Cities Are "Re-Funding" the Police. NewsWire

NewsWire: 11/12/21

• Amid rising levels of violent crime, police departments around the country are getting their funding back. This comes as surveys show a sharp rise in demand for increased police spending. (The New York Times)
• NH: Last year, major cities like Los Angeles, New York City, Dallas, Chicago, and Austin cut police funding. Now they’re getting much of that money back--and in some cases, a lot more than they had before.
• With violent crime surging nationally (see “FBI Releases Official 2020 Crime Report”) and officers resigning in droves (see “Police Resignations Surge as Crime Becomes Hot New Campaign Issue”), the energy that powered the “defund” movement has shifted into reverse gear. According to a recent Pew poll, 47% of Americans say that spending on policing in their area should be increased, up from 31% in June 2020. That includes 21% who say it should be increased “a lot,” up from 11%. The share who support reducing police spending is down 10 percentage points (pp), from 25% to 15%.

• Support for reduced spending has fallen the most among black adults (-19 pp) and Democrats (-16 pp). These groups are still the most likely to support reduced spending, but by much smaller margins than before.
• This attitude was very much evident at the voting booth last week. Candidates who emphasized more or reformed policing, including NYC’s Eric Adams and Seattle’s Bruce Harrell, sailed to victory. Meanwhile, voters in Minneapolis rejected a proposal that would have replaced the police department with a "department of public safety." They also reelected Mayor Jacob Frey, who favors reform over defunding.
• This said, not all pro-policing measures were successful. Voters in Austin, for instance, soundly rejected a ballot measure to hire hundreds of new police officers--even though earlier this year the city council reversed budget cuts made in 2020 and proceeded to raise the police department’s budget to record levels with nary a protest.
• The big takeaway? We predicted earlier this summer that, so long as crime keeps rising, attitudes about policing will shift towards wanting more instead of less. Calls to reform the police are resonating, but defunding has become a third rail that all but the most liberal Democrats won’t touch. The fact that black and Hispanic Democrats are more supportive than white Democrats of increasing police funding, as shown in Pew’s recent poll, points to the disconnect between what many of its most progressive voices are saying and the realities on the ground. 

• A new wave of left-wing political analysts, such as David Shor, are taking progressives to task for ignoring public opinion about unpopular policy ideas to their detriment. He has argued that defunding was one of the key issues that drove down support for Biden among Hispanic voters in 2020.