Cities Say They Want to Defund the Police. Their Budgets Say Otherwise.

By Fola Akinnibi, Sarah Holder and Christopher Cannon

January 12, 2021, 5:00 AM EST

The rallying cry to defund the police that erupted with George Floyd’s killing almost eight months ago has come up against political realities with most major U.S. cities unwilling to make meaningful cuts.

Even as the 50 largest U.S. cities reduced their 2021 police budgets by 5.2% in aggregate—often as part of broader pandemic cost-cutting initiatives—law enforcement spending as a share of general expenditures rose slightly to 13.7% from 13.6%, according to data compiled by Bloomberg CityLab. And many cities like Minneapolis and Seattle have watered down or put on pause changes that were proposed or even passed at the height of the 2020 demonstrations against racism and police brutality.

Disparities in policing came into full view on Jan. 6 as a predominantly white mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a bid to overturn the results of the presidential election. Videos emerged of officers appearing to open barricades for rioters, offering a stark contrast to scenes from summer protests, where largely peaceful demonstrators were met at times with brutal force.

Police budgets will expand this year even in cities like Atlanta, Omaha and Phoenix, where Democrats picked up more votes in the 2020 presidential race versus 2016. Out of 42 major cities where Democrats gained share, 24 increased police spending for fiscal 2021, while 18 made cuts.

Sources: Bloomberg reporting, The Associated Press

Chris Burbank, vice president of law enforcement strategy for the Center for Policing Equity and the former chief of police of Salt Lake City, said he fears the seemingly muted response at the Capitol marks a step back in the reckoning over racism in policing, even as it proves the need for further reform. The divide is significant and “very difficult to repair,” he said.

No city better epitomizes this struggle than Minneapolis, where the city council wrestled with public safety concerns spurred by a wave of violent crime and the underlying financial constraints wrought by the coronavirus. The plan adopted in December was considered a compromise: reducing the department’s ability to spend overtime with impunity and creating several new alternatives to police responses, while planning to expand officer recruitment in 2022.

Despite setbacks, activists say there is more momentum than ever before behind reform and alternative models for policing, but there are divisions on the best way to achieve that. Joe Biden’s administration has signaled it supports spending on training and department oversight, rather than cuts. Biden himself has denounced calls to defund the police, citing it as one of the reasons Democrats underperformed during the 2020 cycle after predictions of a “blue wave.”

Bloomberg CityLab focused its analysis on police spending from general funds, to get a glimpse of cities’ priorities in their day-to-day spending. There are other sources of funding for police, including state and federal funds and private donations, as well as other ways these departments can cost municipalities, like legal settlements, overtime expenses and pension contributions.

“It’s definitely the case that we’ve seen more legislative action on police accountability and shrinking the police department budget in the last 3 months than we saw really in the last 30 years,” said Shaun Scott, an activist and former city council candidate in Seattle, where council members initially committed to cutting the department’s budget by 50%, only to reduce general fund police spending by 11.2%. “At the same time there is a sense of achievement and accomplishment, there’s also a sense of disappointment.”

Much of the money spent by cities on police is on the officers themselves, so when budgets go up—as they have consistently in the years after the 2008 recession—it means that departments and officer salaries are growing. In cases where cities have been reducing police spending, it has often meant they are letting vacancies go unfilled, cutting officers or allowing retirements to happen without replacements. Part of the goal of the movement to defund police departments is to reduce a reliance on officers with a gun; in their place, advocates are pushing cities to fund chronically under-resourced social services and innovate new public safety responses.

“We went wrong in shifting all these resources into policing rather than all these other social services and education, jobs and housing and everything else. That would’ve been a much smarter thing to do, even from a public safety perspective,” said Christy Lopez, a Georgetown Law professor and former U.S. Department of Justice civil rights division attorney. “There are ways that we can and should be looking at how to reduce the amount of resources that police suck up.”

At the same time there is a sense of achievement and accomplishment, there’s also a sense of disappointment.

To that end, San Francisco approved a diversion of $60 million from the police budget in 2021 and 2022, taking money from planned raises. Funds will be shared between three departments, including the Department of Public Health, which will bolster the coronavirus response among the city’s Black population, increase testing in public housing facilities, and pay for programs supporting African American women through pregnancy, said Tracy Gallardo, a legislative aide to Supervisor Shamann Walton, who supported the cuts.

Los Angeles, which spends about a quarter of its general fund budget on police, finalized a landmark $150 million reallocation away from police to communities of color in July. But activists there are now faced with a new challenge: Ensuring that they have a say in how the funds are spent. Already, some of the money has been used to backfill furloughs, and there are proposals to use funds for sidewalk fixes, tree trimming and other projects that are necessary but not necessarily transformative reinvestments.

