Democrats are divided as House passes bill package to fund police

INTERVIEWER: So members of congress Omar, Craig, and Phillips were among those in the US house that passed four bills Thursday authorizing grants for law enforcement hiring, training, as well as mental health first responders. It was a contentious set of policies that show differences in ideas about how to make our streets safer.

Now these bills have a slim chance of passing the senate. But I wanted to talk with Michelle Phelps about what they could mean to Minnesota. Phelps is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. Welcome back to Minnesota Now, Michelle.

MICHELLE PHELPS: Thank you for having me.

INTERVIEWER: So let's talk about these four bills first. What's in them?

MICHELLE PHELPS: Sure, so there's a number of bills that are being proposed. And the one that the most recent news was about was the Invest to Protect Act. And that would increase funding for smaller police departments.

There's also a couple of bills that are in the works in the House, although haven't passed the House yet, that attempt to do things like fund community violence intervention programs and to help train and dispatch mental health professionals to respond to emergencies like involving behavioral health, like the new BCR units in Minnesota.

So there's quite a few different bills that do quite different things.

INTERVIEWER: So you mentioned that Invest to Protect bill. You know the one of the big features here is money to increase hiring in police departments, particularly those with fewer than 200 officers. We know there's a shortage of officers out there. Can money fix this?

MICHELLE PHELPS: You know, I mean I think the research says in some ways, it depends what you do with the money. And I think that's what's been behind a lot of the divides in the house, particularly among the democrats, is what is this funding actually going towards? How much of it is about increasing the number of officers for these small departments? How much of it is about increasing accountability measures?

And what is our goal? When we say, is this money going to fix it, like what is the it that we're trying to fix? So is it the issue of the rise in homicides in 2020 that's continued into 2021? Is it a problem of police violence? Or is it a shortage of officers?

And so depending on what you think the goals are, the money might address different aspects of the problem. But to answer the question of do more officers reduce crime rates, there's a whole criminological literature for decades that attempts to look at that question.

And in short, the answer seems to be that if you put more officers on the street that that can, with the right kinds of deployments and the right kinds of places and the right kinds of tactics, bring down the homicide rate.

But most of that research has focused on big cities, not the kinds of small departments that are the target of this funding. And that research shows that there are costs with that strategy as well, namely that you have more Americans, particularly Black Americans who are arrested for lower-level offenses.

So increasing money for policing can bring down homicide rates in some contexts. But it also carries substantial costs.

INTERVIEWER: You talked a little bit about those smaller departments and addressing other issues in bigger departments in bigger cities. Based on your research, what do those bigger departments like the Twin Cities, what do they need to make changes?

MICHELLE PHELPS: In the Twin Cities, particularly in Minneapolis, the department is facing a really unique set of circumstances that aren't well replicated anywhere else. We were the epicenter of this mass racial unrest and reckoning after the murder of George Floyd.

It is also a context where there have been stark divisions across political leaders about how to move forward with the former city council arguing-- some members of the former city council arguing that we ought to disband the police department. We're also in the process of negotiating a consent decree with the state and also in the midst of this DOJ investigation.

And at the same time the force is down to unprecedentedly low numbers, below the mandatory minimum written into the charter in the 1960s because officers have departed, not because the department was effectively defunded.

So a place like Minneapolis is facing a really unique set of circumstances. We're also attempting to hire a new chief and building this new structure for the department of community safety that will be the sort of overarching home for the police department.

So if you ask what's happening in Minneapolis, we have a staffing crisis. We also have a mass organizational redesign. And the department is still really working on addressing some of the training and hiring and promotion and oversight mistakes, frankly, that led to the murder of George Floyd.

So there's a lot happening in big city departments, particularly Minneapolis. But much of that is happening in other departments too, as we start to think about is it possible to shrink the role of the police and really reduce police violence, especially lethal police violence.

INTERVIEWER: Now you mentioned a couple of other things there, violence interrupters one of them. You know Minneapolis has had some experiments with that. Is that the kind of things that these bills are aimed at?

MICHELLE PHELPS: Yeah, so you know community violence intervention initiatives I think have really risen in popularity over the last two years. And one of the reasons is because they are an attempt to break past the sort of continual cycle where we've had police violence and then community outrage about police violence and then a political response that has attempted to increase spending on policing in order to reform police departments.

I think critics have rightly pointed out, why do we keep funding police departments when they fail? And so the violence interruption initiatives attempt to take residents' real concerns about safety, and particularly risk of violent victimization seriously, but through this alternative route by sending people into the community who are not law enforcement, who are trained in how to intervene with young people who are the most likely to be both the victims and the perpetrators of violence and to interrupt these cycles of violence.

So when somebody is harmed in the community, trying to prevent retaliatory violence that can spin out in this network effect.

The preliminary research on these on these programs is mixed in terms of how much they're able to bring down crime rates and how much they're able to change social norms in really high violence communities.

But I would say that they're evidence-based. Given how recent they are and given how poorly they've been funded, the evidence base is actually fairly strong for them. And I'm excited to see the federal government starting to support these alternatives.

And I would say the same is largely true for these mental health responses to emergencies. Many of those programs are still kind of getting up off the ground like the BCR unit in Minneapolis, even though versions of these kinds of programs have existed in places for many years. And so I think the federal funding is an attempt to try and think about how do we resolve these problems without calling in the police.

INTERVIEWER: So Democratic Representative Cori Bush of Missouri voted against these bills last week, said in a statement that it would give more than a quarter billion dollars to police without addressing the crisis of police misconduct. There's obviously the example of the 1994 crime bill and its consequences divided Democrats during the 2020 election. Does she have a point? I mean could this have some unintended consequences going forward?

MICHELLE PHELPS: I think what she's pointing out, and I agree, is that in the wake of the historic protests after the murder of George Floyd, there were all of these calls for really transformational police reform and really new ways of thinking about how to hold police and departments accountable for police violence.

And we have largely seen inaction at the state level in Minnesota and at the federal level to enact these sort of more significant restraints on police behavior. And so I think for some, the idea that we're going to spend more money on policing is really an affront to those protests and the protesters because they haven't been paired with these more serious accountability measures.

INTERVIEWER: Real quick, what are the chances of this moving through the Senate now?

MICHELLE PHELPS: I mean I think to the extent that this is seen as a victory for the Democrats, I think it's going to be really difficult for it to make it through the Senate.

I think the only thing that is likely to make it through the Senate is a bill that increases funding on police spending with very few accountability strings that both Democrats and Republicans can then claim as a victory coming into election season to say they are the ones that are attempting to respond to the rise in homicides by funding law enforcement.

And so I think whatever we get will be a really weak compromise that is unlikely to address the concerns of Representative Bush.

INTERVIEWER: Well, we'll watch and see what happens. That was Michelle Phelps she's a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities.