From [HERE] In a speech to American mayors last week, Biden made his priorities clear on how cities should spend emergency funding from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan clear: affordable housing, childcare and jobs, and police.

“We shouldn’t be cutting funding for police departments,” Biden said during the speech at the annual United States Conference of Mayors winter meeting on Jan. 21. “Look, we ask cops to do everything, including being psychologists and social workers. Guess what?  They need psychologists and social workers.”

He argued American cities should invest more in their police departments so that they’re able to work better in communities. The comments were met with applause by the audience of mayors, many of whom had already made commitments along these lines. Several of the biggest cities in the US, including New York, Los Angeles, and Washington DC were already increasing their law enforcement budgets in 2021 as crime rates rose.

Will Bunch explained, For decades after urban crime spiked, Dems have offered voters a GOP-lite version of conservative law-and-order politics that resulted in modern America’s mass incarceration regime, along with police brutality and wrongful convictions.

That both political parties tripped over each other in racing to hire more and more cops, lengthen prison sentences, and wage an over-the-top “war on drugs” made it all the more stunning in the spring of 2020 when millions of Americans took to the streets after the police murder of George Floyd to demand radical change. For a remarkable — and remarkably brief — moment, most Democrats rushed to embrace a new world order in which cops wouldn’t just operate under stricter rules but policing itself would be downsized in favor of social services.

The poster child of this pivoting ideology was arguably the then-Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden. He was a key architect of the 1994 federal crime bill that put a U.S. stamp of approval on mass incarceration, but when taking office in 2021, President Biden promised “to root out systemic racism in our criminal justice system and to enact police reform in George Floyd’s name.”

But the echo of 2020′s bold promises had barely died down when the murder rate spiked across much of America, driven heavily, experts increasingly believe, by rage and ennui over the endless COVID-19 pandemic. Terrified by fear that the activists’ chants of “defund the police” would cost their party the 2020 and 2021 elections, top Democrats are now scurrying back to the old playbook by calling for more cops.

Pennsylvania’s Democratic candidate for governor, Attorney General Josh Shapiro is leading the way. The veteran Montgomery County politician needed no big push to stand with officers — the controversial Philadelphia Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police donated $25,000 to Shapiro’s 2020 AG campaign — and the lack of a primary challenger has allowed him to drift to the center-right, months before the general election.

“We need more police ... more police with time to form relationships in the community that they serve,” Shapiro said last month in West Philadelphia. Although Shapiro tempers his remarks with a call for community policing and calls for other services besides law enforcement, his emphasis on more cops — including a plan for hiring bonuses of $6,000 for new recruits — have grabbed headlines early in his campaign.

Biden echoed this last week at the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “We shouldn’t be cutting funding for police departments,” he said. “I proposed increasing funding.” Biden had also promised a national commission on police reform in his first 100 days, then scrapped that to focus on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — which then failed to pass.

Look, no one is disputing that the increase in murders — including a record in Philadelphia last year, with horrific headlines about little kids struck by stray bullets or the Asian woman pushed in front of a New York subway train — demands full and prompt attention from our political leaders. But is there any evidence that hiring more cops is the answer? Especially when many high-profile killings — involving domestic violence or road rage — happen in places and ways that defy traditional police methods.

The evidence that hiring cops alone reduces crime just isn’t there, even anecdotally. There were multiple NYPD officers on the platform when a man suddenly pushed Michelle Go onto the tracks, for example. The evidence also is not really there statistically either. One study by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Aaron Chiflin found that little more than half (54%) of cities that hire more police see murders fall, but Chiflin told the New York Times there are many reasons why crime goes up or down.

Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, the Brown University (and formerly Temple University) sociologist who wrote the award-winning Crook County about Chicago’s dysfunctional justice system, noted that police who boast about their role in bringing crime rates down rarely accept responsibility when they spike back upward. Van Cleve and other experts also note that political calculations about adding cops rarely factor in the negative impacts, such as increased brutality cases, or more traffic stops or stop-and-frisk encounters which could either go bad, or else result in more folks behind bars for non-violent crimes.

“For many people — if you’re Black in Philadelphia, for example — seeing foot patrol officers doesn’t make you feel safer,” Van Cleve said.

But for politicians like Shapiro or Biden, promising to hire more cops is the quickest shortcut for blunting Republican attacks that they’re “soft on crime.” In other words, it’s largely pandering, and it downplays the evidence that other forms of intervention in struggling neighborhoods — increasing mental health services or drug treatment, funding pre-kindergarten, or simply fixing streetlights — are more effective. [MORE]