| JWeinCom said: Due to Covid, the revenues in major cities have fallen pretty dramatically and unlike the federal government, state governments are required to balance their budgets. So, police departments, being expensive, had their budgets cut. Which predictably leads to higher crime rates. But when most people suggest defunding the police, they are not suggesting simply cutting the budget of the police, but cutting the budget allotted to current policing and adding to other programs aimed at reducing crime. I.e. addiction rehabilitation, people trained in de-escalation accompanying police officers, mental health programs, programs aimed at supporting convicts post release to prevent recidivism, etc, etc. Things that have been effective in other countries. Whether or not such things would work in America is unclear, because that is not what is being done. What has been done is simply cutting police budgets without anything to replace them. That's probably not going to help unless police literally have a negative crime deterring value, which is a position I don't think many serious people actually hold. |
From what I've found, changes in revenue are also a poor indicator of changes in crime rates. States that saw increased revenue in 2020 such as Washington and Virginia (Source: https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2021/02/17/pandemic-drives-historic-state-tax-revenue-drop ) still saw increases in violent crime in 2020. The correlation tends to be pretty murky and historical evidence poorly supports the hypothesis that this increase in crime can be blamed on declining police budgets. While I agree that police have some positive value in deterring crime, police budgets right now are so immensely bloated that I wouldn't be surprised if properly planned cuts could be made without causing a significant change in crime rates (however, properly planned is key here. Like you said, we need a plan, and we need to expand our public safety infrastructure and I will acknowledge that many of the proposals I have seen have done a poor job of figuring out the how of changing the funding levels of the police).
Also, I think it is important to note that we do have evidence that other means of crime reduction would work in America. There are plenty of American studies which show that improving housing reduces crime and that improving schooling reduces crime. We just refuse to take action on these fronts because we would rather dump money into our police forces...
