IT IS A DEADLY FANTASY THAT REPLACING THE POLICE WITH COUNSELORS AND SOCIAL WORKERS WILL RESULT IN MORE EFFECTIVE LAW ENFORCEMENT AND FEWER INNOCENT LIVES LOST

The hidden costs of the 'defund the police' movement

 

by Ronald J. Allen

  

Washington Examiner

June 7, 2021

 

Much commentary trumpets that there is a slaughter of innocent, mostly black people at the hands of out-of-control police forces and that the solution to the problem is to cut back on law enforcement authorized to use force to maintain public order. This is wrong on just about every count, save one — there is indeed a slaughter going on, but not at the hands of the police.

Moreover, the purported solution, defunding the police, would greatly exacerbate the problem, resulting in orders of magnitudes more deaths than would be saved even with the elimination of an armed police force. These gruesome facts and the data that establish them seem to be missing from the public debate. Equally missing is that there are paths to reform that would reduce the number of killings of innocent people by the police without making worse the much larger problem of violence between civilians.

First, some data. The number of people killed by the police is quite stable, at about 1,000 per year. Almost all are killed in the context of violent criminal episodes in which the police are doing exactly what they are supposed to do in enforcing the law, and in doing so, another rarely mentioned fact, close to 100 police are killed on average every year, half or so “feloniously.” Rather than a recent epidemic of killings of unarmed civilians, the numbers have fallen from around 95 in 2015 to around 55 in 2020, and in both years, approximately half of the unarmed deaths involved failure to comply with lawful orders from the police. In each of these years except 2015, there were more white unarmed victims than black.

During this same period, the real slaughter was perpetrated by civilians on each other. From 2015 to 2019, the number of homicides each year varied from about 15,000 to 17,000, but in 2020, the number skyrocketed to more than 20,000. In all these years, the number of black and white people killed was about the same, and most were intraracial. These are appalling numbers, but the “slaughter” is by people perpetrated on their own race, and the number of unarmed and compliant civilians killed by police is minuscule by comparison.

Are these innocent deaths just martyrs to the cause? Of course not. They are tragedies that should be eliminated, including with criminal prosecution when warranted, as in the George Floyd case. But proposals to reduce armed law enforcement rather than deal with the aberrational bad apples among the police will make the problem of innocent deaths much, much worse.

Why did murders spike in 2020? Because the "defund the police" movement got what it wanted — considerably reduced policing. The data are overwhelming that when police activity is cut back, crime surges. Beginning in December of 2015, in the wake of the Laquan McDonald murder, Chicago police reduced their aggressive patrols. Paul Cassell and Richard Fowles found that the reduction was immediately followed by a large increase in crime. For example, the number of murders increased from 480 in 2015 to 754 in 2016. Controlling for numerous variables, they determined: “Because of fewer stops in 2016, it appears that (conservatively calculating) approximately 245 additional victims were killed and 1,108 additional shootings occurred in that year alone.”

There are on average 15 police killings in Illinois each year. If that were lowered to zero by taking all the police off the streets, the trade-off would have been the saving of 15 lives and the loss of at least 245. Suppose the estimate is double reality. Then it would be 15 to 122. That looks like a very bad trade-off in any sensible cost-benefit analysis. And consider its racial implications. The victims are minorities: “Of the 2016 victims, 78% were African-American, 16% were Hispanic, and 5% were white.” Cassell has done a similar nationwide study of the effect of the demonstrations that occurred in 2020 with the resultant attacks on the police. Again, the data show the same striking correlation between the protests, attacks on the police, police pullbacks, and a spike in violent crime in large cities.

I am gathering more qualitative data on the effects of paralyzing the police, which happens because of war, riots, natural catastrophes, and police strikes. So far, it is the same story — paralyze the police, and crime explodes. The one exception that I have found is telling. In 1941, the Communist Party of the Netherlands called for a general strike in Amsterdam to protest the Nazi occupation. The police joined, but the protest was violently suppressed within 48 hours.

The relationship between crime and policing is now accepted among criminologists. Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld wrote, “These days, few knowledgeable students of crime dispute the idea that the quantity or quality of policing has an impact on crime.” Another empirical study by Bocar Ba and Roman Rivera “would appear to confirm the 'Ferguson Effect' theory — that increased scrutiny of police tactics and increased political pressure to prosecute police misconduct leads to reduced effort by officers and causes crime to rise.” Importantly, their study also showed that reform done cooperatively with the police rather than by demonizing them can have a positive effect: “We find that an increase in self-monitoring significantly reduces allegations of constitutional violations, but it does not reduce officer effectiveness, as neither arrests nor crime are affected.”

It is a deadly fantasy that replacing the police with counselors and social workers will result in more effective law enforcement and fewer innocent lives lost. To save lives, the impoverished areas of large cities need more, rather than less, of a police presence, although its quality should be improved. The biggest tragedy of this misguided flirtation with a deadly fantasy is that it deflects attention from the significant causes of violence in society — poverty, early childhood development, lack of education, and poor employment prospects — and the real locus of racism and humiliating behavior in policing, which lies more in everyday street encounters than violent confrontations.

Rather than demonize the police, who have a dangerous and difficult job that for the most part keeps us safe, we should search for ways to alleviate the underlying social conditions that trap lives in a world of violence and criminality and focus on weeding out the bad apples while improving the professionalism of the police.