Defunding the police is not simply about withdrawing funding for law enforcement... It’s about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions — mental health counselors
who can respond to people who are in crisis without arms. It’s about shifting funding to education, to housing, to recreation. All of these things help to create security and safety. It’s about learning that safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety. ~Angela Davis
From researching this question, it became clear that the mainstream media were reading from the same playbook in June 2020. Every article I read started with the same premise. It cannot be a coincidence that commentators reiterated the same theme while using their own words to put their spin on the problem. As a group, the media was enthusiastic about pulling funds from the police and re-directing them to more benign solutions to crime and criminals.
The Death of George Floyd at the hands of the racist police needed to be addressed.
Defunding the Police means reallocating funds away from the police. 
Defunding does not mean abolishing the police. 
Some wanted to abolish the police. 
Defunding would allow municipalities to hire social workers to handle cases rather than the police. 
Shifting funds away from the police would improve things such as mental health, addiction, and homelessness and is a better use of taxpayer money.
Interestingly, the pundits who wrote these affirmations to support defunding the police did not list any statistics about how many were killed, wounded, assaulted, robbed, or raped due to black-on-white, white-on-white, or white-on-black crimes. Either they did not do the research, or they did and did not care to report the statistics to support their premise that “defunding the police was an excellent and viable solution to police brutality.”
Please find a sample of the thought process at the time:
Mariame Kaba, a police and prison abolitionist, wrote recently of law enforcement’s origins
of slave patrol and that there is no real way to reform such an institution. Kaba also wrote that politicians’ solution to police brutality is to create more rules—which cops almost always break.
Kaba explains:
Look what has happened over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters. These officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would back him up, and he was right. He stayed on the job for five more years.
Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.
Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.
Defunding the police doesn’t mean getting rid of police departments, as Kaba notes. It means making them obsolete.
Who will be around to catch bad guys if there are no cops?
Cops really don’t prevent crime anyway.
Police officers simply respond to crime, and they don’t even do that well. A recent study by the New York Times that assessed how some of America’s biggest police departments use their time reveals that only 4 percent of their resources are devoted to violent crime. Some 37 percent of an officer’s time is spent responding to non-criminal calls, according to the study.1
This blog was written in June 2022, three years after when the aforementioned articles were written. Most sites I visited to get crime statistics quote rates from 2020, 2021, and some of 2022.
Here are some crime rates to 2021:2
Key Findings:
Murder rates increased dramatically between 2011 and 2021, jumping 46% in one decade. Murder rates also increased by 8% between 2020 and 2021.
Property crime rates in American cities also climbed slightly between 2020 and 2021. However, rates were 28% lower in 2021 than ten years ago.
Memphis overtook Detroit as the deadliest large city in the nation. Among cities with populations of 500,000 or more people, it had the highest per-capita murder and aggravated assault rates. It also had the second-highest robbery rate among large cities, and Houston, Texas, had the highest robbery rate.
Among medium-sized cities, Cleveland, Ohio, had the highest rates of aggravated assault and rape. St. Louis, Missouri, had the highest rate of murders per capita.
Mobile, Alabama, is one of America’s most crime-ridden cities, ranking first for murder, rape, aggravated assault, burglary, and larceny rates.
Now let's look at some crime statistics published by the FBI. These statistics are from 2020. Please note the ratio of crime on whites and the crime on black victims. I am not trying to sway your opinion of who is committing crimes and being arrested. Please make up your own mind. These are FBI statistics, not mine.
Victims
The 9,362,709 victims reported via NIBRS include individuals, businesses, institutions, or society as a whole. For 2020, the data regarding the 6,597,394 victims who were individuals reveal the following:
Of these victims, 23.8% were between 26 and 35 years old.
A little more than half (50.6%) were female, 48.7% were male, and the gender of 0.8% of victims was unknown.
Most victims (66.9%) were white; 24% were Black or African American; 1.9% were Asian, 0.8% were American Indian or Alaska Native, and 0.2% were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. The race of 6.2% of victims was unknown.
Data captured about the relationship of victims to their offenders show that just over half (50.1%) of the victims knew their offenders (or at least one offender when more than one was present) but did not have a familial relationship with them. Approximately one-quarter (24.7%) of the victims were related to their offenders (or at least one offender when more than one was present). Of the remaining 25.2% of victims, the relationships with their offenders were categorized as strangers, mutual combatants (victim was offender), or unknown.
Known Offenders
Law enforcement reported information about 7,173,072 known offenders, meaning some aspect of the suspect—such as age, gender, or race—was known.
Of these offenders, 38.2% were between 21 and 35 years of age.
By gender, most offenders (62.1%) were male, 24.2% were female, and the gender of 13.7% of known offenders was unknown.
By race, more than half (50.8%) of known offenders were white; 29.6% were Black or African American; and 2.2% were of other races. The race was unknown for 17.4% of reported known offenders.
Arrestees
Law enforcement agencies submitted data to the UCR Program through incident reports and arrest reports for 3,621,299 arrestees.
Of these arrestees, 31.9% were 26 to 35 years of age.
By gender, 72.6% were male; and 27.4% were female.
By race, most arrestees (67.7%) were white; 27.1% were Black or African American, and 2.9% were of other races. The ethnic race was unknown for 2.2% of arrestees.
Agency-level NIBRS Data3
If you are a statistics junkie, here are some statistics from Chicago in 2023:4
The data indicate that whites were victims more than twice as much as blacks in 2021. We know there are far more whites than blacks in the country, and logic tells us that more whites should be arrested for crimes and/or be victims of crimes. Still, as the facts show, we have a significant number of black citizens who are impacted. In 2021 47.2 million black Americans resided in our country. This was 14.2% of the population. This was up from 2000, when 36.3 million Black people lived in America. This increase was a 30% increase from 13.4%.[5] We must admit the percentage of black people arrested and convicted for crimes exceeds the percentage per capita of whites. Why do more blacks get arrested and incarcerated than we would expect?
I humbly ask, does a greater percentage of blacks commit more crimes than the per capita amount of whites? Are these statistics indicative of racism in law enforcement and the judicial process? Or do black people commit more crimes than whites?
How did defunding the police work out for low-income blacks? Did the social workers show up to calm the situation when the 911 calls were made? How do the revolving doors of justice impact businesses? How are things going in Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco, and New York? I could go on, but you get to decide if defunding the police is working, and if not, what should we do about it?
1 Terrell Jermaine Star Defund the Police, Explained...for the Last Time, The Root – Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude, July 2020 https://www.theroot.com/defund-the-police-explained-for-the-last-time-1844236393
2 Rob Gabriele, Managing Editor & Home Security Expert, 2023 Crime Rates in U.S. Cities Report, May 31, 2023, https://www.safehome.org/resources/crime-statistics-by-state/
3 FBI National Press Office, FBI Releases 2020 Incident-Based (NIBRS) Data, FBI NEWS, December 6, 2021, https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-2020-incident-based-data
4 Kori Runmore, Chicago homicides in 2023: 265 people slain. Here's how that compares with previous years. News, Chicago Tribune, June 19, 2023, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-2023-chicago-homicides-data-tracker-20230109-scfftvemufhtziwoe2kbia4bq4-story.html
[5] MOHAMAD MOSLIMANI, CHRISTINE TAMIR, ABBY BUDIMAN, LUIS NOE-BUSTAMANTE AND LAUREN MORA, Facts About the U.S. Black Population, Pew Research Center, March 2, 2023. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/facts-about-the-us-black-population/
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