RUTHFULLY YOURS

After attacks on Asian-Americans and a rise in homicides in Oakland, Calif., city lawmakers in April restored $3.3 million of the $29 million in police cuts, and the mayor is now proposing to increase the department’s budget by $24 million. Los Angeles’s mayor has proposed an increase of about $50 million after the city cut $150 million from its police department last year.

In the nation’s 20 largest local law-enforcement agencies, city and county leaders want funding increases for nine of the 12 departments where next year’s budgets already have been proposed. The increases range from 1% to nearly 6%.

Many U.S. cities are led by Democrats who supported protesters’ calls to defund the police—a term that activists have used in different ways, including to push for simply shrinking the size of police forces but also shifting resources from law enforcement to social services. The demonstrations, led by Black Lives Matter and allied groups, followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer last year.

But city officials have found it difficult to keep police budgets down after seeing a rise in crime over the past year, with murder rates up by double digits in many cities. In the last three months of 2020, homicides rose 32.2% in cities with a population of at least one million, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report. Law-enforcement officials and criminologists say pandemic stress and a police pullback amid protests are likely contributors.

“It’s hard to have a serious conversation with folks about cutting a police department’s budget when crime is up,” said Michael Nutter, the former mayor of Philadelphia and a Democrat.

Last year, the defund movement coincided with a drop in tax revenue caused by Covid-19 shutdowns. With the pandemic fading, many local governments now have more resources due to an economic revival and federal stimulus dollars. Some city officials and law-enforcement leaders also note that changes intended to reform policing, such as enhanced training for officers, can be costly to implement. And some neighborhood groups worried about police cuts amid the rise in crime.

Last summer, nearly half of 258 police agencies surveyed by the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C., think tank, said their budgets had been cut or were likely to be cut. The cuts hit purchases of new police equipment hardest, followed by training, hiring new officers and overtime spending, the survey found.

According to Interrupting Criminalization, an initiative at the Barnard Center for Research on Women that supports defunding the police, organizers successfully pushed for $840 million in police spending cuts across the U.S., and $160 million in shifts to other social programs. Cities cut another $35 million by canceling contracts with police departments to patrol schools, the center said.

The figures represent a sliver of the approximately $100 billion spent every year on the country’s 18,000 law-enforcement agencies.

Under scrutiny

Cities under Justice Department scrutiny for their policing, such as Baltimore and now Minneapolis and Louisville, often have to spend money to implement mandated changes. Those can include efforts that activists have called for, such as new training for officers and body cameras.

“If you want to fix policing you have to hire cops, you have to train them differently and hold them accountable,” said Chuck Wexler, the Police Executive Research Forum’s executive director. “The notion that taking away resources is going to improve policing is ridiculous.”

In Minneapolis, where Mr. Floyd was killed, the city cut $8 million from the department last year, only to restore $6.4 million to hire new officers amid mass retirements and rising crime.

In Baltimore, Mayor Brandon Scott took office in December after campaigning on a promise to reimagine the police department. Last year, as city council president, he successfully championed an effort to reduce the proposed police budget at the time by $22.4 million, which he and other council members wanted to spend on social services.

A few months into his first term, he proposed a $27 million increase. In an interview, he attributed the reversal to rising police pensions and health insurance costs. Mr. Scott said a mandate for Baltimore to overhaul its police department policies and training, from a 2017 agreement with the Justice Department reached after Freddie Gray died from a broken neck sustained while in police custody, also makes cuts difficult.

China Terrell of Baltimore said she was stunned Wednesday morning when her husband was assaulted on the street, with the mugger stealing an Apple Watch and iPhone. Ms. Terrell, who is chief executive of a local economic-development nonprofit, said it was the most close-to-home example of the rising crime rates she’s read about in her city.

Ms. Terrell, who is running for a state legislative seat as a Democrat, said she doesn’t blame Mr. Scott’s reduction in the police budget for her husband’s assault. She thinks eliminating economic inequity and vacant lots in communities is the best way to curb crime, but she opposes defunding the police. Adding more funds to police, she said, can help pay for new training and recruitment protocols for officers, with the goal of making police forces more equitable and engaged in the communities they serve.

“I think it’s important to rethink and reimagine how we think about law enforcement, but to implement whatever we think is a better idea is going to cost us more money, not less. That’s something the literal words of ‘defund the police’ don’t grapple with,” said Ms. Terrell, 43 years old.

Toby Ditz, a retired professor in Baltimore, said she was disappointed to hear Mr. Scott proposed increased police funding in his budget after he ran for office as a reformer. She said she understands personnel costs were set to go up to cover healthcare and pensions, but she wanted them to be offset with other cuts. “At the very least, we don’t have to increase that budget,” said Ms. Ditz, 70 years old.

