Crime, Cops, and the Community That Needs Both

Let us begin with what is true, because in a conversation this charged, if you do not establish the ground of shared reality first, you will lose the people who need most to hear what comes next. Police brutality against Black Americans is real. It is documented. It is not a fabrication of activists or a hallucination of the media or a political talking point manufactured for electoral convenience. Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd's neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds while three other officers watched, and a teenager with a phone recorded a man dying in the street in broad daylight. Breonna Taylor was shot in her own apartment during a no-knock raid executed on a warrant connected to a suspect who was already in custody. Philando Castile informed a police officer that he was legally carrying a firearm, did everything right, and was shot seven times in front of his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter. These are not edge cases that can be explained away by context. They are failures so catastrophic that they indict not just the individual officers involved but the systems of training, accountability, and culture that produced them.

The anger is justified. Say that plainly, because the people who will not say it plainly have forfeited their credibility on everything that follows. The anger is justified, and the demand for accountability is not only reasonable but necessary.

And now say what almost no one in public life has the courage to say next: the communities most devastated by the response to that anger are the same communities that suffered from the brutality that caused it. This is the cruelest irony in American public life, and it is killing people, and the people it is killing are almost exclusively Black.

The Numbers After the Protests

In the summer of 2020, following Floyd's murder, a movement swept across American cities demanding police reform. Some of those demands were reasonable and overdue — body cameras, independent oversight boards, restrictions on no-knock warrants, bans on chokeholds. Others collapsed into a slogan that achieved the rare distinction of being simultaneously radical and vague: "Defund the Police."

What happened next is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of data.

In Minneapolis, the city where Floyd was killed and where the city council pledged to dismantle the police department, homicides increased forty-six percent in 2020 compared to 2019. In Chicago, homicides rose fifty-five percent. In Portland, Oregon, where nightly protests continued for months and the police bureau lost significant funding and personnel, homicides increased eighty-three percent. In New York City, homicides rose forty-five percent. In Louisville, Breonna Taylor's city, homicides increased seventy-three percent. In St. Louis, already one of the most violent cities in America, the murder rate reached its highest level in fifty years.

These are not abstractions. Each percentage point represents a human being who is dead. And the demographic composition of that death toll is so consistent that ignoring it requires a commitment to ideology that borders on sociopathy. The overwhelming majority of the additional homicide victims in 2020 and 2021 were Black. Not because Black lives are inherently more violent but because the communities where police pulled back — whether through defunding, demoralization, reassignment, or the simple human calculation that proactive policing was no longer worth the personal risk — were predominantly Black communities.

The people who marched under the banner of Black Lives Matter were animated by a genuine and justified fury at the devaluation of Black life by agents of the state. The result of the policy changes their movement inspired was a dramatic increase in the number of Black lives lost to violence. Holding both of those facts in your mind at the same time is uncomfortable. It is also necessary.

The Ferguson Effect Is Not a Theory

The phenomenon has a name, though using it in certain circles will get you dismissed as a reactionary before you finish the sentence. The "Ferguson Effect," documented extensively by Heather Mac Donald and subsequently confirmed by independent researchers, describes what happens when police officers, facing political hostility and the threat of career-ending viral video moments, withdraw from proactive policing. They still answer 911 calls. They still respond to crimes in progress. But they stop doing the discretionary work — the street stops, the suspicious-person investigations, the presence patrols in high-crime areas — that, for all its potential for abuse, also deters crime through the simple mechanism of visible law enforcement presence.

This is not speculation. It has been measured in city after city. After the Freddie Gray protests in Baltimore in 2015, arrests dropped significantly and homicides surged to levels not seen in decades. After Ferguson, crime in St. Louis increased sharply. The pattern is consistent: political pressure on police leads to police withdrawal leads to crime increases, and the crime increases are borne almost entirely by the residents of the neighborhoods the political pressure was ostensibly designed to protect.

The mechanism is not complicated. In neighborhoods where a small number of individuals are responsible for a disproportionate share of violent crime — and the research is overwhelming that this is how urban violence works, concentrated among a tiny fraction of the population — proactive policing disrupts the activities of those individuals. When that disruption ceases, the individuals resume their activities. The people who suffer are their neighbors: the grandmother who cannot sit on her porch, the child who cannot walk to school safely, the small business owner who watches his customers disappear as the corner is reclaimed by the people the police used to move along.

What Black People Actually Want

Here is where the conversation reveals its most revealing fault line: the distance between what is demanded on behalf of Black communities and what Black communities themselves actually demand.

In August 2020, at the height of the defund movement, Gallup published the results of a survey that should have ended the debate but was instead almost entirely ignored by the people most invested in the debate's continuation. The survey asked Black Americans a straightforward question: do you want the police to spend more time, less time, or the same amount of time in your neighborhood?

"When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time, or less time in their area, most Black Americans — 61% — want the police to spend the same amount of time. An additional 20% want the police to spend more time in their area."

Eighty-one percent. More than four out of five Black Americans wanted the same or greater police presence in their neighborhoods. Not fewer police. Better police. Not the absence of law enforcement but the transformation of law enforcement. The demand, when Black people were actually asked instead of spoken for, was not abolition but accountability. Not defunding but reform. Not the removal of the institution but the removal of the rot within it.

This distinction — between what Black communities want and what is demanded in their name — is not a minor misunderstanding. It is a chasm, and in that chasm, people are dying.

