A terrified Chicago victim of a home invasion called 911, but instead of sending cops, the dispatcher exhorted her to call her alderman and “request more police funding.” (Story here.)
Police are stretched thin in many cities, but generally not for budget reasons. “Defunding the police” never caught on, and Republicans just use the phrase for campaign and fundraising purposes (they’re also the only politicians trying to cut law enforcement budgets).
Many cities are struggling to timely respond to 911 calls because their police departments have a shortage of officers. Partly because Covid killed a lot of them, but also because many have quit, for which police departments often have themselves to blame (see story here).
So, funding isn’t the problem, but response times are a big problem in many places. After the Chicago woman’s initial 911 call, it took 4 hours for police to show up.
Private-enterprise conservatives don’t mind. They don’t believe in public services. In their perfect no-tax world everything is fee-based, and anyone who can’t pay goes without. They have private security in their gated communities, and everybody else will have guns (and need them). They’re fine with this.
They see tax-supported public services as socialism, and paying taxes for services provided to others as wealth transfer. By that reasoning, private insurance is socialism too, because people whose little houses don’t burn down pay to rebuild big houses that do.
In fact, the well-to-do hardly face confiscation under America’s system of “socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest” (see, e.g., article here).
It’s well known in political circles that blue states send taxes to red states, whether conservatives admit it or not. As for the urban-rural divide, not enough people live in the countryside to support their public services; the money comes from urban taxpayers.
Which raises this question: If tax-supported public services disappeared, how would those people have essential services? They wouldn’t. Replacing taxes with user fees, a conservative dogma, works only for the wealthy in urban enclaves and nobody else.
More money, by itself, can’t solve police staffing shortages or response times. That will take a lot of work. What nobody is talking about is defunding police, except Republicans trying to score cheap political points by peddling a false narrative.
By the way, if private-enterprise conservatives realized their dream of replacing public services with fee-based private services, that would completely defund the police.
