Welcome to Byron York’s Daily Memo newsletter.
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to receive the newsletter.
DEFUND THE POLICE! DEFUND THE POLICE! What seemed like a crazy slogan on the far left is threatening to become a reality in some places around the country. On Sunday the president of the Minneapolis City Council announced that a two-thirds majority of the council now supports “ending the Minneapolis Police Department.” Council members said they will be “taking intermediate steps towards ending the MPD through the budget process and other policy and budget decisions over the coming weeks and months.”
But does anyone know what DEFUND THE POLICE! actually means? In its statement, the Minneapolis council members included a line that would be funny were the stakes not so high. “We recognize,” they wrote, “that we don’t have all the answers about what a police-free future looks like, but our community does.” Really? If so, the community should tell the world, because there seems to be great confusion about what a police-free future would look like.
Subscribe today to the Washington Examiner magazine that will keep you up to date with what’s going on in Washington. SUBSCRIBE NOW: Just $1.00 an issue!
On Sunday night, AP published a story headlined, “When protesters cry ‘defund the police,’ what does it mean? The article discussed some of the political factors at work, and it quoted one anti-police group in Minneapolis talking about “strategically reallocating resources, funding, and responsibility away from police and toward community-based models of safety, support, and prevention.” CNN published an article — “There’s a growing call to defund the police. Here’s what it means” — that was even less enlightening.
Nobody seemed to discuss what seems like a very basic question of a police-free future: What would happen when a crime is committed? Say there is a murder, which happened 40 times in Minneapolis last year and 492 times in Chicago. Or say there is an armed robbery. Or an aggravated assault. What happens then? Does a social worker go to the scene? Do strategically reallocated resources solve the crime?
THE PUBLIC DISCUSSION HAS BARELY ADDRESSED THAT SCENARIO, some version of which is guaranteed to happen multiple times on the first police-free day of the police-free future in any medium-sized or big city. But perhaps there is another expert who could be asked. As it turns out, some of the present defund-the-police fervor stems from a 2017 book by a Brooklyn College sociology professor named Alex Vitale. And just a few days ago, Vitale appeared on NPR, where, thank goodness, he was asked about crime.
“People ask the question, without police, what do you do when someone gets murdered?” asked NPR’s Leah Donnella. “What do you do when someone’s house gets robbed? What do you say to those people who have those concerns?”
Here is the thing: Vitale did not have an answer. “Well, I’m certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police,” he began. “What I’m talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. We have better alternatives for them.”
You’ll notice there was no answer in Vitale’s answer. He continued: “Even if you take something like burglary — a huge amount of burglary activity is driven by drug use. And we need to completely rethink our approach to drugs so that property crime isn’t the primary way that people access drugs. We don’t have any part of this country that has high-quality medical drug treatment on demand. But we have policing on demand everywhere. And it’s not working.”
Vitale never addressed the serious crime question. And that’s important, isn’t it? Looking over some of his other interviews, it is amazing how often the question of crime has not come up. But if momentum continues to grow for defunding the police — and certainly if some bold municipality actually tries it — people will want to know what happens if a government defunds the police and crime still happens.