The False Binary

The political discourse around policing in Black communities has collapsed into a binary that serves everyone's rhetorical needs and no one's actual safety. On one side: police are an occupying force, inherently racist, unreformable, and the appropriate response is to reduce their presence, their funding, and their authority as dramatically as possible. On the other side: police are heroes under siege, any criticism of policing is anti-cop, and the appropriate response is unconditional support regardless of conduct.

Both positions are intellectually lazy. Both are demonstrably wrong. And both are sustained by the same refusal to engage with complexity: the acknowledgment that policing in Black communities is simultaneously necessary and in need of fundamental reform. That the institution is essential and the institution is broken. That these two facts do not cancel each other out but rather define the actual problem that actual solutions must address.

The grandmother in Englewood who calls 911 when she hears gunshots is not making a theoretical statement about the role of the state. She is asking for help. And when the help does not come — because the officers have been reassigned, or because the department has been defunded, or because the individual officer has decided that responding aggressively to gunfire in a Black neighborhood is no longer worth the risk to his career — that grandmother is not liberated. She is abandoned. And the people who abandoned her will go home to neighborhoods where the police response time is measured in minutes, not in the hypotheticals of a political debate.

What Reform Actually Looks Like: Camden

If the argument ended there — brutality is real, defunding makes it worse, so shut up and accept the status quo — it would be as intellectually dishonest as the position it critiques. But the argument does not end there, because there is a city in New Jersey that did something remarkable: it proved that the binary is false.

In 2013, Camden, New Jersey — at the time, one of the most dangerous cities in America — dissolved its police department. Entirely. Every officer was let go. And then the city rebuilt the department from scratch, under county authority, with a fundamentally different model.

The new Camden County Police Department was built on community policing principles that were not slogans but operational mandates. Officers were required to knock on doors, introduce themselves, attend community events, play basketball with kids, learn the names of the people on their beats. Use-of-force policies were completely rewritten. De-escalation was not a training module but the default expectation. Officers were evaluated not on arrest numbers but on community engagement metrics. A "guardian" mentality replaced the "warrior" mentality that dominates traditional police culture.

The results were not ambiguous. Homicides dropped from sixty-seven in 2012 to twenty-three in 2017. Excessive-force complaints fell by ninety-five percent. Community trust, measured by surveys and by the more tangible metric of residents' willingness to cooperate with investigations, increased substantially. Camden did not choose between safety and accountability. It achieved both, because it rejected the premise that they were in conflict.

The Governance Question

Camden's lesson extends beyond policing to a principle that applies to every institution that serves Black communities: the tool is neutral; the governance matters.

The Compstat model of data-driven policing, pioneered in New York City in the 1990s, is a tool. When implemented with community oversight, constitutional guardrails, and officers trained in de-escalation, it produces targeted crime reduction in the neighborhoods that need it most. When implemented without those safeguards, it produces stop-and-frisk abuses that terrorize entire communities and erode the trust that effective policing requires. The same tool, applied under different governance, produces opposite outcomes.

Body cameras are a tool. When the footage is accessible to independent oversight and the public, they increase accountability and reduce use-of-force incidents. When the footage is controlled exclusively by the department and released only when it exonerates officers, they become props in a performance of accountability that substitutes for the real thing.

Community policing is a tool. When it is resourced, mandated, and measured, it builds the relationships that allow officers to prevent crime rather than merely respond to it. When it is a line item in a press release but not in a budget, it is nothing.

The question has never been whether Black communities need policing. They do. Every community does. The question is whether the policing they receive will be governed by the standards that every other community in America takes for granted: professionalism, accountability, constitutional conduct, and the basic premise that the people being policed are citizens to be protected, not populations to be controlled.

The Demand That Is Not a Contradiction

A community that demands both safety and accountability is not contradicting itself. It is not confused. It is not failing to pick a side. It is demanding what every affluent, predominantly white community in America already has: police officers who show up when called, treat residents with respect, use force only when necessary, and face consequences when they do not.

That this is treated as a radical demand — that Black communities must choose between being brutalized by the police or being brutalized by criminals — is itself an indictment of how America values Black life. In no other context would a community be told that safety and dignity are mutually exclusive. In no other context would the demand for competent, accountable public services be characterized as naive or ungrateful or politically inconvenient.

The loudest voices on both sides of the policing debate share one characteristic: they do not live in the neighborhoods where the consequences of their positions are measured in bodies. The activist who demands abolition goes home to a neighborhood with responsive policing. The commentator who demands unconditional police support goes home to a neighborhood where officers would never dream of conducting themselves the way they conduct themselves in Englewood or Sandtown-Winchester or the Ninth Ward. The debate is conducted by people who bear none of its costs, about people who bear all of them.

And the people who bear all of them — the residents of the neighborhoods where both the brutality and the crime are concentrated — have been remarkably clear about what they want. They told Gallup. They tell their city council members. They tell anyone who asks. They want officers who protect them without brutalizing them. They want response times that do not depend on their zip code. They want the Fourth Amendment to apply on their block the same way it applies in the suburbs. They want to be able to call for help without wondering whether the help will arrive as a greater threat than the one they called about.

This is not a radical agenda. It is not a left-wing position or a right-wing position. It is the minimum standard of civilized governance, and the fact that it must be argued for — that it must be demanded, marched for, pleaded for, and still denied — tells you everything you need to know about the distance between what America promises and what America delivers to its Black citizens.

The tragedy is not that the answer is unknown. Camden found it. The tragedy is that the loudest voices on both sides would rather win the argument than solve the problem, and the people who live in the space between those voices — the space where the bullets fly and the sirens do not come — are the ones who pay for that vanity with their lives.