Bringing justice and peace to disadvantaged communities will undoubtedly require much more than “police reform.” But doing so will also require more than cutting police budgets. EricLevitz writes
They deserve more than police budgets have to offer. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by torture, tens of thousands have taken to the streets of America’s cities to demand a radical remaking of law enforcement in their country.
And in the present context of widespread fiscal crisis, this outcome is more than possible. For these reasons, massive federal relief for cities today, and durable investments in social welfare and public employment tomorrow, must be understood as racial-justice issues. To “defund the police,” we must refund the social state.
In the Freedom Budget’s executive summary, Randolph and Rustin explicitly framed their economic agenda as a nonpunitive means of crime deterrence, writing, “The breeding grounds of crime and discontent will be diminished in the same way that draining a swamp cuts down the breeding of mosquitoes.” One can debate whether these exact plans are the best modern analogues of the Freedom Budget’s demands. But it is clear that liquidating every police department in the United States would not yield enough public funds to execute King’s vision for preventing crime through social investment.
But as Clegg and Usmani persuasively argue, the origins of intensive policing and mass incarceration in the U.S. are more complex, and economics-based, than some popular narratives suggest. If America’s bloated carceral state were primarily a tool for maintaining a racial caste system, then one would expect its growth to correspond with growing racial disparities in rates of incarceration. But this is not the case.
As concentrated poverty curdled into criminal violence, an organic, cross-racial demand for more policing and incarceration arose. As the Freedom Budget suggests, black communities also wanted nonpunitive solutions to the epidemic of violent crime that afflicted them. For a little while, through Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, they received such solutions in partial form.
And there is reason to fear that in the absence of much higher investments in community-based gun violence prevention, conflict mediation, mental health, public employment, job training, health care, education, and other vital social services, cutting police budgets could result in more African-Americans losing their lives to homicide.
Camden, meanwhile, disbanded its police department seven years ago, and proceeded to see a 42 percent reduction in violent crimes. But this is not the proof of concept for cheap-and-easy police abolition that some have made out to be. For Camden, dissolving the police department was a means of busting its union, and creating a less cost-intensive, but larger, police force. In per capita terms, Camden is now one of the most heavily policed cities in the U.S.
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