First Draft

To End Police Violence Fund Public Goods and Raise Wages

BY DUSTIN GUASTELLA, JULY 9, 2020, nonsite.org

One unfortunate thing about “Black Power” is that it gives priority to race prejudice at a

time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question

fundamental for blacks and whites alike.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Demands to defund, dismantle, or even abolish police departments have leapt from the

bullhorns of protesters, to the pages of the New York Times and even into the policy

platforms of national Democratic Party figures. The demand, and the protest activity

behind it, are informed by an assumption that the use of deadly force by the police is a

fundamental and foundational part of policing. In this view, reforming the police is

impossible. The only way to reduce the use of lethal force, argues Mariame Kaba, is to

reduce policing itself: she advocates cutting the number of police officers in half

nationwide.1

Much of the popular narrative also assumes that the primary cause of police violence is

simple and readily apparent: racism. It is true that black Americans are far more likely to

be shot and killed by the police than white Americans. And it is true that racial prejudice

held by police officers plays a role. Yet to address the problem of police violence, we

need to understand the scope, magnitude, and patterns of the problem. This requires a

much wider lens than the focus on racism allows.

I fear many are getting the conversation around policing entirely wrong. And if mistaken

analysis leads to bad policy, the results could be fatal. Starting with the proposition that

that racism is intrinsic to policing, it may seem intuitive that reducing the footprint of the

police would reduce the prevalence of police brutality – and especially the use of lethal

force. Less cops, less cop violence. Yet a sober look at the evidence suggests

otherwise. To get the politics of policing right we need to understand what drives the

problem of police lethality in the first place.

The Police Kill the Poor

The racial disparities in police killings are almost always the first statistics marshalled in

defense of calls to abolish, dismantle or defund the police. But the focus on racial

disparities can confuse as much as it clarifies. Consider the oft quoted statistic that

black Americans make up 24% of the victims of police killings despite only accounting

for 13% of the population.2 Without context, this suggests that black Americans are

indiscriminately murdered by the police, regardless of where they fall on the ladder of

economic inequality or even where they live.

Jeff Bezos recently quipped: “I have a 20-year-old son, and I simply don’t worry that he

might be choked to death while being detained one day. […] Black parents can’t say the

same.” Are we to believe that the reason the Bezos children are not likely to be killed by

the police is because they were born white, or might being the children of the world’s

wealthiest man have something to do with it? Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier has declared

that George Floyd “could have been me,” but do we really think that black

multimillionaires are more likely to be murdered by the police than poor whites?3 In

truth, this corporate brand of anti-racism—now present in the statements of major

multinational companies, featured on the splash pages of all major streaming services,

and prominent in most national papers—has sought to make invisible the most

significant features of American society linked to police violence: inequality and

austerity.

Though we don’t have comparable statistics at the individual level, there is much

evidence to suggest a startling disparity in the pattern of police violence by class.

According to one analysis, a person in the poorest quintile of census tracts is 3.5 times

more likely to be killed by the police than a person in the wealthiest quintile. Of all the

police killings in the United States about 60% take place in census tracts falling in the

two quintiles with the highest levels of poverty – despite these tracts accounting for only

39% of the population. A full 35% of all police killings occurred in the census tract

quintile with the highest concentration of poverty.4

And because this data is based on the place of killing, rather than the identity or

residence of the victim, these numbers are very likely underselling the degree to which

the poor suffer from police brutality. For instance, it is almost certainly true that many of

the individuals killed by the police in relatively wealthy census tracts were themselves

poor. Consider that in the real-world, patrolling relatively wealthy neighborhoods, like

Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, consists of haranguing any ‘trespassers’ from neighboring

high-poverty areas like Red Hook.

The truth is police lethality is a problem almost exclusively experienced by the poor. And

when we limit our analysis to this population alone we see that racial disparities in police

killings are greatly diminished.5 In one study, Roland Fryer Jr. found that (despite robust

evidence for racial discrimination, and startling disparities in the frequency and use of

force) there was no statistically significant racial disparity in the use of lethal force.6 A

2019 study provided further confirmation, finding “no overall evidence of anti-Black or

anti-Hispanic disparities in fatal shootings.” 7

Of course, a lack of racial disparities does not mean a lack of racism, it could be the

case that the use of lethal force for one group is driven by prejudice, while for others it is

driven by different factors. But then, the inverse is also true: the presence of a racial

disparity does not mean that racism is the cause. In reality poverty is driving much more

of the story than CEOs like Bezos and Frazier would like to admit. While it no longer

surprises people to learn that black Americans are 24% of the total victims of police

murder, it might surprise many that they also make up 23% of the total population living

under the poverty line in this country. And while white Americans make up around 41%

of the poor, they actually account for 46% of the victims of police killings. The takeaway

here is that the racial breakdown of those killed by the police almost exactly matches

the racial demography of the poor.

None of these facts excuse the problem of racism in American police departments. Yet

racial prejudice cannot explain why white Americans are so much more likely to be killed

by the police than Europeans of any race. Nor can racism effectively explain why police

lethality is greatest in the states with the smallest black populations.8 Solving the

problem of violent policing in America requires recognizing these complex dynamics and

tailoring solutions that address the political and economic foundations which gave rise

to it in the first place. Yet no such approach is apparent in the contemporary calls to

abolish, dismantle, or defund the police. In fact, the evidence suggests that “defunding”

police departments and cutting the number of officers is among the worst solutions,

indeed it may even exacerbate brutality.

Budgetary Brutality

A comparison between Philadelphia and Phoenix might help illustrate the complexity of

American police violence. The two cities are roughly the same size and capture roughly

the same level of GDP, but this is where the similarities end. Philadelphia is about 44%

black, whereas Phoenix is only 7% black. The City of Brotherly Love is among the

poorest cities in the country, with nearly 26% of the population living in poverty; while

Phoenix is also very poor, only 18% of its residents suffer under the crush of want.

Notably, Philadelphia has about 42 police officers per 10,000 residents, compared to 17

per 10,000 in Phoenix.

Given the prevailing narratives, we should expect that Philly would be a hotbed of police

lethality: after all, it’s a poor black city with lots of cops and an allegedly bloated police

budget. But the truth is that in Phoenix, an average of 11.0 people are killed by police

each year, while in Philadelphia that number is just 3.1. Phoenix, then, with less than

half the number of police officers as Philadelphia, has 3.5 times the rate of police

killings.9

Once you start to look, such apparently surprising results become visible all over the

map. Montana is a very rural and overwhelmingly white state, with a relatively small

police presence—just 17 police officers per 10,000 residents—but it is rife with police

violence. Montanans are 1.4 times more likely to be killed by the police than Georgians,

a state whose population is 30% black, and which employs 27 police officers per 10,000

residents.

Similarly, West Virginia, another lily-white state with relatively few police officers (just

14.9 per 10,000 residents), has a major problem with police killings. Its average rate is

over 2.5 times as high as its more diverse and wealthier neighbor, Virginia, which

employs 21.5 officers per 10,000 residents.10

These comparisons are not outliers: if we go down the list of cities and states that top

the charts in police violence, we see a striking pattern: fewer officers often correlates

with greater police lethality. If the examples here are any indication, cutting the number

of police officers in half nationwide could result in a three-fold increase in police killings

in some areas.

Police lethality also happens to be concentrated in states with lax gun laws; among

populations with easy access to cheap weapons. Western and Mountain region states

have nearly triple the rate of police murders compared to Northeastern states.11 It

seems, then, that in areas with easy access to guns, high levels of poverty, and few

police, the cops kill more people. This is no less true for mostly white cities like Colorado

Springs or Spokane, than it is for majority-minority cities like Los Angeles or Stockton.

Further, as police lethality in cities has decreased by an average rate of 5.32% per year

over the past six years, just the opposite has happened in rural areas, which have

witnessed an increase in incidences of police lethality by a nearly identical average rate

of 5.14% per year.

Convincing causal explanations for the patterns and trends described here are

available, but they require us to question the analysis and solutions offered by activists.

Defunding police budgets, far from a solution, could in fact be one of the

major causes of police violence. Cash-strapped departments seem to have both fewer

officers overall and more incidences of the use of lethal force. This makes some sense.

Firstly, the lack of cash in a given department is usually an expression of the level of

poverty in the district they serve and, as we’ve seen, cops tend to shoot, choke, and kill

poor people. But a more direct relationship is also evident: municipal austerity affects

police behavior. Fewer cops means longer hours and shrinking budgets means lower

pay. The result is overworked and underqualified officers.12

Returning to Phoenix, a 2015 study found that when officers were expected to work 13

hour and 20 minute shifts, as opposed to 10 hours, their work performance significantly

declined.13 And a similar study in 2018 showed that police fatigue resulted in more

citizen complaints about police behavior.14 Everyone acknowledges that medical

professionals—nurses, surgeons, and EMT’s—are more likely to make life threatening

mistakes when they are overworked, though no one would advocate cutting hospital

budgets as a solution to fatigue.

