In 2021, at a local state and federal level, the U.S spent almost 300 billion dollars on law enforcement and prisons. And blue states spend more than red States and pay their officers better, and yet there’s absolutely no correlation between spending on law enforcement and crime rate. Nor is there any correlation between the number of officers and crime rate.
What does correlate, however, is safety net spending and crime rate. For instance, with welfare reform in 1996, when they removed cash welfare from kids when they turned 18, the crime rate went up by 20 percent.
It’s pretty simple. When you ensure that people have food, shelter, and livable income crime goes down. So as you can see this is not a partisan issue. We need to strip away the talking points and rethink policing. It’s not about defund the police or any animosity towards individual officers. It’s simply about improving Public Safety and the militarized police that we have now is doing the opposite of that.
Follow Tony
