Defund the Military Before the Police
The slogan "defund the police," though it was never really much more than a right-wing boogeyman, should be altered to focus on a far greater source of wasteful oppression
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” - Dwight Eisenhower, 1953
The Biden administration recently released its proposed budget for the 2023 fiscal year, and it includes nearly a trillion dollars in military spending—$813 billion. Though a Democrat and ostensibly distinct from Republicans in some way, this level of spending is significantly higher than it was in the Trump years. The administration is also seeking a substantial increase in funding for law enforcement, ICE, and and the carceral state. The latter is in fact thriving under Biden:
Rather than investing in decarceration and reentry programs to protect the public as recommended by the nation’s leading health and safety experts, several states and cities have allocated federal money from the CARES Act to already-bloated police departments and to the construction of yet more jails and prisons. When petitioned to ban such misuse of these funds that were meant to provide support to struggling Americans, Biden declined to do so. Instead, in an effort to score partisan points in myopic “tough on crime” competitions with the likes of Tom Cotton, Biden has chosen to explicitly endorse the allocation of federal COVID relief funds for punishment rather than support.
Just last week in his address to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Biden again made his position very clear when he told his audience, “We shouldn’t be cutting funding for police departments. I proposed increasing funding.” Reflecting this calculated political stance, in addition to earmarking $651 million in his 2022 budget to boost local police hiring, the Biden administration has repeatedly encouraged state and local governments to use the $350 billion in discretionary funds given to them by the American Rescue Plan to expand police budgets. Indeed, both Biden and his spokespeople have proudly touted his signature COVID relief bill as a major stimulus for policing in a national context already characterized by globally unparalleled police spending.
The police were largely never defunded, though this didn’t stop dishonest Republicans from calling for law enforcement to be “refunded” in the two years that followed. It remains an important idea, and alternatives to policing have been met with great success where they’ve been allowed to exist. In Denver for example, a program replacing some police with mental health teams has been successful enough that it is being expanded. This 2021 Vice article explores other such successes and concludes that restructuring police budgets is both populist and effective:
Chas Moore, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Austin Justice Coalition, told VICE that unpacking what the Austin Police Department spends its funds on created obvious openings for his coalition, and others fighting for budget justice in the city, to carve out $100 million in Defund demands—a number he said he came up with on the fly while speaking to a reporter. “We got our hands on the police budget and we started chipping away at things we thought could be moved out of the police department, like forensics,” Moore said. “We were poking at certain units that we thought didn’t really need to exist, like the mounted patrol unit—they fucking ride down 6th Street on Clydesdales, like… do we really need this?”
Moore said he thinks this hands-on approach was instrumental in the Austin city council’s decision to move $150 million in city funds from the Austin Police Department’s $434 million budget, with $22 million in outright cuts, tens of millions more in reallocations, elimination of mounted patrol units, and the removal of a city forensics lab from police control.
Seattle’s budget wins specifically included moving 911 dispatchers, victim advocacy work, and parking enforcement out of SPD control and cutting millions of dollars in training, overtime, and civilian vacancy SPD funds, for a total of approximately $76 million in eliminations and transfers from the police department’s $409 million budget.
As with the police, the tragedy of military spending isn’t limited to its uselessness or inherent deadliness, it also exists at the expense of desperately needed social programs in the US. Given that resources are finite and government spending does not occur in a vacuum, even generously assuming that the Pentagon budget doesn’t directly steal from other potential programs nor is it explicitly cited as the reason for underfunding something like poverty initiatives (4 million children were pushed into poverty when the child tax credit expansion ended earlier this year), the very existence of excessive military spending is undeniably parasitic. The most recent victim of military overspending is especially relevant in 2022:
Next week, the White House says it will start to wind down a COVID-19 program that pays to test, treat and vaccinate people who don't have health insurance.
It's one of several immediate impacts after Congress declined to add $22.5 billion in funding to a broad government spending bill passed last week. President Biden signed the bill into law on Tuesday, hailing it as a bipartisan achievement without mentioning the lack of COVID-19 funding.
