Assessing the Implications of Defunding the Police, and How to Reimagine Policing
April 4, 2022
I view policing as one of the most polarizing topics we have today, particularly because it elicits either pessimism or optimism, being largely contingent on the experiences of the community and one’s racial background. It tends to be the case among many racialized communities that law enforcement is perceived as the enemy. And if you understand the history of policing in these communities then you’ll understand that this perspective exists for good reason. But this isn’t unique to the Western context. In many developing nations the police are perceived (and have proven to be in some cases) as corrupt, greedy, and unempathetic. When people from these countries migrate West, these perspectives of the police don’t necessarily change simply because their environment has. They may recognize that things are different, but the deep mistrust and disdain for the police generally remains.
In this regard both the developed and developing world share this dislike for the police. However, in recent years this topic has drawn significant interest because of the relationship between Black people and the police. What we have seen are a series of demands for increased police accountability and heightened institutional measures to combat systemic discrimination. It’s my opinion that the most popular movement that has emerged out of these demands is the call to shift funding from police institutions to social services for mental health, education, and more. In 2020, this idea to shift funding took on the phrase, “Defund the police.”
Over the years, I’ve seen that efforts to lobby for defunding of the police have been met with resistance, giving many pause, particularly because of the use of one word in this phrase: defund. I recognize why. I understand that the use of the word defund presents these calls for change as a radical movement. I understand the denotation of the word ‘defund’ means to cease from providing funding to an institution, agency, or person. Intuitively, this is perceived as a threat on our liberal democracy.
For clarity, calls to defund the police aren’t about dissolving the police and removing their funding. The idea is to transfer funding from law enforcement institutions (which are believed to be operating on excess funds) to the social determinants of crime such as education, mental health, homelessness, and labour. The premise for this position is that by increasing the funding to these areas that the need for police intervention in sensitive situations will decrease. As such, it operates on the premise that directly treating the root causes of crime as opposed to using band-aids that treat symptoms and effects will decrease the need for the police.
In theory, this makes sense: by treating the causes there should be a reduced reliance on the police force, resultantly limiting their presence and use aggressive tactics in sensitive situations. I can say that I am a contextual supporter of this perspective. I’ve called myself a contextual supporter because we’ve somehow presented this as a blanket solution that ignores the details and incredible complexities that come with policing. We’ve somehow misunderstood how defunding the police will impact our most disadvantaged communities—communities where those screaming loudest to defund the police don’t have to live in, and couldn’t fathom the implications. I do believe that policing needs to be reimagined. But how we do this is extremely important. I use this piece to discuss the implications of defunding the police in an effort to push us to think about how to effectively and contextually reimagine the role of the police.
How Defunding the Police May Lead to Underfunded Precincts with Inadequate Training
In some respects, the use of this phrase has severe consequences by creating divided nations and disrupting possibilities of dialogue. I do think this phrase is a misnomer. But on the other hand, I think it has provided a voice to the voiceless, and access to platforms to that otherwise wouldn’t have been offered had it not been perceived as ‘radical’. Though this may be the case, I find it interesting as to what movements are categorized as radical. I’ve noticed in the past that there’s a tendency to create distinctions about movements based on the belief system or racial community involved. Movements perceived by the public and presented by the media as a norm-oriented movement tend to be framed as ‘revolutions’. Here, feelings of optimism and ideologies of what should be are associated with this term. Whereas movements that contradict the existing social order are conveyed as hostile or radical, often until the moral compasses of people are reoriented to understand that these movements are actually based in a desire for equity. What makes this even more interesting is that throughout history, the core values of these movements deemed as radical have become embraced decades later as inalienable rights for all humans. I say this to say real change, despite the foresight of our leaders, takes time.
Over the last two years, we’ve heard myriad arguments and defences to defunding the police. Of course, we’ve also heard arguments as to why this shouldn’t happen. But I want to objectively present the implications of these actions, the first of which is that defunding the police could lead to their underfunding, which may have significant repercussions. An article by Stephen Rushin and Roger Michalski discusses how in 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) investigated the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and concluded in a report that, “The CPD was engaged in a pattern or practice of unconstitutional misconduct in violation of federal law.” The DOJ indicated that CPD officers frequently used excessive force against suspects, failed to implement crisis-intervention or de-escalation techniques, relied on deficient accountability systems, and lacked adequate supervision. But the largest problem found was CPD’s failure to properly train its officers, resulting in a police force that was unprepared to lawfully and effectively serve and protect, and supervisors that failed to mentor or support constitutional policing by officers.
