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Defunding the police is one of the worst ideas ever created. The people who think this idea will actually help anything must clearly feel extremely confident in the people they are rioting with. So confident in their riot buddy that when the time comes for their closest best friend to be desperate for cash, they can rest assured, their house is getting vandalized first. Meanwhile, as many people have pointed out, the top 1% or higher will have their own private security to keep them safe from violent crime spikes or vandals.
By wanting to defund the police, it shows a lack of recognition for the amount of crime that the police in general stop each year. Cities with a high rate of unemployment or cities that were affected negatively by the 2005 to 2008 recession, would likely benefit highly from an increase in police officers. For example, one study from the Journal of Public Economics found that by adding more officers to low income cities through the influx of new funds(1 billion dollars) in 2009 to the COPS program, the crime rate dropped.
As the study writes, “each additional police officer hired prevented four violent crimes and 15 property crimes.” This is likely because the simple action of adding another officer is enough to actually deter more violent crime from occurring. Rather than arresting people at every turn, police rely on patrol, not only to watch their local areas, but also to deter crime from occurring. The study also found that the new officers actually had a social value of over 300, 000 dollars. In other words, they paid the community back that much each year what would be taken out in the damage that would have been done by crime. That’s a pretty significant difference. They are worth MORE than the salary they get paid each year.
That particular study shown above demonstrates that adding more funds to city police departments and adding more COPs actually reduces crime and even murder. It doesn’t increase it. This runs contradictory to the idea that people will be better off with less police activity in cities that seem like they would really need it.
If there is one thing the George Floyd protests can really tell someone with certainty is that people are too quick to hyper generalize one singular situation. The killing of George Floyd is terrible and the Cop was charged with second degree murder. However, blaming what seems like every single COP in the country for the actions of only one COP is incredibly exaggerated. From the actions of the riots alone, many of America’s most densely populated cities are now actually moving to reduce Law Enforcement… In New York, Mayor De Blasio plans to cut funding to the police department by as much as 1 billion dollars. In LA, funding was cut from the PD by 150 million dollars. Other areas of the United States like Chicago are looking to “defund the police” by not having Police be the first responders to a call for help. Chicago, a place where crime is some of the worst in the nation. The Minneapolis City council has moved to re-organize their police into a “community safety and violence prevention” department, which essentially abolishes Police. Finally, the mayor of Atlanta has admitted that they have been gradually diverting funding away from their police department for years, even before the Floyd riots of 2020.
At this point, it seems abundantly clear that the people protesting are only hurting themselves. The backlash that Politicians receive from crowd pressure is causing them to make incredibly awful policy decisions that will only hurt those cities in the long run. By virtue of this fact, all we can do is hope that people eventually snap to their senses and realize that law enforcement is designed to deter crime, not create it. The only people creating crime are the rioters looking to eliminate their own civil servants.
