The Moral Bankruptcy of 'Defund the Police'

In Plato’s Republic, we have a vision of an ideal state governed by philosopher kings with a ruling class of guardians who maintain law and order. “But if the guardians of law are not what they seem,” we are told, “then just as surely as they are needed for good government, they will utterly destroy the whole city.”

Over 2,000 years later in his seminal Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes also argued for a strong authority to maintain law and order and prevent the barbaric “state of nature.” Like many Russians and Chinese today, he believed only a powerful Leviathan ruler could stave off our assured descent into chapter 8 of Lord of the Flies.

John Locke, the father of liberalism, said folks form social contracts to protect their “natural rights”—life, liberty and property—and rulers hold no legitimacy but by “consent of the governed.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau echoed this in The Social Contract, asserting that the “general will,” or voice of the people, should determine laws.

This evolution from rule by the educated elite to rule by the people led greater criticism of the former, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s critiques of traditional morality, Karl Marx’s work on power dynamics and Michel Foucault, who was heavily influenced by both, and whose work on institutional abuse of power was revolutionary.

In his classic Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault examined the evolution of disciplinary measures, especially the transition from physical punishment to more subtle methods of surveillance and control. Consider the Chinese police surveillance state in Xinjiang. Foucault said systems of control become less visible over time, but more pervasive.

One powerful example of this is known as semantic distortion, which involves using language and its nuances to shape meanings in ways that serve a particular agenda or maintain control of the discourse around a certain issue. In the context of governing power and maintaining order, one recent example is the phrase “defund the police.”

Police abolitionism has existed for some time, but this phrase gained widespread attention during the protests and riots that erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Initially, the phrase meant exactly that—remove police funding and shut down departments nationwide.

There was immediate pushback and the more activists cried “defund,” primarily Black Lives Matter activists, the more out of touch they seemed. Worse, the more out of touch with the lives of black Americans. Smarter “defund” proponents switched strategies and adopted a motte-and-bailey tactic to shift the Overton window. In June 2020, University of Maryland sociology professor Rashawn Ray wrote:

“Defund the police” means reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality. That’s it. It’s that simple. Defund does not mean abolish policing. And, even some who say abolish, do not necessarily mean to do away with law enforcement altogether.

It was an impressive cup and balls performance. “Defund” didn’t mean defund. “Abolish” didn’t even mean abolish. It was impressive not because it was convincing, but because so many people actually fell for the trick.

Also in June, Sam Levin, the Los Angeles correspondent for The Guardian, wrote a column titled “What does ‘defund the police’ mean?,” in which he explained:

For years, community groups have advocated for defunding law enforcement – taking money away from police and prisons – and reinvesting those funds in services. The basic principle is that government budgets and “public safety” spending should prioritize housing, employment, community health, education and other vital programs, instead of police officers.

Any student of police abolition can tell you the movement is openly acknowledged as a process and the first step in this process is to undermine the power of the police, such as by cutting their budgets and diverting their funding.

Some proponents were not afraid to say the quiet part out loud, even if it meant alienating most Americans. For instance, also in June, the activist Mariame Kaba wrote an op-ed for The New York Times titled, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”

But plenty of folks fell for the motte, including in the media. In fact, even though police departments nationwide defunded to varying degrees, some making catastrophic cuts to their planned budgets, media outlets reported no defunding was taking place—at all—simply because police budgets had increased from the previous year.

This is equivalent to saying that thalidomide does not stunt growth in infants because affected infants still grow. And the results of these cuts were never positive.

In Vermont, the Burlington Police Department slashed 30% of its police force. NBC News reported, “Since then, city leaders have been forced to reckon with the unintended consequences of that decision.”

You don’t say.

Police officers began to leave in droves. Before defunding, Burlington averaged about 95 effective, or active-duty, police officers. Today, the department hovers around 64. Often only five officers are available to patrol at night.

The consequences have been felt hard. In fact, FBI data released in 2020 showed that “defund” efforts were among the most disastrous public safety reforms in U.S. history. That year saw a stunning 29.4% rise in murder and non negligent manslaughter, the single largest year-over-year increase on record.

In Milwaukee, residents experienced an all-time record of 189 homicides—14% higher than the previous record in 1991. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett proposed cutting 120 police officers. The city experienced a 92% increase in homicides by the end of that year.

In Portland, homicides exploded 530% in 2020 after George Floyd compared to the first five months of that year, city police data shows.

The “defund” movement has not only proven an unmitigated horror show, it has harmed the very people is pretended to care about, leading to the deaths of more black and brown people who never supported “defund” in the first place. In fact, most black adults want police funding in their communities to stay the same or increase.

Even some of outspoken “defund” supporters have gotten woke to the dangers of their cause, though sadly, not without paying a price. For instance, BLM activist and Dove “fat acceptance ambassador” Zyahna Bryant backed the “defund” movement but called the cops without hesitation after DailyMail.com made an interview request.

