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Melissa Harris-Perry: One year ago this week, officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in broad daylight while dozens of witnesses watched, filmed, and pleaded with him to stop. Now three other police officers face charges of aiding and abetting second-degree murder because they failed to intervene.

The callous cruelty of these officers undeterred by knowing they were being watched and recorded convinced many Americans the policing reform is insufficient. This time organizers demanded full abolition or significant defunding of police. Initially, police abolition has enjoyed some modest victories by securing promises to shift municipal budget priorities in nearly two dozen cities.

For example, Seattle cut 3 million from its policing department and used the process of community participatory budgeting to reallocate the funds. In the city where police killed George Floyd, Minneapolis City Council President, Lisa Bender, made this promise last summer.

Lisa Bender: Our commitment is to end our city's toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, to end the policing as we know it, and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, one year later, the movement to defund or abolish police has proved as complicated and halting as earlier reform movements. Opponents of defunding have blamed these leaner policing budgets for post quarantine uptick in crime and police unions have remained largely intractable. Poco budget processes are far more opaque than some may have anticipated.

If the conventional imperative to "follow the money" is accurate, just where do we arrive when we follow the dollars spent and cut from American police budgets during this turbulent year? I'm Melissa Harris-Perry in for Tanzina Vega and discussing how police funding has or hasn't changed is where we start today on The Takeaway.

For more on this, we're joined now by Barry Friedman, Professor and Founding Director of the Policing Project at New York University School of Law. Along with Barry is Howard Henderson, Professor of Texas Southern University and the Founding Director of the Center for Justice Research. Howard and Barry welcome.

Barry Friedman: Hi, Melissa.

Howard Henderson: Thank you for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I want to just start with this question. Do police make us safe?

Barry Friedman: That's a really hard question. The data on it is really very, very mixed. When you say safe, I just want to make the point, Melissa, that safe means both addressing issues of crime, but it also means being safe from the police. Too often when we think about public safety, we think about one of those two things and not the other, but if you want an accurate vision of whether we're being safer because of policing, you have to look at both of them.

When you do, it's a mixed bag. There are some studies that suggest some policing tactics are successful in some ways but the numbers are much lower than you might think. Too much around policing, we lack a knowledge base.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Howard, do you want to jump in on this as well?

Howard Henderson: Yes, I want to jump in on it. I think Barry is absolutely right in the fact that there's a mixed bag, but I will also say that the critics of the police movement assert that we need more funding in policing with armed policing across the country, but there's insufficient data to support the position in either direction. In fact, the research has found that the police don't have a 'nototially' of efficient track record of solving violent crime per se, but further what the research does show us is that 70% of robberies and 66% of rapes, 47% of aggravated assaults, and 38% of murders go unsolved each year. The data, again, provides us a position where we're not sure exactly how effective police are, and I think that lies the problem.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For me, that is kind of this core underlying set of assumptions. If we believe that police make us safe, then of course we want to give more resources to whatever it is that would keep us safe. Whether it is a lock on our front door or whether it is a new police precinct. If those aren't the things that keep us safe, then how might we want to reallocate budgets so that we are safer? Do we have any data that suggests in fact, we become safer socially as well as maybe safer from the police?

Howard Henderson: We do know that funding alternatives to policing have been effective. We know that forcing police to focus on a more community health approach using mental health services as an alternative saves us time, save us money, and save us lives. We understand the alternatives are effective, the problem is we are forced with trying to change the mindset of Americans who have been focused on policing and social control as a normal mechanism.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I just want to go to precisely that point. There's a political question here. There's a question of what that word defunding means, what it prompts, and whether or not it's actually attached to these practices of making us safer.

Barry Friedman: Right. One thing we might need to do is think about what safety even means. I think that is exactly what many of the communities that are raising issues about defunding are asking. Safety means freedom from third-party violence. I think we can all agree about that. It also means adequate food and housing and jobs and opportunities.

One of the things we know, for example, is that money that is put into youth job programs actually brings down crime and makes society more productive. What we need to do is think about whether there are resources in society that we can devote to underlying problems and actually solve them.

One of the things that happens is people call 911, they don't call the police by the way, they call 911 and we send the police. The police come, but it's rare that the police can actually solve that problem. Very often police might stabilize things perhaps with some harm, but the question is, have we tackled the underlying problem that brought them there in the first place?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Howard, help me to understand why police budgets are as large as they are right now in the first place.

