The Dangerous Proposition of Defunding the Police Bites Back

Redirecting police budgets to fund criminals in violence intervention programs has predictable results

Photo by Martin Podsiad on Unsplash

The police defunding movement has completely backfired. Shifting funds to criminals to prevent crime has resulted so many more victim shootings and murders.

The key issue is that none of these programs cultivate respect for the law. It is the main issue and the root cause of gun crime and violence.

The data on gun violence is distributed unevenly in age, race, and gender. Being a young black male, in the United States, carries the statistical probabilities of both death by gun violence and being imprisoned due to gun violence obscenely greater than any other group. The obvious solution, honesty, is embargoed on all fronts while the needless deaths mount.

An allegory to this is to compare CVI to teaching people to read with finite resources. If it cost millions to teach an intelligent person to read, and you didn’t have many millions, you would be much more accepting and understanding of illiteracy. Of the very few stories labeled as successes in CVI, you will find an unsustainable resource investment, and resources stolen from programs that are effective.

This is the situation with all community violence intervention (CVI) programs. They can’t even fully staff while dealing with unlimited federal funding from American Rescue Plan and the Safer Communities Act than they can process.  The Biden Administration is printing money in the trillions, yet they have depleted the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) funding and are intentionally funding CVIs. “In 2021, Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, which included funding that many cities are spending on “community violence intervention,” the catchall term for non-police approaches to reducing violent crime.”

The practitioners and the credible messengers (or interchangeably violence interrupters) have reached the capacity of these programs. Also, we are still waiting for authentic success stories.