The movement to defund the police in the United States should be taken seriously. It urges us to try something that has never been tried on a national scale: question the assumptions of a policing goliath that requires almost five times as many employees as the nation’s social workers; and imagine a society without systemic inequality and injustice that does not need a policing, guarding, and security force of at least 4.3 million.
In addition to demanding a massive reduction in police forces and a transfer of resources to public services, we should also demand transparency about how the police are funded and equipped. To fundamentally change the funding of policing requires that we know who foots the bill and who is on the payroll.
Given the inflammatory rhetoric and policy debates devoted to the “crime problem,” government should keep us informed and current about the number of police employees, the cost of policing, and who does the work of policing. Our government fails on all accounts. Police departments are not even mandated to report to the U. S. Department of Justice how and why they kill on average one thousand people every year.
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics used to be a barely adequate source of up to date information, but it is no longer even that since the Trump administration drastically cut its funding and politicized its leadership.
To figure out what policing costs requires demystifying streams of national funding and tracking intra-governmental transfers of equipment, weapons, and technology. It is not enough to be familiar with only local budgets because the police receive a considerable amount of funding, as well as their marching orders, from Congress and the federal departments of Homeland Security and Justice.
National political initiatives make a significant impact on policing. To Lyndon Johnson, the police were “frontline soldiers” in the War on Crime; Richard Nixon elevated Law and Order into a national ideological slogan and rallied his base to turn back “the wave of crime”; during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the FBI’s budget almost doubled; by the time that Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the New Democrats also had taken the low road to demagoguery and passed legislation that funded 100,000 more police and slashed welfare programs.
Private security workers must be included in the count and cost. They outnumber public police by more than 25 percent and perform most of the same functions as urban cops, either as subcontracted by government agencies or as the direct employees of industries, shopping malls, and middle-class communities. In times of social upheavals, such as tribal opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and today’s protests against police racism, they are routinely mobilized to supplement local and state police and sheriff’s departments.
No centralized source of information exists for the number of private security personnel, nor for keeping track of the companies that benefit from contracts for security-related products and services that cost more than government expenditures on criminal justice operations nationally. The corporate-security complex with its dangerous “acquisition of unwarranted influence… in the councils of government” is the latest reincarnation of what Dwight Eisenhower warned us about in 1961.
We activist researchers do not operate totally in the dark.
We know that municipal governments have increasingly sacrificed social services for policing. The cost to cities of police protection almost tripled from the 1980s to the 2000s; and local spending on policing, adjusted for inflation, went from $29.3 billion in 1972 to $84.1 billion in 2012.
Since the mid-1950s, when criminal justice expenditures at all levels of government constituted about one-half of one percent of the GNP, the carceral state has persistently increased its share of the public coffers, with policing and security the primary beneficiary. By 1974, the police received 57 percent of the country’s $15 billion criminal justice budget, eight times the amount they received a decade earlier. Since 2002 the Department of Homeland Security has sent billions of dollars to regional and local governments for “terrorism prevention.”
Then there are the many known unknowns. We can only speculate about what it costs federal agencies to subsidize local policing via special grants and materiel. Moreover, some important parts of national funding are a mystery, including the undisclosed costs of covert operations by intelligence agencies and how much the State Department spends on training foreign police forces.
To be successful in achieving structural reforms at the local level will require cutting ties with federal agencies that have framed and subsidized the military model of professional policing since the early 20th century, from J. Edgar Hoover’s doubts in the 1920s about the “Negro’s fitness for self-government” to Donald Trump’s commitment to make the United States into “a country of law and order.”
Local activists should urge progressive Democrats in Congress to add another demand to the Justice in Policing Act: Make transparent how the federal government funds, equips, and arms local policing.
As Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights leader, used to say about racism: Let’s bring this out to the light. Then we can see what we’re up against.