Originally published October 16th, 2016.
A world without police. Even now, this idea sounds hopelessly leftist and radical to me. I remember first hearing Ashley Yates and Rae Nelson discuss it at the #blacklivesmatter forum at Philander Smith College. Shaun King was in town and gave his presentation on being in a “historical depression” where moral progress seemed to stop. It was Yates and Nelson who captivated my imagination through.
My captivation lead me to find data; and in it, I found the timbre of my writer’s voice. I feel that this piece began the maturation of my writing style. Mixing my personal thoughts with the available data led me to better articulate my personhood. I could lie to myself and say I needed police to feel safer. But the data show that vast swaths of this nation live in a world without police, and that maintaining such a force generally is an enormous strain on municipal budgets with little return on investment.
Seeking out local experiences and perspectives. Articulating my thoughts. Seeing if the data matches or disproves my feelings. Yes…I think this could work.
I spent last Friday at Philander Smith College and listened to Shaun King and some local activists talk about #blacklivesmatter. King spoke about how he feels we are living in the Dip, a time where technological progress lags behind political regeneration. We live through an age where black people are brutalized and killed in front of smartphones. A powerful and vocal part of my nation, however, still read into their actions of the dead and dying a better path—slight behavior changes they could have made to prevent bullets from ripping their unarmed bodies apart.
In the panel discussion, activists Rae Nelson and Ashley Yates bought up an idea. “Look at your city budgets,” Yates exhorted. “Police typically take up the largest amount of money. What would our cities look like if that money was directed elsewhere? What would our cities look like in a world without police?”
Yates’ idea struck me as absurd. I am an amateur student of political theory. I am fearful of the primitive state of nature only the Leviathan constrains. A part of me hopes for a political order that is just, and will appropriately use its legitimate monopoly on violence to protect me. I have been the victim of muggings, beatings, and the deprivations of predators, left bleeding on the streets of Harlem and in the stairwells of my high school. I have also been harassed by police—yelled at in train stations, and ticketed while changing my tire on a Mississippi highway. I am so conflicted regarding what I want protection from and how my protectors have chosen to treat me.
I do not want to live with a spirit of fear. So I started following the money. In 2009, the Little Rock Police Department received $193,212,182 for their budget; this represents about 36% of Little Rock’s funding use, the largest of any of the city’s divisions. The data runs to 2016 and the LRPD’s funding never goes above 40%. Yet the allocation of funds increases dramatically—to $219,272,074 in 2012. The money suffers a precipitous dip in 2013, only to slowly rise to its current rate of $201,644,229 in 2016.
Little Rock’s crime rate drops alongside police funding in 2009 and 2010. In 2011, however, it rose alongside the city’s police budget. The crime rate stays relatively static in the next two years while the police budget increases, then decreases, and increases yet again. By 2014, there is a distinct distance between crime and the money given to combat crime. There is no consistent evidence that changes in police spending serves to impact overall crime in my city.
The divide between crime and police spending becomes even more ominous when looking at the types of crimes the LRPD makes arrests for. The Arkansas Crime Information Center (ACIC) collects yearly statistics from my state’s police departments and aggregates arrests by crime. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) also gathers such data, and aggregates them by race. In 2009, the LRPD made 768 drugs arrests; 543 of those arrested were black. The LRPD had a low point in drug arrests in 2012, with 587 people and 344 of them being black folk arrested on drug charges. But after the previously mentioned influx of funding from 2012 kicked in, the LRPD arrested close to 100 more people in 2013—and nearly another 100 more the year after that. The ACIC classifies drug offenses as “crimes against society.” Prostitution, gambling, and obscenity laws fall under these umbrellas. These are essentially non-violent crimes, and the LRPD has become expert at using their funding to pursing drug related offenses.
Their behavior makes their failure to bring some of our most dangerous criminals—our murderers—to justice particularly egregious. The Murder Accountability Project (MAP) tracks the clearance rate of homicides nationwide, with a clearance being that a police department has made an arrest and is thus confident they can convict. From 2009 to 2014, the LRPD’s clearance rate stood at 33.49%; the national average for the same time period is 58.81%. Even the influx of funding the police received in 2012 did not have an immediate impact on murder clearance. In 2013, only 23.53% of all murders were cleared alongside a drastic increase in drug arrests. There is more improvement in 2014, where 51.16% of murders were cleared alongside another major increase in drug arrests. I argue that the LRPD’s struggle with its murder clearance rate is directly linked with its decisions regarding those who get fitted with handcuffs. You cannot over-police a community for non-violent crime and then expect them to talk to you while a freshly killed victim is still warm.
The data tells me that our crime rates are impervious to police funding. Increases and decrease to funding has no meaningful impact on the truly criminal behaviors south of I-630. All the funding does is increase the amount of black people arrested, detained, and eventually imprisoned. Our murdered never get their due. Our users and sellers of drugs, most who are non-violent, are chained and sent away. And I’m left here sipping my malbec and pondering, again, Yates’ words—a world without police.
I fear too much for my safety to not have police. But a world where their numbers and their budget is drastically reduced—where Little Rock directed the hundreds of millions it gives the LRPD—would look drastically different. And not simply Little Rock. Envisioning a world where the way we resourced police would make Ferguson, Chicago, Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, Charlotte, and Tulsa all vastly different, safer, and human places for their black folk.