Comment by JumpCrisscross
20 days ago
> be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020
This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
To the extent police reform has historically worked, it’s been by rebooting a police department. (Think: replacing the Mets with the NYPD.) Not replacing police with a hippie circle.
> This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas. In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with. Now that police officers are actually doing their jobs again, shockingly, crime is rapidly falling.
What has actually increased is sensationalist coverage in the media, which you're right, has created a significant political backlash.
> In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with
If I recall correctly it was the DA refusing to prosecute just about anything.
Far from it. On one occasion, when the DA in question went after a notorious fence (buyer for stolen goods), he had to rent a u-haul truck because the SFPD would not supply a vehicle to transport the arrestee.
https://missionlocal.org/2022/05/the-case-for-recalling-da-c...
You have to look past the hype. Media on a national scale ran a character assassination program against that DA for trying to rebalance his organization's efforts against the organizers of crime instead of individual delinquents.
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Not sure if "recall" was a pun or not... But the recall campaign for DA Boudin started a month after the 2020 election, so he was effectively DA for 10 months at that point, including during the heart of the pandemic. Interestingly, it was also right after he started trying to implement police accountability reforms in response to the Floyd backlash that year. He did de-prioritize drug prosecution right at the time of major fentanyl spikes in SF, so not a good look.
This was the sensationalist media narrative, yes. Chesa got kicked out. Brooke Jenkins took over to much fanfare. Aaaand nothing material really changed, either with enforcement or with prosecution. The media stopped talking about it though.
SFPD hadn’t been doing their jobs for far, far longer than Chesa’s tenure. I moved here in 2013 and their non-enforcement practices were already legendary. Blaming Chesa for being in office for like 10 months in 2019-2020 is a hell of a cop out (pun intended).
Even if it were true, it wouldn’t in any way excuse the police for choosing not to do the job they’re paid to do.
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> In San Francisco specifically, crime also increased due to police officers quietly going on strike against policies they disagreed with.
People love repeating this point with absolutely no evidence and then asking the world of those who disagree. Beware, selective calls for rigor.
> Crime has been on a downward trend for a generation, outside of a few areas.
This is basically untrue. The decrease in crime that began in the mid 80s more or less bottomed out in the early 2010s at rates much higher than comparably rich nations. This doesn't include the huge reporting issues with non-violent crimes that manifests in low property and drug crime data juxtaposed with crackheads clearing out any products not behind plexiglass in major American cities.
In Los Angeles, crime on the Metro public transportation system has fallen by almost 70% in the three months since the LAPD was booted off the job and replaced by...security guards.
This is pretty good evidence that high crime rates in cities with large police forces are directly related to the police force not actually doing the job it's already being paid to do.
(LA Metro was forced to use LAPD for security a few decades ago, at which point crime rates went from very low to skyrocketing. LAPD serviced the Metro contract exclusively with officers that were in overtime hours (1.5x pay) so at best could only provide 2/3rd of the contracted manpower. That changed earlier this year; the contract was terminated for cause and LAPD was replaced with contract security guards. The contract security guards make substantially less than LAPD officers, so Metro is currently able to field a security presence about 5x the size as the LAPD force. Metro reported this that crime has fallen dramatically in just 2 months.)
For what it’s worth, I agree with you. We need different police. Not our existing police reformed. But also not no police.
There is a vocal minority of idiots who want no police. At all.
"Defund the police" was never actually tried. (This is not a defense of defunding -- I agree it would have similarly bad outcomes! But you can't just point at changes that weren't defunding the police and say it was tried.)
> "Defund the police" was never actually tried
Isn’t this a No True Scotsmen problem?
Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut. Police remit, in the form of decriminalisation, was reduced. No jurisdiction abolished law enforcement (though San Francisco de facto got close). But I’d say those count as defunding the police to an extent.
Even then, we got disaster. Shockingly quickly. Shockingly powerfully. There is no threshold theory that suggests you get magical results cutting the police force by 30% instead of 3%; it’s thus reasonable to extrapolate and assume you get more of the bad.
> No jurisdiction abolished law enforcement (though San Francisco de facto got close).
What year did that occur on their budget chart?
https://x.com/chrisarvinsf/status/1399863666938310663
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> Isn’t this a No True Scotsmen problem?
No, this is a "this didn't actually happen."
> Police budges were trimmed. Police forces were cut.
