The negative impact is from the discussion, not the action

Actually, pretty good reporting from the New York Times.  Makes me nostalgic.

From The Bike Thieves of Burlington, Vermont by Michael Corkery.  The subheading is A hunt for stolen goods has put citizens and business owners in the center of a debate about policing and a growing, sometimes violent, problem with crime.  Well worth a read.

It is interesting throughout and ties together all sorts of issues such as rising crime, homelessness, defund the police, etc.  There are three key issues I see in the reporting though they are not especially emphasized.  

The most salient point to me (including information from the commenters) was that the impact of the defunding discussion was real regardless of whether it was implemented or not.  

In Burlington's case, they had an authorized level of 100 police officers.  Post-George Floyd, that was reduced to 74 officers but to be achieved through slow attrition, not involving layoffs.  But as a consequence of the effective vote of no-confidence, police resigned and left for neighboring forces and the headcount fell to 61 officers.  However, owing to injuries and military service only 53 are actively deployable.

And it is even worse than that.  A NYT commenter from Burlington points out that when they were close to full staffing in 2018, they had 50 patrol officers and 45 supervisors, detectives, domestic violence specialists, etc.  While both groups have experienced resignations, the biggest hit has been among patrol officers.  They had 50 and are now down to 15.  Consequently, only the most consequential crimes are responded to and the response times are much slower than they used to be.

Which explains some of the outcomes we have seen.  Certainly, as far as I can tell, all cities which actually defunded their police (Seattle, Tacoma, Minneapolis, etc), have had very significant increases in crime.  Some cities only talked about it but also experienced increases in crime.  And many locations had no increase in crime because they never changed their policing strategies and tactics.  I have argued before, and this article seems to support, that whether a police department actually experiences defunding, directly or indirectly, is a little bit of a red herring.  

The key issue is that it is being discussed at all.  The discussion itself was the key issue.  It clearly communicated disregard and absence of support to the rank and file of the police force and they made their career decisions based on that.  

In Atlanta, defunding the police was proposed by the City Council but was defeated by a single vote.  However, in the post-Floyd riots, the Mayor took a stance that the police were guilty without evidence, suspending them or firing them without investigation or trial (all or most were found innocent of the accusations).  So the issue was not the defunding per se.  The issue was that in a hazardous and fraught job, frontline police officers had no confidence that the politicians would actually support them.  

And made the logical decision to transfer to jurisdictions which would honor, respect, and support them.  

The second important issue indirectly alluded to in the NYT article is that of vigilantism.  Where civil authority is not asserted, where law is not upheld, citizens will not accept the imposed role of victims.  They will take actions to protect themselves.

In some instances it will be quaint and civil such as a Facebook group for finding and recovering bikes.  In other cases, it will involve citizens arming themselves for the first time in their lives.  The more this becomes an accepted norm, the more likely it is that such organizational and self-defense actions will merge into the next phase of patrols and the like. 

At that point, government has made itself irrelevant to its citizens which is a profoundly untenable position.  Bad things will happen.  Politicians will blame it on scapegoat citizens but the reality is that government failed in its duties.  We need a better class of politicians or need an electorate more willing to hold politicians accountable for bad outcomes.

My third observation, this being based on Vermont, it substantially undermines the usual social justice excuses so often paraded in conversations about homelessness and law enforcement.

This is not a consequence of Covid-19.  This is not about poverty.  This is not about racism (91% white, 3% Asian, 3% Hispanic, 2% Black).  This is not about limited government resources.  

This is simply about bad government policy forsaking one of the principle aims of government - rule of law and equality before the law.