A key example of the inadequacies present in CPD training was the finding that they used a 35-year-old video to teach officers about the use of force. What makes this troubling is that the video was created before the U.S. Supreme Court issued some of the most important and influential decisions on the topic of policing, and further, that the video is legally outdated and inconsistent with the use-of-force standards indicated in the CPD’s own internal policies.
The DOJ in this case conducted interviews with a number of police officers. From these interviews they found that only 1 in 6 officers were somewhat able to explain the legal standard for the use of force, meaning that poor training and a lack of understanding led police officers to wrongly and unjustifiably use force in many cases. With this assessment the DOJ suggested that the poor training failed to eliminate low-performing recruits, resulting in many unqualified officers who didn’t have much formal training after they began policing in the streets. The DOJ also found that CPD’s physical training facilities were in terrible shape, lacking sufficient space to train the thousands of officers that used the facilities each year, and that they were too understaffed to meet the growing demand.
With these findings, you may have assumed what the recommendation to improve these issues was. It was the common remedy for situations of this magnitude: more money. The DOJ resolved that Chicago needed to greatly increase its investment in officer training. The city Mayor at the time announced that the city would spend nearly $95 million on a new training facility located in one of the most disadvantaged areas of Chicago to be shared by the police and fire departments, the location of which I consider insensitive. The facility was to have a shooting range, a designated space for officers to conduct simulated training scenarios, and a driving training course.
Being that this was slated to be built in one of Chicago’s most disadvantaged communities, it’s no secret that the public saw this as an undesirable response. The reaction to this announcement was immediate backlash as local activists criticized this plan and protested against the new facility. They argued that the investment in the police academy would take the limited resources the city had away from the local school system, mental health services, and community programs. Instead, they called to redirect the $95 million into Chicago’s most marginalized communities, suggesting that true community safety begins with fully funded schools and medical health centers, strong and widespread after-school and job-training programs, and social and economic justice. Though the phrase “defund the police” came to exist a few years later, the lobbying by local Chicago activists in this scenario is exactly what defunding the police is about. It was a call for investment in the communities, not the police. It’s the desire to treat the cause, and not the effects.
Situations like this have become common over the last two years as similarly, people have demanded a reallocation of funds to support community growth. In many cases, this has been the overarching demand, devoid of any context, because there’s an assumption that all police agencies are operating with excessive budgets. And many have this assumption because they are unaware of their local tax base or police budget. Yet, they have continued to demand for the defunding of the police without understanding how this will impact their region.
The issue here is that the context for a police agency’s operating budget greatly varies across municipalities and cities. I wish it was as simple as defunding all precincts. But the reality is that police agencies are a heterogenous group, ranging from small sheriff offices in small, rural communities, to large police departments in dense urban areas with millions of residents. Yes, some departments have an abundance of funding, allowing them to lavishly spend on expensive goods and services such as helicopters or foreign intelligence operations. But others, being small, or not having an elaborate budget, must operate modestly, at times, doing so at the cost of shutting down basic operations. So, the truth is that in the U.S. police agencies aren’t created or funded equally.
In part, this disparity exists because most police departments receive the bulk of their funding from local taxpayers, specifically local sales and property taxes, with smaller additions from state grants and federal programs. As a result, based on the local economy, the budget for a police agency could be small—as is the case in low-income communities who have the least funded police agencies, and by correlation, the worst police officers when measured by inadequate training and the inability to ensure they’re not violating constitutional rights.
What this also means is that the salaries of police officers across municipalities and counties dramatically varies. In fact, Southern states and adjacent regions tend to have significantly lower average salaries for police officers than many areas in the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, Southern Florida, and the Pacific region. But beyond regional differentiation, there is also notable intraregional differentiation, where high-salary counties are surrounded by many low-salary areas (around Oklahoma for example).
