The “defund the police” movement was never merely a budget argument. It was a moral argument, a political argument, and at its worst, a civilizational argument against the legitimacy of law enforcement itself. Its advocates spoke in the language of justice, healing, equity, and public investment, yet the practical effect was to weaken the very civic mechanism most responsible for standing between ordinary people and predatory violence.
The slogan was always more revealing than its defenders wanted to admit. To “defund” or “divest” from police and put money into “Black communities” sounded humane to people who live far from the highest-crime streets and mostly experience policing as an abstraction. For residents in neighborhoods where shootings, robberies, open-air drug activity, carjackings, domestic violence, and retaliatory violence are not ideological talking points but daily threats, the matter was never so airy or academic.
Civerum avoids the phrase “Black community” because it implies a concentrated monolith, either in spirit or geography, and neither is actually true. Black Americans are not one political mind, one cultural unit, one neighborhood, one socioeconomic class, or one moral constituency waiting to be spoken for by activists, nonprofits, academics, and city council members. The relevant subjects are mostly-Black neighborhoods in particular cities, or neighborhoods with large Black populations, where ordinary families, workers, churchgoers, students, business owners, retirees, and children often pay the heaviest price when public order deteriorates.
That distinction matters, because the anti-police movement constantly blurred it. Activists claimed to speak for “the community,” then pushed policies that exposed real neighborhoods to greater disorder. They treated the police as the principal threat to Black life, while homicide, gun violence, robbery, intimidation, and the collapse of deterrence continued to destroy actual Black lives at rates the comfortable activist class could not honestly ignore.
The data from the 2020-2025 period does not allow a simplistic one-variable conclusion. Anyone claiming that every crime increase after 2020 was caused only by budget cuts is overstating the case. The COVID shock, school closures, court backlogs, jail-release policies, officer resignations, prosecution changes, anti-police rhetoric, reduced proactive enforcement, and social breakdown all overlapped. Yet the correlation is still too large, too visible, and too morally serious to wave away.
In 2020, several major cities cut, redirected, or symbolically reduced police budgets. New York advertised a $1 billion NYPD cut, though the Citizens Budget Commission found the real recurring reduction was far smaller and much of the claim involved accounting maneuvers, overtime assumptions, and proposed transfers [Citizens Budget Commission]. Los Angeles cut LAPD funding by $150 million [CBS Los Angeles]. Austin made one of the clearest reductions, voting to cut or reallocate $150 million from its police department, with roughly $21 million taking effect immediately [Axios]. Seattle moved civilian functions out of the department and reduced the police budget by roughly 17 percent [Cascade PBS]. Washington, D.C. cut more than $15 million from police and diverted the money to social programs and violence interruption [FOX 5 DC].
The crime pattern that followed was not imaginary. The Council on Criminal Justice found that homicide increased sharply from 2019 to 2020, rose again from 2020 to 2021, then declined substantially by 2024-2025. Its midyear 2025 report also cautioned that the drivers are difficult to isolate, while acknowledging that changes in police practices, public trust, pandemic disruption, and social stress likely played roles [Council on Criminal Justice]. That is the sober reading of the evidence: not a cartoon, not a slogan, but a pattern of weakened deterrence and civic disorder appearing at the same time that cities were indulging anti-police politics.
Austin is a useful example because the homicide series is stark. Austin police reported 37 homicides in 2019, 48 in 2020, 90 in 2021, 71 in 2022, 75 in 2023, and 71 in 2024 [Austin Police Department]. That does not prove the budget action alone caused the homicide surge, but it makes the progressive narrative look morally unserious. If a city reduces police capacity, delays cadet classes, sends an unmistakable signal of hostility toward law enforcement, and then experiences a major homicide spike, the burden is not on skeptics to pretend nothing meaningful happened.
Los Angeles tells a similar story. LAPD homicides rose sharply after 2019, and by 2025 the city was celebrating a 19 percent homicide drop and the lowest homicide level since 1966, with officials citing reductions in guns on the street, investigative work, and law-enforcement investment [City of Los Angeles]. New York’s 2025 numbers likewise showed murder down 20.2 percent and shooting incidents down 24 percent from 2024, with the city emphasizing data-driven policing and targeted deployments [NYPD]. Portland, after suffering a major post-2020 violence surge, reported 52 homicides in 2025, down from 68 in 2024, while also describing focused policing missions, improved staffing, vehicle-theft operations, retail-theft missions, and gun-violence reductions [Portland Police Bureau].
There is a pattern here that polite progressive analysis often avoids. Crime rose when public authority was weakened, officers pulled back or left, prosecutors and city leaders signaled indulgence toward disorder, and anti-police ideology gained institutional power. Crime then fell in many places as cities restored enforcement, improved targeting, rebuilt staffing, leaned on data, worked gun cases, and rediscovered truths that should never have been treated as reactionary in the first place.
