I predict that defunding police departments will mean an increase in local taxes. Allow me to explain why.
As you know, “peaceful protesters” have thoroughly destroyed portions of several U.S. cities with a cry to “defund the police”. Instead of growing a pair and handling the problem, some cities have caved to their demands. Cities such as Los Angeles have begun reallocating money from their police budgets while Minneapolis is working to disband their entire department.
The plans include taking funds from the police department and use it to hire social workers to handle some of the calls that would normally be handled by police officers. Examples of these types of calls are domestic violence complaints and where someone’s mental health is in question.
They also want to invest money into community programs which they believe will result in less crime. The money to fund these programs will come, primarily, from the budgets of their police departments. This means there will be fewer police officers on the force.
There’s a little thing called “cause and effect”. Everybody has heard of it. If you do one thing, then something else will happen because of it. However, causes and effects are not interchangeable. In other words, you can’t start with an effect and expect that to produce a given cause. It doesn’t work that way. But that’s exactly what these cities are trying to do.
The plan to invest money into the community is a sound one. The more effort you can put into educating kids to respect the law, the less crime you’ll have when those kids grow up. So, while it’s a good idea, it’s also the long game. Results won’t be seen for years.
Meanwhile, the people who aren’t going to be helped/reformed by the community programs will continue to commit crimes. In fact, they’ll commit more crimes. When you have less of a police presence, crime goes up. The effect has been well documented and we can see examples of it happening already. Decreasing the size of the police force means fewer officers will be trying to handle more crimes. The result will be that more property will be destroyed, more civilians will die from violent crimes and more police officers will be killed in the line of duty.
Here’s the second problem, if you ask any police officer, and I have asked many, they’ll tell you that some of the most dangerous situations to be in are domestic violence and mental health calls. In those situations, people can act unpredictably and be extremely violent.
So, the plan is to take unarmed social workers and put them in harm’s way. I can easily predict what’s going to happen. Social workers are going to get killed. I think nearly everyone can see this coming. Everyone, that is, except the people that came up with the plan.
Once the social workers start dying, I think they’ll figure out pretty quickly that an officer or two needs to be paired with each social worker to make sure that safety is maintained. But, they won’t have any officers available because they cut the size of the police force. The officers they have left will be trying to stop the ever-increasing number of crimes that aren’t being assigned to social workers.
Since they can’t very well let social workers continue to get killed, and they can’t allow the crime rate increase even more, they’ll have to hire more police officers to work alongside the social workers. That takes money and the money will come from increased taxes.
There is a right way to do this. Find the money from someplace other than police budgets to invest in the communities and work to decrease the crime rate. It will eventually produce results. But it’s going to take time, probably years. When the crime rate goes down, there will be less of a need for a large police force.
With less of a need for police, the departmental budget will be decreased to match. Meanwhile, and until the crime rate drops, you still have the police presence you need to keep people and property safe.
It doesn’t work the other way. You can’t reduce the police force and then hope that somehow, magically, the crime rate will drop. Because that’s not the way “cause and effect” works, and nearly all of us can predict that trying this solution is going to get people killed.
