Defund the Police? Not So Fast.

The answer to problems in policing is better policing, not its abolition.  If the move to eliminate policing were successful, “people will hate you.”  That was the response of Dr. Paige Vaughn, assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina.  In this episode, Dr. Vaughn explains that studying the public’s perception of the police is nuanced, but the bottom-line finding is that the public expects the police to be part of most emergency responses, crime or otherwise.  Our conversation also moved into aspects of organizational justice and job enrichment.  In the long run, efforts to improve policing can benefit the community as well as the officers themselves.

Main Topics

• Understanding the public’s opinion of the police is much more complex than simply slogans about defunding the police.
• Improving policing is preferred over defunding or abolition.
• The mere perception that policing is being diluted or eliminated can threaten their legitimacy, which can lead to an increased perception of crime, increased fear, and even lower police legitimacy.

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The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the author and guests, and are not authorized by and do not necessarily reflect those of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services or the State of New York.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi everyone. Before we get to the episode today, I want to apologize for the sound quality. It's not great. Normally I use Zoom, which is basically a plug-and-play approach to recording the podcast. Or more recently I switched to something called Riverside. Riverside has more bells and whistles than the space shuttle. And one of the buttons I should have pressed, which is intended to improve the sound quality. Well, I forgot to press the button. So again, I apologize, but I think the episode is really worthwhile. So I hope you stick around. I'm your host, Scott Phillips. Most public opinion polls of the police have consistently found that, for the most part, people tend to have a positive overall view of policing. Another consistency is that there are always variations in how people of different races view the police, and that individual events can impact polls. For example, after September 11th, the public's view of the police skyrocketed, and after the shooting of Michael Brown and the death of George Floyd, the polls dropped significantly. In the past 10 or 15 years, when a policing event gained national attention, protests against the police were couched in a framework that was more than just a need to reduce corruption or brutality. There were calls to defund or even eliminate the police, which are more drastic than just calls to punish unacceptable police behavior or maybe make some policy changes within a department. While there was concern about what Americans were seeing with policing from a handful of videos five years ago, most politicians were aware of the problem with suggesting that the police should be eliminated when there was a clear crime problem related to the pandemic. In addition, there has been some research suggesting that the public's view of the police were more nuanced, and blanket statements about eliminating the police were not realistic. That's why I'm happy that Paige Vaughn has joined the podcast today to discuss her study that was titled Mass Support of Proposals to Reshape Police Depends on the Implications for Crime and Safety. Dr. Vaughn is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of South Carolina. She studies violent crime and criminal justice policy issues. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:47

Of course.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Now, what have your colleagues in South Carolina pointed me towards your research? And you have published in a few different areas. I was actually looking at some of these, and we could have talked about uh the public risk avoidance in high crime areas, which seemingly makes sense, or advancing police uh research collaborations, which is actually kind of the point of this podcast, and this is where I'm going to make a shameless plug. Uh make sure you press the button to follow the podcast to automatically receive new episodes when they drop. But anyway, off of me and back uh to your research. You decided to try to untangle public opinions of the police. What drew your attention to this?

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Yeah, so to understand that we kind of have to go back to the pandemic, the George Floyd murder, and the murder of others, uh other people of color that kind of caused these protests that we had never seen before. So we've we'd seen Black Lives Matter protests before, right, with Michael Brown. We had seen nothing like this, no like large-scale movements to that were promoting defunding and abolition. So um and and at the time there was an election going on, or there was about to be an election, and there were those commercials, right, with women calling the police or someone calling the police and no one responding, and there had been this big crime spike during the time, and we knew that when crime when there's crime rising, that the media um makes it or when the media even just makes it seem like crime's rising, that people kind of freak out and want more spending on police. Um but we suspected that there was kind of a disconnect between what the media was pushing, what politicians were pushing, and what the public actually supported on the ground. And by we, I mean my colleagues and I. So I was working at the time with um someone named Kyle Payton. He's a brilliant political scientist. He's currently at the University of Melbourne. Um, and we were both postdocs under someone named Tom Tyler who studies fairness and policing at um Yale Law School. But we were working with him on a project called the Community Vitality Survey, where we were fielding a bunch of surveys about policing, and we were working with residents and communities, but also police officers to kind of understand the overlap between the two groups. Um and Kyle introduced me to his mentor, Greg Huber, who's in the political science, he was the chair of political science at Yale at the time, and he was really interested in this defunding abolition reform, these discrepancies between the different slogans and movements, and he studies public opinion about different a variety of issues, and so we all teamed up on this study. Um, and yeah, we were just interested in we knew that people did not support defunding and abolition by then, and we were interested in understanding why that may be.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

