“Defund” or “Refund” the Police?: City Council Responsiveness to the Black Lives Matter Protests
Abstract
In this research note, we investigate the degree to which local governments
reduced or expanded the budgets of police departments in the aftermath of
the nation-wide protests organized by the Black Lives Matter movement
during the summer of 2020. We also consider the political and social factors
that might explain local councils’ decisions on the budget. In analyzing an
original dataset of about 100 of the most populous U.S. cities, we do not
find strong evidence of government efforts to “defund” the police.
However, across various specifications of potential responsiveness to the
movement’s demands, we do find that mayoral partisanship may be associated with local government decisions to meaningfully reduce their police
budgets or abstain from increasing them, but even this relationship may
not be sustained in the longer term. Thus, we encourage more research
on barriers that potentially inhibit local government responsiveness to social
movements like Black Lives Matter.