To a certain extent, I recently tweeted about this misleading talking point. The Democrats are trying to turn the tables on the Republicans in the Congress. The GOP have had a signature "tough on crime" platform for decades. Now, in part, many Democrats, including then Sen. Joe Biden, have sought to position themselves as "just as tough", whether we are talking minimum sentences, "three-strike rules", or other punitive measures.
Let me point out that I never bought into Trump's act of pandering to the police, openly embracing the concept of rough rides (potentially injuring apprehended suspects), of not being "too nice" to those presumed to be innocent under the law. Policing is vested in state, not federal responsibilities. I never liked the feds militarizing the police, embracing corrupt civil asset forfeiture deals, etc. Trump tried to meddle in sanctuary city policies, wanting local police to cooperate in his anti-immigrant crackdown. Never mind his illegal, unconstitutional attempts to intervene during the past year's post-Floyd urban protests.
Now let's provide some context. With about 4.5% of the global population, the US incarcerates about 25% of the global prison population. It leads the world with a rate of about 639/100K incarceration. To give a comparison Canada has 107 and France 87. So we are talking, in the Land of the Free, of 6 times or more incarceration compared to other developed democracies. Between 1972 and 2009, the aggregate (federal and states) incarcerations grew nearly 7-fold. The federal portion from 1980 to 2013 was about 5-fold. One of the biggest factors, of course, has been the dysfunctional war on drugs.
We libertarians are appalled by this, particularly the focus on victimless crimes. Certain groups, e.g., young urban black males, often with limited, poor public education and bleak work prospects, are disproportionately represented.
Each party attempts to score points with the other's base. A classic example was a recent tweet by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton (R) who seized on the Biden Administration's temporary moratorium on federal executions. He pointed out this includes Dylann Roof, the convicted perpetrator behind the Charleston black church massacre. His attempt is to portray Biden as soft on crime against his key black constituency. (The Trump Administration executed 13, more than any administration in over a century.) We libertarians generally oppose the death penalty.
I'm not going to summarize the long post-Floyd riots/protests and the related demand for defunding the police. This GOP webpage lists various Democrat-run municipalities where this became a key issue among Democrats, with Biden himself paying lip service to reallocating police resources. (I generally don't like to cite partisan sources, but you can validate the defund efforts through independent news reports.) Let's be clear: the defunding was not a cost-cutting move in response to lower pandemic tax revenues; it wanted to reallocate funds to other social programs. Note from a libertarian perspective, protection of unalienable individual rights (life, liberty, property) is one of the few legitimate government functions. In our federal system, the police power is primarily vested with the states by the Tenth Amendment.
Now a great deal of the kerfuffle involves distortion (including Biden and White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki) about the $350B in the recent $1.9T for state/county/local (195, 65, 46) government relief (other funds are dedicated for US territories, tribal lands, etc.) Timing of the payments is expedited for some government entities with higher relative pandemic-associated unemployment. There are some official approved uses for the funds included COVID-related public health response expenditures and rehiring certain public service personnel laid off during local budget cuts, such as first responders and educators. (This seems to be what Biden and Psaki are disingenuously referencing.) As usual, there are certain strings attached to the funds; for example, the Democrat-only sponsored legislation specifically ruled out fungible expenditures for financing tax cuts, replenishing rainy day funds, etc.
No doubt local/state government budgets have been constrained depending on the nature of their revenue streams. For example, most states/municipalities charge sales tax and/or have income tax. So shutdown "non-essential" businesses don't turn over sales tax receipts, and laid-off workers don't pay income taxes. But note in many cases there are policy-related issues exacerbating budgets, like unfunded pension liabilities, expensive public employee union contracts, and depleted rainy day funds. We libertarians oppose morally hazardous policies, like taxpayer bailouts to offset the unsustainable expenditures for Dem constituency payoffs.
But now let's look at the kerfuffle itself: Psaki and Biden have attempted to turn the tables on the Republicans by disingenuously trying to link Republican votes against the $1.9 COVID relief bill to state/local budget cuts (made by largely Democrat-controlled municipalities). There are going to be nuances here depending on local economies and policies. In many cities, reallocations were done in response to the pandemic: for example, fewer cops are needed on the beat when most local businesses are shut down; cities often slashed overtime budgets; others (temporarily?) cut or deferred pay. Maybe still others postponed rehiring replacements (new cops, retirements or other turnover). Not to mention there may be alternatives to cut elsewhere in the local budget (say, administration costs) vs. highly visible cutbacks on the operational level. I documented in a recent tweet that roughly 1% of state budgets go to policing expenditures and 6% of municipalities. (There can be nuanced differences from the average for specific states/cities.) The idea that states or municipalities are going to finance any budget shortfalls at the expense of one of their most politically popular, high priority services (disregarding the Chauvin/Floyd controversy) is patently absurd. This is not to say things like policing and local public education are exempt from the realities of constrained budgets, but cities are more reluctant to embrace long-term budget cuts for a theoretically short-term pandemic.
But this has been a historical tactic employed by Dem demagogues: advocate budget cuts, and they'll argue that translates into service cuts affecting you personally--trash collection at your house, your kid's homeroom teacher, the unavailable policeman when you are mugged on Main Street, and so on. Make no mistake: cutbacks, no matter how temporary, can be painful to those directly affected by them. I have a niece who is an elementary school teacher, newly hired by a Colorado public elementary school, when the Great Recession hit. She lost her job (I don't know her pay but estimate probably $30-35K). She probably had as many students and taught them as well as her senior counterpart probably making twice that. But her colleague had a union contract with seniority preference in layoffs. It took her years to find another comparable job (in Kansas).
The attempt to argue that Congressional Republicans had voted to "defund the police" in rejecting Biden's $1.9T relief bill is patently absurd. Local policing is a state/local funding expenditure; it's never been an ongoing federal expenditure. The $350B bailout isn't even necessarily tied to local police expenditure. You can't defund something you never funded in the first place. In a recovering economy, states and local governments may naturally obtain the funding to call back laid-off personnel, even without Biden funding. A short-term, one-time funding boost is trivial compared to the long-term costs of hiring police officers.
