Police Departments Have Shrunk. Crime Is Plummeting. Now What?
New, surprising data has lessons for all sides of the “defund” debate.
In late May, Politico ran an article with the trollish headline “White House to the left: We told you so on crime.” The piece was built on interviews with two anonymous advisers to President Joe Biden, who asserted that falling violent crime rates and the electoral defeat of a “progressive” prosecutor in Oregon had validated the administration’s “toughness” and vocal support for increased law enforcement funding. Its framing depicted the politics of law and order as a zero-sum game in which leftists—especially those who called to “defund” law enforcement in 2020 after numerous high-profile instances of police brutality—have been routed.
But while it’s true that voters generally chose not to support defunding efforts amid rising COVID-era crime rates, the administration’s more-cops triumphalism might not tell the entire story either. In a New Republic piece published the day after the White House’s Politico victory lap, for instance, Michelle Phelps—a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies policing—noted that thanks to retirements and resignations, there are actually fewer police officers working in the Minneapolis Police Department now than there were before the protests triggered by the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by an MPD officer. And according to numbers compiled by the Police Executive Research Forum, a respected independent group, that’s true of major cities across the country as a whole. “In large agencies, sworn staffing slightly increased during 2023,” PERF writes, “but it is still more than 5 percent below where it was in January 2020.” (Caveat: PERF’s data relies on departmental self-reporting.)
In other words, while voters may not have wanted it to be the case, and it didn’t happen in the way that activists would have chosen either, many U.S. police departments have gotten smaller—and the violent crime rate is still plummeting. So what is going on? Slate spoke to Phelps, author of the new book The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence and the Politics of Policing in America, about the fallout from Floyd’s death in Minnesota and how it might relate to the politics of police and crime nationally. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. ...
Rest of article:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/police-crime-minneapolis-george-floyd-blm-brutality-defund.html#
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