The Interconnectedness of Underfunded Precincts, Police Salary, and Police Misconduct
The second implication is related to salary. Researchers have found that lower salaries are linked to an increase in likelihood of officer misconduct. How? Salary differentials are usually a rough approximation of the ability of different counties to attract and retain talent, and implement disciplinary deterrents. The lower the salary, the less workers are attracted, and the lower the grade of talent received. Simultaneously, with the low pay and low applicant levels, agencies are unable to be truly selective in their choices, often picking whatever options are available which, often, is not the best. This can lead to troubling scenarios. Take for example, when an officer who was paid $10 per hour “accidently shot an innocent 13-year-old in the back,” the local sheriff didn’t seem to conduct a serious investigation, and ultimately chose not to fire the officer. When the sheriff was asked about the incident, his response was that they “have a hard time enough getting officers to patrol the town, let alone to have a separate part of their office set aside that just analyzes police-involved shootings.” The core challenge this precinct was faced with was a lack of funding, leading to a lack of accountability and the inability to recruit top talent. Agencies under similar circumstances face similar challenges. The result is the attraction of a certain ‘type’ of person—one who simply needs a job, doesn’t take pride in what they do, and is forced to risk their life for a significantly low pay in more dangerous neighbourhoods.
The disharmonious funding models across the country also impacts the employment of full-time and part-time officers, as law enforcement agencies may choose to fill out their staff with part-time officers to minimize the need to pay benefits and provide job security. This is dangerous as part-time officers may be unable to effectively handle situations during their shift in a similar fashion to well-paid, full-time officers. According to a police chief:
Oftentimes we have a part-timer, they get with other departments, and they work as many as three or four departments… It just beats them up—it really does. You’ve got to be really careful that you don’t get the tail end of a double or a triple shift, because you don’t have them at 100 percent.
What can be seen here is that lower funding forces agencies to compromise quality and effectiveness, placing police officers on the job who aren’t fully capable of being patient and rational. Ultimately, this detracts from civilian safety. The issue is that nearly every county uses some part-time officers. Notably the level of reliance differs across the country, but there are also stark differences across counties in close proximity, with some agencies relying heavily rely on part-timers.
Often, agencies that have the lowest average salaries are also the ones that rely most heavily on part-time officers. It’s also the case that agencies that rely on part-time officers tend to pay the least. This is exactly why the idea of defunding the police in all scenarios is an oversimplified approach, and the idea that the U.S. overinvests in police services is inaccurate. This claim may be true of larger departments, but many counties have limited funds to invest, causing them to only be able to hire part-time workers that receive extremely low wages in comparison to their peers in other counties and other industries.
How Defunding the Police Can Impact Police Talent Pools, Hiring Processes, and Can Lead to Corruption
The limited funds for many of these institutions is important as it impacts various elements of policing. For starters, departments are currently struggling to attract entry level applicants, and this is because limited financial resources means that communities will be unwilling to invest in officer salaries, benefits, and good working conditions. This causes these communities to lose their talent to not only other precincts in other jurisdictions, but completely different industries. This is demonstrated through the decline in applications for open policing jobs across the country. Consider that applications in Nashville dropped from 4,700 in 2010, to 1,900 in 2017; while the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) saw applications decline from 21,000 applicants per year to 13,000 in 2017. Further consider that overall, nearly 66 percent of police departments surveyed by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) reported a decline in applicants. And with respect to talent, departments have had a particularly hard time attracting racialized officers.
Another problem is police departments have struggled to keep officers in the profession. A PERF study found that 29 percent of individuals who left their policing jobs did so voluntarily after being in the force for less than a year, with another 40 percent leaving in less than 5 years. In this case, defunding the police as a blanket approach serves to weaken an already diluted police force.
"When you put any type of numbers on a police officer to perform, we are going to go for the most vulnerable... we’re going to those that have no vote, that have no power."
The consequences of an underfunded police force may lead to internal corruption. In many low-income and predominantly Black neighbourhoods where crime and drug activity are high, ethnographers have reported seeing and experiencing police officers virtually robbing drug dealers and gang members during traffic stops or off-the-book raids. You may be wondering how and why this is an issue the general public has to deal with, and agreeably it shouldn’t be. But in reality, this may become an unintended consequence, again, impacting our most marginalized communities.
