The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will ultimately cost something like $6 trillion and policing costs $100 billion a year.
At the federal level, it spends twice as much on the Pentagon as on assistance programs, and eight times as much on defense as on education. At all levels of government, the country spends roughly double on police, prisons, and courts what it spends on food stamps, welfare, and income supplements. There were more fatal police shootings in the first 24 days of 2015 in the U.S.Ī thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way. As a Guardian investigation demonstrated, the police shot dead 55 people in 24 years in England and Wales. Gun violence is rampant deaths and injuries from firearms among children are considered “ a major clinical and public health crisis.” And Americans absorb far, far more violence from police officers. Robberies are more than twice as common as they are in Poland. The number of rapes, adjusted to the size of the population, is four times higher than it is in Denmark. But America’s murder rate is still higher than the average among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and about four times the rate in Canada. Violent crime has reduced markedly in the past few decades. If the state with the lowest incarceration rate, Massachusetts, were its own country, it would imprison more people than all but nine other nations, among them Turkmenistan.ĭoes this spending make the country safer than its peers? No. It locks up millions, with an incarceration rate many times that of other NATO countries. It spends more on domestic public-safety programs than virtually all of its peer nations, double what Singapore spends in GDP terms. spends twice what Europe does on the military. It spends far more on health care than these other countries, notably, but for a broken, patchy, and inequitable system, one that leaves people dying without care and bankrupts many of those who do get it. It spends just 0.6 percent of its GDP on benefits for families with children, one-sixth of what Sweden spends and one-third the rich-country average. spends 18.7 percent of its annual output on social programs, compared with 31.2 percent by France and 25.1 percent by Germany.
The distinctions are stark when comparing America with its peer nations. Read: Who will hold the police accountable? It feeds the former and starves the latter. It has an equally extreme budget commitment to food support, aid for teenage parents, help for the homeless, child care for working families, safe housing, and so on. But it is also and more urgently a statement of first principles: The country needs to shift financing away from surveillance and punishment, and toward fostering equitable, healthy, and safe communities.Īs a general point, the United States has an extreme budget commitment to prisons, guns, warplanes, armored vehicles, detention facilities, courts, jails, drones, and patrols-to law and order, meted out discriminately. This is in one sense a last-resort policy: If cops cannot stop killing people, and black people in particular, society needs fewer of them. Now a longtime demand from social-justice campaigners has become a rallying cry: Defund the police. Police forces across America need root-to-stem changes-to their internal cultures, training and hiring practices, insurance, and governing regulations. The death of George Floyd and the egregious, unprovoked acts of police violence at the peaceful protests following his death have raised these urgent questions. What are the police for? Why are we paying for this?
Register for The Big Story EventCast here. About the author: Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers economic policy.Īnnie Lowrey and Adam Harris will discuss the future of policing, live at 2 p.m.
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