I’m sure there are better, more thoroughly researched summaries of this issue, but here is my grain of rice.
What does it mean to defund the police?
☀️”The concept is simple: When cities start investing in community services, they reduce the need to call police in instances when police officers’ specific skill set isn’t required. “If someone is dealing with a mental health crisis, or someone has a substance abuse disorder, we are calling other entities that are better equipped to help these folks,” Garcia says.”☀️
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/defund-the-police-1007254/
❗The vast majority of 911 calls are health emergency related – This means put more money into EMT and EMS and community healthcare, yes, Universal Healthcare.
The TBI collects all crime statistics around the state and compiles them. This is the data from 2018:
🔷https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/tbi/documents/Crime%20in%20Tennessee%202018_Final_7-19-19.pdf
❗Looking through the data none of these things require police equipped with riot gear and military weapons/vehicles. In fact, very few of these require cops equipped with a gun. Most crime is reported after the fact, therefore what is needed is people trained in detective work, social work, and therapy.
❗Social inequality and insecurity is a direct contributor to crime. Which means to reduce property crime and often crime against persons means putting more money into education, pre-k to college, better minimum wage (Fight for $15), low income assistance, and rehabilitation vs. incarceration.
☀️”Because certain populations are forced into positions of social inequality, crime becomes more common within those populations. “Most inmates are minority men under age 40 ‘whose economic opportunities have suffered the most over the last 30 or 40 years. Incarceration in the United States is socially concentrated among very disadvantaged people,’” says U.S. News & World Report. In the United States, the people most likely to commit crimes are “people without education, jobs, housing, or hope,” U.S. News explains. This is exacerbated by the fact that people from disadvantaged populations are frequently given harsher sentences than those from dominant populations for the same crimes.”☀️
❗Drug crime is dis-proportionally slanted towards incarceration. Black communities are more targeted than white communities and incarceration and conviction numbers are higher in black communities even though drug use and abuse is higher in white communities.
☀️” According to the 2003 NSDUH, 38.2% of White young adults 18 to 25 years of age in the U.S. reported any illicit drug use in the past year, followed by African-American (30.6%) and Hispanic (27.5%) young adults (SAMHSA, 2004a).” ☀️
🔷 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377408/ ☀️”It’s no surprise that people of color — who face much greater rates of poverty — are dramatically overrepresented in the nation’s prisons and jails. These racial disparities are particularly stark for Black Americans, who make up 40% of the incarcerated population despite representing only 13% of U.S residents.”☀️
🔷 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2020.html
☀️”Today, researchers and policymakers alike agree that the war on drugs is a failure. This fact sheet summarizes research findings that capture the need to replace the war on drugs with a fairer, more effective model that treats substance misuse as a public health issue—not a criminal justice issue.” ☀️
Arbor Winter Barrow 
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