This post saddens me as I am greatly sympathetic to police abolitionism. I believe we have way too many prisons, and we are over-policed. Still, I think that the evidence is showing that “abolish the police” was more motto than policy success.
First, as far as I can tell, no city or town in America actually abolished its police department or even drastically cut their police force as a result of pressure from activists. The most famous attempt was in St.Paul-Minneapolis. Police abolition did not poll well and the effort to radically reform or remove the police failed. Even worse, major Democratic politicians doubled down and supported the police. The most famous is Joe Biden. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, he rejected police abolition and pushed for more funding.
The most interesting recent evidence that “defund the police” has been a failure is a new paper by Bocar A. Ba, Roman Rivera, and Alexander Whitefield. The study reports empirical data showing that firms that provide resources for police departments saw an increase in stock prices after the 2020 protests. In other words, Wall Street anticipated that the police would get more stuff in the post-George Floyd world and they were right.
Here’s a key clip from the abstract:
We find, in contrast to the predictions of economics experts we surveyed, that in the three weeks following incidents triggering BLM uprisings, policing firms experienced a stock price increase of seven percentage points relative to the stock prices of nonpolicing firms in similar industries. In particular, firms producing surveillance technology and police accountability tools experienced higher returns following BLM activism–related events. Furthermore, policing firms’ fundamentals, such as sales, improved after the murder of George Floyd, suggesting that policing firms’ future performances bore out investors' positive expectations following incidents triggering BLM uprisings.
The accumulated evidence, then, is that the police defunding movement is not only a failure in the sense of simply not removing police. The police are more entrenched, and wealthier, than before.
Bottom line: One day, the budget cutter may come for the police, but today is not that day.
+++++
Buy these books!
Grad Skool Rulz - cheap ($5) advice manual for grad students
Obama and the antiwar movement
No surprise. But this movement did have two accomplishments. First, it handed rightists a top talking point: Democrats want to abolish policing. This might have faded by now, except that in many places Democrats actually have cranked back considerably on enforcing laws on what we used to call petty crime -- shoplifting, traffic offenses, vandalism, and so on. City attorneys, understanding that the those charged with these crimes included a disproportionate share of people of color, did not have the resources or time to transform America into a society that shares its resources more broadly. But they could fix the optics.
In my city this has led to a near-abandonment of traffic laws, too often used as a pretext for harassing POC and an opportunity to assault and even kill them. It's hard not to draw a line between this decision and a near-tripling of pedestrian and cyclist deaths over the last three years. As a cyclist I see the results in motorist behavior daily. As a homeowner I hear a significant increase in street racing and hot rodding.
Making America a better place where, presumably, people do not commit crimes as much as they do now may be a laudable goal, but strikes me as a very inefficient way to prevent crime. This campaign would take many years to kick in, would require a vast restructuring of many institutions, cost a great deal, and would spread the benefits over many millions of people, only a small share of whom might have become criminals. What's wrong with all of the other reasons?