Okay, so again, this might be obvious to most people listening, but uh why is this area so important to the police?

SPEAKER_00 6:02

So I think it's important to understand what is truly feasible in terms of um appealing to the public and um making sure that the police are supported by the public. Um what's feasible in terms of what can we reform without there being significant issues and legitimacy? So there had been issues with how we had measured public preferences about reforms and defunding. So research had shown that while Americans don't support defunding or abolition, they generally do support reform. Um and the most popular reforms, such as increasing trainings or um accountability in policing, are going to be costly, right? And so we had talked, we've usually we asked people, do you support having social workers supplement the police on the ground? And people are, yeah, I do, right? But we don't give them these trade-offs or potential trade-offs to think about. So we were wondering, okay, what happens to support for reform defunding app once you make these explicit connections between, okay, if we do reform the police, we also might have to get rid of crops on the ground, right? So how does that make you feel? Or yeah, just trying to understand kind of the nuances and what's feasible. And also it's important to know that when you make the public fearful of crime, or when the public doesn't support the police or trust the police, and they don't think the police are doing a good job, then that's going to lower something called police legitimacy, which is really important to crime control. And so it's really important that the police understand what works and what the public wants from them in order to ensure that they do have that legitimacy, which causes people to cooperate more with the cops and to um comply with the law more.

SPEAKER_01 7:55

Right, there's often a two-way street that people forget when it comes to these kinds of things. So I mentioned this in the introduction, but historically in most public protests that focused on uh the police had a uh a more general feel, and uh they were concerned with brutality and wanted accountability. And again, this was maybe more than 10 years ago. But now, within the past decade, accountability has been framed, whether right or wrong, uh has been framed uh as completely dissolving the police agencies. I'm just gonna get rid of them. Can you give us uh a brief overview of the difference between reform? I say improve, but okay, we'll go with reform, defund, and abolishment.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

Yeah, so briefly uh in simple terms, uh we can distinguish them kind of by how much they seek to change policing. So reform is going to keep policing in place, but try to improve it. So reform efforts are usually going to focus on changing police practices, training, accountability, supervision, use of force policy, oversight. Usually, though, that is going to cost money, right? Um, but the goal is to make sure that the police are still there, they're just operating more effectively, more fairly, potentially. The fund doesn't necessarily mean eliminating the police, but it is going to reduce your police budget and shift some of the responsibilities from the police to these other services, right? So mental health care, housing, education, violence prevention. The core idea is that some problems there defunding advocates would argue that some problems should be addressed by non-police rather than by armed officers. And then abolition is going to go even further than defunding and say, okay, we need to dismantle policing as an institution and fundamentally replace it with something that's not built from slavery, and it's this we need these alternative systems for safety and community well-being. So rather than improving the police or shrinking the police budget, they're going to question whether the police should even exist. Um, so reform's gonna just change how police operate. The fund is going to reduce police response or resources and reallocate them elsewhere, and then abolition is going to seek to replace policing with something that is quite unclear, um, I think.