Howard Henderson: Let's use this, in the US we spend an estimated $100 billion on policing every year. Most of that is based upon the perception of fear. We have been taught and trained that the police are necessary in society at the level that they currently are. Well, we need to begin to invest in, as Barry said, in education, healthcare, housing, and other critical programs, but we've just been trained and culturated to believe that policing needs to be as broad as it is.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Barry, right now, in part, because of that training that we have this belief, as we're seeing an uptick in some forms of property crime, some forms of violent crime in some cities as the quarantine rules are lifting and more people are heading back out into interaction with each other, I'm certainly seeing the op-eds popping up across the country saying this is a result of defunding the police. Is that accurate?

Barry Friedman: I don't think there's any basis for saying that the uptick in crime is a result of defunding the police, because even if that were the proper relationship between defunding and crime, it's just too soon. Police forces have gotten smaller because of attrition. It's been a difficult time, but there are lots of causes of current uptick in crime and we just don't really understand them.

The question is whether we could be safer by using policing and here again, though, perhaps that is the case, and many people feel that it's the case, you also have to ask about the costs of trying to address that crime in the way we do.

For example, in most police departments, the way they tackle violent crime is through stops. Pretextual stops, traffic stops, pedestrian stops, and those have really serious costs. It's unclear that they actually have the impact of bringing down crime. The question is whether we could allocate those resources to police presence without the enforcement, or whether we could bring in violence interrupters, which are private individuals who help bring peace to the city streets.

Those are all hard questions, but in this country, we have a snap judgment mindset about policing, you're for them or against them without thinking really thoughtfully about what would make us safer.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm going to dig into the financial piece for one second because one of the critical findings out of the Ferguson Report which came out of the death of Michael Brown was that the police-- It wasn't even so much about how much money was going into policing, but how much municipal revenue was being generated by police. Those stops that you just talked about, Barry, were creating resources, dollars for municipalities. How do we manage that part if cities are actually reliant on these small non-violent crime preemptive stops of police in order to basically keep their revenue up?

Barry Friedman: Anywhere that that happens it's an abomination. Cities should not be raising their money through policing. I'm part of a project with the American Law Institute, which is just recently said that. That's the irony of this, which is when you're thinking about public safety, you have to think about the impacted communities, the Black and brown communities that both experience the crime and feel the pressure of policing.

One of the things we hear out of those communities is that they are being hit with fines and fees all the time, which then maybe folks can't afford, so then they end up with warrants out on them, then they get arrested, and there's this spiral that actually ends up costing us a tremendous amount of money as a society and does not really solve problems. Again, it would be better if we policed smarter, whether that's using the police, or whether that's using private resources than the way that we currently do.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Howard, I want to ask you about Black and brown communities, because a lot of times there is, at least in our sort of public discourse about it, there's this idea that maybe there's a generational divide, or there's a class divide, that there are some Black folks who really want more policing and others who want to defund or abolish, how would you reflect on what those divides look like and how they complicate this story?

Howard Henderson: The reality is, there is a Black-white divide, the most recent poll show us that Blacks still have the most negative view of the police, even though that number is not as low as it used to be, there's still a divide there, you also see a class dimension. Reality is there's a different experience in this country with American policing based upon race and class, and we have not done a very good job of addressing that issue and that divide.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Here's one big thing I keep hearing from former police officers, and that is that the culture of the policing itself is a challenge, that what happens in that sort of behind that blue line. Wouldn't defunding potentially actually make that problem worse, or at least not address it? If there's a toxic police culture, it can be better or less well resourced, but should we care about and try to address police culture?

Howard Henderson: I think that's the broader issue and thank you for raising that question. We have several examples of police departments that have defunded or reallocated resources and addressed the direct culture and they've been fairly successful so far, even though we need a little more time to understand the long-standing effect of defunding and reallocation services.

I think a lot of what we're talking about here is a matter of perception, is a matter of tradition, and many offices are not used to that form of policing that society is now requesting and expecting.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Barry, I'm going to give you the last one on this. What I heard from Howard is sometimes we need a little more time. What should be the measures that we're using to determine whether or not any of the reforms that we seek to implement are in fact being successful, making us safer?

Barry Friedman: I hate to say it, but that's the million-dollar question, which is, for a long time, policing drove on measures like how many folks got arrested? What were the number of stops that the police conducted? We've, I think, all become dissatisfied with that, but we don't have good measures to replace that.

Folks want to look at the crime rate but you will find that some folks are eager to take credit when the crime rate goes down, but not eager to accept the responsibility when the crime rate goes up. I think policing over the run of history doesn't affect that crime rate that much, so we have to look at what are the things we want out of policing? Like Howard says, do we want to know whether the community feels safe? Do we want to know whether the community feels comfortable calling 911?

