Defunding the Police
Discussion
The 2021 Aftermath
Micha Narberhouse:
"According to a recent poll in Minneapolis — the city where George Floyd was killed and his murderer was convicted a few months ago — three quarters of black people in the city oppose the idea of defunding the police. National polls show a similar picture.
Since the George Floyd protests the homicide rate has soared across the United States. In 2020 the increase was 30%. While there are likely a number of reasons for this trend, the “defund the police” movement appears to have played an important role. In the wake of the George Floyd protests, more than 20 major American cities — including San Francisco, Portland, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia and Baltimore — cut their police budgets by a total of $870 million, according to the Guardian. Many cities transferred much of these budget cuts to investments in community services, mental health programmes and “community-based safety strategies”. Following the protests against George Floyd, the police in major US cities also held back on arrests. According to Jerry Ratcliffe, a professor of criminal justice, the police abruptly adopted a hands-off approach after the protests because they received signals explicitly through management decisions or implicitly through social media and the community.
Given that approximately 55% of all homicide victims in the United States are black, 90% of whom are murdered by other black people, these trends are particularly troubling for black Americans.
The “defund the police” movement has most likely done more harm than good for the people it was supposed to help. Believing that black communities will be safer if police budgets are cut significantly and instead invested in mental health and community services has always been a utopian idea with little chance of success. This is not to say that building closer relationships and trust between local police and communities is not a good idea. However, this has little to do with “defunding the police” as Black Lives Matter meant it and as most people, including city governments, understood it. Instead, one conclusion from the murder of George Floyd could have been to significantly increase funding for the police to invest in training, pay police officers better and recruit more qualified personnel. Many American cities have now realised this. Budgets for policing are being increased again.
“Defund the police” is a divisive slogan that, instead of improving the lives of black Americans, has backfired and likely contributed to more black Americans being murdered over the past 18 months. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Action Aid and many other NGOs were blinded by intersectional ideology when they endorsed the slogan."
(https://mnarberhaus.medium.com/ngos-will-fail-if-they-succumb-to-extreme-ideology-7ac71621e2e7)