A guy named Adam Johnson wrote an articulate op-ed piece in the Sunday Chronicle expressing his belief that “refunding” the police, i.e. increasing their budgets, “doesn’t work.” His premise is that “more police and longer sentences” is counter-productive, and “fails at its nominal goal of actually making us safer.”
Because Johnson wrote his piece so earnestly, it deserves a respectful response. Johnson makes his case on the basis of statistics. For example, he notes that “New York City boosted its Police Department budget by $465 million from 2021 to 2022 [but] overall crime reported in New York, compared to the same period last year, has gone up 41%.” Similarly, “Chicago increased its 2022 police budget by $147.3 million [in 2021]…and has seen a sizable spike in crime in 2022… with an overall reported crime increase of 36%...and a 22% increase in killings…”. Johnson’s conclusion is intentionally ironic: “When street crime increases under ‘soft on crime’ prosecutors or police budget cuts…it’s the fault of cutting resources and not throwing the book at enough bad guys. But when street crime increases under the watch of conservative prosecutors, and amid massive police budget increases, it’s proof that the public simply needs even tougher laws and enforcement, and even more money for the police.”
I concede that Johnson makes a strong argument (which is similar to what we hear from council members like Carroll Fife, Rebecca Kaplan and Nikki Bas). Certainly, any rational person would say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Is Johnson right? Is throwing more money at the police the answer to criminal activity, or is it a waste of needed resources?
For starters, it’s unfair to look at 2021 police budget increases, followed by 2022 crime increases, and conclude that the former were pointless or counter-productive. For all anyone knows, if police budgets hadn’t been increased, crime would have been even worse. Beyond that, these things take time; increasing a police department’s budget doesn’t instantaneously lead to more cops on the street. The cops have to be recruited and trained, going through a lengthy Academy process and then furthering their education as rookies. When a city increases its police budget to hire more cops, it’s likely to be several years before an impact on crime will be seen.
There’s also a less tangible consideration that has to do with our (the public’s) feelings about public safety. Our feelings are real, regardless of whether or not we’re ever crime victims, because we have to live with those feelings, and they impact our quality of life. When we hear that our police department is being defunded, most of us naturally feel less safe. Some of us will choose to move away from a city like Oakland due to this feeling of insecurity—and most of the people (and businesses) who are leaving Oakland are the kind of taxpayers and consumers we want.
On the other hand, when we’re assured that our elected officials take cops seriously, and respect them, we feel some measure of comfort. That hasn’t been the case in Oakland, sadly, because we have a City Council that constantly trash-talks OPD and gives them money only begrudgingly. No wonder so many people feel so insecure here. They know that cops would like to have our backs, but can’t, because they’re hog-tied by the City Council, by the Police Commission, and by Mr. Warshaw and his Negotiated Settlement Agreement.
It’s not wise to discount this subjective feeling. The average citizen doesn’t really care that the U.S. has (as Johnson writes) the largest incarceration rate in the world. (If we did away with our draconian drug laws, which we should, incarceration rates would drop dramatically.) But the argument that we jail more people than any other country while still having lots of crime ultimately fails to convince, because people know that America is very different from a country like Sweden (which, with its homogeneous population, has a very low crime rate) or one like Singapore (where the authorities tolerate no deviation from the norm). We incarcerate a lot of people because a lot of people break the law.
Johnson can cite all the statistics he wants, but common sense tells us that the more cops we have, and the more they’re actually allowed to do their job, instead of being hamstrung, the fewer bad guys will be out there on the streets. We’ll never be safe until we have an adequately-staffed police department, and cops are permitted to arrest people instead of being afraid to. I put that last phrase in italics to emphasize its importance.
Steve Heimoff