Where were police budgets trimmed and forces cut? They weren't; that's the crucial thing you're describing that did not happen. Otherwise, I agree -- lots of reform changes that sounded good on paper led to bad outcomes. But there's no need to inaccurately call other reforms "defunding."
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SF did not reduce police funding. They quiet quit anyway.
Quiet quitting does not make the position legally vacant, such that the employer knows they need to fill it. The employer has to notice that the employee is not performing, and then replace that employee. Those steps are often harder than you’d think.
SFPD has plenty of unused budget for hiring; they aren't hiring either.
Where was it tried? My understanding is that even Minneapolis didn't follow through with it.
> Where was it tried?
Chesa Boudin. New York with cashless bail and non-prosecution of petty crimes. That fuck in Chicago.
Defund the police was a marquee policy and messaging failure that underlined why radical minorities capturing the Democratic Party cause it to lose elections.
>>> be angry at those who didn't follow through with promises to severely reduce funding to their police departments in 2020
>>This was tried. It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose.
>Chesa Boudin.
Chesa Boudin is not a police budget, that's a completely unserious nonsequitor. SF's police budget rose throughout the defund the police movement, just not as high as initially allocated. https://abc7news.com/post/sfpd-budget-defund-the-police-depa...
> New York with cashless bail and non-prosecution of petty crimes.
What does that have to do with "defund the police"? Bail money doesn't go into their pockets.
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==That fuck in Chicago.==
Not sure what this is adding to the discussion, but eliminating cash bail has been a success in Illinois. That’s why you don’t hear the right talking about it anymore. Crime in Chicago has fallen every year since it went into effect.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/cash-bail-illinois-one-...
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Chicago did not defund its police department.
Crime did not rose, crime has been in a downward trajectory for decades, this is likely one of the reasons the crackdown on illegal immigrants is so bad, prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow and needs a new population to imprison.
In addition to what JumpCrisscross said, illegal immigrants are not going to be long-term prison population; they're going to be deported. (At least, that's the campaign promise.) So I don't see how that benefits prison owners.
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/04/nx-s1-5417980/private-prisons...
> Nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in facilities run by for-profit, private companies. Two of the largest, Geo Group and CoreCivic, are working to increase their ability to meet the administration's demand.
CoreCivic used to be called the "Corrections Corporation of America". GEO Group used to be "Wackenhut Corrections Corporation".
It should be unsurprising that the folks who make money building and running large, secure facilities to detain people would be interested in doing the same for ICE.
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The administration is already talking about indentured labor and slavery, these will soon be work camps where the prison owners will rent the labor to farm and industries.
Crime rose significantly in the US over ~2020-2022 or 2023. It was on a downward trend before 2020 and is on a downward trend since 2022/2023. But you can't ignore that period.
Did anything else happen around 2020 that might be a confounding variable?
(We see similar crime trends in other countries without BLM/George Floyd/police reform movements during that time period.)
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> Crime did not rose
Murders didn’t rise. Petty crime and open-air drug use absolutely did.
> prison owners are noticing they might lose their cash cow
This is nonsense.
It was not tried, and saying that it was is a fundamentally false claim that is actively pushing public opposition to the idea supported by lies. It’s as reasonable as saying don’t vote for democrats because they have a pedophile office under a pizza store. Are there a bunch of people who were convinced by this lie? Yes. Does that make it anything other than a manipulative lie to say? No.
> It generated a generational backlash against the left as petty crime and visible homelessness rose
With "the left" you mean the SF DA?
No, the entire police reform agenda and I’d argue progressive wing of the Democratic Party as a whole. “Defund the police” was a monumental fuckup.
It was a branding fuckup more than a policy fuckup. The idea that we want types of response units other than armed gunmen available to respond to certain types of emergencies isn’t exactly radical.
We don’t send the police for medical emergencies or house fires. We send personnel with dedicated training for those types of events.
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Yes but I don't think we can judge the progressive wing from the antagonistic media coverage and bilateral party disdain of them.
Like, more proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy.
Making them sound naive is so easy. Especially if you choose the protagonists.
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Don't speak bullshit. There was more media outrage hullabaloo around the idea of reducing cop funding than there was any actual reduction. Especially because the cops went on strike to ensure that no cuts would happen.
Police forces across the US have never seen higher funding rates.