ability to ensure due process.
My main purpose in writing this piece isn’t to suggest what to do about police unions, whether defunding the police is the solution or to accuse a political group of abandoning their long held principles and policies. It’s to point out how quickly and easily both main parties have abandoned their long held principles and policies to appease their base. If either side claims victory from this, it will legitimately damage the support of their long held positions on the issue of unions (but we can all look forward longingly to articles that will let their party have its cake and eat it too).
My advice in all of this is… think for yourself. You don’t have to hold the party line. Stop living your life in blind support of your major party’s platform. Even they don’t have allegiance to it.