Place  /  Antecedent

When Conservatives Called to Freeze Police Budgets

The loudest opponents to police funding were once fiscal conservatives.

In 1984, Hollywood resident Jerry Martz wrote the Los Angeles Times to observe a political impasse. With the fear of crime reaching a crescendo, City Council faced calls to enlarge the Los Angeles Police Department to 8,500 officers, which Chief Daryl Gates sloganized as the “8500 Plan.” Martz’s support for police expansion ran up against his fiscal conservatism. Nevertheless, he offered a sardonic solution: “Has anyone considered having the criminals pay for these expenses?” Only then would “the financial burden” not fall “solely on the law-abiding taxpayers.” With its many Jerry Martzes, Los Angeles rejected tax increases to fund the police department on three separate ballots over the course of the 1980s. “The people have spoken,” one voter wrote to Mayor Tom Bradley. “Government is getting no more money.”

Jerry Martz could never have predicted that calls to defund the police would gain nationwide attention in 2020. While he would have dismissed abolitionist demands to transform public safety, his position reveals a moment when the loudest opposition to swollen police budgets came from fiscal conservatives. As demonstrated in the strange career of James Q. Wilson—whose theory of “broken-windows” policing drew its explanatory power from a single study by a liberal criminologist, though Wilson himself was an ardent libertarian—fiscal austerity and police power have made for strange bedfellows. For a brief moment between the “taxpayer revolt” and the all-out war on crack cocaine users, arguably the most powerful police department in the country was not safe from austerity. Surfacing the contradictions of law-and-order politics forces historians to disentangle police power and police spending, in ways that help explain the unprecedented moment we find ourselves in. As Black-led campaigns to defund police and invest in criminalized communities have entered the mainstream, the politics of “law and order” and fiscal conservatism appear the most fragile they’ve been since the 1970s. By understanding conservative activism to freeze police budgets, and particularly its punitive outcomes, historians can amplify grassroots demands that containing police spending must also mean reducing police power and investing in criminalized communities.