People have a right to safety. That’s why we must acknowledge crime and insist that we have the best solutions to address its root causes
In the wake of last summer’s mass uprisings against the police state that killed Geoge Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among so many others, many on the progressive left believed that real change was imminent. Unprecedented numbers of people poured into the streets, day after day, week after week, in the midst of a global pandemic. Polls showed a massive upsurge in support for the Black Lives Matter movement. So-called establishment politicians appeared to be on the back foot, with lawmakers in Minneapolis going so far as to pledge to abolish their police department and replace it with a community-based public safety model. Large municipalities across the country saw a wave of action, from calls to remove police officers from schools to more demands to defund police departments. Politicians and public figures who had previously been loath to wade into issues of police brutality unequivocally acknowledged the need for drastic reform. Floyd’s gruesome death at the hands of police, and the months of protest that followed, felt like an inflection point – at long last, elected officials and the general public alike seemed jolted out of the usual refrains. Enough was enough.
Yet just over a year later, the state of policing appears largely unchanged. Almost no US cities have reduced their police budget – some, in fact, have expanded them – and efforts toward the goals of the defund movement have mostly stalled. In addition, a small but notable rise in crime since last summer has changed the picture. While some of this comes from cynical and nakedly misleading crime statistics produced by police departments, and much of it is media narrative, the truth is that many people do not feel safe. Support for BLM has fallen in the past year while support for the police has dramatically risen. This is something people care about, and defensive explanations that this is a bogus narrative are not going to cut it. The left needs a compelling counternarrative around crime in addition to our critique of policing. It is clear that street action and grassroots legislative pressure is not enough: The left needs to win power at the local level, where most police budgets are controlled, with a clear mandate for radical action around crime and policing.
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