Biden Scorns ‘Defund the Police’ as Cities Rush to Spend on Cops

(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden implored local governments to fund police departments during his State of the Union address on Tuesday. Major cities, though, had already gotten the message.

“The answer is not to defund the police. It's to fund the police,” Biden said, sparking raucous applause that brought both House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to their feet. “Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training. Resources and training they need to protect their communities.”

In fact, major cities have been allocating more dollars to their police forces, even before some of them faced a pandemic-era increase in violence. The five biggest cities in the U.S. expect to spend nearly $11 billion on policing this fiscal year, up from the $10 billion they allocated before the pandemic. In aggregate, their spending on police has increased every fiscal year since 2012.

While the 50 largest U.S. cities reduced in aggregate their 2021 police budgets amid broader pandemic-fueled cost-cutting initiatives, law enforcement spending as a share of general expenditures grew over the same time period.

Biden has consistently expressed support for funding police departments. But his denouncement of calls to defund the police in his first State of the Union address hints at how Democrats might look to position themselves ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans have sought to blame Democrats for an increase in violent crime over the past two years, seeing it as an issue that could help them win control of Congress.

Crime rates across the U.S. remain well below historic highs. However, FBI data show a nearly 30% increase in murders from 2019 to 2020, with 21,570 homicides tracked nationwide in 2020. The overall violent crime rate was up 5.6% and property crimes were up 8% in 2020. Statistics for 2021 have not yet been released.

Local politicians, even those in progressive cities, have already sought to counter potential Republican attacks on this issue. San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, both of whom face reelection in 2023, have expressed a desire to get more boots on the ground in response to increases in violent crime in their cities.

Even as major cities continue allocating more resources to police, they are still struggling with an increase in crime, suggesting that money alone isn't the issue.

In New York, crime rose in most categories from 2020 to 2021, with the overall total for major crimes in the city exceeding 100,000 incidents for the first time since 2016. Mayor Eric Adams seized on crime to secure his election win in late 2021 and suggested his approach was the right playbook for Democrats to replicate nationally. He has since revived a notorious plainclothes police unit and pledged to have more police walking the beat and patrolling New York's sprawling subway system.

The president also used his speech to tout “proven strategies like community violence interruption,” but the resources for these programs have been dwarfed by traditional police spending. Policing is heavily shaped by local rules and regulations, and a push for federal reform, known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, has failed to get traction in the U.S. Senate.

Biden said the Department of Justice has required body cameras, banned chokeholds and restricted no-knock warrants for its officers. Many jurisdictions require officers wear body cameras — the officers who killed George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were equipped with them. New York City has banned chokeholds since 1993, yet an officer used a chokehold to kill Eric Garner.

Last month, in Minneapolis, where Mayor Jacob Frey claimed to have barred no-knock entries, a 22-year-old Black man was killed in an early morning no-knock raid that roused him from sleep. Despite piecemeal reform efforts across the country, more than 1,110 people were killed by police in 2021. That's roughly the same number of people killed by police on an annual basis, going back to at least 2014, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit data project.