SPEAKER_01 10:25

Yeah, well, I would agree with that too. I've had those conversations with people, okay, so you're gonna get rid of the police and then what? Because hey, look, I'm like I said in other podcasts, I am all for improving the police. There's just we we could all use some self-improvement, right? But what are you gonna do in the in the process of getting rid of them? What are you gonna replace it with? But okay, so just you know, just play devil's advocate for a second. I this is this is what I'm gonna do. Why not you know ditch the police or at least you know make substantial changes via large funding, you know, reallocations and uh maybe shift the money to other social service agencies? Well, why not?

SPEAKER_00 11:01

Yeah, so I would say just because the public will hate you, but and it'll increase crime, but um we'll get there. So um this is exactly what we wanted to know, right? We're like, we know that people are opposed to defunding and abolition, but why are they supportive of reform? So we already knew reform was much more popular. We wanted to understand that, like why. Um I was working again with these political scientists, they were really concerned. So they study electorally motivated politicians, right, who are constrained by what the public believes changes should be. Um so we knew again that many Americans support police reform in principle, um, but we didn't understand what that why they were so um against the defunding and abolition. So we thought there were three possible reasons. Um we started with something pretty simple. So we're testing first whether people react differently to the slogans themselves versus the actual substance behind them. Okay. Um so if they just saw the slogan reform, defund, abolish versus they actually saw a description or substance. Um, and then we're like, okay, why are there differences between these groups? Um, what about defunding an abolition puts a bad taste in people's mouths? Is it the kinds of people respondents maybe imagined supporting those movements? Was it negative assumptions that uh supporters backed things like attacks on police or uh destruction of property? Was it the people involved? Like, was it because there were more black people involved with these protests or females or Biden supporters? Um, and we also looked at like specific reforms, right? Like banning chokeholds, reducing military equipment. Is it because of that? The third thing that we were interested in looking at, like the third mechanism we were exploring was is it the actual policies underlying these movements, right? So we're going to examine perceived support for eight different policies, and we're going to say, do you think people who support defunding the police agree that they we should reduce military equipment and policing or require body warm cameras or make firing police easier, ban chokeholds, right? All of these eight policies. Um, and this is where we're going to start to see some movement. So it might not be the slogans, it might not be the people associated with the protest, but it's the policies underlying them. So we're going to measure beliefs about whether supporters of each proposal also sought general policing changes, right? So eliminating police altogether, um, replacing them with social services, reducing police spending, replacing the number of officers on the street with something else. Um, and then we we asked people, we said, okay, say your police cut patrol by 10% or 20% or 50%. How safe would you feel?

SPEAKER_01 14:20

And that's what we'll get to in a moment, I assume, in terms of the buttons, but those are important questions because you're going after a variety of things again, you slogans, or is it the people that are doing this? Or you just mentioned it yourself. Okay, well, 10% reduction in the police in my neighborhood. Okay, well, that doesn't seem too bad. 20%, I'm starting to scratch my head a little bit. And then you get to the 50%. Well, I'm I'm starting to think, so so this is more than just a do you believe do you agree with cuts or not? You can see a progressive movement towards, yeah, well, this is okay, but you're getting a little too far into it. Now I don't agree with that. So your study um where was it done and how did you collect the data?

SPEAKER_00 15:02

Yeah, so our we did a national survey um of US adults in October of 2020. Um, we used um a platform, an online platform called Lucid to field the survey, and we we had over a thousand respondents, um, and we had explored other issues at a national level before this to understand that people were not supportive of defunding an abolition, and then this survey came out of that.

SPEAKER_01 15:36

And okay, so you got over a thousand people, national survey, not too bad. You have a lot of information regarding what you found in your in your paper. I wanted to tackle um these one at a time as they as they were discussed. So, first uh you asked uh the the basic question was do unpopular slogans obscure public support for substantive policy goals? So I wanted to ask how did you measure the underlying uh policy goal of defund from slogan?

