“Defund the police” has been one of the defining phrases in the weeks of protests following the death of George Floyd. Although there has been considerable debate about the meaning of the phrase, it’s clear that it’s really just another excuse for the Left to push its usual standard and destructive policy agenda.
There are two broad definitions that have been given for “defund the police.” Some activists have pushed for the most straightforward, literal definition — abolishing police departments and replacing them with … well, that part of the plan hasn’t quite been hashed out yet.
A larger group, which includes liberal columnists and some elected officials, pushes a more benign definition. They argue that defunding the police merely means shifting some money currently spent on police into other priorities, such as housing, education, and healthcare.
But that’s really just a fancier way of saying everybody should support the same big-spending, left-wing agenda they were pushing long before Floyd became a national figure.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave away the game early on in the protests when she put people on notice that “if you’re out here calling for the end to unrest, then you better be calling for healthcare as a human right.”
Ocasio-Cortez has been her usual self over the course of the protests — a font of disinformation. “Teachers are paying out of pocket for school supplies, yet police are given extra tanks,” she wrote on Twitter. “Budgets convey priorities. We should question ours.”
In reality, in her home of New York City, the operating budget of the Department of Education is $24 billion — more than 4 times the $5.6 billion operating budget of the NYPD.
She then came up with what she thought was a clever example of “defund” in action.
“What a lot of folks are talking about when it comes to the movement, is that they’re asking for the same budget priorities that many affluent suburbs already have,” she said. “And it may sound strange, but many affluent suburbs have essentially already begun pursuing a defunding of the police in that they fund schools, they fund housing, and they fund healthcare more as their No. 1 priorities.”
In reality, the governments of affluent suburbs did not come up with funds for healthcare, housing, or schools by defunding their police departments. In reality, people living in the suburbs purchase their homes at a premium and pay significant property taxes to fund their local school systems. Most residents have employer-based health coverage or other private insurance and do not depend on the local city government to pay for their healthcare. There is also less crime in these neighborhoods, hence less need for a large police force, but that doesn’t mean their police forces were larger previously.
Even if Ocasio-Cortez wanted to make a separate argument about income inequality, it would not have any bearing on how the budget is allocated in wealthy, suburban neighborhoods, or what “defund the police” would look like in an urban setting. Moreover, the militarization of the police has less to do with localities overspending on law enforcement than it does with the controversial decision to bestow upon police forces leftover military equipment from recent wars. There is no budget for “extra tanks” that can be cut or diverted into teachers’ salaries.
Ocasio-Cortez’s squad-mate, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, tweeted, “When we say #DefundPolice, what we mean is people are dying and we need to invest in people’s livelihoods instead. EXAMPLE: Detroit spent $294 million on police last year, and $9 million on health. This is systemic oppression in numbers.”
But this is misleading. Tlaib is ignoring billions in healthcare spending in Detroit by federal, state, and county governments. Whereas cities mostly fund their own police forces, the healthcare budget in cities such as Detroit comes almost entirely from non-city programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare.
The “defund the police” movement is thus using the same left-wing tactic often deployed at the federal level, where liberals claim, falsely, that the government is neglecting social spending because of the military budget. In reality, the federal government spent $2.6 trillion in 2019 on Social Security, healthcare programs, and income support programs — more than three and a half times the $719 billion spent on national defense.
Should Joe Biden become president and move to enact the sweeping agenda he has proposed, with activists clamoring for more, arguments about structural racism will become excuses to expand Obamacare, spend hundreds of billions on subsidized housing, and so on.
Many conservatives are willing to debate in good faith ways to reform police departments — specifically to demilitarize police forces and make bad police officers more accountable. There may also be good arguments that some functions of police departments may be better handled by mental health professionals or social workers.
But it isn’t hard to see where this is heading. Liberals are ready to argue that the only way to really show you care about racism and police reform is to support the full domestic agenda they’ve been flogging ineffectually for years. By now, it’s worn pretty thin.
