‘Defund the Police Debate’: I’d tell Democrat Pundits to Go Back to the Books, But If They’re Anything Like Mandela Barnes, They Won’t Be Able to Name One
Ouch. I know, that headline! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up the video interview where Democrat governor candidate Barnes stumbled brutally when asked to name the last book he read and came up embarrassingly short.
Boring headline version: No, Republicans Didn’t Defund the Police – It’s Democrats Who Are For That, and Worse
Democrats have a problem on their hands. Their frontrunner for governor, Francesca Hong, has advocated ABOLISHING police, and the other Democrat candidates (and AG Josh Kaul) won’t call her out on it. They’re all too desperate to curry favor with the runaway train on the Democrat side, ie the antisemitic, anti-American, anti-police, anti-sanity anarchist vote they’re pandering to.
Feckless liberal Sara Rodriguez, falsely painted as a moderate, even specifically declined to comment on DSA, the bonkers socialist group that Hong belongs to, even after New York elected a DSA compatriot of Hong’s who said she once wiped her hand on an American flag because she forgot a napkin (and other really despicable stuff, and eradicating the country is apparently on the table.) Hong pledged to bring the DSA mentality to Wisconsin next. This is super extreme stuff – abolish police, prisons and borders and the U.S. Senate besides.
This is so crazy even James Carville announced he didn’t want to be part of the Democrat Party anymore. James Carville! Some moderate Democrats in Congress signed a pledge to stand up against the anarchist, anti-capitalist America-hating new socialists. Good for them. Meanwhile in Wisconsin, the Democrat candidates are acting like someone put tape over their mouths, and none of this is happening.
So, obviously this is a problem for the Democrats. And it’s not just Hong. They’ve been, as a party, ranting about police for years now. And they’ve never met a prison they didn’t want to empty, a point they all pretty much reinforced at a forum this week.
They planted the seeds for the socialist algal bloom in their own party by turning criminals into victims and cops into villains years ago, and painting even obviously justified shootings as horrifying acts, enabled by a race-conscious largely white media industrial complex. This dates to Ferguson, minimally, and the “hands up don’t shoot” myth that even Eric Holder couldn’t abide. Most prominent Democrats tried to ease out of the defund the police rhetoric a few years ago (switching it to ICE) when they figured out that most average people think it’s totally nuts (and defunding police hurts minority communities most besides), but now it’s all back with a DSA-fueled vengeance, and they have to idea what to do about it.
Liberal Blogger Extraordinaire
Which brings me to Dan Shafer. He’s a liberal blogger who is a contributing editor for Civic Media, which is this big effort to grow liberal talk radio in Wisconsin. I really don’t mind the guy. He’s the best they’ve got over there, and he at least tries to argue points with intellectualism, so he’s a worthy foe.
He grew angry at me before when I opined that he builds the intellectual foundation for the Democrats’ narratives. But I don’t mean that they control or pay him or tell him what to write or anything. I don’t believe they do. What I mean is that he’s their intelligentsia, and they pick up on what he puts out. I tried to explain that it was a compliment.
But now, he’s disingenuously trying to twist this anti-police nuttiness on Republican Tom Tiffany, who is obviously a stalwart supporter of police, by claiming Tiffany and Republicans are responsible for defunding police budgets in Wisconsin!
Say What?
This is such a faulty analysis that it’s worth the time to debunk it before it takes root. He’s wildly posting a misleading screenshot from a Wisconsin Policy Forum report that, if you read it in full, actually says more communities increased police funding in 2018 to 2019 when Tiffany was in the legislature than decreased it. Got that? His big piece of evidence that Tiffany and Republicans defunded police is a report that says more police departments increased funding than decreased it.
Why do they make this so easy. Pop goes the weasel, er the narrative, right out of the gate.
Dan’s big argument is that state shared revenue cuts caused police departments to be defunded, and so it’s all Tom Tiffany’s fault! No matter that Tiffany definitively doesn’t want to defund or abolish the police and is the lone gubernatorial candidate to make that explicitly clear.
