As Calls to Defund the Police Grow Louder, Joe Biden Wants to Give Them More Money

By Alice Speri, The Intercept

14 June 20

s tens of thousands of Americans have descended into streets for nearly two weeks to protest police violence, they have articulated a clear demand among the calls for justice and accountability: defund the police.

In a matter of days, the demand some groups had been raising for years — that officials reallocate resources from police terrorizing communities to invest in initiatives and social services that keep those communities safe — became a rallying cry that pushed city councils to reevaluate their budget proposals and forced some mayors who had at first disdained the idea to give in. For the most part, campaigns to defund police have been aimed at local governments, which control police departments and their budgets — some $100 billion annually nationwide.

But on Wednesday, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, in a striking rejection of the growing movement demanding better use of public dollars, reminded Americans that there is also plenty of money for police coming from the federal government when he called for an additional $300 million in federal incentives “to reinvigorate community policing in our country.”

“I do not support defunding police,” Biden wrote in an op-ed for USA Today. “The better answer is to give police departments the resources they need to implement meaningful reforms, and to condition other federal dollars on completing those reforms. … Every single police department should have the money they need to institute real reforms.”

As the force of the defund police movement has taken some by surprise, Biden has hardly been the only politician to seek to defend the status quo. Even his one-time rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, indicated in a recent interview that he objected calls to defund the police. “I think we want to redefine what police departments do, give them the support they need to make their jobs better defined,” said Sanders. “So I do believe that we need well-trained, well-educated, and well-paid professionals in police departments.”

That’s what officials have promised for years. Proponents of police reform, including some who sit on Biden’s criminal justice task force, have been pitching solutions to police violence that include more resources for police at least since the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The protests that followed ushered in an era of massive investment, much of it with federal dollars, to pay for things like bias training, as well as body cameras and, especially, more officers to staff “community policing” initiatives flooding already over-policed neighborhoods and schools.

These proponents usually call for “procedural” reforms that do little to tackle the underlying problems of the institution itself, said Alex Vitale, author of “The End of Policing.”

“Procedural justice is the idea that if police take the time to explain what they’re doing, hear your side of the story, act in a professional manner, that people are going to accept police actions,” Vitale told The Intercept, “and therefore that you can reform the police by making them more professional and nicer, and people won’t question them or protest them, and they will let the police go back to doing what they do with no interrogation whatsoever of whether or not what the police is doing is actually right.”

While an industry of consultants has boomed around police reform, those who have been calling for an end to police violence for years say the police reforms Biden is once again proposing have already failed. Minneapolis, which starting in 2014 received millions of dollars in federal funding as part of the pilot National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, is a poster child for such a failure, and community members there have been demanding — and so far, winning — a much more radical approach to ending police violence by reducing the presence of police altogether.

But as communities across the country push their local officials to redraw next year’s budgets, a number of groups have also begun calling on Congress to do its part to defund the police.

In a letter sent this week to the House Judiciary Committee, a coalition of national advocacy and local grassroots organizations have called on representatives to “permanently end and cease any funding to local law enforcement in any form.”

Specifically, the group called on Congress to defund the COPS Program — which stands for “Community Oriented Policing Services” — a federal initiative that critics have long accused of hiding behind the sweet-sounding notion of police developing relationships with communities while de facto flooding those communities with more officers. “The COPS Program has helped precipitate the policing crisis that we find ourselves in today,” the group wrote. “This is money that should have gone directly to people instead of policing.”

The COPS Program was established as part of the 1994 Crime Bill and to date has granted more than $14 billion to state and local governments, much of it used to hire more police. In the first few years of its existence, it contributed to the swelling of local law enforcement agencies by some 100,000 officers. The program has also funded new equipment and technology for police across the country and has resulted in the escalation of militarized SWAT teams even in small-town departments.

Just last week, as the nation was reeling from the impact of the Covid-19 crisis and as protests against police violence raged, the COPS office announced almost $400 million in grants to hire nearly 3,000 new police officers in more than 500 agencies across the country. And the $300 million Biden is now calling for comes in addition to $300 million that was just allocated to COPS as part of the HEROES Act for Covid-19 relief.