This notion of corruption goes beyond stealing from drug dealers and gang members. In the past, some agencies may feel so pressured to increase funding that their attention shifted from reducing crime to revenue generating actions that violate constitutional rights and public policy. For example, in March of 2015, the DOJ released an extremely critical report after conducting an investigation into the Ferguson Police Department (FPD) in response to protests for Michael Brown. They found that FPD engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional misconduct that violated the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments. The DOJ also revealed significant evidence that when FPD faced major funding challenges, FPD and city leadership used the police department as a source to generate revenue. The method used consistently violated civil rights, specifically for Black residents. This was the case in 2010; the DOJ found that the financial director of Ferguson emailed the police chief stating that they were “looking at a substantial sales tax shortfall,” unless, “ticket writing ramps up significantly before the end of the year.” The police chief responded by placing officers on twelve-hour shifts with the intention to increase traffic enforcement during their shifts. With this response, the police aggressively enforced traffic codes in ways that seemed to be, at large, unrelated to public safety, and frequently founded in a legal interpretation with ulterior motives.
The officers in this scenario would regularly handout numerous citations for one violation, sometimes issuing 6-8, and as many as 14 in one instance for a single encounter. This created a toxic culture, pushing some officers to even hold competitions related to who could issue the most citations in a single encounter. Supervisors would push this culture further by posting lists showing each officers’ citation numbers with the underlying intention to motivate officers to hand out more tickets.
Ticket distribution then became an added assessment of officer ‘productivity’, and they used this to inform their promotion and disciplinary decisions. All of this had detrimental effects on the community. Take for example, a woman who received two parking tickets for one violation in 2007 which totaled $151 plus fees. Being unable to pay the ticket, over the next seven years she still owed Ferguson $541 despite having already paid $550 in fees and fines. It also led to multiple arrests and jail time on multiple occasions. In another case, an arrest warrant was issued for a 90-year-old man who failed to punctually pay five citations issued by the FPD in a single stop in 2013. Researchers indicated that these stories were very common with their review of court records that documented multiple instances with similar penalties for minor violations.
These corrupt and immoral tactics did in fact help the FPD overcome budget shortfalls; but it also eroded public trust, and disproportionately impacted Black residents. Between 2012 and 2014, Black citizens made up 90 percent of the citations despite representing 67 percent of the population in Ferguson. The police specifically targeted Black people knowing their inability to pay fines would bring in more money over time. According to the DOJ, there were 73 cases where officers issued four or more citations to a Black resident for a single incident; however, this was only done twice to a non-Black person.
Further consider that Black people were considerably more likely to be cited for highly discretionary offenses (events where a warning will suffice), and were more likely to be arrested for failure to pay municipal fines. Though the discussion here is about Ferguson, these occurrences happen everywhere. New York, for example, demonstrated how revenue-generating policing can lead to officers target racialized groups. A local investigation found that numerous officers felt pressured to increase summons and arrests to convey their productivity. One officer even stated the following:
When you go hunting, when you put any type of numbers on a police officer to perform, we are going to go for the most vulnerable. Of course, we’re going to go for the LGBT community, we’re going to the Black community, we’re going to those that have no vote, that have no power.
The Possibility of Increasing Crime
In recent years, literature has emerged suggesting that the police can influence crime rates. Stephen Levitt had findings in line with this, and suggested that with this correlation, police departments are likely to hire more officers if their community struggles with higher crime rates. However, a lack of funding leads to decrease in the supply of police officers, which, as a result, may increase crime rates. This means that underfunding police departments may contribute to fewer officers on the streets, leading to higher crime. This is supported by the rise in crime rates for 2020 when policing was scaled back in response to the defund the police movement (LINK, LINK, LINK). Knowing that Black and Latinx peoples in low-income communities bear the brunt effect of these crimes, this may mean more violent and property crime among low-income people. This was also the case when New York City experienced its highest crime rates in the early 1990s. During this time Black and Latinx neighborhoods experienced the brunt of this crime epidemic. Conversely, when crime dropped dramatically through 1990s and early 2000s, victimization among the Black and Latinx communities dropped more significantly than victimization among other racial groups. With neglect being a major sentiment in these communities with police under the current operating budget, I ask, wouldn’t this increase the feeling of neglect? The argument can be made that this will only be the case if we don’t focus on the social determinants of crime, and this is fair. But I am cautioning our ideologies so that we can think critically about how to proceed, specifically because major changes evoke major unintended consequences.
