The newest nonsense from the Left in response to police misconduct is to call for defunding or even disbanding police departments. The mind reels at the foolishness and callousness of this, and at the horrors that would be unleashed upon black Americans if this were to happen.
There’s no need to cite too many particular statistics, because so many statistics will bear out the following truths that anyone can find them in quick internet searches aplenty: The more cops there are, and the more they arrest serious criminals, the more the crime rates fall. Overwhelmingly, it is people of color who are less victimized when more police are more visible in city streets, able and willing to arrest more perpetrators of crimes.
Okay, maybe one statistic: The number of black victims of violent crime fell by nearly two thirds from 1993 through 2005, exactly in conjunction with widespread adoption of larger police forces, more patrols in the “inner city,” and greater willingness to cite or arrest people for even lesser offenses. For most of the 15 years since, those numbers have fallen still more.
Granted, most jurisdictions failed to intelligently devise appropriate penalties and corrections for offenses: Too many low-level offenders were incarcerated rather than afforded alternative sentencing that stresses rehabilitation. But “corrections” is a different issue than “policing,” and the simple facts are that increased policing leads to increased safety, especially for people of color.
The answer isn’t less funding for police, or elimination of police. The answer is to have more police, better paid (to attract better applicants), and especially better trained so as to learn alternatives to force where possible, elimination of biases, greater accountability, and easier approachability by ordinary citizens.
Surely there are far too many police who are ill-trained, psychologically ill-equipped, too prone to violence, and even corrupt. Powerful police unions sometimes make it too difficult to discipline bad officers, or to discipline them severely enough. Still, the proportion of seriously problematic police conduct to the millions of annual interactions between police and potential suspects is quite small.
It is almost inarguable to say that most cops really are the “good guys,” and more than a few cops are heroes. Some, perhaps too many, police departments are badly run, but many, perhaps most, are well motivated and well led, and far more accountable than they were several decades ago.
Reforms have been slowly but steadily improving police forces, too. Take one more pair of statistics: The number of all U.S. deaths of unarmed civilians at the hands of police dropped from 94 in 2015 to 41 in 2019. The number of those who were black dropped from 38 to 9.
Police in general aren’t the enemy; only bad police are the enemy. Most police are good, and more police departments than not are becoming steadily better. Police shouldn’t be defunded; they should be funded better, so they can keep improving, so they can save more lives—including black lives, because black lives matter.
