How much does DC spend on cops—and does it make us safer?
Your guide to understanding the police budget and *submitting testimony*
Dear District,
This year, DC’s 2021 budget process has collided head first with the dual public health crises of COVID-19 and police brutality against Black people.
In this issue of Dear District, I’ll give a quick refresher on how the DC budget works, explain how it’s been affected by COVID, and add some context to the call to defund DC’s police department. I’ll also give a quick rundown of how the politics of police militarization played out in the resounding victory of the Janeese Lewis George in the Ward 4 Council race.
Ready to add your voice to DC’s debate about police funding? Here’s a handy resource for how to submit testimony to the Council’s Committee on Public Safety. More details on that below. TUESDAY June 16 is the last day to submit testimony.
Photos by Flickr user Geoff Livingston.
DC budget basics
There are three main centers of power during DC’s annual budget debate: the Mayor, the Council, and you. The Mayor kicks things off each year by submitting a draft budget to the DC Council. The Council holds a series hearings around different budget priorities, tinkers around with the numbers a bit, and then passes the budget as law. Generally there isn’t a huge amount of movement between the Mayor’s budget and what gets eventually passed by the Council—but the Council has real power to shift money and reshape priorities. Therein lies the people power. Every year, the DC advocacy community and members of the public rally around certain budget asks and push the Council to advance a more equitable budget. Here’s a little more context on the timeline and size of DC’s budget from last year’s Dear District.
What’s already changed because of COVID?
The budget process has been delayed by a month or two already, and the focus initially shifted from which programs would receive the most investment (pre-COVID) to which programs would avoid the biggest cuts. Firstly, a note that this is a false choice. DC is a city with high per-capita income and extremely flush reserves. The question is: Do our leaders have the moral and political courage to use our rainy day funds during this thunderstorm and to ask our wealthiest residents and corporations to pay more of their fair share as we navigate this crisis.
The Mayor presented a revised COVID budget in mid-May. Overall there were some things to celebrate—major cuts to key social services were avoided by dipping into some reserves and spending down prior years’ surplus. Read more about what there was to like and not to like in her proposed budget from the DC Fiscal Policy Institute.
Another key aspect of the budget process that has changed this year is how the public can participate. Generally speaking, the various committees of the Council hold oversight and budget hearings focused on the departments and programs their committees oversee. Experts and the public are invited to testify at these hearings. This year, some hearings have been limited to invited expert guests only, and others have expanded to include a greater reliance on video and written testimony. A coalition, Just Recovery DC, has formed to demand DC’s COVID budget help the city rebuild in an equitable way.
What to do: Follow JustRecoveryDC to receive action alerts on key budget priorities
What does the budget have to do with police violence?
The brutal murder of George Floyd has sparked a national call to action on police brutality and police funding in America. Building on the decade’s-long work of activists all over the country, leaders, individuals, community organizations (and freakin street artists!) in DC are calling on the Mayor and the Council to shift money away from policing and instead invest in programs like community violence interrupters, domestic violence prevention services, trauma-informed mental health care in DC public schools, and affordable housing. The tagline is simple: Defund the Police. The thinking and research behind it is nuanced and rigorous.
I’ll admit that I am embarrassingly new to this fight. I’m hoping that I can try to help you understand a little more about the political context and you all can help me understand more about the history of the movement to defund policing in favor of public health and social services.
How much does DC spend on cops—and does it make us safer?
For context, DC is one of the most heavily policed cities in the entire country. DC’s police force, known as the Metropolitan Police Department or MPD, has about 3,800 officers and 600 civilian staff, making it the sixth-largest municipal police department in the US (we are the 20th-largest city). DC employs about 55 cops per every 10,000 residents—we have more police per capita than any other large city in America. And that figure doesn’t even include the alphabet soup of agencies that regularly patrol our streets (Capitol Police, Park Police, Secret Service, FBI Special Police)—nor the Army or National Guard invasions we’re currently enduring.
DC spends about half a billion dollars per year on policing. That’s about $822 per resident. For every $2 we spend on education, we spend a $1 on policing. For every $1 we spend on policing, we only spend 50 cents on affordable housing. Despite dipping into reserves, freezing hiring at some agencies, and making cuts to key programs, Mayor Bowser’s proposed 2021 budget actually increases the police budget by about $18 million.