One guy on social media had a good response: “Dan, you’re acting like spending restraint is intentionally targeting and defunding police. It’s insane to frame Tom’s position like that especially when he’s been actively against defunding police. Seems like you’re being way more disingenuous than anyone else here.”
Shafer claimed, “Parse all the statements you want, the fact is that Republican budgets that Tom Tiffany voted for defunded police in hundreds of municipalities across Wisconsin well before 2020.” (And increased them in more, but he left that out…)
Here’s where his argument also fails:
1. Budgets don’t defund things. People who write budgets do. And the fact is that local police and sheriff budgets are set by local city and county officials – not a state legislator or federal congressman like Tiffany is and has been. Budgets are about priorities. Tiffany did not set police or sheriff budgets in any community, ever. He did not set their priorities.
2. Democrats made decisions to prioritize other spending at times. For example, Tony Evers, with Josh Kaul, at his side, directed millions of dollars to a Milwaukee office of Violence Prevention, even though that office has spent funds on nonsense like a “paint the city teal day,” a gift basket giveaway, denim day posters, T-shirts, individual counseling sessions, a COVID-19 panel discussion, parking fees, a “shoe giveaway,” Pizza Shuttle, “reusable drawstring bags,” a social media workshop, and “brainspotting training.” For starters. This was a choice. The money for that office could have gone to add police.
3. Shafer ignores how weak liberal judicial sentencing, felony court backlogs due to C*vid policy decisions, early release recidivism, lack of probation and parole revocations even when new crimes are committed, and other policy choices can lead to increased crime and, thus, pressure on police budgets.
3. Shafer ignores the fact that the state Republican-led Act 12 recently “imposed minimum (police) staffing level requirements that Milwaukee must meet over a 10-year period, including the need to add up to 150 new officers. It also imposes a restriction that a portion of the city’s new 2% sales tax must be spent on public safety,” according to Urban Milwaukee. That’s hardly Republican budgets defunding the police. Act 12 also increased shared revenue to municipalities all over the state.
“2023 Wisconsin Act 12 significantly increased state shared revenue for local governments, providing a historic generational boost to municipalities and counties.”
Thank Republicans for leading that charge.
The Missing Elephant in the Room
4. Obviously, the most significant police department is in Milwaukee, due to its concentrated violent crime (cutting officers in, say, Cadott, probably wouldn’t be as big of a deal. Hate to tell you that, Dan.) What Shafer completely leaves out is the role that city and county mismanagement of the pension system has played in Milwaukee’s police budget pressures. And this might be the biggest point of all.
The MPD’s budget has grown over the years, largely due to salary and benefits, but the number of sworn officers on the force has plummeted from about 2,100 in the mid 1990s to 1,587 in 2024. The number of cops on the street is key. And so is the pension mismanagement, which means the budget has grown even as positions drop.
Let’s turn to the Wisconsin Policy Forum, which does a good job with this kind of stuff but does not lean conservative. In an exhaustive report in 2020, WPF explained why the city and county of Milwaukee pension systems were in worse shape than the highly praised state system.
The Milwaukee plans had “sizable unfunded liabilities” that are putting pressure on budgets. The state pension system in the period studied was fully funded, a “testament” to, in part, the state’s “unusual approach of linking retiree payments to investment performance.”
The study found:
- In 2020, the pension issues in Milwaukee caused the mayor and council to cut 60 police positions.
- As for the county, its employer contribution to support the pension obligations grew by 50% in a decade, causing staff and service reductions and a wheel tax.
How were the Milwaukee funds mismanaged?
- The Milwaukee plans differ from the state by providing automatic cost of living adjustments regardless of fund investment performance.
- At the end of 2018, the city and other units in the plan were facing an unfunded liability of nearly $1 billion. City employee contributions were less than those in state. The state used more conservative assumptions. The city public safety retirement age was lower.
- All of this massively stressed city and county budgets.
- That’s even though Scott Walker’s Act 10 – which all Democrat candidates want to get rid of, helped alleviate the situation somewhat by increasing the employee contribution.