Sources: Los Angeles City Council, U.S. Census Bureau

“Part of what was happening is we were in the midst of a global uprising, so keeping our eyes on what hands were moving behind the scenes became — we were kind of overwhelmed,” said Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and a Black Lives Matter organizer who has been pushing for police budget reallocations for years. “We’re definitely going to keep a much closer watch, and exert even more pressure for the next budget cycle.”

After cancelling a planned increase to police department funding in late June and setting a goal of cutting its budget in half eventually, Oakland, California, formed a community-led Reimagining Public Safety Task Force to recommend further budget changes by April 2021. There’s tension over what that future looks like: A letter signed by five Black task force members from the flatlands of Oakland, a collection of neighborhoods with the highest 911 call rates and homicide rates, highlighted the need to agree on and fund effective alternatives before making further cuts to the police.

Budgets aren’t the only needles that were moved by last year’s protests. Already, city leaders have faced political consequences—either for their receptiveness to calls for reform, or their resistance.

In Seattle, Carmen Best, the first Black woman to lead the city’s police, resigned in August over plans to cut the department’s budget and eliminate as many as 100 officers. Mayor Jenny Durkan, who was assailed by city council members and activists for the police response to the protests during the summer, announced she would not seek reelection months later, citing a desire to focus on the problems facing Seattle rather than a campaign. And the entirety of Minneapolis’s city council will be on the ballot this year, meaning their records in 2020 will be scrutinized by voters on both sides of the ideological divide.

Other cities were more resistant to demands to defund the police: 26 of the 50 largest cities raised their police spending for 2021. But regardless of motivation, several cities were forced to make across-the-board cuts because of budget shortfalls driven by the financial impact of the pandemic.

Denver cut its police department budget by $25 million, at a similar proportion to other departments, because of the pandemic. The city has also been able to prioritize investing in police alternatives with money from ballot initiatives, including a pilot program for a roving mental health response team and a co-responder program for riskier mental health calls.

“This is not an ‘or.’ This is not, ‘fund the police department or fund mental health.’ It is an ‘and,’” said Denver Police Chief Paul Pazen. “Taking from one and assuming that that’s going to solve issues is not the answer from my perspective.”

In any budget, however, there are trade-offs that eventually have to be made—even moreso now that coronavirus has damaged the fiscal health of even the wealthiest cities. Groups like the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors have spent months petitioning for aid to local governments, arguing that failing to provide it puts public safety funding at risk. Biden and Congressional Democrats have signaled state and local aid is a priority as well.

Just as the coronavirus has impacted policy decisions by stressing city budgets, the pandemic’s economic devastation has contributed to a spike in violent crime in some cities. Police chiefs, including Denver’s Pazen, and public dissenters to police reform have leaned on those statistics as proof that cutting back on police would be a threat to public safety.

However, this year’s spike in violent crime in many cities across the U.S. predated the protests and cuts to budgets. Indeed, there’s debate over the benefits of having more police; hiring more officers doesn’t necessarily translate to less crime, according to Georgetown’s Lopez. Cities like Tampa, Florida, have seen spikes in crime despite increases in police spending.

And as evidenced by the Jan. 6 insurrection, having a police presence isn’t a guarantee of results. Images emerged last week of rioters reaching House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office and the Senate chamber as some officers stood by. Other events, like Trump’s summer photo-op with a Bible at St. John’s Episcopal Church and a largely peaceful summer protest in New York City, saw demonstrators met with tear gas, beaten with batons and mass arrests.

During the Trump administration, the federal government has deferred to police forces and resisted pushing local departments to reform. Trump’s Justice Department didn’t enter into any federally mandated settlement agreements with departments over policing during his term, while Trump himself derided those who were protesting against racism and police brutality during the summer. In 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo suggesting that federal interventions into local police departments are an overreach and should be used only in limited circumstances.

There is an opportunity for that to change with the Biden administration, said Lopez. The federal government could incentivize and finance novel alternatives to police so that local governments don’t have to take zero sum approaches to budgeting.

“It’s not clear to me how innovative the Biden administration is going to be on this front,” Lopez said. “The moment is right for them to be funding very different approaches to public safety problems.”

Cities Say They Want to Defund the Police. Their Budgets Say Otherwise.

Mixed Messages

Minneapolis Budget

Modest Increases, Deeper Cuts

Los Angeles Reinvestments

Seattle Budget

Denver Budget