One year after the movement to "defund" law enforcement began to upend municipal budgets, many American cities are again funding their police departments or proposing to increase expenditure, The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
Mayor of New York City Bill de Blasio said that he would restore 92 million U.S. dollars for a new precinct after dropping the project last summer. The mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, who as a city councilman proposed to cut the police budget by 22 million dollars last year, recently suggested a 27 million dollars increase.
In the nation's 20 largest local law-enforcement agencies, city and county leaders want funding increases for nine of the 12 departments where next year's budgets already have been proposed. The increases range from 1 percent to nearly 6 percent, according to the report.
"But city officials have found it difficult to keep police budgets down after seeing a rise in crime over the past year, with murder rates up by double digits in many cities," said the Journal.
In the last three months of 2020, homicides rose 32.2 percent in cities with a population of at least one million, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Quarterly Uniform Crime Report.
Last year, the defund movement coincided with a drop in tax revenue caused by COVID-19 shutdowns. With the pandemic fading, many local governments now have more resources due to an economic revival and federal stimulus dollars.
