“Defund” or “Refund” the Police?
City Council Responsiveness to the Black Lives Matter Protests
Bai Hoang (University of Texas at Arlington) and Andrea Benjamin (University of Oklahoma)
In June of 2020, like many of you, we watched as George Floyd died at the hands of the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. We also watched as countless residents of cities took to the streets to protest this injustice. At the same time, the coronavirus pandemic meant that most city council meetings were being held via Zoom. In meeting after meeting, we observed calls to defund the police or move funds to other departments. While popular media reported that most departments did not defund their police budgets, the narrative and the rhetoric persisted. We wondered: to what extent might local governments have reduced their police budgets in the aftermath of the protests? Furthermore, what other factors might help us understand how city councils responded to requests to defund the police?
To conduct our study, we created a dataset that considered the budgets of the largest 100 cities in the United States. We tracked their budgets for the 2017-2018, 2019-2020, and 2020-2021 fiscal years. We researched and collected information on the characteristics of the local governments and other local public institutions: the racial and gender make-up of the city councils and the police force, the race, gender, and partisanship of the mayor, and the race and gender of the police chief. We also collected information on the profile characteristics of each city, such as change in crime rates over the years, racial composition, and ideology (as measured by Warshaw and Tausanovitch’s (2022) dataset on subnational ideology scores). We also accounted for considerations that might hinder the ability of local governments to respond to the protests, such as the timing of the budget introduction and budget passing, the presence of police unions, and the extent to which state governments exert control over local matters (e.g., whether or not the city is under Dillon’s or home rule).
Our results show that many cities neither reduced their police budgets nor meaningfully reduced the police share of the overall budget, which confirms the reports in news media coverage (see Table 1). However, there were a few factors that might be associated with local government decisions to meaningfully reduce the police share of the budget in the 2020-2021 fiscal year. For example, we find that local governments with Democrat mayors meaningfully reduced their police budgets compared to cities without Democrat mayors (see Figure 1). We also find that, surprisingly, cities with majority-female councils or greater female representation on the police force were more likely to substantively increase the law enforcement budget share than were cities with minority-female councils or less female representation on the police force (see Figures 2 and 3). However, we note that these findings on gender composition may be attributed to COVID-related factors (such as a rise in domestic and intimate partner violence during 2020) rather than any kind of responsiveness to the BLM protests. Despite these conclusions, however, we also find that even the association between the factors discussed above and meaningful changes in police budgets is potentially ephemeral given the information provided by the cities’ revised budgets and actual expenditures. Thus, we emphasize that responsiveness to the Black Lives Matter movement, even if it does occur, may not be long-term.
Table 1: Distribution of Changes in Original Police Budget
Only 15 of these 57 cities decreased the police share of the budget by a value of more than 1% (the average and median decrease was 0.876% and 0.720%, respectively).
Figure 1
(a) The difference between cities with non-Democrat mayors and those with Democrat mayors is marginally significant at p<0.10.
(b) Neutral Funding – police share of budget did NOT follow trajectory in (a) or (c) and police share of the budget did NOT increase or decrease substantially from FY2020- FY2021
(c) The difference between cities with non-Democrat mayors and those with Democrat mayors is significant at p<0.015.
Figure 2
The difference between non-majority female councils and majority female councils in decreased funding is significant at p<0.055.
Figure 3
(a) This figure shows that, on average, for every 1% increase in the female members of the city’s police force, the probability of increased funding (potentially negative response) goes up by a value of 0.021. The difference is statistically significant at p<0.052
In general, despite protests and public comments, our results suggest that cities did not respond to public demands to defund the police by actually defunding the police. We speculate that even though local politics allows public access to the policy-making process, city governments are still largely constrained by various factors that do not burden the federal and state governments, which have been shown to positively respond to social movements initiated by marginalized groups. While we do not find conclusive evidence that the presence of local police unions or the degree to which city governments are given autonomy by state legislatures affects local budget outcomes, we do not discount these factors as potentially influencing the ability of municipal-level governments to alter budgets to meet certain citizen demands. Thus, we urge scholars of urban politics to investigate how these considerations might shape council responsiveness to certain social movements. Additionally, given the various limitations to our study, we strongly encourage other researchers to continue the work we have done as our study is most definitely not the end-all or be-all on this topic!
Bai Linh Hoang is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Texas - Arlington. She is a scholar of American politics, with an emphasis on race/ethnic politics and urban politics.
Andrea Benjamin is an Associate Professor in the Clara Luper Department of African & African American Studies Department at the University of Oklahoma. She is a scholar of American politics, with an emphasis on racial/ethnic politics and urban/local politics.