Dozens of municipalities in the United States pledged to defund the police after Minneapolis police officers murdered George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, while he was in their custody. We first consider whether the municipalities that promised to defund the police actually did so. We find that they did not: municipalities that promised to defund the police temporarily reduced police budgets, only to later increase them beyond what they were previously. We then argue that two mechanisms-the electoral incentives of city politicians to provide jobs and services (what we call allocational politics) and the strength of police unions-explain why the predominant political equilibrium is one with protected police officers as a barrier to reform. We discuss several additional reforms suggested by public choice scholars interested in the problem of predatory policing.
Keywords: Allocational politics; Defunding police; Neighborhood policing; Policing; Quasi-markets.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.