A lack of funds also means lack of training and accountability. Consider the situation in

Dolton, Illinois. This small Chicago suburb is home to a particularly violent police force.

However, the trouble with reforming the department has been attributed to an inability to

spend money on training and hiring qualified officers. Disgraced officers from larger

urban districts often find their way to places like Dolton where their formal experience

and their willingness to work for less make them attractive recruits. So, in the rare event

that officers are disciplined for their behavior, violent cops tend to bounce around

underfunded departments. In another Chicagoland example, Robbins, Illinois pays an

all part-time force $10.50 an hour—similar wages were found in Ferguson, Missouri’s

department in 2015.15 Low wages in policing are hardly a rare occurrence, across the

country officers are expected to work for less and do more. It doesn’t take a social

scientist to predict what might happen when you combine poverty wages with a job that

requires you to carry a gun. In much of America we pay police officers McDonald’s

wages to patrol Walmart’s workforce.

Austerity Allocations Aren’t Enough

All of this is to say that we cannot solve the problem of police violence by avoiding the

problem of poverty. Yet this is exactly what the “defund” solution threatens to do. In a

remarkable twist, liberal militants have embraced austerity as a solution for local

government. Slashing police budgets has been so widely accepted on the Left that

criticism of it—on welfarist grounds, policy implementation, or simple political

commonsense—has been labeled reactionary or racist. The reality, as I have tried to

show, is that if defunding the police were to result in fewer beat cops, more poverty

wages for officers in already poor districts, less police training and effectively no change

in the presence of guns or the rate of poverty, then the defunding “solution”—for all its

radical rhetoric—would likely result in more, not fewer, incidences of police lethality. We

cannot be afraid to say what is true: defunding the police is wrong because it will result

in more people dying.

The response to this charge might be to claim that we could reallocate municipal funds

to other social goods and offset the need for policing altogether. Yet slashing police

budgets to zero would do almost nothing to stem the tide of municipal bankruptcies and

solve the public funding crisis. That’s because, as Adaner Usmani and John Clegg have

shown, it’s significantly cheaper to police the problems associated with joblessness and

poverty than to solve them.16 Many activists point to what seem like high dollar amounts

for police budgets as evidence that money could be better spread around. Instead of

demanding that the federal government tax the wealthy and their corporations to fund

public goods and eliminate joblessness, activists seem to believe that city governments

have no choice but to rob Peter to pay Paul. Though if we took the $150 million Los

Angeles recently cut from their police budget and redirected it to housing stipends for

the entire poverty population, it would buy everyone no more than a couple weeks’ rent

in LA’s cheapest neighborhoods.

Indeed, when looking at any major city budgets the big story is not eye-popping police

spending but shockingly low investment across the board. Today, no city can afford to

fund public provisions to adequately address the upstream causes of police violence.

Therefore, no city can effectively use the public purse to reduce the demand for police

in poor, violent neighborhoods. The reallocation argument fails on these terms. And

without addressing poverty and unemployment, the human costs of removing the police

would be staggering. When Baltimore reformed its department after the death of

Freddie Gray, a move that involved removing dozens of officers from their beats and

changing methods to avoid police contact with citizens, homicides increased in that city

a full 63% in a single year. 93% of the murder victims were black.17

It is no wonder, then, that the demand to defund the police is deeply unpopular, no

matter how it is phrased, among black and white voters alike. Truthfully, I can’t think of a

better way to repel working people of any race (the very group that liberals and

progressives have increasingly struggled to mobilize) than to accept that austerity is

permanent and to insist that concerns about crime are inconsequential.

Bayard Rustin once warned about activists’ psychic inability to fend off leftwing slogans

which result in rightwing policy. That difficulty persists today. Not only do calls to

“defund” fail to address the problems of police violence, racism, public safety or poverty,

they also risk missing the clear opportunity to unite a constituency around ending the

complementary problems of police brutality, gun violence, municipal austerity, and

economic inequality. Each of these problems are widely felt concerns among working

people. And advocacy around popular solutions like massive increases in federal social

spending on public goods to eliminate unemployment, raising the minimum wage to a

living wage, and federal gun reform, would go a long way to reducing police violence.

