“We must invest less in police and more in social workers,” President Joe Biden’s Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke wrote in June of 2020. Clarke went on to say the Black Lives Matter movement slogan to “defund the police” is a “unifying call” that “speaks to the urgency of reform for African Americans and other people of color who continue to experience harsh and overly punitive policing.”
But this isn’t true. The real danger to black lives is not that there are too many police but that there are too few.
FBI statistics for 2020 won’t be available until September. But according to the Gun Violence Archive, 19,410 people were killed by firearms in 2020, an increase of more than 25% from 2019. Murder hits black communities the hardest. In recent years, black people have consistently accounted for more than half of homicide victims despite comprising just 13% of the population.
For context in the national debate about race and policing, the Washington Post’s police shooting database reveals that a grand total of 60 unarmed men were shot dead by police in 2020, of whom 18 were black.
Ideally, the number would be zero, not 18. But approximately 10,000 black people were killed by people other than police last year. That is obviously a much larger problem than the one obsessed over by the Left, which trumpets its concern for racial sensitivity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that the leading cause of death for black males under age 44 is homicide. The 18 people shot by police are not the issue.
To save black lives, cities should look for ways to reduce homicide. Fortunately, there is plenty of research showing exactly this can be done. What is needed is more funding for police to investigate homicides. That is, what is required is the 180-degree opposite of what the “defund the police” movement advocates.
A recent study of Boston homicides between 2007 and 2011 found that most unsolved homicides had similar characteristics, including gang-related disputes, outdoor crime scenes, and black and Hispanic victims. The study did not find that police invested fewer resources in investigating homicides when the victim was black — quite the opposite. Black victims were more likely to be killed outside, generally requiring more officers to canvas the crime scene.
But what the study did find is that gang homicides generally produced fewer follow-up interviews with witnesses and that those witnesses who were interviewed were more likely to leave out important details. Cultural norms against cooperating with police and fear of gang reprisals were both identified as reasons police often failed to get more follow-up interviews with witnesses.
Armed with this data, researchers recommended the Boston Police Department hire more homicide detectives, more civilian crime analysts, and more victim-witness resource officers to work with victim assistance organizations.
It worked. The increase in police funding helped the Boston Police Department increase its homicide clearance rate from 47% to 66%.
This is important because we know from other research that when criminals know they are more likely to get caught, they are less likely to commit murder.
Not every police expenditure or tactic improves public safety. It is not clear how armored personnel carriers or grenade launchers make police forces more effective. But putting more police on the streets, adding eyes and ears in communities, clearly does help police solve more murders and decrease crime. The Biden administration’s suggestion that this is a job for social workers is hooey. It is a job for police officers, which is why anyone serious about preserving black lives should support more funding for the police — not less.
