“France is living its George Floyd moment”, judged the American magazine Newsweek a few days after the death of Nahel, killed by police fire on June 27, in Nanterre. The parallel with the American situation has sometimes been pushed to the point of absurdity, in particular concerning the racism that some consider “systemic”. But if France carries its lot askew, it is not America, where institutionalized racism has long persisted, to the point of having durably marked the organization of its society. Still, part of the French militant left seems to register its demands in the wake of the slogan “Defund the police” (Stop financing the police), carried by the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd during a police arrest in 2020. The principle: reduce the funding of the police, or even remove certain bodies, deemed violent or racist.
In France, these proposals are mostly supported by the anti-capitalist sphere, which considers the police as the armed wing of power. Each police blunder being an opportunity to put a coin back in the machine. The trade unionist Anasse Kazib, at the head of the Permanent Revolution movement, thus advocates the dissolution of the special bodies including the BAC, the Brav-M, the CRS, or the gendarmerie.
After the revelations of the press concerning the author of the shooting on Nahel, passed by the Brav-M and the CSI 93 (two groups with methods often criticized for their excessive violence), the journalist and ex-militant LFI Taha Bouhafs judged on Twitter that these are the “two worst brigades with the BAC”, and called to “disband them”. On June 30, the Nupes-LFI parliamentary group even proposed, as part of an “emergency plan to end the crisis”, the dissolution of the BAC. But the apostles of this idea seem not to push the reasoning to the end. That is to say without taking into account the fiasco constituted by the implementation of such proposals across the Atlantic.
Increase in murders
Minneapolis, December 2020. Eight months after the death of George Floyd, the city council of the city become the capital of the movement Defund the police takes the decision to cut 8 million dollars from the budget of the police forces to reallocate them to other municipal services. Consequence: at the beginning of 2021, the number of people injured by gunshots was up 250% compared to the previous year, at the same period. Similarly, the number of rapes increased by 22%, and thefts by 59%. In Portland too, the $15 million cut to the police budget in June 2020 proved to be counterproductive. In November 2021, as the city recorded murder rates not seen in fifty years, the city council voted unanimously to increase the budget by $5.2 million. As for the city of Seattle, its experience in 2020 of an “autonomous zone” (without police) in the Capitol Hill district, controlled by activists from the Black Lives Matter movement, lasted… twenty-three days. Result: four shootings, two of which were fatal, traders forced to pay private security services to ensure their protection, and the city sued, in particular by an African-American father whose son was killed in this area.
Overall, no less than 20 of the largest US cities have cut police budgets, including New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. In parallel, the Brennan Center for Justice noted a 30% increase in the murder rate in the United States in 2020, and an overall increase in violence.
Admittedly, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, the causes are multifactorial. But according to Roger Michalski, professor of law at the University of Oklahoma and co-author of a study entitled “Police funding”, published in the Florida Law Review in 2020, the reduction in law enforcement budgets is not without consequences. “Reducing police funding means less money to recruit qualified police officers, train them, keep the good guys, so more pressure to hire and retain those who may have misbehaved in the past. Not to mention that ‘there is no longer enough money to allow the police to take leave and rest, which increases the pressure and fatigue,’ explains the professor to L’Express. The latter points to two consequences. First, the public is therefore less safe, especially because tired, under-trained and under-funded officers are at risk of committing more wrongdoings. But the reverse is also true: police officers are more likely to be injured.
Twice the private security
The approach is all the more counter-productive as the first to suffer from it are… people from minorities. At the start of 2021, the city of Los Angeles, which had reduced its police budget in July 2020, recorded eight times more shootings than the previous year at the same period. The number of gunshot deaths also rose by 141% in February. However, a majority of these crimes were perpetrated in South LA, an area with a large minority population, including blacks and Hispanics. “The wealthiest and non-minority communities have additional means to guarantee their security, explains Roger Michalski. This ranges from private security services to the construction of higher walls, passing by living in closed communities. easier to isolate themselves from different sources of crime. Conversely, the poorest have less access to these tools. For them, the police are one of the only security providers available.”
