RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remember ‘Defund the Police’? It was the slogan du jour of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was being hollered on every street during the protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota cop Derek Chauvin. In those riotous days in the summer of 2020, everyone seemed to be waving a placard or wearing a t-shirt demanding defunding. The entire in-crowd posted those three words on their social-media accounts. Even here in the UK, where cops aren’t armed and where the police-funding model is very different to America’s, the right-on lined up behind the vague, strange call for police forces to be starved of funds. A headline in the impeccably middle-class Guardian declared: ‘The answer to police violence is not “reform”. It’s defunding.’

Yet now, ‘Defund the Police’ seems to be a fast fading idea. You don’t hear it very much anymore. It might linger among the white antifa oafs who stomp around in cities like Portland and among well-to-do radical students on quiet, handsome campuses in the UK where there’s very rarely any need to call the cops. But on the streets, in politics, in the press, ‘Defund’ seems to have fizzled out. The old woke roar is barely a whimper now. And it isn’t hard to see why. This slogan has proven lethal. It has been an unmitigated disaster in numerous US cities. The cutting of cops’ budgets did not give rise to the new dawn of flowery peace and racial justice that the virtue-signalling defunders fantasised it would. On the contrary, it helped to stoke violent crime, further destabilise city life, and make life even harder for poor black and brown communities in particular. The lesson here is clear: wokeness kills.

The idea of ‘Defund the Police’ has been around for a couple of decades. But it exploded into public view following the killing of Floyd in May 2020. It’s a simple-sounding proposition: you take public money away from police departments that are too often heavy-handed and racially prejudiced and plough it instead into fairer non-policing forms of ‘public safety’, like mental healthcare, youth services, improvements to housing, and so on. And hey presto, there’ll be fewer trigger-happy cops on the streets and more happy citizens no longer tussling with mental problems and crappy living conditions. The reality, of course, as could have been predicted by anyone who doesn’t live in a gated community and get all their news from the New York Times, has been rather different.

‘This US city was working to cut its police budget in half – then violent crime started to rise’, said a headline in the Guardian in March 2021, less than a year after that very same bastion of liberal correct-think was telling its readers that defunding cops is the ‘answer’ America is looking for. The March 2021 piece was about Oakland in California, where local officials took the post-Floyd anger of 2020 to heart and made plans to cut police spending by a whopping 50 per cent – around $150million a year. Then the killings started. And other forms of crime. In 2020 there were 107 murders in Oakland, compared with 75 in 2019. The spike in violence led five black members of Oakland’s taskforce on public safety to write a letter warning officials that ‘even more lives will be lost if police are removed without an alternative response being put in place’.

There have been similar rises in violence in other American cities that have planned or actually made cuts to police budgets. Throughout America, homicides rose by 30 per cent in 2020. And they continued rising in 2021. ‘Cities across the US are breaking all-time homicide records this year’, reported CNN in December. CNN reports that more than two-thirds of America’s most populated cities experienced more homicides in 2021 than they did even in 2020. Last year some American cities broke their all-time homicide records. Philadelphia suffered 513 homicides, smashing its previous annual high of 503 in 1990. Indianapolis had 230 homicides, breaking its previous record of 215 – which was in 2020. Things have gotten so bad that even the New York Times has been moved to ask: ‘Why are so many Americans killing one another?’

Speaking of New York, crime is surging in NYC, too. Already this year things look bad. An extraordinary 72 of the city’s 77 police precincts have experienced more crime in the first few weeks of 2022 than they did in the same period in 2021. And that’s saying something, given how strange and fraught 2021 was. So far this year there has been a 35 per cent rise in robberies, a 35 per cent rise in rapes and a 30 per cent rise in shooting incidents in NYC compared with the same period in 2021 (killings, however, are down, by 13 per cent). ‘No neighbourhood is safe’, says one Brooklyn cop. Is it a coincidence that this is happening in a city where right-on officials responded to the political tumult of 2020 by agreeing to cut police funding by a whopping $1 billion? Many NYC residents are pretty certain it isn’t. Marisol Sanchez, whose son was shot to death in the Bronx in August last year, slammed the Defund the Police movement, saying that poor communities like hers ‘just don’t see [cops] no more’.

In numerous cities, there seems to be a pretty clear relationship of causation, or at least of inflammation, between ‘defund’ policies and blow-ups in violent crime. So in Austin, Texas, officials cut $20million from the police budget. This led to the dissolution of some law-enforcement units. ‘In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests this summer [2020], we made a significant cut to policing dollars’, boasted once council member. What happened in 2021? Austin experienced its highest number of homicides in 20 years. Aggravated assault rose, too. ‘Austin police chief says city doesn’t have enough officers’, said a news headline in December. There were cuts to police funding in the city of Los Angeles, too: $89million was taken away from the LAPD and rerouted to other services. With depressing predictability, there were 397 murders in LA in 2021, the most it has experienced in 15 years.

Not surprisingly, the focus is now turning in many US cities, away from ‘defunding the police’ to, in the words of The Economist, ‘refunding the police’. ‘As violent crime leaps, liberal cities rethink cutting police budgets’, The Economist soberly reported last month. LA cops are now set for a budget boost. San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, initially supported the idea of defunding the police – now she says she will be ‘less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city’. That’s a remarkable turnaround. The Economist says many ‘liberal’ city officials across the US have twigged, finally, to a fairly obvious fact – that ‘if a city wants to drive down its murder rate, hiring more officers seems a reasonable place to start’.

But even as defunding turns to refunding, and even as woke politicos start to recognise that cops can be useful in crime-ridden communities, the question remains – how was this ‘bullshit’ allowed to ‘destroy cities’? Why did so many accept and promote the preposterous idea that cutting police resources and having fewer officers on the streets would help to make communities – especially black communities – safer? Many people warned against the slashing of police budgets, and yet still it happened. In NYC, for example, in August 2020 – right around the time of the BLM and Defund uprisings – influential people of colour were sounding the alarm about defunding the police. City councilwoman Vanessa L Gibson, a representative for the Bronx, said her constituents ‘want to see cops in the community’. Numerous black New York officials counselled against Defund. One described this woke belief in trimming cop numbers as a form of political ‘colonisation’ pushed by white progressives. Another said it had the whiff of ‘political gentrification’.