“Defund the Police” Hurt Everyone

“Defund” extracted a terrible toll on public safety. Now, local police departments and at-risk communities are paying the price.

Photo by Fred Moon on Unsplash.

“Don’t Count Out Crime as a 2022 Midterm Issue,” warned the Wall Street Journal back on August 18, 2022. “Cashless bail, ‘defund the police’ and unsafe streets add up to danger at the polls for Democrats.”

“Americans are anxious about crime, and that could spell more trouble for Democrats in November,” is how the WSJ broke the bad news. “A Council on Criminal Justice study of 22 U.S. cities found that the number of homicides in 2021 was 44% higher than in 2019. According to an April Gallup poll, 80% of Americans worry about crime and 53% worry a ‘great deal’.”

Exactly two months later the crime wave, “largely the byproduct of far-left criminal-justice and policing reforms that Democratic cities and states have adopted over the past few years,” such as, “sweeping and indiscriminate police budget cuts, reckless sentencing guidelines and cashless bail,” as the WSJ put it, has only gotten worse.

The media landscape has since been littered with think pieces about, “How ‘defund’ failed,” and lamentations about the evaporation of support for criminal justice reform in the wake of rising crime unlike anything Americans have seen in decades.