That's a really important measure. Does the community have satisfaction with its policing agency? Those are, at least, some of the questions we can ask, but the truth is, this is a real unknown, something we need to work on.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Howard Henderson is the Founding Director of the Center for Justice Research, and Barry Friedman is the Founding Director of the Policing Project at NYU School of Law. Thank you both for joining me today.

Howard Henderson: Thank you so much.

Barry Friedman: Thank you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now we're going to focus in on one city's efforts to reallocate funds back to community. This week, the Los Angeles City Council approved its plans to divert funds away from the police department budget from last year into programs ranging from homelessness services to anti-gang initiatives.

In total $89 million will be going into these social programs. At the same time, Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council recently increased the LAPD's budget for the new fiscal year, frustrating many activists hoping for real lasting systemic change. Here to walk us through all this is Dakota Smith, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. Dakota, thank you for joining us.

Dakota Smith: Happy to be here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Let's just start with the latest. How did the city council in Los Angeles settle on the size of the fund that would be reallocated away from the police?

Dakota Smith: This all first happened as protests were still going on last year. There was a lot of anger on the streets, the National Guard had come in. It was a very tense time and the City Council and the mayor, they clearly wanted to respond to what was going on. The city council came forward and said, "We're going to cut 150 million from the police budget and put it towards disenfranchised communities, communities of color."

How they came up with that number, not entirely clear, but it was a big number and it got national press and people responded. Activists said it's not enough, other groups said this is the first step. After that promise last year, they finalized the list this week, and that money will start coming into communities.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Then what's the deal here about more resources next year allocated to the police?

Dakota Smith: The budget that will start July 1st in Los Angeles, in fact, will slightly increase spending for the police department, and the argument there is that with retirements of officers and with resignations of officers, the police force is going down and at the same time, we're seeing some rise in certain types of crimes, shootings, homicides, and there's concern about keeping the LAPD at certain levels.

The city council wants to continue to fund the police department in order to have those officers on the streets, but at the same time, there's going to be fewer officers compared to a year ago, just because of attrition. They're really trying to just keep things level I guess they would probably are you.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Okay. If we know that there's this kind of balancing out around officers and the size of the department, what is going to grow, where our resources going to be reallocated into spaces that aren't about policing?

Dakota Smith: It was 150 million, and then about 60 million of it actually went to go help balance the city's budget, so that left about 90 million or so and that's going to a variety of programs, some of which you mentioned, gang intervention workers, youth education, jobs programs, park improvements, and some of the money has been criticized by the police union because it's going to do things like fix streets.

At the same time, activists are supportive, and they're happy that the money is going to help things like reentry programs after people get out of prison to help them find jobs. This is not an insignificant amount of money that's going to flow to these programs.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Can you back up for me a second, though. When you talk about both balancing the budget with some portion of it, and also doing some sort of broader municipal actions like street repair, like that's the classic things that cities must do, keep the streets good, it sounds to me, and please let me know if this is right. Sounds to me like the pressure that came from the movement for Black lives to reallocate funds basically allowed the city to take kind of a loan off the police department budget but didn't really respond to what that movement was asking for relative to a new way of thinking about public safety.

Dakota Smith: I think there's a bit more to pick apart there. If we go back a year ago, LA was in a budget crisis. This was before a billion dollars flowed in from the Biden administration. LA was really struggling and it was struggling with and looking at having to potentially lay off city workers who make up-- There's a lot of Black and brown people who work for the city.

The city was struggling, "Are we going to lay off a lot of city workers or furlough them?" When I say 'balance the city budget", they wanted to protect those workers. That's why some of that money went to the city budget if that makes sense.

Your broader criticism, what really changed? I think that's totally valid. What I think activists would say, and what is concerning right now is that this was a one-time allocation of money, this 90 million or so, are these programs going to be funded next year?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Right and your point about protecting the jobs of city workers then become protecting the jobs of those folks who are now running those programs. Let me ask one last question in our last few seconds here. What was the budget process itself? Did community get a voice in where that 150 million went?

Dakota Smith: They certainly did. You had a wide array of groups, community groups, asking for specific programs to be funded. You had some neighborhoods too, who said, "We want these types of services". At the same time, there's tensions over, "You want more cops or you want less cops?" Different neighborhoods have different views. There was community input and City Hall did respond.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Dakota Smith is a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. Dakota, thank you for bringing the complexity of this, it's not simple.

Dakota Smith: It's not simple. Thank you.

 

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