President Biden called for increased police funding in his State of the Union speech. In a March 10 letter, Sherrill Hogen argued that Biden’s position was speaking to his base of “white, middle-America” and that increased funding “kicks Black America in the teeth and sends a chill into the people of color and Indigenous communities as well.”
This gets the politics and the facts backwards. A Pew Research poll in 2021 found that Black and Hispanic Democrats are more likely than whites to support increased police spending. This is not surprising when violent crime disproportionately affects their communities. The frequency of violent crime dwarfs police violence and the racial disparity for murders is much, much greater than the racial disparity of those shot by cops.
At the height of the BLM movement in 2020, I wrote a letter here supporting police defunding. But my thinking changed as I’ve come to acknowledge that Black people are far more likely to be killed and that those murder rates have dramatically increased in the last several years. I realized that my privileged position as a white man in a safe rural town biased my thinking about the needs of those who live in poor and urban communities that are much less safe.
None of this is to condone police violence, which is abhorrent. Corrupt and irreparable police departments should be rebuilt from the ground up. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Massachusetts rightly mandated de-escalation training and other police reforms to reduce police violence. The militarization of some police departments with war and spy equipment is anti-American.
But “defund the police” is not just bad politics, it harms the people we aim to help.
David Kulp
Ashfield