In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Black Lives Matter activists are demanding that cities disband their police forces in favor of funding more social policy programs. A lot has been written about the obvious, awful outcomes of disbanding police, especially in low-income neighborhoods, where the elderly, women, and children are especially vulnerable to local crime. But what about those social programs that the Left claims it wants to “invest” in to redress the harms of systemic racism?
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has always had a very difficult relationship with the city’s well-trained police, has announced that: “We committed to move resources from the NYPD to youth and social services as part of our City’s budget. Our young people need to be reached, not policed. We can do this AND keep our city safe.”
What programs and initiatives does he have in mind? Improving mental health, healthcare, and raising black incomes get bandied about as goals. A goal is not a program. Bringing in social workers and addiction counselors is also not a program. New York’s extensive Medicaid program provides addiction services. There are social workers in the schools. The politicians, protesters, and anarchists who want to get rid of the police have no concrete ideas about what programs to build thriving black communities would be.
That is odd. For the past 65 years, since the start of the Great Society, we have seen nothing if not a mighty river of demonstration projects, programs, and policies to fix what ails the black community. Since 1965, we have spent upwards of $15 trillion on the War on Poverty. Surely there are successes that communities can use.
There was welfare: Aid to Families with Dependent Children, now called Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. It paid some bills but had some unintended consequences: It destroyed the black family, by making men and their role as father and income provider unnecessary. No one, including conservative think tanks, black ministers, and devotees of the late HUD Secretary Jack Kemp managed to figure out how to restore marriage before childbearing. When rates reach 69% (higher in many cities), there is no coming back.
How many generations raised without fathers before the concept of marriage disappears from a (sub)culture? If Black Lives Matter activists have good ideas for that, I’m all ears.
Better housing? Public housing is part of the problem, and it is hard to escape. Moving it to the suburbs, as the Obama administration tried to do, brings crime with the Section 8 vouchers. But sure, rebuild the soon-to-open $30 million affordable housing project that was burned in the Minneapolis riots.
There’s education. Head Start failed to show lasting improvement. Ending segregated schools helped, for a while. In the end, public education became indoctrination in various leftist precepts, especially the corrosive identity politics now destroying society. Teachers unions did extremely well, especially in cities such as New York and Chicago. But inner-city children don’t get educations that qualify them to be good citizens or good job candidates. The travesty of Common Core dumbed down everyone, black and white.
Would more affirmative action work? The original idea made sense: Elite universities would recruit smart black students to create a black professional class which could join the establishment, get its fair share of spoils, and provide leadership to the black community. That worked, a little. Look at the Obama administration. Ultimately though, we got a plethora of African American studies and sociology majors, who become community organizers and join unproductive, unhelpful groups.
In the face of the echo-boom crime spree in the late 1990s, President Bill Clinton offered young black men midnight basketball. That was a fun program! More innocent times, when we thought that playing ball at midnight with local cops would preclude gangs and crime. It was part of the infamous crime bill, so naturally, no one on the Left supports it anymore.
What about jobs programs? Public jobs are always touted as a new Civilian Conservation Corp, building tunnels and hot springs. In reality, a bunch of kids sit around learning bad work habits in make-work settings. The teachers get paid, though. In fact, all of these programs divert government money to the black middle class, which administers and runs them. In the big picture, nothing changes.
In a nutshell, government programs don’t work. Jobs work, mostly at for-profit entities.
President Ronald Reagan famously said, “The best social program is a job.” President Trump deserves credit for creating real jobs, including for black, inner-city youth, in places that hadn’t seen growth or investment in 60 years. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were even jobs for ex-cons and the unskilled. The lockdown swept much of that away.
Trump says he can replicate the economic growth of his first three years, which would help the nation get back on its feet. We know that Obama, Joe Biden, and the Democrats cannot create real jobs. They failed for eight years. Before the pandemic, the Trump economy was what Obama always wanted, with racial inequalities waning in recent years.
As for the police, jobs are easier to come by when businesses can open and are safe from looters — which is why we need more police, instead of defunding them.
Lisa Schiffren is a former White House speechwriter.