The anti-police movement tried to pose as sophistication, yet much of it was simple hostility to the necessary functions of civilization. A society requires law, enforcement, consequences, investigation, deterrence, and visible authority. Remove or weaken those things, especially in places already suffering from social fragility, and the vacuum is not filled by poetry slams, nonprofit slogans, or municipal equity statements. It is filled by the most aggressive people on the block.
This is where the moral scandal becomes most obvious. The people most injured by weakened policing are not the affluent progressives in expensive neighborhoods with private security, quiet streets, responsive institutions, and the luxury of ideological experimentation. The people most injured are the law-abiding residents in high-crime neighborhoods, many of them mostly Black or heavily minority neighborhoods, who depend on public safety because they cannot purchase private substitutes.
The CDC’s own firearm-homicide analysis from 2019 to 2020 found that the overall firearm homicide rate rose 34.6 percent, with the largest increases among non-Hispanic Black males aged 10-44 and American Indian or Alaska Native males aged 25-44. The same report found that Black Americans already had the highest firearm homicide rates, and that the disparities widened during the 2020 surge [CDC]. That reality should have shattered the moral pretensions of the anti-police movement. Instead, many activists doubled down on the idea that policing was the chief danger.
This is not an argument for reckless policing, abusive policing, unconstitutional policing, or treating citizens as enemies of the state. Bad policing can do immense damage. Police misconduct should be punished, standards should be high, departments should be accountable, and constitutional rights should not be treated as administrative inconveniences. None of that requires adopting the deranged premise that the police are generally more dangerous to vulnerable neighborhoods than violent criminals are.
One of the most manipulative rhetorical moves of the defund era was to pretend that support for policing meant indifference to police abuse. That was always a false choice. A serious society can demand both lawful policing and enough policing. It can demand body cameras, training, discipline, transparency, and constitutional restraint while also demanding more detectives, faster response times, proactive gun enforcement, effective patrols, and real consequences for violent offenders.
The National Academies’ review of proactive policing found strong evidence that hot-spots policing can reduce crime in targeted locations without simply displacing crime into nearby areas [National Academies]. That matters because the activist caricature treats all focused enforcement as oppression. The evidence says otherwise. Properly designed, properly supervised, constitutionally bounded policing can reduce victimization in the exact places where victimization is concentrated.
The people living in those places know this better than distant activists do. They know the difference between a police officer harassing someone for no reason and a police officer responding when gunfire erupts outside an apartment building. They know the difference between excessive force and no force available when a violent offender owns the sidewalk. They know what it means when response times stretch, when witnesses are intimidated, when open drug markets settle in, when teens are recruited into violence, and when older residents stop sitting on porches because public space no longer belongs to decent people.
The anti-police movement was not only wrong in policy terms. It was arrogant. It looked at neighborhoods already bearing the burden of violence and decided to run a theory experiment on them. It presumed that police could be replaced by vague “investments” without proving that those investments could stop the immediate aggressor, solve the shooting, arrest the repeat offender, protect the witness, or deter the next retaliatory attack.
Investment matters, of course. Good schools matter. Family stability matters. Employment matters. Mental health treatment matters. Addiction treatment matters. Housing stability matters. Churches, fathers, mentors, local businesses, and civic institutions matter. A sane public-safety strategy does not sneer at any of those. It simply refuses to pretend that they are substitutes for law enforcement when a man with a gun is actively making a neighborhood unlivable.
The phrase “divest from police and invest in Black communities” carried its own hidden contempt. It implied that the protection of law is somehow separate from investment in the people who live in mostly-Black neighborhoods. Public safety is not an enemy of human flourishing. Public safety is one of its prerequisites. No school reform, business corridor, housing initiative, church ministry, job program, or youth mentorship effort can fully take root where violence is allowed to govern the street.
The great irony is that the anti-police movement claimed to be defending Black life while undermining one of the basic conditions necessary for Black lives to be protected from criminal predation. The victims of homicide are not slogans. The grieving mothers are not abstractions. The children learning to distinguish fireworks from gunfire are not props in a progressive morality play. They are citizens, and their government owes them protection.
The lesson of 2020-2025 is not that police are perfect or that every enforcement tactic is wise. The lesson is that civilization is fragile, deterrence matters, and ideological hostility toward policing has consequences. When cities send the message that enforcement is morally suspect, that officers are political villains, that prosecution is optional, and that public disorder is to be therapeutically managed rather than stopped, the worst people in the neighborhood receive the message too.
A just city does not abandon its vulnerable residents to criminals in order to flatter activists. It does not confuse compassion with permissiveness. It does not treat law enforcement as a regrettable relic while expecting peace to somehow self-generate from social spending and elite-approved rhetoric. A just city protects the innocent, restrains the violent, disciplines the state when it abuses power, and refuses to sacrifice real people on the altar of fashionable theory.
The defund movement failed because it misunderstood human nature, public order, criminal incentive, and the moral meaning of government. It was sold as liberation, but in practice it often meant less protection for the people who needed protection most. That is not justice. That is ideological malpractice with a body count.