$813 billion in defense spending, which does little to benefit anyone but defense contractors who use the money to line their pockets and supply sometimes comically subpar goods and services, yet nothing for Covid relief efforts despite the looming wave of infections that will surely occur in an unmasked and misled American public. The reason for this favorable budgeting is outlined by Stephen Semler here:
One might argue that despite the existence of dark money influences in its funding, the military is still an important institution which keeps us safe from potential threats abroad (the police have their own dark money influence in the form of politically connected unions). This is incorrect. The military, like the police, actually decreases safety by stirring up (usually justified) resentment toward us. Any criticisms one might apply to American policing are doubly applicable to the American military and its enlisted enforcers. Imagine the worst of American cops, and then remove even the minor oversight that prevents their worst impulses, and we can see how so many innocent people lose their lives at the hands of our military (indeed, we’ll never know how how many millions of victims there have been in recent decades, as coverups and lack of accountability define military justice). The police may worry they’ll be caught and punished, however slim a chance that might be; the American warfighter knows he or she operates with almost complete impunity. Our military is unsurprisingly biliously disliked throughout the world—its overseas bases are hubs of crime and pollution (the military pollutes more than 140 countries, as much as the entire nation of Sweden), much as they are in the US (see Fort Bragg). Examples of its violent malfeasance abound:
From The Military Times (sex trafficking): “Throughout the next year, those probes uncovered evidence that sailors were housing prostitutes in their taxpayer-funded apartments, seizing the women’s passports and taking a cut of the women’s earnings, profiting from a sex trade that serviced shipmates who lived on the island or came ashore during port calls…Shore patrol logs obtained by Military Times also suggest the higher-ups were aware of how some sailors were spending their nights at various off-base watering holes. One November 2017 report showed 35 to 40 sailors at Wrangler, a popular nightclub. More than 100 suspected prostitutes were in attendance.”
From The New Republic (white supremacy among the ranks): “The fact that such numbers are elusive to the public is unsurprising, given the Defense Department’s general lack of transparency. What is even more troubling, though, is the probability that concrete data on military extremism is unknown even to Department of Defense leadership. Considering the longevity and seriousness of the problem of white supremacists gaining access to military weaponry and training, this institutional lack of knowledge is in and of itself a staggering failure—one that points more to willful blindness than simple neglect. It’s also a lacuna that the military is incentivized to perpetuate.”
From The New York Times (coverup of civilian deaths): “Task Force 9 typically played only an advisory role in Syria, and its soldiers were usually well behind the front lines. Even so, by late 2018, about 80 percent of all airstrikes it was calling in claimed self-defense, according to an Air Force officer who reviewed the strikes. The rules allowed U.S. troops and local allies to invoke it when facing not just direct enemy fire, but anyone displaying “hostile intent,” according to a former officer who deployed with the unit numerous times. Under that definition, something as mundane as a car driving miles from friendly forces could in some cases be targeted. The task force interpreted the rules broadly, the former officer said.”
As with the police, the military ignores and spurns whistleblowers who attempt to bring attention to its atrocities. Take Ian Fishback for example, the Special Forces Major who revealed widespread use of torture by US troops in the War on Terror, who died last year “broke, virtually homeless and medicated with heavy antipsychotic drugs in an adult foster care center near Kalamazoo, Mich., on Nov. 19 at age 42, as his friends and family scrambled to find him mental health care.” Even the Pentagon Inspector General recently found that retaliatory measures against those who dare to speak out are rarely punished:
From fiscal 2013 through 2018 (the most recent reporting period), the IG determined that 350 Defense Department officials — most of them in the military services — retaliated against or sought to intimidate 195 whistleblowers.
In each of those cases, the IG substantiated both the allegation of wrongdoing and the report of retaliation for having disclosed it. But only one of the officials who tried to exact retribution on a whistleblower was fired.
Nearly half the retaliators’ cases are still pending within the department, though some are years old. In dozens of instances when action was taken, the punishment was just a verbal or written admonition. In 57 cases, the services or agencies opted to take no punitive action against the documented offender.
Meanwhile, about 85 percent of the people who bravely came forward to try to right a wrong — only to be punished professionally and personally for doing so — had still not gotten any remedy, the IG’s figures show.
We should more thoroughly defund the police, but not before we defund the US military. If we restructure the police first without recruiting social workers and mental health specialists to fill the ranks of a new civilian public service corps, the military will step in to fill its fascist role with ease. The increasing militarization of the police and deployment of the National Guard to counter protestors in recent years show that the military, already used to acting as police for the interests of capital in other countries, would have no problems applying that skillset domestically. The reverse is not true: an American cop would be worse than lost if charged with operating jets or aircraft carriers, or dealing with roadside bombs. Theirs is a lazy, passive occupation of their own homes which would never translate overseas and would inevitably result in mass abandonment and desertion.
At the same time, we must ensure that private military contractors, who are even less accountable and far more dangerous than cops or troops, do not swoop in to pick up the pieces. This could prove to be an even greater challenge than the defunding program, as the same dark money contributions that inflate the military budget to obscene proportions ensure that paramilitary groups like Blackwater (now Academi) can continue to operate freely. These mercenaries are far less popular than the police and military, so at least in this case their heavy regulation or outright criminalization shouldn’t lead to many calls to “refund” them. If the police can be called the largest street gang in America, an anachronistic mafia-like protection racket we’re increasingly hesitant to pay off, then the military is its platonic form and must be defunded first.