The pension problems are probably the single biggest pressure on the budget, and Tom Tiffany had nothing to do with them.
- Furthermore, the Republican led Act 12 helped the city and county of Milwaukee deal with its budget problems only if they finally agreed to a major pension overhaul to fix this situation going forward.
Hardly Republicans defunding the police. I mean, it’s just absurd.
- At the county level, a pension scandal that dished out massive lump sum payments to employees years ago led to criminal charges, a recall… and the election of Walker. It also put pressure on that budget, which Tiffany also had nothing to do with.
5. What about the rest of the state?
- Wisconsin per capital municipal spending on law enforcement in 2018 (the year studied in the 2020 report) ROSE 29.8% since 1986 and 6.4% since 2000. Police spending was higher than in the 1990s and early 2000.
Tiffany was in the state Senate from 2013 to 2020 when he was elected to Congress.
There goes the narrative.
However, police staffing in the “largest cities” lagged population growth.
See the above pension discussion on Milwaukee. However, it’s also safe to say that defund the police narratives were escalating then. Ferguson was in 2014. And it’s also safe to say that protest pressure was more intense in the largest cities than, say, Cornell or Thorp.
In 1986, Wisconsin “municipalities spent about $353 million on law enforcement (both operating and capital); this rose to $1.28 billion in 2018, an increase of 262% in raw dollars and nearly 60% after accounting for inflation,” WPF reported.
From 2015-2020 spending for Milwaukee and Madison police went up, but sworn officers in Milwaukee went down.
Defund the police was a rhetorical device that never fully took root in Wisconsin, thanks to Republican efforts, although the declining force strength in Milwaukee due to the massive pension problems and misplaced priorities are a big challenge.
It should be noted that Democrat Evers vetoed a Republican bill to decrease shared revenue payments to communities that cut police budgets.
One Final Tendril
This leaves Shafer with the slimmest tendril left to justify his flawed and unproven claim.
Another report by WPF looked at 2018 and 2019. It contains a throwaway line that shared revenue drops and property tax limits might have caused pressures on communities that resulted in the reduction in some police budgets. But there’s no detailed evidence or proof of this being the cause for any community listed. It’s just a guess.
The other premise of that report, which Shafer appears to be seizing on, is the claim that the cuts in SOME departments in 2018 and 2019 predated protests. But WPF uses the 2020 death of George Floyd as the starting point for protests and the defund the police movement. I’d date it to Ferguson in 2014, and, in Milwaukee, the death that same year of Dontre Hamilton. So I don’t buy the premise that the anti-police protest movement started in 2020.
Furthermore, even that report states that more Wisconsin police departments INCREASED their spending in that two year period than decreased it as noted at the start of this article!
- 461 municipalities increased spending on police.
- 253 decreased it (but again, Shafer doesn’t prove why.) In fact, a number of those decreasing spending were very small communities. 144 of them had fewer than 2,000 residents. I’m guessing some of those areas decreased law enforcement spending because they consolidated with Sheriff’s departments or had almost no crime or just found efficiencies. In the larger cities, the reductions came in the height of the defund the police mania.
- “Over that same two-year span, 461 municipalities increased their spending on police, including three that increased spending by more than $1 million: Madison ($2.2 million), West Allis ($1.7 million), and Racine ($1.5 million),” WPF wrote. WOW, even liberal Madison.
- More Wisconsin police departments increased their sworn officers in that time frame than decreased them as well.
I’d tell Dan Shafer to go back to the books, but if he’s anything like Mandela Barnes, he won’t be able to name one, and now you get my original headline. This is all called a shiny ball diversion from the fact that the Democrat frontrunner is a nut who has advocated abolishing the police, Tom Tiffany supports the police, and the cat has the tongue of all other state Democrats.
Part of the reason defund the police didn’t fully take root here is because Republicans controlled the Legislature, and most Wisconsinites appreciate their local cops. That could change dramatically if the Democrats get their trifecta. Rhetoric matters. People shouldn’t vote for someone because they might not actually do what they’re saying they will do!
Go ahead, ask them if they support increasing police budgets and see what they all say.
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