Slashing budgets has never been a solution fit to rectify the failures of any institution of

government. In fact, it’s the exact policy approach, which has failed to provide high-

wages and a broad range of public goods from health care to education. And if

miserable low-wages and the lack of any stable economic life are a major cause of our

uniquely violent police force, then it is necessary to insist that the federal government be

held responsible and reverse course. To return to Rustin, when he campaigned for the

“Freedom Budget for All Americans”, he was roundly ignored by the youth-dominated

activist Left and the new militancy around the rising Black Power movement. Rustin, in

warning against the lure of a new ethnic politics, understood that “dignity and self-

respect must spring from the economic and social position which you hold in the society

and cannot be mythologically and viscerally created […] where the objective situation

indeed makes dignity impossible.”

Similarly, black lives can only truly matter in this society when we provide adequate

jobs, housing, education, health care and so on, to everyone. If we want to end police

violence, we must seek to end the economic violence visited upon nearly all victims of

police brutality long before anyone calls 911.

Notes

1. Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” The New York Times (June 12, 2020). 2. Washington Post, “Police Killings Database,” washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/ police-shootings-database/. 3. Amelia Lucas, “Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier: George Floyd ‘could be me,’” Cnbc.com, June 1, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/merck-ceo-george-floyd-could-be-me.html. 4. See Justin M. Feldman, Sofia Gruskin, Brent A. Coull, and Nancy Krieger, “Police-Related Deaths and Neighborhood Economic and Racial/Ethnic Polarization, United States, 2015– 2016,” American Journal of Public Health 109, no. 3 (2019): 458-64. 5. George R. Gabriel, “Poverty Explains Racial Bias in Police Shootings,” Replication Index (June 03, 2020), https://replicationindex.com/2019/09/27/poverty- explain-racial-biases-in-police-shootings/. 6. Roland G. Fryer, Jr., “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” Journal of Political Economy (July 2017). 7. David J. Johnson et al., “Officer Characteristics and Racial Disparities in Fatal Officer- Involved Shootings,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 32 (August 6, 2019): 15877, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1903856116.

8. Paul J. Hirschfield, “Lethal Policing: Making Sense of American Exceptionalism,” Sociological Forum 30, no. 4 (2015): 1109-117. 9. See “Mapping Police Violence,” https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/. The “Average Rate of Police Killing” is calculated per 1,000,000 residents in a given city or state, meaning the rates are accurate comparison across states of different sizes. 10. For data on law enforcement officers per capita see the “National Sources of Law Enforcement Employment Data,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, www.bjs.gov/index.cfm? ty=pbdetail&iid=5600. 11. See Washington Post, “Police Killings Database,” washingtonpost.com/graphics/ investigations/police-shootings-database/. 12. Matthew Yglesias, “The Case for Hiring More Police Officers,” Vox (Feb. 13, 2019),  https:// www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18193661/hire-police-officers-crime-criminal- justice-reform-booker-harris. 13. Leonard B. Bell, Thomas B. Virden, Deborah J. Lewis, and Barry A. Cassidy, “Effects of 13- Hour 20-Minute Work Shifts on Law Enforcement Officers’ Sleep, Cognitive Abilities, Health, Quality of Life, and Work Performance,” Police Quarterly 18, no. 3 (2015): 293-337. 14. Samantha M. Riedy, Drew Dawson, and Bryan Vila, “U.S. Police Rosters: Fatigue and Public Complaints,” Sleep 42, no. 3 (2018). 15. Patrick Smith, “What Happens When Suburban Police Departments Don’t Have Enough Money?,”NPR (January 22, 2018), https://www.npr.org/2018/01/22/579778555/what-happens- when-suburban-police-departments-dont-have-enough-money. See also “Police Pay Gap: Many of America’s Finest Struggle on Poverty Wages.” NBCNews.com (October 26, 2014), https:// www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/police-pay-gap-many-americas-finest-struggle- poverty-wages-n232701. 16. John Clegg and Adaner Usmani, “The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration.” Catalyst 3, No. 3 (2019): 9-54. 17. Alec MacGillis, “The Tragedy of Baltimore,” The New York Times (March 12, 2019), https:// www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/magazine/baltimore-tragedy-crime.html.

Dustin Guastella is a union staffer in Philadelphia and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.