The Mayor was celebrated by national media last week for commissioning the painting of Black Lives Matter in front of the White House as part of her escalating and performative feud with Trump. But local activists know that she hired a Police Chief with a history of aggressive tactics, continues to expand police funding at the expense of other priorities, and instituted a curfew among other methods to crack down on the protests.
Protesters have demanded urgent attention to a message Black people and Black organizers have been saying for decades—the police don’t keep us safe.
Submit testimony to tell the Council to defund MPD
The nationwide protests are an urgent backdrop to DC’s budget debate, which is unfolding as we speak. Organizations like Black Lives Matter DC and Stop Police Terror Project DC, are calling on the DC Council to defund MPD and invest in what will actually make our communities safer.
Due to overwhelming public interest, the Council Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety (which has jurisdiction over MPD), has shifted its budget hearing to June 15 and is accepting testimony from the public via phone, in writing (via email), and via video upload. If you have never testified before the Council before, this is your chance to do it! It is easier than ever and the stakes couldn’t be more stark.
The hearing will be broadcast live on Monday June 15 starting at noon. The deadline to submit written or recorded testimony to be included in the public record is Tuesday, June 16.
Organizers with Occupation Free DC and Jewish Voices for Peace have put together a super readable guide for how to submit testimony. (Their guide lifts from work that Black Lives Matter and Stop Police Terror Project have been doing for years.) It includes the logistical details as well as talking points and some other guidelines. Start working on your testimony now and submit it to the record by Tuesday!
Here’s a great resource from Stop Police Terror Project DC with more information about police violence in DC and how to write and submit your budget testimony. A few highlights from their budget asks:
Maintain and increase funding for the Office of Neighborhood and Safety Engagement and violence interrupter programs
Reallocate funding from the MPD budget to pay for medical and mental health professionals and social workers to respond to emergency calls
Cut funding for school resource officers and reallocate that funding to pay for mental health care and trauma-informed services in DC public schools, along with technological support for remote learning
A winning message in Ward 4
As you probably know, Council challenger Janeese Lewis George won a resounding victory in Ward 4 over the conservative Democratic incumbent, Brandon Todd. Janeese won convincingly across the Ward—she won in all but four of the Ward’s 20 precincts, beating an entrenched incumbent by double digits.
DC-based freelance journalist Rachel Cohen wrote an excellent piece for the Intercept that seeks to explain Janeese’s win and put it in context of the current moment: A Progressive Challenger Was Attacked for Calling to Defund the Police. She Won Anyway. It’s worth a read!
Quickly summarizing from Rachel’s piece: A debate about community safety, policing, and outside political spending animated the final weeks of the Ward 4 campaign. An education privatization lobbying group, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), spent half a million dollars on the 2020 primaries in DC, sending a dozen or so mailers to Ward 4 voters smearing Janeese. DFER is the largest group active in DC that consistently runs “Independent Expenditures” in DC elections. Outside and corporate groups are able to spend an effectively limitless amount of money supporting or smearing candidates as long as their work is not done in coordination with an official campaign.
DFER’s mailers in Ward 4 focused on two key quotes from Janeese: one explaining that the militarization of urban police forces is a threat to community safety, and the other that, as a Councilmember, Janeese would divest from MPD in favor of a public health approach to crime. Janeese is an attorney who has spent her career working on criminal justice issues, piloting and scaling programs to interrupt the school-to-prison pipeline and improve community safety. DFER’s mailers purposely misrepresented Janeese’s quotes and were intended to sow fear around a Black woman candidate. They backfired spectacularly on their own merits, and collided with a debate about police brutality in the final weeks of the campaign.
Read the full story here.
Thanks all for reading this week! I’m hoping I can add a bit of context to help you understand what’s happening in DC at the local level—but I know I have huge blindspots. If there’s something I missed, got wrong, or should highlight more, please let me know.
Sincerely,
Dan
Found Dear District on Twitter or forwarded from a friend? My name is Dan Essrow—I’m an independent designer, writer, and concerned citizen working on electoral politics and issue advocacy in the District. Disclaimer that I do paid design and digital work for politicians mentioned in this issue.