For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. It's something I've thought about a lot in the last few weeks.
On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1].
> To test this, Ostrom worked with the Indianapolis government and her students to measure the quality of policing. Surprisingly, against common assumptions, they found that the smaller the police force, the more positively residents evaluated the police services they got.
> "Increasing the size of [the police force] consistently had a negative impact on the level of output generated as well as on efficiency of service provision… smaller police departments … consistently outperformed their better trained and better financed larger neighbors.”
> But why did this happen? To explain this, Elinor Ostrom argued that in small communities with small police forces, citizens are more active in community safety. Officers in smaller police forces also have more knowledge of the local area & more trust from people.
Yes, we should rebuild the infrastructure. If more money is required we should find it. But we should find a way that holds the bureaucrats accountable on both the costs and the schedule; otherwise we will be throwing good money after the bad. My 2c.
And here is GDP in 2010 dollars: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location...
State and local governments went from spending 10% of $23,000 per person to 15% of $55,000 per person. Per-person state and local spending went up by a factor of 3.5, even after adjusted for inflation.
With respect to public infrastructure specifically, there has been no austerity. For example, here is a graph of NYC subway ridership from 1970 to 2014: https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%.... Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The system deteriorated the whole time leading to catastrophic failure in the last few years.
The London transit system, by contrast, spends about $3.2 billion in capital expenditures to run a system that is very similar in terms of age, size, etc: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf. Despite spending half as much money, London has been able to significantly grow the network while keeping maintenance current and maintaining on-time performance.
Honestly, invocations of "starve the beast" and "austerity" are nothing more than gaslighting. It's a cop-out for why our public services are so shitty, even though we spend vastly more on them than we used to spend.
San Jose has issue with single family units over dominating the area; the need for denser housing options hasn't abated, nor for the surrounding county and the greater bay area. That has to be planned with local Transpo options, and now you enter the quagmire of 4 transportation agencies systems in the South Bay at least across several modes.
After defunding the police, they'll have private security as well.
Hence the brilliant onion headline, "‘So, It Means Making The Police Lose Their Homes And Forcing Them To Get A Divorce?’ Says Nation Still Struggling To Understand How Defunding The Police Works"
https://www.theonion.com/so-it-means-making-the-police-lose-...
https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-poli...?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
The defund the police narrative isn’t based on any actual examination of US police spending, or general public spending. The key issues are instead police unions, lack of police training in the US, impunity for police abuses, etc
Cambridge NJ is often cited as a model of reform. But I am not sure they reduced spending. Instead they disbanded and reformed their police.
Obviously the capital spending boost that is happening right will only be reflected in future ridership.
Wikipedia[0] says that "[austerity] is a set of political-economic policies that aim to reduce government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases, or a combination of both." That strikes me as a correct definition of 'austerity'. But we've not had any spending cuts in real terms or in terms of GDP. Nor have we had tax increases for the past "40 years" -- sure, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama raised taxes, but Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Trump cut taxes.
Yes, reducing budget deficits has been a stated goal of most Presidents since 1980, but that's mostly been lip service. None bothered to actually try. President Clinton did manage to reduce the deficit, but not because he wanted or tried to, but because of the unexpected revenue growth caused by the unexpected economic growth caused by the unexpected IT revolution.
> For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD.
What was that in 1980? Was there a step in this, say, around 1996? Did it go up in 1996 when Federal funding for 100,000 new police officers dried up? I.e., did President Bill Clinton's well-meaning 100,000 police officer initiative have unintended consequences?
> On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1].
I don't doubt this! We saw in Ferguson, MO, that the police was giving out an inordinate number of traffic fines every year! It's almost... exactly as if... they were paying themselves with that -- a terrible corruption. As I recall the number of citizens in NYC who have fines in arrears is staggering. Police department funding via fines is a form of corruption, and strongly indicative of police departments being too large.
And the invention of civil asset forfeiture (in the 80s, IIRC), and the rise in its use (in the mid-90s, IIRC), also seems like police (and prosecutors) paying themselves with poor people's assets. And it is invariably the poor who have been hardest hit by civil asset forfeiture.
