In these cities, there is a public safety crisis playing out. Police morale is down, allocations have been cut, and some crimes, such as retail theft, have fallen off the radar.
Between 2019 and 2020, the U.S. recorded its highest increase in the national homicide rate in modern history. In 2021,12 cities broke their annual homicide documents. The fallout from the defund the police movement has been reported in large cities such as New York and Los Angeles, but citizens in less populated areas have also been influenced.
In Evanston, Illinois, a Chicago suburb with a population of around 78,000, police announced they will start to triage police responses to crime.
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Evanston cut their police budgets by 5.36% in 2021 following George Floyd's murder.
"Just because we haven't had a George Floyd or a Breonna Taylor doesn't mean what we have is working," Evanston Alderwoman Cicely Fleming told the Daily Northwestern.
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A year later, the city restored police funding, but by then, it was too little, too late. The force, dogged with low officer morale and retention rates, is operating at a reduced capacity, which is hurting residents.
The department is now 26 officers short of its 154-member force. The detective bureau has been cut almost in half from 22 in 2019. The department is reassigning five members of its community policing unit to patrol for the next couple of months. Detectives will only focus on violent crimes, and although officers will still respond to 911 calls, the follow-ups will be different. The reduced force will also limit investigations into incidents involving stolen vehicles and burglaries.
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"The defund movement hurt our morale and our ability to retain our employees," Ryan Glew, the police public information officer, told the Wall Street Journal. A survey of nearly 200 police departments by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit think tank, shows a 45% increase in the retirement rate and a nearly 20% increase in resignations in 2020-2021 compared to the previous year.
"Let's be honest, the conversation nationally has been very much questioning police authority, what they do, how they do it," PERF Executive Director Chuck Wexler said. "So, if you wake up every day and that's what you hear, it takes its toll."
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Police departments in Indiana, Texas, Massachusetts, and Virginia have struggled to figure out how to facilitate the anti-police approach and protect their residents.
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In Roanoke, Virginia, which reported a 400% increase in crimes last year, Mayor Sherman Lea said residents told him they wanted more officers in their community. The city passed a budget to increase pay for officers and hire more people, but the response hasn't been what they had hoped.
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