Why “Defunding” the Police Won’t Work — and Won’t Bring Reform
Some of those who rightfully call for reform amid America’s troubled history of police brutality have urged cities across the nation to “defund” the police in the wake of the horrific murder of George Floyd. I am grateful to the many protesters who have moved this important issue to the forefront of our national consciousness, and who righteously demand change. I also agree with those who interpret “defund” to mean that we should use this moment as a catalyst for discussion about how we could reduce police involvement in social problems for which they may be poorly equipped or trained. Two years ago, for example, we announced that SJPD would no longer engage in police enforcement on public school campuses where student behavior was better handled as an internal disciplinary issue. Similarly, for several years, Chief Garcia has sought to work with the County to find ways to enlist trained mental health providers to work collaboratively with SJPD to provide the first response to a resident experiencing a psychotic episode, rather than confronting the troubled person with a badge and a gun. There are plenty of other opportunities for us to work with the community to co-create a better response.
But if “defund” merely represents a means to slash police budgets as a means to express protest, I disagree strongly. The appropriate response to protest is to reform, not to defund. We will be exploring and implementing many reforms in the days ahead, such as to expand the authority of the Independent Police Auditor, to ban the use of rubber bullets in crowds, to mandate a “duty to intervene” on all officers, and to revise our use of force policies. We’ll need to consider many others, to be sure, and that will require more work — particularly regarding the power of unaccountable arbitrators to make it harder to discipline or fire bad cops.
Yet defunding the police will undermine our efforts to keep San Jose’s community safe — particularly for those members of our community who have suffered the most from systemic racism.
Other cities may have the luxury of considering defunding measures without undermining public safety, but San Jose has the most thinly-staffed police department of any major city in the United States. The City of Los Angeles, for example, has more than twice as many officers per resident as San Jose, and San Francisco has three times as many. Although I am proud of the work we have done to boost our police force by more than 300 officers since 2017, we have much more work to do. We’ve understaffed critical investigations units for more than a decade, and have heard repeated calls from the City Council to bolster everything from sexual assaults to domestic violence investigations. We have seen traffic-related deaths of pedestrians and cyclists climb while the staffing of our traffic enforcement unit remains near historical lows. We have only recently emerged from a half-decade in which officers routinely worked multiple mandatory overtimes every week due to patrol staffing shortages, and our police 911 response times lag well below our own — and other cities’ — standards.
Our residents have told us, again and again, they want more police — not fewer. Over the last decade, I have attended perhaps a half-dozen cafecitas with the predominantly Spanish-speaking “Madres” at Washington Elementary School, and I have never completed a conversation without several of them pleading for more police to counter whatever has transpired the prior week in their neighborhood, from gangs to gunfire. Americans of color statistically suffer from higher rates of victimization to serious and violent crime, ranging from homicide to aggravated assault.
I don’t believe that the more affluent neighborhoods in San Jose will suffer with defunding; we’ve seen the explosive growth of the private patrol industry in cities like Atlanta, for example. But our families of modest means will suffer. Westfield and Santana Row will hire security guards for the businesses in their malls, but immigrant-owned small businesses along East Santa Clara Street, Alum Rock and Story Road will struggle with the robbery and vandalism without recourse. No matter how justifiable any criticism of SJPD might be, I remain certain that our civil liberties will be far more vulnerable to violation in a city with roving private security patrols. Private security companies will not be accountable to the public when they disproportionately stop and question black and brown drivers in affluent neighborhoods, for example.
Moreover, defunding police will undermine substantive efforts at reform. A decade ago, I can recall then-Independent Police Auditor LaDoris Cordell imploring our City Council to boost spending on hiring police to address the harmful impacts of officers’ fatigued decisionmaking on the civil liberties of our residents. We have made numerous investments over the last half decade in transparency and accountability: collecting data on demographics of every person stopped by police; publishing use-of-force data on a public dashboard; deploying body worn cameras, hiring independent experts to identify trouble spots for racially biased policing; creating new courses on implicit bias, de-escalation of force, and encountering mental health crises; backfilling patrol so that every officer can attend those classes; and improving recruitment and screening. All of those investments require more money, not less. Based on an independent report issued weeks ago and recited in the Mercury News, this work has eliminated the longstanding statistical disparity between officers’ use of force rates and arrest rates against persons of color in San Jose. We have much more work to do — particularly in light of the many complaints arising from recent protests — but we don’t get it done by cutting these programs.
Finally, we should all be honest about what gets cut in police budgets — typically during recessions. Any City Council will be loathe to cut the lifeline 911 emergency response that patrol officers provide to communities in moments of distress, or to lay off investigators of sexual assaults, child abuse, or domestic violence. Instead, in this city and every other, departments wring savings from programs that work proactively to build stronger police-community relationships, such as crime prevention, outreach, and youth programs like Police Activities League and gang prevention.
We need a better approach. Yes, reform takes time, and feels less satisfying than a “quick fix.” But nothing worth achieving has ever been simple, and no meaningful reform has ever resulted from a “quick fix.”
The 2020–21 June Budget Message is now available: sanjoseca.gov/mayorbudget.
