In 2022 Rafael Mangual a senior fellow and head of research for policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research published his book Criminal (In)Justice. If your profession revolves around the criminal justice system then this is a must-read book. Using extensive studies and documentation Mangual takes the fight to the decarceration and depolicing narrative. He quickly and succinctly destroys the concept of defunding the police.
Criminal (In)Justice points out that the defund police movement fundamentally does not understand the causes of crime. They believe that by transferring funds away from the police and putting those funds into non law enforcement services such as social work the cycle of crime will be broken and crime will decline. However, the facts and studies prove the opposite. In 2020 the United States saw more than 21,000 murders which accounted for a 30 percent increase over 2019 and the biggest year-over-year increase on record. His book goes on to state:
The year 2020 was preceded by a decade-long trend of
Increasingly vitriolic expressions of anti-police rhetoric in the media and academia.
Decarceration (between 2009 and 2019, the country’s imprisonment rate declined 17 percent)
De-policing (during the same period, arrest declined by more than 25 percent, going from more than 13.6 million to just over 10 million, while the number of full-time police officers working American cities went from about 452,000 in 2009 down to 443,000 in 2019.
He hits you with these numbers in the first 22 pages of the book. It only gets better from there.
https://manhattan.institute/book/criminal-injustice