You cannot protect something when you have no money yet people think that the police require no money to do their job. Local governments and people believe that police officers should have less funding. They also believe that by defunding the police there will be less crime, in fact it is quite the opposite. In most cities where funding has been cut from the police department's crime has increased. In order to keep our country safe we should not defund the police. A recent release of a crime report by the NYPD shows that crime has recently increased.

“In crimes liked Murder, Rape, Robbery, Fel. Assault, Burglary, Gr. Larceny, and G.L.A there has been a 71.26% increase in these crimes. In 2021 there were 1,402 crimes, while in 2022 there were 2,401 crimes.”

    In New York City, The NYPD had slashed funds totaling up to 1 billion dollars. From these numbers you can see that this has caused an uptick in crimes. Some people say that police departments should have funds taken away, so the money can go to social services to reduce crime. However, adding funding to social services does not also help with crime as shown with these statistics. Police officers have now had to respond to a lot more calls. These calls tire out the endlessly working officers. Because of the current climate regarding officers and high working rates, there has been a decline in the amount of officers. These decline in officers have caused increases in response time for the police.

    The more time something takes, the more problems that could occur during it. Yet, some people believe the police should be able to deal with this. Since the police have been being defunded, the response time has increased. The reduction in the number of people due to early retirements and lack of recruiting has resulted in a smaller number of officers. These officers have had to respond to more calls and deal with more problems. Resulting in longer response times. A recent study by the London School of Economics and Political Science found that: 

“Contrary to previous evidence, we find large and strongly significant effects:  in our preferred estimate, a 10% increase in response time leads to a 4.7% decrease in the likelihood of clearing the crime.” 

    This article talks about how if a police officer is later to a scene of a crime, then it will be harder to descale a situation. Yet some people believe that police should never do anything else but try to use de-escalation techniques. This clearly does not make it easier for the police officers to de-escalate situations, when they are already late to a call because of lower funds in the department. A second article about the increase of response time by police officers is by the Minnesota Reformers, this article talks about how some response times have slowed as much as 5.42 seconds in the wake of George Floyds death in Minnesota. Response times have increased for police officers, many people don’t think of the impact that defunding the police would have, but victims of crimes have felt the increase in response time by police officers. The increased response times are detrimental to the safety of communities all across the US.

    If we defund the police then the riots in Portland will become our everyday life.