City budget fights pit activists against Democratic politicians.
The liberal push to “defund the police” has drawn predictable scorn from conservatives and resistance from more moderate Democrats, including the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden.
But there’s a more significant obstacle to the growing movement on the left: Democratic politicians in the country’s deep-blue cities.
“These are very blue places, yet we’re still seeing this kind of dynamic with police spending skyrocketing and cuts to community resources and community-led programs,” said Kumar Rao, director of justice transformation at the Center for Popular Democracy, a liberal Brooklyn-based advocacy group. “This is a political issue on one level, but it’s actually very much a bipartisan problem.”
In the nation’s capital, Mayor Muriel Bowser had “BLACK LIVES MATTER” painted on the street leading to the White House after federal officers forcibly cleared out protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets to make way for a presidential photo op outside a historic church. A day later, Black Lives Matter activists painted “DEFUND THE POLICE” next to the original message.
Bowser, however, has proposed a 3.3 percent increase, to $578 million, in police spending in the city’s fiscal year 2021 budget. She told NPR last week that she was “not at all” reconsidering her position.
“We fund the police at the level that we need it funded,” she said.
The District is just one of dozens of cities from the East Coast to the West Coast grappling with the message behind the “defund police” motto. To critics, it’s a literal call to bankrupt and abolish police departments. But to many leaders, it’s a call to reform policing; rethink when, where and how police should be deployed; cut police budgets; and invest more money in communities, instead of in policing communities.
“You ask people what does defunding the police mean — you ask three people, you’ll get three different opinions,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told California Playbook in a virtual interview Tuesday. “But I think what is crystal clear to all of us is that we are underfunding black communities — whether it’s economic development, whether it’s education, whether it’s health — and other communities of color.”
Garcetti said he supported a reevaluation of police funding but did not embrace calls to fully defund or dismantle police departments.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/19/defund-the-police-movement-faces-skepticism-328084