Mr. Scott said that he supports lowering the police budget over time, but worries that rushed and ineffective cuts could provide fuel for critics.

“I think the residents of Baltimore are expecting me to not only do the right thing but to do the right thing at the right pace,” he said.

Oakland, Calif., cut $14 million from the police budget last summer to fund a new program in which mental-health specialists respond to mental-health crisis calls instead of police, and to shift some functions like crossing guards to other departments. In December, facing a budget crunch, Mayor Libby Schaaf asked the department to cut another $15 million.

Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong said the department chose to cut walking patrols, a team that worked to prevent retaliatory gang shootings, and a detail that policed sideshows—informal gatherings on city streets where car aficionados show off their stunt-driving skills.

By mid-April there had been 41 homicides, up from 13 over the same period last year, when strict lockdowns were in place. Sideshows proliferated, with one occurring near Ms. Schaaf’s home, the chief said. There were also attacks on Asian-Americans in Oakland’s Chinatown, where walking officers had previously patrolled.

“What’s missing in the defunding conversation is our city is facing a huge increase in violent crime,” the chief said.

John Jones III, a community leader from East Oakland, where most homicides occur, said people in his neighborhood don’t want fewer officers, just better ones.

“They want the police to, number one, stop killing and harming us, and two, they want them to do their job. When bullets are flying through your home, when your house is being broken into, you want somebody to show up and respond,” he said.

On April 12, after pleas by Chief Armstrong and complaints from Oakland residents about crime, the city council voted unanimously to restore some of the cuts.

Nikki Fortunato Bas, the city council president and one of the leading voices for shifting money away from police, helped to restore the funding. The council was “trying to be responsive to some of the safety issues that are happening on the ground,” she said.

In New York City, Mr. de Blasio and the city council initially reduced the NYPD’s annual operating budget from about $5.6 billion to $5.2 billion following last year’s protests. Some of the savings went to youth programs and other social services.

From Jan. 1 through May 23 of this year, there were 531 shootings, up from 295 during the same period last year. For the coming fiscal year, Mr. de Blasio is proposing to restore about half of last year’s monetary cuts.

At an April news conference, he said that the initial cuts were a result of his response to the “environment at that moment,” a push by the city council to divert police funding to communities and the financial strain of the pandemic. Mr. de Blasio said the city now has more money due to the federal stimulus package.

Among the highest profile cuts to be reversed was funding for the new 116th precinct in Queens, which community leaders said they wanted to be built. The money for that project comes out of a separate police capital budget.

Roberto Williamson, who owns Breezes Island Grill Restaurant and Lounge, an American and Caribbean restaurant in Queens, called the new precinct “wonderful.”

Mr. Williamson said he hadn’t noticed a local uptick in crime but was in favor of more accessible police services to the area. Most important, he said, was improving relations between police and community members.

“The precinct that serves the area is very far away so it will be beneficial to have one that is closer,” he said. “I wouldn’t encourage defunding the police as long as they’re doing the right thing by the community and the people that serve the community.”

Activists who helped push the defund movement into the mainstream are disappointed in the reversals but argue their efforts have yielded results in other ways. Chivona Newsome, co-founder of the Greater New York branch of Black Lives Matter, pointed to a measure passed by the New York City Council in March ending qualified immunity as a defense for police officers sued over civil-rights violations. Qualified immunity protects officers from the threat of litigation for most law-enforcement actions. “I know [defund the police] was such a controversial term, but it has changed the way some people look at policing,” she said.

Denver initially cut nearly $25 million in police spending last year because of the pandemic’s economic toll. A pilot program launched last summer sends social workers and paramedics instead of officers to mental-health calls when the subject doesn’t appear to be violent. The STAR program got an initial $208,000 from a sales tax approved by voters in 2018. The program will be expanded citywide at a cost of $3 million in the coming fiscal year, money that will come out of Denver’s general fund and other sources—not the police budget.

A city report found that 68% of the 243 people social workers interacted with during responses to calls were homeless. None of the incidents required the assistance of Denver police officers. The report found that the program could reduce overall police calls for service by approximately 2.8%.

Denver may be able to restore funding to the police department this year now that finances are more stable, said a spokesman for Mayor Michael Hancock, who doesn’t support defunding law enforcement.

Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen said the STAR program exemplified the “holistic” approach needed to reform policing, and that stripping funding would only inhibit those efforts.

“Not too many systems out there get better by taking money away,” he said.