According to the Security Industry Association, there are twice as many security guards employed in the United States today as twenty years ago. At the same time, some cities suffer from a lack of police officers. Data analyst Jeff Asher found that in New Orleans, a city where the median income is about half that of Beverly Hills, police response times tripled from fifty to one minute in 2019 to one hundred and forty-six minutes in 2022.
“bourgeois left”
Public opinion felt it. In Minneapolis, a poll conducted by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy in 2020 showed that while 73% of respondents favored the city redirecting some funding to other programs (drug treatment, violence prevention) , 50% of black residents were opposed to reducing the number of police officers. In November 2021, a majority of Minneapolis voters rejected a proposal to replace the city’s police department with a new Department of Public Safety.
Another poll carried out in August 2020 – about two months after the death of George Floyd – by the famous Gallup institute even showed that while black Americans were slightly more likely than most other ethnic groups to encounter the police locally, most (81 %) still wanted it to be as present or more present in the communities. In New York City, which had announced a $1 billion (out of 6) budget cut to police departments, several elected African-American Democrats were among the opponents.
So Vanessa Gibson, an elected official from the Bronx, where several people were shot and killed in 2020. Asked by the New York Times that year, she said of her constituents that “they don’t want excessive force. They don’t want the cops putting their knees on the back of our necks […] but they want to be safe when they go to the store.” In the same year, the Democratic mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, went so far as to call the idea of dismantling the police a “bourgeois left” solution… If there is no conclusive data showing that the wave ‘Defund the police’ impacted 2020 election scores, with many Democrats – and even the Democratic Congressional campaign committee – claiming the move dealt a blow to their candidacy or political camp, deemed lax on crime.
Paradox
According to the database Mapping Police Violence, 1,126 people were killed by police in 2020. Black people made up 28% of the victims, despite the fact that they made up only 13% of the population. But at the same time, the FBI hate crime statistics showed that in 2020, anti-Black or African-American hate crimes continued to be the largest category, with 2,871 cases, an increase of 49% since 2019. In other words, black American communities suffer the majority of violence police, but are also more victims of hate crimes, which would require a police response.
A paradox that journalist Jill Leovy reports on in her book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America (2015). She described, concerning the poor black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a policing that was both excessive and inappropriate. “Minor crimes are much easier and cheaper to control. In the neighborhoods where I worked, everyone had been arrested by a policeman. But at the same time, a significant number of murders were not solved. It works together: the less people trust the police, the less they cooperate with them, and therefore the less crimes are solved and the more violent people kill each other.Then, the witnesses are more afraid of reprisals, so the situation gets out of hand , to the point that we end up with islands of crime. Meanwhile, the police are busy all day bothering people for minor crimes, “explains Jill Leovy to L’Express.
Reforms
Reforms have been implemented in several American cities. In Minneapolis and New York State, chokeholds, as in the murder of George Floyd, have been banned. The city of Louisville, Kentucky also implemented a law banning “no-knock” search warrants – which allowed police to raid a home without warning. A method that had resulted in the death of Breonna Taylor, an African-American paramedic.
“Rather than defunding law enforcement, thought needs to be given to how to fund them equitably so that all communities can benefit from a well-trained, well-funded police force that protects them, and is able to deal with difficult situations, assures Roger Michalski. I have never met a police officer who refuses to be trained, but many say that their department did not have the resources to do so. It takes time and money. For example, do we really need police to hand out tickets? Couldn’t someone else do it? This would reduce the risk that some fights over tickets would escalate and the police could concentrate on more dangerous situations.
In the United States, the city of Camden (New Jersey) is an example. Renowned for its criminality and poverty, it carried out a radical reform in 2013, laying off its 260 police officers, then recruiting 400 others for the same budget – around a hundred former agents were rehired. This measure was accompanied by a new code of conduct defining the conditions for the use of force, and obliging civil servants to intervene to stop and report any breaches by colleagues of these rules. In addition, training takes place on this subject every year and the interventions are filmed. Result: if the city remains one of the most dangerous and poorest in America, the rate of crimes and misdemeanors has drastically dropped, and complaints against the police… have almost disappeared.