“We must invest less in police and more in social workers,” President Joe Biden’s Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke wrote in June of 2020. Clarke went on to say the Black Lives Matter movement slogan to “defund the police” is a “unifying call” that “speaks to the urgency of reform for African Americans and other people of color who continue to experience harsh and overly punitive policing.”

But this isn’t true. The real danger to black lives is not that there are too many police but that there are too few.