“Defund the police” turned out to be a really unpopular slogan outside of certain circles, so activists aren’t using that term anymore.
Psychologist and “defund the police” advocate Phillip Goff doesn’t use the word “defund” in his latest New York Times op-ed. The closest he comes is this line: “If throwing money at police and prisons made us safer, we would probably already be the safest country in the history of the world.”
The conservative reader will be very familiar with Goff’s formulation: “Throwing money at” government agencies doesn’t solve problems, conservatives and libertarians always argue.
THE LEFT’S ENDLESS STRING OF CENSORSHIP JUSTIFICATIONS
We know that government spending often makes problems worse and that government agencies often try to do things they are not good at. For this reason, some arguments from the “defund the police” deserve a hearing.
Goff, in his Times op-ed, makes worthwhile points. His motto is “strong communities keeping everyone safe.” The specifics offered by Goff mostly aren’t what I would think of as “strong communities.” Some of it is more like police reform, such as rerouting some mental health issues to clinicians instead of police “if there is no immediate danger.” Some of his solutions are local government programs aimed at keeping people off of skid row, such as housing subsidies.
But all around the country, you can find efforts that really are about building up community bonds in order to make lives better and places safer, and Goff subtly nods toward them with a link to the website “One Million Experiments.” This campaign highlights local community efforts, some that will reduce crime and many that won’t.
For instance, “So Fresh Saturdays” is a campaign in Englewood, California, of throwing mini carnivals in local parks on Saturdays. For single mothers and poor families, this sort of free, nearby entertainment is a great draw. Giving parents a place where they can bring their children, get them fed, and let them safely run around is an immense gift. More importantly, in the long run, regular gatherings such as this help neighbors get to know neighbors, which is probably the most important way “strong communities” reduce crime.
Programs “designed to change the neighborhood from a dangerous, run-down, anonymous set of streets into an urban village, where the streets were clean and safe, and where people knew their neighbors and looked out for each other” are the programs that have proven to reduce crime, according to studies.
“One Million Experiments” also includes lots of radical left-wing projects, which strike me as irrelevant to or even harmful to efforts to build community. Also, like many of our friends on the Left, there seems to be an effort to exclude Christian and Muslim community organizations, which is a shame since religious congregations have always been the central community institutions for the poor and middle class in the United States.
Setting aside these differences, though, the central point is that government programs attempting to address some malady directly rarely perform as well as does the organic functioning of a healthy community. This is a central insight that conservatives from Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk down to many of today’s conservatives have fought to preserve. Increasingly, you see this sentiment, in somewhat different framing, on the Left these days.
Human life needs order. But that order need not be handed down from on high but can be built voluntarily and organically if people come together in community institutions.
There’s a lot of common ground between the communitarian Right and some “defund” activists on the Left. It would be nice if we could shed differences and work on them together.
