Debunking Police Staffing Myths
The defund the police movement is designed to make law enforcement dysfunctional, not make society more functional.
Anti-police activists say that there is no correlation between police staffing and crime. Spoiler alert, they’re correct to a point, but sudden de-policing results in increased violence.
Taken as a whole, the United States has 2.5 police officers per 10,000 citizens. Big cities have a much higher ratio because they have more crime than small towns or rural areas, typically having about 17 cops per 10k. Anti-police activists are vehemently opposed to this quantity of police in urban areas. In fact, they are so focussed on the material resources given to city police that they actively oppose any effort to improve the quality of policing because reforms such as better training, supervision, and accountability cost money. They feel so strongly about starving big city departments of resources that they went to war to stop the construction of a public safety training center in Atlanta. The radical leftist narrative is as follows:
Black and brown people are overpoliced by racist cops. Police reform has been proven not to work and the only solution is to defund the police and use those resources to pay for social services. Once this is done the need for militarized police will be eliminated in favor of community-led public safety.
There’s a lot to unpack there. Here it goes:
The people advocating for defund the police are playing a game of bait and switch. To a moderate audience, they will say that they merely want to shift some resources in order to build a better social safety net in order to solve criminal justice problems more holistically. When addressing a far-left audience they will admit that the real goal is no police whatsoever, consequences be damned.
There are more police in areas that have more crime, which sometimes means more staffing in minority neighborhoods. To deny these areas police services in the name of “equity” would create more death and misery for those in need of protection, which is racist!
The United States is the wealthiest civilization in human history. We can afford to have a criminal justice system and a social safety net at the same time. To say otherwise is a false dichotomy.
The police in the US are not militarized. When I was in the Army I carried fragmentation grenades and belt-fed a machine gun. No cop has any of that stuff. We don’t have Predator drones, either.
When asked how society should deal with murderers, rapists, and robbers the activists are infuriatingly vague, giving buzzwords such as “restorative justice.” I’ve read every abolitionist book and essay I could find and have never seen a concrete plan to protect the public from violent people.
I built a spreadsheet showing the police staffing levels of the largest 20 cities in the United States along with the murder rate, average housing price, and poverty level. You can view and sort the spreadsheet at this link.
The results are all over the place. San Jose has barely any cops and still has low crime. Philadelphia has a small army of police and is a war zone. What is going on here? First of all, those two cities are outliers and are not useful for determining public safety policy for a typical city. Despite its enormous population, San Jose has more in common with a quiet suburb that a big city. Philadelphia is in a depopulation death loop that Rust Belt cities such as Detroit endured. In 1950 Philadelphia had two million citizens and it has declined to 1.6m. As a result, the fact that Philly has the highest officer ratio does not stop it from having the highest murder rate, the highest poverty rate, and the lowest home value.
One trend the spreadsheet shows me is that East Coast cities tend to have much higher staffing. West Coast departments have made a decision to focus on quality over quantity and tend to pay better. So cutting staffing at a West Coast PD is going to do much more damage because they're already such a lean operation.
Housing cost seems irrelevant: it is a function of geography. The Northeast and West Coast are expensive regardless of other factors. I do see a strong correlation between poverty and murder. One could say that this proves the radical leftists are correct: we only need to abolish the police in favor of welfare and we will achieve a stateless, classless society free of oppression. I think the solution is common sense moderation with both the rule of law and a social safety net that keeps people from becoming desperate without creating incentives to be dysfunctional. Even the most generous welfare states in Europe still have cops with guns!
The police staffing policy I advocate is that a city should have a good reason if they choose to deviate from the norm of 17 officers per 10,000 citizens. For example, New York City’s official population does not reflect the fact that it is such a major business and tourism destination so there is a vast daytime population of commuters and visitors.
The slogan of defund the police is a display of religious fervor, not a thoughtful policy suggestion, and should be treated as such. The evidence of the harm caused by radical de-policing is clear because we ran that experiment in 2020. Police officers left their jobs in big cities in droves and as a result, murders increased by 30%. The only rebuttal that the activists have to this fact is that this phenomenon was caused by COVID. But every other country in the world experienced the same pandemic and none of them had increased violence.