A few seasoned Democrats have indicated that they want the “defund the police” meme to die.
Former President Barack Obama suggested the “snappy slogan” was a liability for the cause of criminal justice reform. President-elect Joe Biden said the snappy slogan had something to do with poor Democratic performance in November.
“That’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police. We’re not,” Biden said. Sen. Joe Manchin told the Washington Examiner, “Defund the police? Defund my butt.”
But others are intent on keeping it alive. That would include “defund” supporters, such as Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep.-elect Cori Bush, and Republican detractors too.
Ahead of Biden’s appearance in Georgia on Tuesday, where he campaigned for Democratic Senate candidates Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, a few Georgia sheriffs denounced Democrats for their associations with the “defund the police” initiative. “We have to have money for police if we want better police,” Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway said on Tuesday.
Police abolitionism is pretty self-evidently asinine, but Conway’s words revealed to me something new about the morally vacuous reallocation.
When the idea began to gain steam over the summer, there arose at least two different categories of proponents. There were the full-on police abolitionists, arguing that policing as we know it is totally depraved and must end. A second group began promoting the reallocation of funds away from police budgets and toward other social services. Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey embraced reallocation. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio became a reallocator, as did Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Both of their cities cut police budgets.
Suggesting that funds need to be taken away from policing and used for other services would seem to be a tacit recognition of fiscal constraints. We have x amount of money to spend, and social service y needs more funding.
“I want people to understand that we are committed to shifting resources to ensure that the focus is on our young people,” de Blasio said in June. But prominent reallocators were not expressly making that case. Their argument might have been somewhat more compelling if they had.
Either way, Conway’s comment led me to these questions about reallocators: Why not support raising taxes to pay for more education and mental health services? A penny sales tax might do it. Or why not consider shifting funding from other projects? Reallocators gave little indication that they had run through these options. George Floyd died on May 25. On June 3, Garcetti announced that Los Angeles would move $250 million away from its police budget.
This was my realization: It was about implicating the police. It wasn’t simply “we need better social services, and there’s no other way to get there.” It was, almost instantly, “we need to fund social services, and we need to use police money to do it.” Was there really no other way to go about investing in “jobs, health, education, and healing,” as Garcetti explained was his city’s aim in moving money?
The reallocators came off as being less punitive than the abolitionists. They weren’t, and they were even more wormy, beholden to political exigencies, and less principled than the police abolitionist group.
