In a recent Grok post, this question was posed: ‘Defund the Police You Say … Okay … Now What?’ The author’s answer is that violent crime should be expected to go up, and that recent events have confirmed this prediction. But that’s only half the story, and the less interesting half.
Like many people, the author of the post seems to be under the impression that it’s the job of the police to protect people from violent crimes. But that isn’t the case, and hasn’t ever been the case — as confirmed by the US Supreme Court in 1981 (Warren v. District of Columbia), in 1989 (DeShaney v. Winnebago County), and again in 2005 (Castle Rock v. Gonzales).
Before continuing, let’s be clear about one thing: No one is talking about defunding the investigation of crimes where someone (other than the government itself) has sworn a complaint against someone else.
Strictly speaking, there’s no need for such investigations to be done by ‘the police’ per se. They could be done by investigators working directly for the prosecuting attorneys, who could do the job without (1) militarizing themselves, and (2) cruising around looking for opportunities to charge people with new crimes.
So ‘defunding the police’ doesn’t mean leaving actual crimes unsolved after they’ve been committed.
So what does it mean? If the police aren’t there to protect you, what are they supposed to be doing? For an answer to that, we can turn to Sir Robert Peel, who invented the modern police force. Here’s what he had to say about it:
The police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen.
On the one hand, if the police are doing something you couldn’t do yourself, then they shouldn’t be doing it either, and it definitely shouldn’t be funded. These are largely the sorts of activities that people have in mind when they talk about defunding the police.
On the other hand, if the police are doing something you could do yourself — in particular, defending yourself, your family, your property, or your rights — then you can do it yourself, or make private arrangements to have it done for you. So at best, funding the police with your taxes is a convenience. And at worst — well, we pay for the convenience, not just with taxes, but with all the abuses that are leading people to call for defunding the police.
So the answer to ‘What happens if we defund the police?’ is that people will have to start accepting responsibility for things for which they’ve actually been responsible all along: protecting themselves, their families and friends, their property, and their communities, instead of deluding themselves into believing that those responsibilities have been outsourced to the police.
To put that another way, if we defund policing (as opposed to the police), people will have to start deserving the liberty they’ve been taking for granted — something that may be painful in the short run, but in the long run is necessary to the preservation of that liberty.
