As America has been assailed by the deadly COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been seeing a surge of another murderous phenomenon. Killings, due primarily to gun violence, rose around 25% in 2020, and the early months of 2021 have shown similar trends. Much of the rhetoric around the increase in gun violence and crime has focused on the movement to “Defund the Police” as the cause. The proposed idea states that Black Lives Matter protests were successful in taking away resources from departments around the country as well as dispiriting the police, making them a less effective method of crime prevention. This is not true, but is rather an excuse to villainize the Black Lives Matter movement.
Crime in general has not increased over the past year. Homicides have increased, but robberies, rape, larceny, and many other categories of crime have actually seen significant decreases. The reason for this very specific increase in homicide has been difficult to pinpoint. Some have suggested it is due to widespread closings of community-based violence prevention programs, while other research has stated that the historic rise in gun sales in 2020 correlated heavily with the rise in gun violence.
In response to the increase in violent crime, Biden released a plan to increase funding to police departments around the country. Richard Rosenfeld, the criminologist upon whose research Biden’s plan was based, echoed the sentiment that BLM probably isn’t the reason for the increase in violent crime, explaining that if that was the case, there would have been widespread increases in crime rather than a very specific increase in gun violence. He further stated in an interview with the HPR that preliminary research about the increase in gun purchases was a more viable explanation for the increase. Overall, Rosenfield stressed that the increase in homicides was a complicated issue which could not be explained by any one specific reason.
Although Biden hasn’t commented on the reason for the increase in homicides, he has pinpointed a plan to halt these increases. He explained the need to invest in the police rather than pull away from the institution, diverging from other left-leaning advocates. Biden’s new plan calls for increased funding to repopulate police departments with officers at pre-pandemic levels, trying to balance aspects of police reform as well as attempting to appeal to conservatives’ reverence for the police. His current proposal would allow local governments to utilize COVID-19 relief funds to hire additional police officers and support community-based anti-violence groups such as summer work for young people and at-risk youth intervention programs. The plan specifies that big cities that have particularly intense issues with gun violence can hire more officers than they had before COVID-19.
Biden’s new plan is in accordance with his general outlook on policing, as he has historically been a strong supporter of the police since the 1994 crime bill. He attempts to walk a very careful balance advocating for the police while also considering liberal reform initiatives. National police organizations still widely support conservative alternatives, believing that Biden isn’t addressing the actual issues that the police are dealing with — widespread demoralization and negative attitudes towards the police throughout the country. Biden is trying to appeal to moderate Democrats and Republicans to support both police reform while still upholding the institution of policing as is, but he is unfortunately appeasing neither side. Contrary to Biden’s beliefs and his plan, increasing police funding is counterproductive.
Nearly 1 million people in the United States experience the threat or use of force by police annually, and they are disproportionately Black and Latinx. The police tend to play a lot of roles within the context of American society: They regulate traffic, deal with mental health issues, handle domestic and sexual violence calls, solve personal disputes within communities, police schools, manage student disciplinary action, resolve drug charges, and investigate murders. American police are asked to put on so many hats, many of which they are not equipped to handle — which ends up bringing guns and weapons into situations that generally don’t require them.
The median police recruit trains in firearms for over 58 hours while receiving only eight hours of de-escalation training. As a result, it’s more than likely that a situation that someone could simply solve without a firearm ends in violence because the police got involved. In an interview with the HPR, Alex Vitale, sociology professor and abolitionist coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, stated that “police are violence workers,” and mentioned that giving them more money and creating more instances in which they have direct contact with civilians increases the chances of violence.
This is not a new phenomenon, argues Paige Fernandez, Policing Policy Advisor in the ACLU’s National Political Advocacy Department — it’s simply a continuation of historical prejudices in the system. Fernandez spoke on the history of policing in America in an interview with HPR, explaining that “there’s no way to separate police from White supremacy here, there is no way to separate policing from slavery. It’s just impossible … The first-ever police department was a slave patrol, and you can’t suddenly undo the racism in that system.”
Putting people within the carceral system can be a violent act within itself, as the carceral system can have profound impacts on people’s futures and chances for job opportunities. Prison populations as compared to the general population have much higher rates of infectious diseases, and prisons concentrate those with mental illnesses in an institution without a viable support system. Vitale told the HPR, “Even a totally proper, procedurally just legal arrest for low-level drug possession or other buyer crimes puts people into the criminal justice system that we know has long-term harmful consequences for them … It affects their overall lifetime earnings. It affects their life expectancy, and it has harmful effects on their families.”
Conservatives like Andrew Lelling, former U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, disagree about the harmful impact of the police, instead telling HPR in an interview that “what the ‘defund the police’ movement has done beyond calling for taking actual dollars away from the police is that it has severely demoralized police departments across the country.” Lelling looked favorably upon Biden’s new plan to help better police morale and fight the increases in violent crime, and he has called for more actions by liberals that would outwardly support the police.
Lelling also called for the demilitarization of the police as well as training to deal with situations that involve mental health. As Lelling explains, the police are likely to be ill-prepared to handle mental health situations, which leads to deadly outcomes. Indeed, studies have shown that people with mental health issues are 16 times more likely to be killed when confronted by the police. Criminologist Richard Rosenfeld supported some of these ideas as well, calling for policymakers to “increase accountability of police officers for documented instances of misconduct” and create separate agencies to handle issues regarding homelessness and drug overdoses. Notably, Lelling and Rosenfield called for these reforms while simultaneously espousing the benefits of the police for reducing violent crime, similar to how many conservatives and moderates like Biden approach issues of policing.
Such reforms aren’t enough to deal with the harmful impacts perpetuated by such an institution. Many of these situations the police currently handle need specific unarmed task forces to deal with these issues in a peaceful and targeted way. Mental health calls shouldn’t be handled by the police, but rather by psychiatric nurses that can adequately address could-be victims of police violence. One in 6.5 million traffic stops end in death for a police officer — which is only around six times higher than the chance one will get hit by lightning in a given year — yet armed police officers are trained to believe each traffic stop could be the end. Consequently, traffic enforcement, one of the leading instances of police violence, needs to be handled by unarmed traffic enforcers and automated traffic enforcement systems. Social disturbances can be dealt with by social workers or mediators, not armed police officers.
Another, more effective way to stop violent crime is to invest in social programs that address the root causes of crime. Vitale powerfully explained the reason police are being utilized so heavily, arguing that “they have unleashed unregulated states and neoliberal capitalism that has destroyed communities that has created a widespread economic precarity that has denied people access to homes, incomes, health care.”
We need to increase government funding to alleviate poverty, addiction, homelessness, and mental health issues. There are certain structural inequities that need to be adequately addressed by governmental institutions to ensure that economic discrepancies are leveled and individuals get an opportunity for social mobility so they don’t have to default to a life of crime. We need to focus on creating equitable access to health care. We need to focus on providing help and rehabilitation to those who require it. We need to focus on providing affordable housing by investing time and resources into housing reform. We need to focus on investing additional money: not into the police as Biden is calling for, but into SNAP programs, universal health care, and free college. We need to invest money in the people, not the police.
Image by Spenser H is licensed under the Unsplash License.