SPEAKER_00 16:07

Right. So so we asked people whether they support defunding, right, for instance, and then the actual description of that would be reduced police budgets and reallocate funding to social services. Um and what we found there was that describing the policy goals increased support for reform and even defunding a little bit, but it didn't really move support for abolition. So, and even then, reform still remained the by far the most popular of these um cond of these movements, followed by defunding, and then abolition had very little support.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Yeah, so people are not okay, just based upon the very first question, uh the idea of slogans, you're you're not finding any support for for getting rid of the cops.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

Right, no.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Okay, so now the second question asks uh does opposition reflect different beliefs about the activists associated with the proposals? Now I like this one because there's a there was a time I used to joke with my father, he would have, you know, he was older, obviously, he's gone now, that he would have referred to activists as hippies and commies. So you know, we're just the you know, that he was that old and I'm that old. So anyway, uh for those who oppose serious changes to the police, how do they view uh those in favor of it, the activists?

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Yeah, and I should say my father would probably still refer to folks as hippies and commies. Um I was a little yeah, I was a little surprised here. I thought that we would find more than we did. So was it the kinds of people associated with each of these movements that put the bad taste in their mouths? And it wasn't. So again, we asked, do you believe that people who support reform are um more likely to be female or black or um or Biden supporters? Um, and we didn't find big differences between reform, defund, abolition there. Was it negative assumptions again that like the supporters of these different things supported attacks on police or the destruction of property? No. Like I thought for sure there we'd be like, oh, abolition and defunding are support are associated with the attacks on the police, right? Destruction of property, some riots, but no. Um, and then when we looked at those specific reforms like banning chokeholds, reducing military equipment, creating civilian review boards, um, they didn't support those that big wide gap that we were seeing. So then that's when we went to the third mechanism.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Right. Okay, so just based upon this the second question, the they're not associating activists with you know wanting to destroy property. And when it comes when when it comes to the some of the reforms, like as you said, reducing military equipment or chokeholes, they weren't even overly so you know jazzed about that idea.

SPEAKER_00 19:17

No.

SPEAKER_01 19:18

So so okay, so maybe there's something going on in the job.

SPEAKER_00 19:21

I'm sorry, I thought they would be.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

I would have thought so too, particularly after uh Michael Brown, there was the the the tons of inf um yes uh media coverage about the militarization. I remember St. Louis and the uh the officer with the scoped rifle on top of the uh the well, whatever it was, Humvee or whatever I don't recall the exact vehicle. But people, you know, the Senate had hearings about this. And then there were questions about the 1033 program, and police agencies were sending back their their equipment that they were getting just so they could avoid the uh the the presumption of, oh my god, you're militarized and you know the earth is gonna end. So, okay, so so you're finding not not not a huge support for that, okay. So your your final research question was Does opposition reflect different beliefs about the policies associated with those proposals? So here you were looking at whether supporters of the the different proposals are believed to have different policy preferences from those who oppose them.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Right, and that's where we start to be okay, bingo, right? So so we still didn't have see the biggest changes here, but we did see, okay, um there's some movement banning, so um those supporting reform are going to be less likely than supporters of defunding or abolition to favor these changes to on-the-ground policies, right? But it's still it wasn't the big enough to explain the differences. So that's where we looked at like you said, reducing use of military equipment, requiring body worn cameras, making firing policing easier, banning the use of chokeholds, implementing civilian review boards, banning no-knock warrants, requiring police to live where they work, um, and requiring warnings before shooting. So at the time this was after Brianna Taylor, too, right? Um and no knock warrants and shooting um without warnings, shootings without warnings were getting a lot of attention. And so we were like, maybe that's what where the big difference is, and that still didn't do it. So then we were like, okay, what about these broader policy changes that they're proposing, right? The defunding and abolition movements, general policing changes that they're proposing. So eliminating police altogether, replacing them with social services, reducing police spending, reducing the number of officers on the street, is that where the problem is? And that's when we're like, okay, yep, that's it. So a minority of people. Said reform people who support reform want to eliminate police departments, right? But you saw defunding and abolition were really high there, right? The majority of respondents were like, okay, defunding and abolition want that. Um also about half of the people said that those who support reform want to replace the police with social services, which is interesting. So they're getting that uh description a little bit wrong. Um, but there were way more defunding and abolition. They thought that those who support defunding and abolition were more likely to support that. Um, so basically what that was suggesting was okay, perceptions about the degree to which supporters of abolition and defunding want to reduce policing offers a better explanation for all of these things. And that's when we were like, okay, say we cut your patrol by 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 percent. What what do you think happens? I forget the actual, I can look at what the actual breakdowns were. Sure. Um but we we said, okay, we're going to um decrease your police by this much. How does that uh impact crime? What do you think will happen to crime, right? And people were like, if you said 10%, then people were kind of fearful of that and thought crime might increase, right? But when you said 75%, they were like, no, please don't do that. Crime's going to skyrocket, right? And so that was where the big kicker was. Okay, people do not want local police to be taken off the street. Um, that will decrease public safety, and that explained most of that big difference between support for reform, defunding, abolition.

