Who will protect us if we defund the police?
Did you know? Police only spend about 4% of their time handling violent crime? Most states spend more money per inmate than per student. Almost half of released prisoners are back in prison within 3 years.
Defunding the police doesn’t mean that anarchy reigns and no one will stop thieves and murderers. Many people believe that the police are here to keep your family safe, but what police actually do is catch criminals. An alternative is to reduce crime by addressing the root causes of crime. “Defund the police” means to divert money from police and prisons to more cost-effective solutions like education and mental health care that can actually reduce crime, thus avoiding the social, emotional, and financial costs of crime altogether. However, to do this effectively, we first have to understand how people become criminals.
Imagine there’s a girl named Alexis. She is 16, the youngest of four, and gets good grades. One night, she is out at a park with friends. They are talking and laughing loudly when a police car pulls up. Two policemen tell the teens to step to the side of their car and submit to a search. Incredulous, the kids refuse. The police insist, telling them that they are unlawfully violating park curfew, and refuse to let them leave. As the situation escalates, the police arrest them, additionally charging them with disturbing the peace and refusal to disperse. Between the cost of the bail bond, the fines, and the court fees, Alexis’s family owes almost $2000, and she now has a juvenile record. Because of this incident, she fights a lot with her mother. Rebelling, she begins skipping school and dating a “bad boy.” One day while in his car, they run into his friends, who jump in his car and tell him to drive. It turns out the friends have just robbed someone at gunpoint, and the police soon stop their car and arrest everyone.
Because Alexis has a juvenile record and is now 18 years old, they threaten to prosecute her to the fullest extent, with a maximum sentence of 19 years for aiding and abetting an armed robbery. Scared, she caves to pressure to plead guilty to lesser charges, and is sentenced to 6 years in a prison. Not defeated, she works hard in prison, gets her high school diploma, and is released a year early for good behavior.
Upon release, she is 23. With only a high school degree and a criminal record, she can only take a low-paying job. After some months, she is hospitalized with the flu. Due to lacking medical insurance coverage and high bills, she falls behind on rent. She receives notice of eviction and eventually finds the sheriff throwing all her things onto the sidewalk, after which she is forced to live out of her car. She continues working but suffers from anxiety, and begins taking strong sleeping pills to help her sleep. She is eventually picked up by the police for illegally sleeping in her car. When they find her, she is heavily sedated and confused, and can’t answer their questions. When she doesn’t promptly comply with their order to get out of the car, they pull her out roughly. She struggles, hitting one of the policemen with a bottle and cutting him. When Alexis appears in court, the police officer claims she pointed a gun at him. The judge sees a homeless drug user with a criminal record and doesn’t question this claim, and she is sent back to prison for another 4 years.
At this point, Alexis has fallen through the gaps in our social safety net into a place inhabited by people who are often homeless, drug users, formerly incarcerated, or mentally ill. Each of these problems is mutually reinforcing, so manifesting any one of them is a stumble that can send you into this inescapable abyss. Alexis feels abused and abandoned by the world. She has lost all hope of leading a normal life. When released, she turns to harder drugs and more serious crimes.
Few people want to be here, and as much as it is a tragedy for people caught in this cycle, it is also an expensive burden on our society. Since Alexis’s first arrest, she has been consuming police and judicial resources, and taxpayers have been footing the bill. From the costs of housing and feeding inmates to the payroll for guards and parole officers, these are the costs of a service no one wants to be a customer of, and no one wants to fund. Yet we continue to throw more and more people into this abyss, incurring larger and larger financial costs.
Prevention measures
Alexis is fictional, but in poor minority communities, her story is common and represents many missed opportunities for society to do better. If the police, who have great discretion to help or to punish, had simply chosen to give Alexis a warning at the park or when sleeping in the car, her story wouldn’t have ended like this. We could also have sent Alexis to a counselor instead of to prison after the robbery, or provided her with health insurance when she had the flu, or helped her retain her housing when she was evicted, or sent her to mental health or drug treatment when she was picked up when homeless. If any one of these had happened, she might still have had a stable, fulfilling life. We need to give children a better start to life, and provide teens and adults with a better safety net, in order to break the cycle and prevent people and their children from falling into that inescapable abyss. Not only is it the right thing to do, it is also the most financially sound thing to do.
Many studies have shown that building a social safety net can reduce crime. One study found that every dollar invested in drug treatment yields $12 of savings in reducing future crime and health care expenses. Another found that just a 1% increase in graduation rates would lead to an estimated $338 million dollars in savings on corrections costs ($1.4 billion if you account for the cost to victims). Together, these studies show that investing in preventative care can effectively reduce crime while saving money.
Yet we continue to increase police and prison budgets at the expense of services like education. Most states spend more money per inmate than per student.
The police have become our “solution” to bad schools, poverty, inadequate healthcare, homelessness, mental illness, and drug abuse, even though police lack the tools and training to resolve these problems. And unlike paramedics and social workers, police are sanctioned to use violence against us. This is why a person with an untreated mental health issue is 16 times more likely to be killed by police than other members of the community. The story doesn’t end with their deaths. Their families suffer not only grief, but also the loss of a parent and breadwinner. The children raised by the remaining single parent will have an even higher chance of falling into the cycle of poverty and crime.
Not only that, sending people to prison doesn’t make us safer. The justice system is not at all effective at rehabilitation and reintegration. Almost half of released prisoners are back in prison within 3 years. The justice system is a revolving door that people like Alexis get stuck in, and locking them up doesn’t keep us safe.
But these solutions are slow! What about our safety in the meantime?
Yes, some of these preventative measures will take time to have an effect on crime rates. However, we could begin shifting the money in ways that should have an immediate, positive impact. We could begin by having other government staff, such as social workers or traffic patrollers, handle some of the police’s responsibilities — patrolling schools, dealing with homelessness, traffic infractions, and noise complaints. Police actually only spend about 4% of their time handling violent crime. Much of the remaining time is a poor use of police resources that could be better addressed by members of other departments with more suitable training and equipment. We could also make police personally responsible for paying a percentage of fees from lawsuits against them, which should reduce fees and unneeded violence (in 2019, false arrests, civil rights violations, and excessive force claims cost over $300M across the US). By shifting these initial savings to proven alternatives like education and mental health treatment, we can gradually reduce crime, creating more savings to funnel into more preventative care.
OK, what can I do?
What we’re doing now is like fighting a war without first trying diplomacy, or dealing with coronavirus by allocating more money to ventilators and less to masks. We let chances at early intervention pass by, allowing problems to worsen until we are forced to handle them with the most urgent and severe methods. There is only so much money in the budget, so we have to make a choice. Do we deal with crime by spending more and more money on police and prisons, or do we allocate that money towards measures that actually reduce crime and leave people more educated, healthy, and able to contribute to the economy?
What you can do is vote and donate.
Support better funding for education, mental health and drug abuse treatments, health insurance for all, affordable housing, and other initiatives that are proven to improve outcomes and decrease crime.
Support police reforms, smaller police budgets, diversion programs that redirect people from prison into treatment, “unbundling” the police and redistributing their duties to social workers and other government staff, ending cash bail, and electing reform prosecutors who will hold police accountable.
Vote for local representatives who support the above reforms!
Use your voice and your money!
Please share this article to encourage more people to support these reforms!
