Considering that National Police Week is upon us and Cop City — the moniker for Atlanta’s controversial public safety training facility — is now open for business, this is not a good time to be a police abolitionist. Just a few years ago, the #Defund the Police movement had some momentum among progressives, especially in big blue cities. Now it’s all but dead. All is not lost, however, if you’re an abolition dead-ender, the type to still peddle Ibram X. Kendi at your book club or graffiti the acronym “ACAB” (All Cops Are Bastards) on the pavement of your local skate park.
In fact, the long view is looking good.
First, the bad news. On Monday, President Trump proclaimed that the police deserved an entire week in May. America should figuratively pat the boys in blue on the back, he suggested, while the administration attempts to reverse the awkwardly titled “Advancing Effective, Accountable Policing, and Criminal Justice Practices to Enhance Public Trust and Public Safety.” That’s Joe Biden’s 2022 executive order directed at mild and fair-minded police reform. Trump also called on Congress to pass a new crime bill intended to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction — to restore immunity to police officers and a mandatory death penalty for those convicted of killing a cop. In doing so, he’s trying to create more George Floyds, rather than help solve the problem.
This federal Police Week comes on the heels of a late April ribbon-cutting ceremony in Atlanta celebrating the opening of the so-called Cop City. For four years, a motley crew made up mainly of the “A’s”— anarchists, activists, and academics — bitterly fought the construction of the police-and-fire training center under the banner “Stop Cop City.” Atlanta Democrats were asking for it: they tried to quietly fast-track a $115 million facility in early 2021, a time when progressives were still making noise about abolishing and/or defunding cops in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
To make matters worse, the ruling Democrats would raze a patchy forest in the ruins of Atlanta’s defunct Prison Farm to make room for the project. It was, as the kids say, not a good look, and soon the anti-police and prison activists teamed up with NGOs and environmentalists to rabble-rouse against the project, which ranged from petitions to the city government to acts of arson against police motorcycles and construction equipment. The movement tried to expand its jurisdiction and make the fight over a police training complex on the outskirts of Atlanta a national flashpoint, the sequel to the Standing Rock protests, which in 2016 won the sympathy of environmentalists, celebrities, and eventually Barack Obama.
The problem: as it turns out, almost no one wants to actually abolish the police, which is why the Democrats are now pretending that their flirtation with the movement never actually happened. Plus, since Oct. 7, the Cop City protests have been absorbed into a much broader — and spurious — ideological campaign against white supremacy, settler colonialism, and Western empire. That’s why slogans like “From Atlanta to Palestine” circulate on social media, and in their No Cop City, No Cop World book out this month, Stop Cop City activists suggest that Houthi missile strikes on oil tankers in the Red Sea are inexplicably connected to their effort to — say — shower the Atlanta City Council with ping pong balls. What Stop Cop City looks like now is the Left’s Waterloo, a final death of the movement to abolish police and prisons that became a boutique cause de jour in 2020.
So far, so good for those who think we need cops, right? Not exactly.
Even as #Defund fails, it’s not as if the police are an ascendant institution, at least, not on the local level. Two things can be true at once: Trump is granting federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement expansive and unconstitutional new powers, even as he has little control over the hundreds of thousands of uniformed officers funded and controlled at the county and municipal levels. The latter is slowly going the way of the dodo.
Consider the numbers. The United States employs more police officers today than half a century ago, but population growth has outpaced that increase. Density matters. In 1973, the country had roughly 4 officers per 1,000 people — a ratio that placed it slightly above Canada and Australia, but below Spain, France, and Austria, and nearly identical to England’s per-capita figure of 3.9. That ratio peaked in the early Nineties at 4.3 officers per 1,000, coinciding with the crest of the late-20th-century crime wave during the first Bush administration. (Even then, the American police force was only about a quarter the size of Russia’s in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
“The police force has fallen to its lowest level in half a century.”
But from 1990 to 2020, a paradoxical trend emerged. The national crime rate fell precipitously — by some measures, mysteriously — even as the police presence, relative to population, remained flat. By 2013, the Department of Justice counted approximately 600,000 full-time personnel in local police departments, bringing the officer-to-resident ratio down to about 3 per 1,000 — roughly 25 percent lower than four decades earlier. By the time Joe Biden took office in 2020, the size of the overall police force had contracted even further, placing America’s police density below average for countries in Europe and the Americas.
America’s depolicing trend has only worsened since the pandemic. According to a recent survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, departments across the country are operating with, on average, a 10 percent shortfall in personnel. To compensate, 65% of responding agencies reported cutting back on services or eliminating specialized units, like detective bureaus or community outreach teams, to preserve basic patrol coverage. In Washington, DC, the police force has fallen to its lowest level in half a century, prompting the city’s police union to describe the situation as “dangerous.” Likewise, Philadelphia has a 19% vacancy rate, and in Gotham, the NYPD has seen its headcount decline by 11 percent since 2019.
As a result, fewer than 50 million people reported contact with police in 2022, according to the Bureau of Justice’s statistics — the fewest number of police encounters since 2008. That’s mainly because traffic enforcement is disappearing. By the end of 2023, officers in Baltimore, New Orleans, and San Francisco were making fewer than half the traffic stops they had made before the pandemic. Not coincidentally, road fatalities have jumped to startling highs, including a 74% increase in Memphis from 2019 to 2022, which has lost 22% of its force since 2011. All over America, you can spot “Slow Down!” signs in lawns, but little in the way of enforcing those requests.
The problems are structural. Young people, generally, are more cynical and don’t trust institutions, including the police, and are increasingly not willing to accept relatively low pay, long hours, and a lack of remote work possibilities. It’s the same reason military recruitment is down overall (notwithstanding a recent uptick) and civil service jobs everywhere aren’t being filled — even why pools are closed. Why be a cop or a lifeguard when you can get an email job, work from home, and sell photos on OnlyFans? That explains why one of the biggest growth industries is the private security industry, which, according to one report, is expected to more than double in value in the decade from 2022 to 2032.
That America is actually under policed is not an issue that the Left wants to talk about, because progressives only seem to care about state-inflicted violence, not the vastly more common interpersonal kind. However, the truth is that the decline of policing — both in terms of quality and quantity — is a social-justice issue. Eventually, the police departments, the ones publicly accountable to citizens, will abolish themselves and, like nearly everything else in America, public safety justice will become a privatized luxury good.
