Defund The Police and Abolish Prisons?

Glenn Greenwald has an article in which he goes after AOC and others for the hysteria of the woke era (which is apparently behind us?)

Most of it I agree with, but I’m not entirely down with this:

AOC, on Sunday, went on ABC’s morning news program with Jonathan Karl, where she was asked about some of Hong’s statements, including her call for “abolishing prisons” and “[defunding] the police,” policies and phrases that have proven to be deeply unpopular. AOC, who herself aggressively advocated those policies, sought to laughingly dismiss this all as just some momentary, harmless frenzy of “craziness” that never really meant much and that everyone has all just agreed to move beyond:

I can’t really imagine America operating with no police or prisons.

But if you got rid of three quarters of prisons and released three quarters of prisons tomorrow I think that’d be a good idea, if done with some care.

These rates are deranged, and “abolish prisons” is exaggeration for effect, but the idea is simple enough: take all that money and spend it on welfare and social services and transfer payments and so on. It’s also worth remembering that the US did not always lock up so many people:

There’s been a slight dip since 2014, but the massive spike in how many people were locked up that started around 1980 has not flattened back to the previous historical norm. American courts are so overwhelmed with cases that most people in prison never had a real trial: they just plead out under threat of massive sentences if they dared fight.

As for police effectiveness, this is a chart of what percentage of homicides they solve.

And it’s really worse than the above chart:

That statistic would have stunned detectives in the early 1960s. In 1962 the FBI reported a clearance rate of 93 percent. Today, homicide is the only violent‑crime category that clears even half its reported cases; rape, robbery, and aggravated assault fare far worse. Murders themselves declined by 14.9 percent in 2024, but the clearance rate refused to rebound alongside them.

Why the hell are more and more cops constantly being hired when the more there are the worse they are at catching criminals?

This is like everything in America. No one looks at what actually produces good results. As far as I can tell most of the decline in crime in America isn’t about cops, it’s about getting lead out of gasoline. It certainly isn’t because criminals are scared of being caught.

And this is odd. Really odd. You’d think with all the surveillance devices we now have it’d be easier to solve crimes than in the sixties, not harder, but it turns out that what really matters is whether or not the police are trusted: whether informants will talk to them. And, more and more, they aren’t trusted and most of police work isn’t Sherlock Holmesesque brilliance or cleverly uncovering forensic clues: it’s people being willing to tell the cops what happened.

So when people, especially those in crime ridden areas, start saying things like “abolish prisons and defund the police” this an indication of a problem. And part of the solution probably is to have less cops and less prisons and spend that money on other things. This is especially the case because a lot of what police do could be done in other ways: should police really be doing wellness checks given how often they wind up shooting mentally ill people?

It’d be cheaper to have social workers take over a lot of what cops do, too. Cops are very well paid in America.

I’m no fan of “woke” and I’ve been an opponent of much of identify politics for decades.

But the truth is that America’s incarceration, court and police systems are all world class piles of flaming garbage and everyone involved with them knows it.

The response to police sucking at their jobs and to America locking up more people than anyone else in the world never seems to be a common sense “this isn’t working, we should do something else” it’s always “let’s fund them more, give them more military equipment, get rid of more due process and lock up even more people.”

I’m pretty damn sure that cutting police budgets in a quarter and releasing most non-violent criminals and closing prisons, then directing all that money to social welfare and transfer payments wouldn’t make the US any worse and would probably make it better.

And if that means being “woke”, I’m to that extent woke.

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