*Defunding the Police is a Terrible Idea

* This article was originally published last summer (2020) during the height of the Defund the Police movement. It was unintentionally deleted and is being reposted now. With the recent catastrophic failure of law enforcement to protect the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, this article may be even more relevant now.

Americans never seem able to do anything in moderation. We seem genetically pre-programed to function either with an extreme, over the top, knee-jerk reaction, or not at all. There is never any middle ground, never any room for common sense, never any looking past the emotionally charged moment to reflect on how our decisions may influence the future. Rash decisions made in that kind of scorched earth atmosphere rarely, if ever, actually solve the problem in the long term. 

We are living in just such an atmosphere now.

Before you accuse me of not understanding the gravity and historical significance of the current situation, I assure you, I get it. The murder, and I will readily admit this was a murder, of George Floyd in Minneapolis was the act of four police officers, at least one of which, Dereck Chauvin, should have probably never been allowed to wear the badge and carry a gun. Certainly, after receiving at least seventeen citizen complaints for abusive behavior, it is clear this was a man not cut out for either protecting or serving. The other three officers involved were a combination of two rookies barely out of the academy, J. Alexander Kueng and Thomas Lane, and another officer, Tou Thao, with several years on the force, but also with multiple complaints in his file (six). Their actions in this case have been and will continue to be hashed and rehashed in the media and the courts for a long time, so I will not waste time doing so here. I will also not attempt to convey the idea that I can relate to the raw anger and long suppressed emotions of the black community regarding their experiences with American law enforcement. I am not black, I therefore can’t relate, and I won’t pretend to. 

Having said that, I can however, very much understand the long overdue need to overhaul both the law enforcement and criminal justice system in this country. Both are in bad shape, in many ways broken, perhaps irreparably so. But defunding the police is a terrible idea and abolishing police departments is even worse. Yes, I am aware of the theory being floated around that “defund” and “abolish” don’t really mean “defend” and “abolish”, that they are really just code words for other much more nuanced and less drastic interpretations of these words. Perhaps, but I don’t believe it for a minute. Oh, I am sure there are some well meaning activists that actually do mean something a little different than the literal definitions of those two words, but most people who shout, “defund” and “abolish” in demonstrations or scrawl them on posters mean exactly what they say: totally eliminate police funding and get rid of police departments altogether. Many have said as much in several different interviews. I believe them.

So, let me start with defunding. If police budgets were drastically cut, as many have proposed, where do you think the bulk of the cuts would come from? The excess DoD military equipment being vilified in the news? No, not really. If you actually look into that (I did), you will find that for the police agencies that actually did accept military equipment from the Pentagon (only about 8,000 of the almost 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, according to a 2018 Rand Report), the total dollar amount accepted by local law enforcement agencies from the feds from the years 1990 – 2018 is only about six billion dollars. To put that into perspective, the budget for the NYPD this year alone is about the same total of all DoD military excess equipment transfers to all 8,000 U.S. law enforcement agencies since 1990 - six billion dollars. Additionally, the local police agencies pay absolutely nothing for the equipment, save for their maintenance once acquired. So even if every piece of federal military surplus equipment across the country was hauled away for scrap, it would not save one penny from any law enforcement agency budget.

Where then, to cut the budget down to size? As with most large public organizations, the vast majority of the budget comes from salaries and benefits (about 88% according to the Rand report). Slashing the cop’s salaries would then seem to be the logical solution to implementing radical defunding programs. As a former police officer, I can tell you with a great amount of certainty that if law enforcement agencies started to drastically cut the salary and benefits of their officers, most would resign. And yes, I have every confidence that would be the case. One can love them or hate them, the fact is that a police officer puts his or her life on the line every single day they go to work. And no, most people cannot say the same thing, unless they routinely strap on a sidearm and intentionally seek out people that wish to do them and their general community harm. Police officers literally do not know if their current shift will be their last, and as the years go by, more and more of them do not, in fact, come home at the end of their shifts. That is also a fact. In this rage enhanced, anti-police atmosphere, I know that some may actually rejoice in that tragic fact, once less cop in the world. As for myself, I pray I never have to attend the funeral of another police officer. In addition, the current anti-law enforcement, anti-government hysteria in America right now makes being a police officer more difficult than at any time in recent memory. Many are already walking off the job without having their pay cut.

Why then, would any sane police officer remain at their job after having their salary and benefits greatly reduced? The answer is that most of them would not. Many people might say that would be a good thing, solving the defunding issue. That thought actually dovetails into my next issue: abolishing the police. One might ask, if reducing salaries results in a grand exodus by police officers, why not just totally abolish all police departments and let the local communities decide how best to replace the services formerly performed by the police departments? For example, just replace the police officers with drug counselors, rehab specialists, mental health therapists, legal specialists, social workers, nurses, housing specialists, childcare specialists and so forth. When a call comes in for a drug deal going down in an inner city neighborhood plagued by high crime, addiction, gang warfare and drug related violence, dispatch a drug counselor, social worker and perhaps a rehab specialist. But you had better send along a priest as well, because someone should be along to say Last Rites to the counselor, social worker, and rehab specialist because they may not survive the encounter.

What about an armed bank robbery in progress? Or a violent home invasion? The kidnapping of a child by a known pedophile? A rape that just occurred? A badly battered wife/husband/child? A hit and run with two dead and the suspect fleeing the scene? An active shooter at a local elementary school? What to do? Send in the counselors and therapists? Write a prescription for Xanax and text it to the suspects? Call their cell phone and ask the suspects what would make them happy? Declare the crime scene a police free zone of the people, then sit down with both the suspects and victims and read aloud from On Walden Pond?

Sounds silly? Of course it does. I think it sounds ludicrous and downright catastrophic, something out of a nightmare. But what else do the proponents of totally defunding and abolishing police departments expect to do in order to realistically replace the law enforcement agencies they seek to do away with? Do they think that career criminals, the mentally ill, terrorists, sadists, opportunists, or even violent drunks and desperate addicts, are suddenly going to get with the program because some group of well meaning Americans want to chance society for the better? I don’t think so. Life doesn’t wok that way. Maybe it will in the future, but it never has in the past and it certainly does not operate that way now.

Talk of defunding or abolishing the police is a very bad idea, regardless of the subtleties attached to the phrase. It is an unrealistic, utopian, ill-considered, reckless, and a very dangerous consideration. If implemented, it will destroy the fabric of every American jurisdiction that allows such actions. The result will be chaos and increased violence, not humane treatment of suspects and a reduced crime rate.

However, before such drastic actions are taken or even considered, I strongly suggest the following course of action instead:

Every citizen that supports defunding and/or abolishing their local law enforcement agency should ride along with a local police officer for an entire shift, experiencing all three shifts in the highest crime area of their town/city/county, and do so every day for one week. If after that time they still feel as though abolishing their local law enforcement agency and replacing the funding and sworn police personnel with human service workers and counselors is the best way to go, than at least they will make that decision with a clear idea of what the likely outcome of that reckless action will be. I pity the jurisdictions that actually do go forward and abolish their local law enforcement agency and essentially replaces them with social workers to face the dark, and sometimes violent underbelly of our society that police officers successfully deal with every day, to little or no fanfare, but often with boatloads of grief afterwards from an ungrateful and mostly clueless public. What started out as a very justified, grassroots national appeal for positive police reform is now morphing into something that may have a negative impact on all of our communities for a very long time.

We must not let that happen.

I am more than ready for the expected backlash I may receive from readers that disagree with these comments. But damn it, someone has to stand up for our good police officers.