Despite ’defunding’ claim, police funding has increased in many US cities. That’s an ABC News Headline to an ABC News report. That’s also what happens when economically illiterate people report things. In the ABC News “Investigative report” they state: A new ABC News analysis of the budgets of more than 100 cities and counties 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%. ABC’s analysis of police budget data shows police spending has increased in some of the very cities frequently cited by conservative politicians and pundits as places where Democrats' defunding has fueled violent crime waves. The Los Angeles Police Department's budget is up by 9.4% since 2019. San Francisco’s police budget is up by 4% and Philadelphia’s is up by 3%. In Chicago, police spending is up 15%. The overall narrative in the report, reviewing the largest Democrat led cities and Democrat led counties, is that conservative assertions of defunding the police occurring is false because only nine of the 100 locales studied outright cut their budgets. Now here’s the thing and it is quite a thing. You might have noticed your dollar doesn’t go as far as it used to go. You might have realized or even accidentally heard that over the past year we reached a 41-year high for inflation and our current inflation rate remains at 40-year highs. The effect of ‘Bidenflation is that a dollar in 2019 is only worth 83.9 cents today. Yes, the net rate of inflation means you have to spend 16.1% more today to equal the same outcome as in 2019. In ABC’s BS report, not one example they used, not one showed funding levels today matching funding levels in 2019 adjusted for inflation. Literally every example in their report “debunking” the defunding of police, in fact illustrates the defunding of police in net dollars. Their reporting was so profoundly unsound, it’s the perfect example of what happens when economically illiterate people report things. And that’s the generous take on the report. The only other excuse would be that they knew what they were doing and were intellectually dishonest in the dissemination of information – with the expectation that the consumers of their news are dumb and wouldn’t know better. Their report in fact showed just how pervasive the defunding of police in inflation-adjusted dollars has been.
Photo: Getty Images