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More cops don’t mean less crime
Putting more police on patrol doesn’t work — addressing the root causes of crime and disorder does
Across the country, the movement to defund and demilitarize the police is gaining steam. This week, activists in Seattle scored a major victory. On Thursday, three more city council members voiced their support for cutting the police budget by at least half, bringing the total up to seven. Assuming none of them reverses course, the proposal will have enough votes to override a veto by Mayor Jenny Durkan.
Predictably, the prospect of slashing police budgets has been met with a lot of doomsaying from police advocates. Crime will skyrocket overnight, they say, and cities will devolve into lawless hellholes. These same folks assert that police are the “thin blue line” between order and chaos, but does thickening up that line really have an effect on crime?
Recently, officers from the Atlanta Police Department staged a sick-out in retaliation for anti-police demonstrations over the death of Rayshard Brooks. In 2014, the NYPD pulled a “slowdown” — a form of striking on the job — because they were angry at New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio.
When unions engage in such actions, the goal is to demonstrate the value of labor by withholding it, ex. a garbage strike…