Or consider Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party second vice chairwoman Shivanthi Sathanandan, who lives in Minneapolis. In June 2020, she wrote this:

The term “dismantle” leaves no room for the kind of cup and balls game we saw with “defund.” She is being painfully clear. But fast forward to this month, when she wrote this Facebook post:

Yesterday my children and I were violently car jacked in the driveway of our home in Minneapolis. Four very young men, all carrying guns, beat me violently down to the ground in front of our kids. The young men held our neighbors up at gunpoint when they ran over and tried to help me. All in broad daylight.

Look at my face in the picture. This is the face of a mother who just had the sh$t beaten out of her. A mother whose only thought was, "let me run far enough and fight hard enough so that my kids have a chance to get away." This is the face of a mother who just listened to her four year old daughter screaming non-stop, her 7 year old son wailing for someone to come help because bad guys are murdering his Mama in the back yard, her neighbors screaming in outrage... all while being beaten with guns and kicks and fists.

I have a broken leg, deep lacerations on my head, bruising and cuts all over my body.

And I have rage.

These men knew what they were doing. I have NO DOUBT they have done this before. Yet they are still on OUR STREETS. Killing mothers. Giving babies psychological trauma that a lifetime of therapy cannot erase. With no hesitation and no remorse.

I'm now part of the statistics. I wasn't silent when I fought these men to save my life and my babies, and I won't be silent now. We need to get illegal guns off of our streets, catch these young people who are running wild creating chaos across our city and HOLD THEM IN CUSTODY AND PROSECUTE THEM.

PERIOD.

Look at my face. REMEMBER ME when you are thinking about supporting letting juveniles and young people out of custody to roam our streets instead of HOLDING THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS. […]

I genuinely feel awful for this poor woman. But I also think to myself, some folks actually have to touch fire to know it’s hot. Others are populist phonies willing to turn on a dime if they think the weathervane shifted. Still others never saw a baby they didn’t want to chuck out with the bathwater.

But let’s take a closer look at her home town, Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered and this whole thing started. This month, The Star Tribune reported:

Some days, the Minneapolis Police Department’s ranks are so thin that just four officers in a given precinct are expected to patrol wide swaths of the city during their shift.

There’s often no one available to work the front desk at police stations, so residents seeking assistance with a report are greeted by a locked door. Handmade signs instruct them to dial 911 in an emergency.

Staffing shortages plague law enforcement agencies nationwide […] but the problem is particularly acute in Minneapolis, where the police force continues to hemorrhage officers faster than it can replace them.

To give you a clearer sense of the problem, the Minneapolis Police Department had 900 sworn officers on its payroll in 2019. As of this month, it has 585, one of the lowest ratios of officers to citizens in any major American city. And if the trend continues, it may have fewer than 400 within a few years.

As a result, the MPD crime dashboard reports that over the past three years there were an average of 6,394 assaults per year, compared to 6,871 in 2023 so far, and 3,253 car thefts per year on average over the past three years compared to 6,019 in 2023 so far.

Looking at a crime map of the city, it looks like a Lite-Brite where some kid filled all the holes (that line through the middle is is E. Lake St., by the way).

This is not to say Minneapolis, or other cities, should just pour money into their police departments without reforming them or addressing systemic abuses. I shouldn’t have to spell that out, but sadly, I probably do. Yes, there is a lot of abuse in the MPD, In fact, the Department of Justice released a report this past June that found:

The department used force against Black people at 9 times the rate and against Native American people at 13.9 times the rate that it used force against White people.

[…] when compared to White people behaving in a similar manner in comparable circumstances, Black people in Minneapolis experience 24% more uses of force, 22% more searches and 37% more vehicle searches. 

There is also an ongoing investigation into the current MPD chief. These issues require our attention, but if we found systemic malpractice at hospitals in the city, what kind of fools would we be to then demand the abolition of hospitals?

Then there’s another problem. Recently, The New York Times ran a piece titled “How ‘Defund the Police’ Failed,” which opens:

Minneapolis’s Third Precinct police station, which was set ablaze and looted during the tumultuous days after Mr. Floyd’s death, remains abandoned.

And guess what, that station was on E. Lake Street, the one noted above. You have to think the hurting community it once served sure would love to have a local station if a bunch of entitled white activists hadn’t seen otherwise. The article later adds:

And the hollowed-out force has been a boon for private security companies, as more business have hired them. As of June, there were 181 private security companies in Minnesota licensed by the state, up from 155 in 2020.

The great irony is not only that these after-school anarchists made neighborhoods more dangerous for black and brown residents, but they cleared some Lebensraum for private security corporate interests. Well done, comrades.

And this is not even touching on the crisis in Seattle, where I live, or Oakland, where I just went to investigate the matter, or any number of other major cities whose black and brown communities have been done dirty by affluent white BLM virtue signalers.

But it’s really hard to expose a cup and balls scam. Even if you shake your head and walk away, or tell everyone who’s standing there what the trick of it is, once you leave, there will be another crowd of onlookers within five minutes.