Sheriff Alex Villanueva is not alone in suggesting to voters that crime is up because Democrats defunded police agencies after nationwide protests following the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
Politicians, pundits and police leaders across the country are repeating the accusation as they address concerns about crime heading toward Election Day.
Yet in many communities, defunding never happened.
ABC Owned Television Stations examined the budgets of more than 100 cities and counties and found that 83% are spending at least 2% more on police in 2022 than in 2019.
Of the 109 budgets analyzed, only eight agencies cut police funds by more than 2%, while 91 agencies increased law enforcement funding by at least 2%.
In 49 cities or counties, police funding has increased by more than 10%.
An ‘outbreak of crime’
Despite what the public record shows, an analysis of broadcast transcripts shows that candidates, law enforcement leaders and television hosts discussed the impact of “defunding the police” more than 10,000 times over the last two years, according to the Internet Archive’s TV news transcripts dating back to June 2020 — and the mentions aren’t subsiding during this campaign season.
“In communities across the country, like in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, so many other places, it is this remarkable, incredible, outbreak of crime,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a video posted on Twitter in August by the Republican Governors Association.
“You typically see where these crimes are taking place, there has been a de-emphasis of the role that law enforcement plays. It could be defunding law enforcement. It could be a reduction in law enforcement,” Abbott said.
Dr. Rashawn Ray, a sociologist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told KABC in Los Angeles that this false narrative has persisted due to repetition by public officials.
“Overwhelmingly, cities, counties, police departments across the country are not being defunded in any way,” Ray said. “In fact, many of them have increased their budgets. Part of the reason why the ‘defund the police’ narrative has stayed around is because police officers say it and elected officials say it.”