Pros of defunding

Cons

+ Civilian crisis teams handle mental-health calls more cheaply

+ Forces scrutiny of police budgets

+ US police kill more people per capita than peer nations

– Homicides rose; officers reduce homicide in the best studies

– Cuts turned into expensive, unbudgeted overtime

– Every city reversed course within two years

Bottom line: Real cuts were smaller than the slogan, but officer attrition was large. All three cities reversed course within one to two years. The 2020–21 homicide spike was national, so these cuts can’t be blamed for all of it. Still, strong research shows more police officers reduce homicides, especially of Black victims. Defunding as a strategy was a mistake. Shifting mental-health calls to non-police responders is the part worth keeping.

Minneapolis

Council members pledged to dismantle the department (June 2020); $8M shifted from police in the 2021 budget

Question 2 (replace MPD) failed Nov 2021, about 56% No; budget restored

Austin

Aug 2020 vote redirected $150M of a $434M budget; only about $21M moved immediately, the rest was transfers of units and phased amounts

Texas HB 1900 (2021) penalized cuts; Austin restored funding in 2021

Portland

About $15M cut (2020); Gun Violence Reduction Team disbanded

Funding and gun-violence unit restored 2021–22

US homicides 2020

Up about 30%, the largest one-year rise on record

FBI / CDC

Minneapolis sworn officers

Fell from about 900 (2020) to about 600 (2022) (reported)

Attrition, not budget lines

Stated reasons

Underlying drivers

+ George Floyd’s murder (May 2020) and a record of police violence

+ Police handle mental-health and homelessness calls they are not trained for

+ Fund root causes: housing, jobs, treatment

– Council members responding to intense protest pressure and activist primaries

– Pandemic budget shortfalls made cuts easier to sell

– Police unions’ resistance to discipline drove calls to cut rather than reform

– Republicans used the slogan as a national campaign weapon (2020–22)

Minneapolis

97 homicides in 2021, tying the 1995 record (a later city report says 93). Response times went up and staffing fell sharply. A state court ordered the city to meet its charter’s minimum staffing (2021).

Crime up

Portland

Homicides hit a record 90 in 2021 and set another record in 2022 after the gun unit was disbanded. They fell from 2023 on after reinvestment and the national decline.

Crime up, then down

Austin

Homicides rose sharply in 2021, but Austin is a fast-growing city, and the cuts were partly accounting moves. Causal attribution is weak.

Unclear

Research

Chalfin, Hansen et al. (2022, AER: Insights): each added officer prevents about 0.06–0.1 homicides a year, with larger per-capita benefits for Black residents, but also brings more low-level arrests. Crisis-responder pilots (Denver STAR) reduced low-level crime reports in a published evaluation (Dee and Pyne, 2022).

Police reduce violence

Austin sworn overtime

$14.67M actual vs $0.41M budgeted (2021); $25.48M vs $5.85M (2022). The council later demanded more overtime transparency (2025).

Austin budget office, July 2024; KUT

Minneapolis overtime, 2021

Projected up to $11.8M; 160,000 overtime hours in Q1–Q3, against 120,000 in 2020; 80,000 hours blamed on staffing shortage. Sworn officers fell from 808 to 615 on average.

MPD finance director via Minnesota Reformer

Minneapolis today

583 sworn officers (Mar 2025); MPD over budget by $19.6M in 2025.

Axios; Star Tribune

Portland overtime

2018: nearly 250,000 hours, $15.7M; auditor called management ‘lax.’ A 2021 follow-up found progress but gaps in supervisor approvals. FY21-22 budget counted on vacancy savings to fund overtime, which the city budget office called not best practice.

Portland City Auditor 2019/2021; CBO review FY21-22

Verdict: Bad as executed. Cuts plus demoralization shrank departments just as violence spiked, and the people hurt most were the residents of high-crime neighborhoods the movement meant to protect. Adding civilian responders and pairing police funding with accountability (body cameras, decertification, union contract reform) is the evidence-backed path.

Strongest case for defunding

Strongest case against

+ Many calls don’t need armed officers, and civilian response is cheaper and safer

+ US policing kills far more people per capita than peer nations

+ Violence interruption and other community programs show some promise

– Officers reduce homicide in the best causal studies

– Black residents bore the brunt of the 2020–21 spike

– Every city that tried it reversed course within two years, and voters rejected it at the ballot

Who

Party / level

Position

Evidence

Ref

Reps. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) & Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)

Democrat

For

Announced the Movement for Black Lives’ BREATHE Act proposal (July 2020) to divest from policing; a proposal, not a formally introduced bill

[1]

Minneapolis City Council majority (2020)

Local, D/DFL

For

Pledged to "dismantle" MPD; ballot Question 2 (2021) would have replaced it

[2]

Minneapolis voters

Ballot measure

Against

Rejected Question 2 (Nov 2021), ~56% no

[2]

President Joe Biden (D)

Democrat (defector from the left)

Against

2022 State of the Union: "The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police."

[3]

Republican Party

Platform

Against

2024 platform pledges to support and fund law enforcement

[4]