The police have to be sized appropriately to:
- investigate and close most cases
- support investigations appropriately
- provide a minimum of neighborhood police
presence to deter crime and build a rapport
with the community
The police departments of most large U.S. cities are almost certainly oversized at present. One of the first steps in remediating some of iniquities of our system should be to end police department funding via fines and civil asset forfeiture (by simply ending civil asset forfeiture -- as clearly unconstitutional a practice as any). In some States fine revenue is shared with the State, but perhaps the amounts of the fines should go down and the percentage that goes to the issuing jurisdiction should go down significantly. At the very least the parameters of traffic violation fining need fine-tuning. Once the police can only be funded by general revenue of the local town/city, and the towns/cities cannot fund themselves with fines / civil asset forfeitures, we'll see a proper reconsideration of police funding.
I.e., the police need to be not so much defunded as right-funded, and today that would generally mean spending less on police. I'm not sure that in 1993 it was the case that the police needed to be funded more, though I'd be happy to see evidence to the contrary. Crime rates did go down significantly in the 90s, but those extra ~80,000 new police officers are not the only cause of that, and probably not even a major cause at all. The main cause of the fall in crime rates in the 90s seems to have been demography.
Every city/county had their own "Bauhof" with a couple of construction workers and machines for all kinds of maintenance that a city had: snow plowing in the winter, pothole fillings and greenkeeping in the summer, pipe laying/maintenance, traffic lights and general lights maintenance, other infrastructure upkeep.
Today much of this is mandatory outsourced to the lowest bidder, with no way of accounting for regionality or quality.
To make it worse, cities and counties used to have capable public servants in architecture and supervision, which meant that for those projects where external help was needed (think construction of new projects) that work could be properly supervised and issues either prevented in the planning stage or caught during construction and remedied before that became too expensive. Nowadays, thanks to more and more budget cuts, pay in public service is a third to a half of the private sector which means that even if there were a budget no one would apply. In IT the situation is even more dire, which is why almost all major government IT projects fail, with the additional complexity that most IT projects have way too many stakeholders and no leadership.
We as Western societies need to roll back that privatization mandate, at least for areas where it has obviously failed.
> For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc.
Education isn't part of LA City government, education comes from school districts which are not funded or controlled by cities in California (if any Mayoral candidate in California other than SF tells you they're going to fix the schools, they're either lieing or unaware of the job of their office; SF is an exception because they are a combined city and county and school districts are supervised by the counties in which they reside)
Same with healthcare and transit --- those agencies are separate from cities too, so city funds don't go there.
Do you have a source for this claim? I mean we can all claim it is intuitive but just how many police, how "well funded", what equipment, and what jurisdiction?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13...
Likely a large portion of what they saw was a product of racial and political demographics. Whites are a larger percent of rural populations than cities. [0] White people on average rate police much better than non-whites. [1] Of course whites may rate police better because they live in rural areas, but the gap in satisfaction between whites and blacks is too great to be accounted for by more whites living in rural areas. Also rural people are more likely to be conservative and conservative people rate police much higher. Rural officers are in less danger in rural areas, so they may not need to be as alert and forceful because they know their lives are not in danger as much.
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/06/27/census-... [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confid...
Inefficiencies or corruption when building new things?
Pension benefits for an aging workforce?
Pure incompetence at the top or pure incompetence at the bottom of the org chart?
Transit capital projects in the USA, for instance, are typically delayed for many years by lawsuits over environment laws, etc. For instance, near the nation’s capital: https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-beat/transportation/pu...
> “PLTC and its member companies should not be required to finance the hundreds of millions of dollars in added costs for issues that are out of its control, not of its making …,” Risley wrote.
> More than 970 days of project work were affected by delays caused by the MTA, he wrote, which included third-party lawsuits, delayed right-of-way acquisition, and changes to regulations and third-party agreements after the project started.
And on the other hand, there’s straight up corruption and fraud. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/nyregion/cuomo-andy-byfor...
> “They are working here?” Mr. Cuomo asked. Not a soul was in sight. “Yes, sir,” the man replied, nodding vigorously. “They must be very short people,” Mr. Cuomo said. “Or invisible.” About 130 people were being paid to work until 11 p.m., though their day had clearly ended well before that.
Police unions, poor training and qualified immunity are really serious issues - but ones that are intractable to fight for on the national stage due to political gridlock. Just breaking up the unions as they stand right now and enforcing transparent employment history for law enforcement would make worlds of difference, but the action can't be taken unilaterally by a particular district - that district can ensure that incident reports are preserved but officers moving into the district may have had their employment history purged.
