(Some of) The Issues

The Defund Movement is NOT responsible for the uptick in violence.

 

There has been a dangerous and false narrative circulating that the defund movement is responsible for an uptick in community violence. This ignores important key facts.

  • No layoffs have yet occurred due to a decrease in SPD funding. All of the reductions in staffing are due to officer attrition, and SPD’s 2021 staffing plan is fully funded. Last year’s reductions to SPD’s personnel budget eliminated only vacant positions.

  • Politicians and pundits are conflating homicide, violence & crime — homicides have gone up, other forms of violence have gone down.

  • Crime statistics are collected and reported by cops. They can be manipulated for public relation purposes. Fearmongering using these data is an age-old tactic whenever police legitimacy, power, or resources are challenged.

  • The recent trends are national phenomena, taking place across major cities in the US. They are occurring equally in cities that have adopted budget cuts and those that have not.

  • There has been a small but significant increase in homicide since 2014, indicating that this is a trend that started before the summer 2020 protests.

  • We don’t know exactly why this increase in homicides is happening, but rates of homicide tend to be highest where there is socio-economic disparity. Likely the increased violence is a combination of factors related to increased socio-economic disparities made greater in the wake of a pandemic, increases in firearm sales, the closure of community institutions, and the onset of summer, which does tend to see increased violent crime.

We have seen the results of a “tough on crime” approach in the 1990s that led to mass incarceration and biased policing. According to a recent report, SPD subjects Black people to force at a per capita rate more than seven times the per capita rate for white people. We do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past. 

We all want safe communities. There is a better way. The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform released a report that concluded 49% of 9-1-1 calls could be directed out of SPD. Community violence prevention programs are highly effective at reducing violent crime and have been shown to reduce violent crime by up to 60%. Unfortunately, as police budgets have grown, funding for community resources that would address the root causes of harm and actually prevent violence from occurring in the first place are under-resourced. 

The solution to greater public safety and reduction in both police and community violence is to shift funding from law enforcement agencies to proven community responses.