Beyond crime control, misconduct is an issue with defunding the police. Police misconduct disproportionately impacts racialized communities, which disrupts public trust and contributes to civilian injuries and deaths. Though decreasing the amount of police officers on the street may reduce the opportunities for police officers to engage in professional misconduct, again, it may increase crime based on the low presence of law enforcement. Some may support the decrease in police officers as their communities are already relatively safe communities. But in communities with high crime rates, many are have called for an increased police presence due to fear, gun violence, high crime, and gang and drug activity.
What’s clear is that there’s a disconnect between the people living in low-income and high-crime communities, and those outside who will never fully understand what it’s like to be in these communities. I’ve heard some say that the people in these communities are likely asking for greater police presence because they don’t understand the power of putting funds into institutions with socio-economic impact. But why would this foresight be a concern for the people that are scared to leave their house after 8 p.m.? And why should we act as if we know what’s best for the community?
This desire to increase the police presence among people in high-crime neighbourhoods isn’t new. This desire was also the case with the 1994 Crime-Bill. I know this bill is controversial (I won’t unpack why and its impact here); nonetheless, 58 percent of African Americans supported the crime bill, and most Black mayors who had record highs of violent crime in their cities, supported it as well. And why? Because violent crime working in concert with crack cocaine was destroying inner-cities and Black communities. At the time, this decision wasn’t controversial at all.
The Possibility of Increasing Police Misconduct and Creating Greater Safety Disparities Between Income Classes
In terms of misconduct, in cases where police are found to use excessive force and are policing in a discriminatory fashion, the DOJ often recommends improved training, new technology for assessments, and procedural changes. These remedies have substantial costs, with previous estimates scaling between tens to hundreds of millions of dollars based on the size of the department and complexity of the agreement. Here, defunding the police may lead to a lack of sufficient training, subsequently perpetuating bad behaviour.
The relationship between misconduct and funding is also tied to union contracts. Union contracts are problematic as disciplinary procedures for professional misconduct are negotiated in police contracts. Evidence from Campaign Zero indicates that union contracts contain many potentially problematic clauses that can disrupt legitimate internal investigations into officer misconduct. This includes, delays in interrogations, access to information before interrogation, purging disciplinary files, and blocking the consideration of anonymous civilian complaints. It’s reported from many cities that jurisdictions are often forced into offering protections from disciplinary investigations and punishments, partially because they can’t afford to meet officer demands for higher salaries and better benefits. Defunding in this context could mean even lower police salaries, decreased benefits, and stronger protections for police officers.
In scenarios where a defunded police department leads to underfunding, underfunded departments may lower their barriers to entry and standards for employment. The result of this is poor departments hiring officers that would be unemployable by other precincts due to prior misconduct. In a study, researchers evaluated around 77,000 full-time police officers employed by the approximately 500 law enforcement agencies in Florida. The researchers found that, in any given year, around four percent of all police officers in the state were previously fired from another agency. It appears that these wandering officers have some difficulty finding another policing position with other agencies; nonetheless, these police officers often find their new jobs at smaller agencies with less resources, or, in municipalities with larger racialized communities. It’s these wandering officers that are most likely to reoffend in comparison to their peers. In Florida, for example, an officer fired by another agency is nearly twice as likely to be fired from the next employer for misconduct in comparison to other officers in similar situations.
Here, if underfunding or defunding a precinct reduces the ability of that department to compete with nearby agencies in terms of compensation or benefits, this may cause the agency to hire more unqualified or wandering officers with records of misconduct and higher reoffence chances. Examples of this problem can be taken from the Chicago suburb of Dolton, Illinois. An NPR investigation revealed that some precincts in Chicago suburbs face such severe funding shortages that they can’t pay for officer training, afford to properly investigate officer shootings, fire problematic police officers, and can only afford to pay officers the equivalent of “fast-food wages.”
