After years of using a ‘tough on crime’ strategy in Baltimore, it’s time for the city to reevaluate its priorities. With the budget realities of post-COVID Baltimore, and as we examine policing across the country, displayed in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, we feel it is time to look at our budget priorities.

In 2011 the budget for the Baltimore City Police Department was $311M, representing 20% of the general fund. The proposed budget for 2021 is set at $509M, which is over 26% of the general fund. Thinking about the state of crime and policing in the city over time, it is clear that taxpayers are receiving a diminished return on investment in the nature of the police budget. Collectively, we think a better solution would be to more effectively address underlying factors that contribute to crime, like poverty, mental illness and homelessness, and reallocate funds to address these public health issues. Every year that we maintain the status quo, it is another year that we continue to traumatize residents of Baltimore. We cannot say that we are a trauma-responsive city when we are still, in part, the cause of the trauma.

Black lives do indeed matter, and our current budget does not reflect that. We are inflicting undue harm on our residents--actively through flawed policing tactics--and passively by the lack of investment in truly supporting our residents. Southeast Baltimore has advocated for these harms in the past. We feel this is totally unacceptable.

Over the last decade, taxpayers have spent $4.74B in city funds on the Baltimore Police Department. Despite a budget that increases every year, the homicide rate for 2020 is outpacing the same time period in 2019. This is a tragic statistic and one that fully describes just how broken the current policing and funding equation truly is. We, therefore, believe that it is time to responsibly cut the BPD’s budget and begin an honest discussion about where we can best redistribute those funds. Rolling the budget back to 2018 levels would allow for an additional $30M for programming that is sorely lacking in our parks, in our youth and trauma services, and in our schools. Los Angeles has already begun such a budget roll-back. In addition to examining where our budget priorities should lay, we need to have an honest debate about how we can create a better police force that may provide better results. For example, a program that would incentivize police officers to live in the city, so that they may actually begin to feel a sense of pride about where they work and live.
 
We are happy to help in any way that is needed, whether that is engaging at a local level or organizing public discussions. Please feel free to reach out to any or all of us directly if there is something we can do to further this conversation.