SPEAKER_01 23:56

Okay, so again, there's a lot going on within this research, and I know sometimes it gets a little even muddled for those of us who do the research research to explain it clearly. But to summarize your your basic last finding, there was very little appetite among the mass public for policy changes that might reduce the police department's capacity to send officers to even the most mundane calls that involved no direct threat to public safety.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

Exactly. So what seemed to matter was defunding and especially abolition are going to be associated with reducing police on the ground, so cutting the number of officers on the street, and then that's going to impact public safety, and people do not want you to mess with their public safety perceptions, or there they do not want to feel unsafe in America, and so that's where that disparity is. Um public support for police reform depends heavily on whether people think that police capacity to prevent crime and respond to crime will be lowered.

SPEAKER_01 25:00

So okay, so I'm gonna jump to the implications in just a second, but that makes me you know just again to summarize, people are all about police improvement. Totally get it. And you know, should again, shouldn't we all be better policies, better training, whatever, whatever might, whatever might help the police. But when it comes to either defunding, if the defunding and the abolitionists just you know just getting rid of them, if if there is a threat to the public safety, no.

SPEAKER_00 25:26

They don't and even in the and we did some other research, like even in these these incidents where you might think the public would be willing to shift, like uh a public health response might be they might be a little more open to that, right? So like an overdose, people still want the police there, like they're willing to have a social services person come with, but they still want the cops responding to all of these things.

SPEAKER_01 25:52

Alright, so let's jump to the implications. What are some of the implications? I mean, I've got my own, but uh for for police, uh police personnel, police leaders.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

Yeah, so for police agencies, this means the public won't support reforms that reduce budgets that shrink the number of cops on the street that substantially remove police from responding to any sorts of calls for service. Public appears to view staffing as really important, and so I think that that's really interesting given the um huge staffing and retention crises that are plaguing policing right now. Um so maybe prioritize that and fixing that problem and make sure you do have cops on the street. Um many believe that just having fewer officers lead to having fewer officers will lower their safety. And and with with cuts to safety perceptions, you might see cuts to police legitimacy, which are going to potentially increase crime, right? So you want to do what the public wants, and that's keeping cops on blocks.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

Yeah, so you know, if I'm the if the general public's thinking that the cops aren't going to be there, uh then even if they're not doing anything wrong, their legitimacy drops because people people perceive the cops aren't even available.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:15

That's just that's just that's that's a big one, I think. That's a big one. If it's if it's just the bul the general belief, again, that's what perceptions are, the general beliefs. But if that's what the public believes, that's what they believe. Okay, so last question. The data was from, as you said, 20 uh 20. Um, any any chance of updating the research in the future?