“What’s been particularly insidious about the COPS program is that the name masks what is really happening, which is that we’re essentially just flooding the streets in communities of our country with more and more police under the guise that it is going to be community-oriented,” said Kumar Rao, director of the Justice Transformation Program at the Center for Popular Democracy, one of the letter’s signatories. “It’s obvious to anyone living in communities across this country that are heavily policed that there has been nothing about policing that has been community-oriented, and the actions of this last week have revealed that in dramatic fashion to even people who have not been living under this heavy policing apparatus.”

While COPS provides federal incentives for local governments to hire more police, those governments are then left to pay for the cost of keeping the officers when the federal funds expire. “So we’re getting $100 million of ‘free’ money to hire police officers,” said Rao. “But two years later, you have a dozen new police officers on the force, and you need to pay their salaries and their pensions and their overtime and their brutality settlements with local money.” In some cities, the cost of police already eats up more than 50 percent of the local budget.

Defunding COPS is part of a broader push, by a growing number of groups, to dismantle and replace the 1994 Crime Bill itself. It is only one of several federal initiatives that advocates want to end; another is the Department of Defense’s 1033 program, which transfers equipment from the military to police and which critics say has contributed to certain communities’ perception of police as an occupying force. Advocates are also calling for an end to Operation Relentless Pursuit, a $71 million initiative that was introduced by Attorney General Bill Barr in December and aims to increase the number of federal law officers in seven “of the country’s most violent cities,” according to the FBI’s announcement of the initiative. And they want Congress to reexamine the Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant Program and other federal grants that fund a criminal justice system they say has long failed to deliver either safety or justice.

“Federal resources that continue to perpetuate police violence and harm against Black and Brown communities must end,” the American Civil Liberties Union wrote in a statement earlier this week, as it also called for defunding COPS and other programs. “Congress must reinvest those dollars into resources that end systemic racism, inequality, and disparities in Black and Brown communities. Congress must invest in true health and safety in communities that have for too long been harmed by the status quo.”

Learning From Schools

As the movement to defund the police picks up momentum, those looking to learn from the experiences of past divestment campaigns can look to efforts to get police out of schools as a blueprint. One of the most immediate outcomes of the Minneapolis protests was the decision by the local school board to end its relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department. Days later, the Minneapolis City Council announced plans to dismantle the department altogether.

“In the last few weeks, we’ve seen suddenly an echoing of the defunding police narrative across the country,” said Dmitri Holtzman, director of Education Justice Campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy. “But where some of the most specific articulations and policy pushes around the broader defunding police framework have gotten most traction has been at the school board level and specifically around police-free schools.”

“School is a microcosm of society,” he added. “There is actually a very clear path towards abolishing police in schools, which I think presents an opportunity for the broader movement as we think about defunding police more broadly.”

Through the 1994 Crime Bill, the federal government has played a leading role in the escalation of school-based police. COPS, for instance, has provided some $1 billion for law enforcement initiatives in schools, most of it going toward the hiring of “school safety officers.” As The Intercept has previously reported, school-based police have greatly contributed to the criminalization of children, and their presence has proved particularly devastating to students of color and undocumented students.

But schools are also where calls to redirect funds from police to initiatives that keep students safe and thriving, like mental health counseling and job programs, have been the longest running and most successful. In Milwaukee, for instance, black students have led a campaign to rewrite the public school system’s racist discipline code. They have also won a $1 million divestment from school-based police, reducing the number of police officers in their schools from 16 to six, said Dakota Hall, executive director of Leaders Igniting Transformation, the youth group behind the effort. The group has now joined others across the country in calling for an end to federal incentives to police, particularly school-based police, and for a reinvestment of more than $300 billion into K-12 education.

“Congress was the genesis for a lot of this with their programs in the ’90s that were tough on crime,” said Hall, in reference to the criminalization of youth of color. “So they have a very important role to play in the defunding of police departments, as well as removing cops from schools.”

Hall noted that Milwaukee students were continuing to put pressure on state and local officials, for instance, calling for the repeal of a “truancy abatement and burglary suppression” state law that mandates that Milwaukee schools must have police. But Congress, he added, needed to do more.