Defunding the police is an actual policy decision that can be made on a local scale to address issues of over policing and start reinvesting in crime prevention rather than punishment.
Can you give an example of a country that does what you recommend? If you can’t, what evidence do you have that it is the solution?
I’m not American. My criticism above is that the movement appears to have developed a policy idea that is not used in any country with a successful policing track record.
As for your claim that individual districts can’t take action....why? Cambden did. They’re hardly perfect, but it’s an improvement. They’re a local area.
And this story shows that when they did try cutting funding, before the reforms and it didn’t solve the problem. Only a concerted reform effort did.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...
Comment above was heavily downvoted, but no one has provided a meaningful reply to the stats. The numbers are clear. Compared to places with better policing, the US has a smaller number of officers per capita, and spends less.
The US does spend much more on prisons however, which is surely a mistake. To your point on shifting focus away from punishment this is one of the first places I would look to cut money: prisons.
In the UK, police killed only 3 people in 2019. There has been surprisingly little inquiry as to how they do it. I get that US police are bad, and so spending less money to get less of them might be an improvement. But to actually solve the problem it seems that changing the police is the better answer. And this will necessarily be local because most of the important stuff in the US is local.
Just because the spend per rider increased over that time doesn't mean the system is getting what it needs though. A newer system will usually function better than a starved system years later naturally because of deferred maintenance and other aging infrastructure ailments even if the per rider numbers have increased. Comparing it just on the per rider spend assumes that the earlier number is enough.
Well then.
- US police are above the law, and have free union-provided legal counsel.
If a city prosecutes an officer, he will sue them right back, and the union will threaten the careers of city councilpersons, DAs and judges at the next election. A perfect circle of corruption.
- DA's and judges are elected, so political from Day One of their careers. Public unions hold 20% or more of the votes and vote in a bloc. Either play with the unions, or finish second.
- the US is the most successful multicultural large country in history, but that makes things more complicated.
- everybody who wants a handgun has one, or two. A lot of people driving around illegally have a loaded gun under their seat.
No, they don't. Public employees don’t, outside of a few localities with extremely high concentrations (which are usually military, which isn't unionized) make up 20% of the electorate, much less public sector unions holding 20% of votes.
> and vote in a bloc
No, they don't. Law enforcement and corrections unions often don't even lean toward the same major party as most other public sector unions.
So get your facts straight.
If you want to see DA politics in action, watch just about any Law & Order episode when they discuss optics. Those "stories" are based on current affairs.
How does that relate to my argument? My point was that attempting to tackle those factors is the actual solution.
(Would need a source on your 20% claim though. Endorsed by the police union is an appeal to voters outside the union, not an appeal to union share of electorate)
Though I suppose you would have to look at the state of thr system in the 1980s. NYC may have had more deferred maintenance.
(The local share of property tax was not defined in Prop 13; this is strictly how the Democrats in power chose to implement Prop 13.)
a city prosecutes an officer, he will sue them right back
That doesn't contradict anything I said. There are signs saying that not because public sector unions as a whole either make up the 20% of the electorate you've claimed or vote in a unified block across different public sector unions as you've claimed, but because the general public, and especially voters that consider “law and order” an important concern, are particularly likely to be swayed by law enforcement union endorsements.
> If you want to see DA politics in action, watch just about any Law & Order episode when they discuss optics. Those "stories" are based on current affairs.
...often, quite badly. I've got a Political Science degrees from a subprogram specialized in the pragmatics of US electoral politics at all levels; “Law & Order” is, I know, entertaining to a lot of people, but it's not really a guide to reality on, well, anything.
Governments employ 20 percent or more of workers in nine states
https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/on-numbers/scott-tho...
The claim was public sector unions, not government employees. And the claim was 20% of votes, not 20% of workers. A substantial share of government employees are not unionized; this is particularly true of federal government employees; and a substantial share of voters are not employed (some unemployed, but more out of the workforce, looked students, homemakers, and retirees.)
And nine states leave 41, or 82% of the total, where even that far-from-what-you-originally-claimed situation still doesn't apply.
[0] More or less, they've stopped during COVID but it's not a great time to do maintenance.