SPEAKER_00 27:34

Yeah, I think I'm a firm proponent of that whenever possible, especially here given that police debates, the election, all of these things have probably shifted in some ways. I also think that there is a lot of room for extensions of this work. So maybe examine whether public pref preferences change when people are given more concrete information about things. So one thing that Kyle and I are now looking at is, for instance, budget um information. So if you actually show the public what police spend their money on, what happens to support for things like um uh reform like increasing spending for training versus accountability. So we showed people in Yonkers, New York, the actual budget. Half of the people who got our survey um saw the budget, half of them didn't, and then we said, okay, you have to decrease the budget by 10%. Where do you want to take money from? And those who saw how much money we do use toward patrol were like, oh, we're not gonna take from there. Like, um, but but people, it was interesting, people aren't willing necessarily when you reallocate the money, they're not necessarily going to be willing to we think this was just done in one city, they're less likely to give to reform efforts than I would have thought. So they're more likely to update their preferences to align with the police budget, right? And so they're like, oh, I underestimated what patrol spending looked like, I'm going to put more money into that and lower my training number and lower, and so that's interesting. And I think just like also showing them what police spend their time on is going to be really important, and to see like what people want in these civilian interactions, right? So, what do they want the police to be acting like in these different they we know they want them there, but how do they want them to be acting? And then also what do the police want to be doing in these interactions? Having police as satisfied with their job, I think, is really important, and I don't think we talk nearly enough about that, right? So, how can we increase police job satisfaction to not only quell that crisis in retention and increase staffing potentially, but to make sure that they have what's called organizational justice and satisfaction with their job so that they're doing a better job policing on the ground? I think just looking at these like nuances in more depth will be really important.

SPEAKER_01 30:08

Right. I've mentioned organizational justice on the podcast to somebody else before, and I just don't remember who it was, but the idea of job enrichment in policing is uh is something I I think is lacking. There's a huge opportunity to enrich an officer's you know performance because they like to come to work. When you want to go to work, because the job enriches you from inside.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

Right, and I think that where where people often say we need to take the police from, like in these interactions that are more public health focused or social service focused, I think the police enjoy in a lot of ways, at least in my experience with them, these like these roles that allow them to really care about people and like help them in ways that maybe they wouldn't be if they're just tasked with responding to violence, right? Um yeah, I yeah, I think of for instance focused deterrence research and like how these cops get really close with treatment participants that they're working with who have committed a lot of gun offenses, um, and how they kind of enjoy like helping them find employment. I don't want to be huggathuggy here, but you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

No, but that's oh there's your but there's your there's another study that needs to be done because I've never seen anything like that. Okay, you know, get get get a sample of officers who are doing those kinds of you know, personal on-the-ground, practical approaches that aren't necessarily violence reduction because cops aren't doing a lot of you know the the hopefully they're reducing violence by the preactive uh preemptive patrols, hot spots, those kinds of things. But I mean there's that cool part of reacting to to uh an event that I mean that's kind of what a lot of cops like that, you know. The coolest part of the job. Guilty. I I did it too. Yeah. But the idea that, you know, maybe there's a population of officers out there that like this other approach that again it's just a job enrichment idea.

SPEAKER_00 32:01

Right. Exactly. Yeah, I think there's so much work to be done still, and I'm excited to work on it more.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Well, Paige, this was uh fascinating information. Look forward to the the next iteration of your research, and I think this will be very important for the police, particularly leaders, who will be able to say, hey, look, here's some research we have now that tells us the public doesn't want these drastic cuts. There might be some modifications, but not drastic cuts. This was great information, Paige. I appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

Yeah, and I think that we saw it like it during all of the defund when people actually did defund the police a little bit, fear of crime increase, crime increase, and they're like, oh, okay, we've learned our lesson, right? So I think hopefully we've already learned, but if not, this research can be abused.

SPEAKER_01 32:48

Very good. You have a great day. Take care.

SPEAKER_00 32:50

You too, thanks.

SPEAKER_01 32:54

That's it for this episode of the Police in Service Training Podcast. I want to thank you, the listener, for spending your valuable time here. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts. And please take a moment to review this podcast. If you have any questions or comments, positive or negative, or if you think I should cover a specific topic, feel free to send me an email, which you can find in the show notes. Or you can find me on Blue Sky using the handle at policeinservice.social. Thanks very much and have a great day.