“The accountability has been placed on the shoulders of local officials,” he said. “And many senators in Congress, people who are still in office who voted for these bills back in the ’90s … they definitely should be held accountable as well.”

A Guy Named Craig May Soon Control a Large Swath of Utah

By Bill McKibben, The New Yorker

14 June 20

ven if you’ve never been to the vast red-rock desert country around Moab, Utah, you’ve been there—its mesas and buttes, its towering arches, have been the backdrop for a thousand movies (and even more S.U.V. commercials). It’s what we think about when we think about “the West,” a truly mythic place. Some of it has been protected in national monuments and parks: Arches and Canyonlands. But the fate of a large swath of it, though nominally belonging to the American people, may soon fall to a guy named Craig Larson.

Here’s the story so far. Under a long-standing law known as the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, anyone can “nominate” a parcel of federal land for oil-and-gas development—it doesn’t cost a thing. The rules are so lax that you don’t even have to supply your name if you want to nominate a piece of land, but Prairie Hills Oil & Gas did provide at least that much context when it asked the federal Bureau of Land Management to set aside land between Arches and Canyonlands. Prairie Hills Oil & Gas, of North Dakota, it turns out, is headquartered at a home that Larson, an attorney, co-owns in Big Lake, Minnesota, about forty miles northwest of Minneapolis. After the land is nominated, and certain review processes are completed, the B.L.M. moves to set up a lease auction, which, in the case of Larson and Utah, is scheduled for September. (Although Larson has nominated the parcels, anyone, in fact, could be the ultimate winning bidder.)

The minimum competitive bid for an acre is two dollars, and that’s often the price it goes for in areas like Moab—the prospects are far from guaranteed. The lease has a term of ten years, and, after the gavel comes down, the annual rental fee per acre would be a dollar and a half for the first five years, and two dollars for the second. As Steve Bloch, of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, explained it to me, “If Company A buys a hundred-acre lease, they will write B.L.M. a check for five hundred and twenty dollars.” That would include the bid, the first-year rental rate, and an administrative fee. If the company drills for oil and gas, it also pays the government a royalty of 12.5 per cent on the production, and the lease can be extended.

I recently called Larson to ask him about the company’s plans, and he couldn’t have been more polite or more unhelpful.

“I was curious how it was you decided to ask for those leases,” I said.

“You know, I really don’t have much to add than what we’ve done as far as the nominations,” he answered.

“Are you worried about the local Native American groups? Some have been upset.”

“I don’t really have anything more to say about it other than that our actions are public record.”

“What are the next steps in the disposition?”

“It’s up to the B.L.M. to decide the next steps.”

“Does the current economic environment around oil and gas give you pause?”

“I guess our actions speak for themselves, and I really don’t have much more to add. . . .”

“These aren’t technical or legal questions. I was trying to get at whether you took seriously the things people were raising.”

“I understand.”

Larson does not seem like a villain to me here, and he’s done nothing illegal. In fact, what’s preposterous is how entirely legal it all is. The law itself is the crime—a gift to the oil and gas businesses. It awards the industry chunks of federal land through a process designed to move real estate out of public control as easily as possible. Perhaps you could argue that, a century ago, it was an improvement over the previously unregulated disorder that gave industrialists almost literal free rein over the landscape, in that it provided at least some government oversight. But now?

Now Moab, a city of some five thousand people, makes a lot of money each year from mountain bikers and rafters, from people coming to visit the parks—though not during a pandemic. It’s world-famous for its dark skies; an Instagram capital of Milky Way viewing. Will oil wells flaring off gas help that business? “When you look at that map it just sends chills up your spine,” the chairwoman of the local county council told Bloomberg Law. (She also asked, “Why would you put an oil well in the center of a Picasso or van Gogh?”)

Now the world is awash in oil. The pandemic crash could mean that the planet reached peak oil demand in 2019, and that, as economic recovery follows, any new growth in energy supplies is likely to come from solar and wind power.

