Yes, ‘Defund the Police’ Actually Happened

R ather than reckon with the failures of the pervasive anti–law enforcement policies that were implemented in the wake of summer 2020, many advocates of criminal-justice reform have continually attempted to rewrite the story. The latest iteration of this is a new video posted by Hannah Cox and Brad Polumbo, co-founders of the libertarian “Based Politics” outfit, ostensibly dedicated to “debunking” Ben Shapiro’s criticisms of the criminal-justice-reform movement. In the video, responding to Shapiro’s claim that “2020 was the year of . . . defund the police,” Polumbo queries: “Also, the whole defund the police thing — did that actually happen? It was a lot of talk, but . . .” To that, Cox responds:

Nobody ever defunded the police. Like, they’re going to consistently try to say, ‘Oh, see, there’s more violent crime over the past two years because police got defunded.’ No they didn’t. No they didn’t. There was only ever, maybe, less than five departments that had any funding taken away, it was quickly reinstated, and actually, I’ve done some research that shows the police unions as a whole used the defund movement to actually come in and lobby for pay increases, so the vast majority of departments actually got an increase in funds.

Cox posted the clip of that exchange on Twitter, with the caption: “The right wants to paint the entire justice reform movement as part of a move to defund the police. Not only was the defund movement always fringe though, it also never happened. In fact, most departments got pay increases.”

Almost every word of this is incorrect.

As I see it, Cox’s argument makes three distinct claims: The “defund the police” movement was fringe and irrelevant to mainstream criminal-justice-reform discourse; its ambitions were never implemented as actual policy; and in fact, most police departments received pay increases — i.e., the opposite of defunding. The third claim is highly misleading. The first two are flat-out false.

Let’s take a look at Cox’s first claim. Defund the police was only fringe if “fringe” means advocated in the Opinion section of the nation’s paper of record, endorsed by top-billing celebrities from John Legend to Natalie Portman, and vocally supported by multiple sitting members of Congress:

The retort that one often encounters to this is that progressives such as AOC and Bush don’t represent the mainstream of the Democratic Party. That may or may not be true on other issues, but — contrary to Cox’s attempt to memory-hole the movement as “fringe” — defunding the police had a deep bench of support among Democratic Party functionaries and activists during summer 2020. “Interviews with 54 Democratic National Committee members, convention superdelegates and members of a criminal justice task force convened by Mr. Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders found a near-unanimous sentiment that local governments should redirect more money toward social services, education and mental health agencies” and “drastically rethink the priorities surrounding law enforcement,” the New York Times reported in a June 2020 piece titled “These Top Democrats Go Further Than Biden on Diverting Police Funds.” While “63 percent of registered voters oppose spending less money on the police,” the Times reported, “among Mr. Biden’s supporters, 55 percent favor reducing the amount of resources spent on law enforcement.” That’s a far cry from any reasonable definition of “fringe.”

What’s more, the movement was influential enough that even many moderate Democrats felt — at least for a time — unable to muster anything other than the most reticent of disavowals. (Many of those moderates would later find their voice with more-forceful condemnations, but only after the political consequences of the movement became impossible to ignore). Representative Karen Bass (D., Calif.), chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, demurred by worrying that the phrase could “be used as a distraction,” while hastening to add that she supported the “intent” behind the message. The issue, according to many ostensible moderates in the Democratic caucus, was simply that the language of the phrase was too charged: “If you’re talking about reallocating resources, say that,” House majority whip Jim Clyburn (D., S.C.) told the Washington Post in June 2020. “If you mean reimagining policing, say that. If you’re going to reform policing, say that.” But the underlying premise of defunding the police — that the entire institution of American policing functioned to keep down black people — was one that Clyburn appeared to share: One of the “pillars” of “our judicial system, our law enforcement system, our police practices,” he said, is “holding up black experiences of people who came to this country against their will — chain and shackles and enslaved. The whole law enforcement and policing system has been established to preserve that phenomenon. We all know that.”

Cox’s second claim — that defunding “never happened” and/or “less than five departments that had any funding taken away” — is also empirically false. It’s not clear what her source is for the claim that budget-slashing occurred in “less than five departments.” In reality, many of America’s biggest cities cut police budgets amid the fervor of anti-police sentiment that accompanied the Black Lives Matter protests. According to an August 2020 article in Forbes, “at least 13 U.S. cities have cut funding from police department budgets or decreased officer numbers with several more in the process amid a national reckoning over systemic racism and police brutality.” That included the nation’s two biggest cities — New York and Los Angeles — as well as Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and a number of others. A report published eight months later in the Guardian bumped that estimate up to “more than 20 major cities” that had “reduced police budgets in some form,” totaling out at some $870 million in cut funds.

Cox’s third claim — that many police departments ended up receiving pay increases in the wake of Black Lives Matter — is true, to an extent, in a vacuum. But when deployed as a counterpoint to the idea that “defund the police” was ever a political reality, it’s enormously misleading. It’s true that in the two years following summer 2020, many cities re-funded their police departments, and some even added extra benefits and bonuses in an attempt to incentivize new hires. But all that only happened against the backdrop of record-breaking homicide spikes in many of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, and a concurrent crisis of early retirements and hiring deficits in many police departments — all of which can be linked to the budget-slashing and broader atmosphere of anti-police sentiment that accompanied the Black Lives Matter protests. As I wrote of the situation in my hometown of Portland, Ore.:

In the burst of utopian ideological fervor that swept the city in 2020, Portland slashed its police budget by $15 million, disbanded three of its units — public-school policing, TriMet (the commuter bus and rail system) policing, and the Gun Violence Reduction Team — and cut eight of its Special Emergency Reaction Team positions. When the predictable consequences of those policies led to mass resignations in the Portland Police Bureau, the city government scrambled to restore the funds it had cut a year before, but the change of heart was too little, too late. Amid its worst staffing shortage in decades, PPB can no longer find officers to hire; Portland currently has fewer cops on the street than at any point in the last three decades. In an exit interview, one of the countless officers leaving the city put it poignantly: “The only difference between PPB and the Titanic? Deck chairs and a band.”

In other words, the rise in police salaries and benefits was a response to the failures of police-defunding policies — not proof that defunding never happened. Taken in context, then, Cox’s correct claim that police salaries rose in many places actually undermines the fundamental premise of her argument. The fact that many police departments have scrambled to re-fund their police departments, and throw more benefits on top of what they previously offered, does not mean that they did not defund the police in the first place. Quite the opposite, in fact. If proponents of criminal-justice reform want to be taken seriously, they will need to reckon with the failures of the policies advocated by their radical flank, rather than wave away those policies as irrelevant or nonexistent.