In Dolton, the department had an oddly large number of officer-involved shootings for such a small department serving a community of 22,000 residents. In four separate shootings, one officer killed a man, and wounded the three others. In another case, an officer who worked for the Dolton police was suspended by another department for a similar shooting, and fired by another department for misconduct, yet was able to land a position in this small community. In most circumstances this troublesome background would eliminate this officer from most policing jobs; but for cities and communities with severe funding shortages, this background makes the officer affordable. This is largely because low-income communities with small policing budgets can’t afford the cost (approximately $140,000) to hire, train, and pay a new hire during their first year on the job.
In reality, underfunded agencies are often left with limited options, being forced to pay their officers extremely low salaries—comparable to entry-level employees at Walmart—and operate without adequate training. There’s also the challenge that some states, like Illinois, don’t permit the decertification of officers for professional misconduct. To be decertified in Illinois, an officer must be convicted of a felony or multiple misdemeanour offenses. This differs from many other states where the simple act of professional misconduct—absent a criminal conviction at large—is enough to be decertified. Consequently, in a state like Illinois, these wandering and bad police officers may remain employed, primarily because the local economy disallows for the hiring of more qualified officers. In this light, defunding the police may lose the only qualified officers in these departments to other agencies or even industries that pay more and have better working conditions. These defunded departments will ultimately be left to hire from a diluted pool of applicants that have been proven to be unfit for service.
For wealthier communities, defunding the police may prompt private policing. Often, when municipalities fail to adequately invest in public police, wealthy residents cover the gap with investments in private security services. In comparison, low-income residents, and primarily communities of colour, are underserved. New Orleans, for example, invested in private security when faced with budget shortfalls. But this transition from public to private policing can increase inequality, with wealthy residents having stronger police forces by bridging funding gaps, and underfunded communities being less safe due to decreased qualified police presence.
A Need to Critically Assess How to Reimagine Policing
Defunding the police and reimaging policing at large is certainly an important conversation that needs to be had. It’s my opinion that we should, to some extent, defund the police; but doing so must be a context and evidence-based assessment that ensures we limit the impact of unintended consequences. This is important because low-income communities, and most often Black communities, bear the brunt of these negative effects. Certainly, more funding should go towards community development programs, labour, and education; and I say this because targeting the causes as opposed to the effects of crime may decrease the incentive to offend, or better the immediate conditions of low-income people.
Nonetheless, defunding the police can’t simply be applied as a blanket solution. Seeing that professional misconduct and unconstitutional police practices are tied to the funding police precincts receive, and that some precincts—especially in low-income and predominantly Black communities—are already underfunded, merely defunding may exacerbate already bad conditions. Although it’s not what we want to hear, funding enables better training, allows for higher salaries, improves the talent pool selection, and can lead to better policing. This isn’t a suggestion that the police should get more funding from the government. But in addition to increasing funding to the roots of crime, reimagining police funding in a manner by which excess funds can be redistributed to underfunded precincts to increase equality in pay and services is certainly one of the steps that should be taken in improving police practices.
To achieve this, the robin hood recapture tax blueprint may be an excellent method to use as guidance. In saying all of this, I want to ensure that I emphasize that training is only one part of this. Police professional misconduct merely speaks to the character of these police officers, and when it comes to shooting unarmed people, I find it troubling to simply blame the shooting on the lack of training. In many situations this excuse is a cowardly evasion of reality, primarily because for every scenario where the police pulled the trigger in an environment where there was no imminent threat, there are numerous situations where police with the same training didn’t pull the trigger, and many situations where police were in worse situations and still didn’t shoot. Training is important, but we shouldn’t relinquish accountability of police officers, and believe that they are machines, defunct of compassion and humanity. Especially if there are significant counterfactuals for the exact same situations.
More must be done. We should reimagine policing, but defunding isn’t applicable in every case. My hope is that this adds to the discussion on policing, and conveys the consequences related to defunding precincts. Although this is contextually related to the U.S., the logic follows in any environment, this being that defunding should be context specific, and as such, we must think critically as to how we improve our policing services.
Interested in learning more? Check out these resources related to the subject:
Suggested Readings:
- Gang Leader for a Day by Sudhir Venhatesh
- Police Funding by Stephen Rushin and Roger Michalski
- Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime by Steven D. Levitt