And now, above all, the world is overheating, and dangerously; the last thing it needs is more oil. The rivers of the Southwest are perfect examples of the mortal peril we now face. Moab is situated in the Colorado Plateau watershed. In February, a new study showed that, over the past century, the flow of the Colorado River was down by twenty per cent, owing mainly to climate change, and that it could fall another twenty per cent by 2050, if we don’t cut emissions. But, instead, as Bloch told me, the Trump Administration is “putting the Interior Department and B.L.M.’s pedal to the floor to sell as many leases as possible.” (A B.L.M. spokesperson said that the agency “follows its congressional mandate regarding lease sales.”) Indeed, the B.L.M. has scheduled nearly twenty oil-and-gas-lease sales on federal land nationwide through the end of 2020, and the Administration has shrunk the size of wildernesses and national monuments, paving the way for more drilling. It is a classic land rush.

The Southwest is not my landscape—I’ve spent my life in the wet mountains of the East, where an unobstructed view comes only if you devote a day to climbing the highest peaks. But I know that others feel entirely at home in that sere, spectacular region. “This land is beautiful,” Davis Filfred, a Navajo leader, told me, as he was delivering groceries to people suffering through the coronavirus pandemic, which has hit the Navajo Nation with particular force. At least, it’s beautiful until the fossil-fuel companies get there. “Where they’ve come, the land is completely contaminated,” Filfred said. “The water base is completely contaminated with petroleum, and with arsenic and selenium. The air—it smells like a rotten egg.” He added, “A hundred years from now—let’s say when my kid’s grandkids are here, we’re robbing them. I want them to see this land as it was Day One.”

I first got to know the region through the writings of Edward Abbey, whose classic book from 1968, “Desert Solitaire,” plays out against that remarkable terrain. “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread, “ he wrote. “A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” I visited Abbey in Moab when I was in my mid-twenties, gathering string for what became my book “The End of Nature.” It was a memorable trip, ripping around desert backroads in a rental car; I was a little overwhelmed both by Abbey’s outsized personality and by the scale of the place itself. (I asked Craig Larson if he’d had a chance to read any Abbey. “I thank you for your call, but I really don’t have anything more to tell you,” he said.) In later years, I’ve gotten to know the land better through the eyes of a dear friend, the writer Terry Tempest Williams, who has succeeded Abbey as the chronicler of that region. I asked her to describe the scene near Moab as spring turns toward summer. “I was up before dawn this morning just watching light touch the desert and fill it with birdsong,” she wrote. “The globe mallow are blooming. Claret cup cactus, too. Clouds like schooners sailing across the blue skies.”

As it happens, Terry and her husband, Brooke, went to a B.L.M. auction in 2016 and tried to lease land—they paid $1,680 for a ten-year lease on 1,120 acres, plus a processing fee, and formed a company, Tempest Exploration L.L.C. (Not all the parcels were leased in the auction, and some were discounted afterward, in a sort of “fire sale.” That’s where Terry and Brooke obtained their lease.) She had no hesitation in explaining her motives, as she wrote in an Op-Ed for the Times, “The energy we hope to produce through Tempest Exploration is not the kind that will destroy our planet, but the kind that will fuel moral imagination. We need to harness this spiritual and political energy to sustain the planet we call home.” They made it clear that they would not drill for oil “until science could show it was worth more above ground than below.” The lease was eventually denied; they appealed, and a decision is still pending, four years later.

Another friend, an environmentalist named Tim DeChristopher, bid for leases on a large area at a competitive Salt Lake City auction, in 2008. He bid $1.8 million, and then said that he had no intention of paying the sum, which he didn’t have. For that, he was sentenced to two years in a federal correctional facility, in California. I visited him there, and remember thinking that Ed Abbey would have been proud of him. (He served twenty-one months, and was released in 2013.) Terry Tempest Williams has been one of his biggest supporters.

Now, finally, something may change. Joe Biden has promised, repeatedly, that, if elected President, he would end new leasing on federal lands for oil, gas, and coal. As he said during a primary debate in March, “No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period.” That would make a massive difference for the climate: fossil fuels pulled from public lands account for about twenty per cent of the nation’s total greenhouse-gas output.

But it would also make a massive difference for those parts of the Utah desert that have lain empty and sublime. I don’t know exactly whom they belong to—Native people, all of us, the coyotes, God? But the answer clearly shouldn’t be some guy named Craig.