Police Funding: Newton Police Budget 1 Year After George Floyd

NEWTON, MA — “Defund the police,” a rallying cry for activists against police brutality has been amplified in the year since protests erupted in Newton after the May 25, 2020, death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They erupted again after Newton police fatally shot a man having a mental health crisis on Jan. 5.

In the wake of social justice rallies, a local group had been calling for the police budget to be reduced by 10 percent. But Newton's proposed police budget is up this year compared with last year's.

The police department's budget in 2021 was 22,751,779, down slightly from 2020 when it was $24.3 million. After the protests last year, Newton Mayor Ruthanne Fuller agreed to use $200,000 to use in "a bottom up analysis of the police department."

The Newton Police Reform Task Force made a number of recommendations, and Fuller has said she expects the department under incoming Police Chief John Carmichael to continue to review the department.

The proposed budget that he'll have to work with for next fiscal year is $23.4 million, or $669,889 more than the previous year's $22.7.

Fuller said $350,000 of the current proposed budget is because she cut police cruisers from last year's budget, and plans to return it this year, so the department can retire five cruisers and replace them with hybrid models.

Fuller also said police will pilot body-worn cameras during this budget cycle, and she is setting aside an additional $3 million in funding from the American Rescue Plan Act to upgrade police facilities and look into building a training facility.

"We’re still on this journey of determining what Newton policing will be in the coming years," Fuller told reporters in a briefing before she presented her $462.7 million budget to city council.

Elsewhere

Nationwide, cities, villages and towns are taking various approaches to calls for lowering police department budgets now that the increased activism after the Floyd death has reached a full year’s budget cycle in most places.

A little more than half of the country’s largest cities increased police funding, Bloomberg found in a review of budgets in 39 American metropolises earlier in 2021. Minneapolis was one of the 18 police departments in the Bloomberg report that did see money taken away, accounting for the largest decrease.

In Sacramento, funding may not only increase when the next fiscal year begins on July 1 but could reach an all-time record. Sacramento’s proposed budget includes $166 million for the police department, an increase of about $9.4 million.

As the capital of California — traditionally a liberal state — moves to add more funding to its police department, Austin — the capital of traditionally conservative Texas — already did the opposite just months after Floyd’s death.

The Austin City Council last August voted to cut its police department’s budget by $150 million.

Democratic and Republican lawmakers have taken some polarizing stances on the police defunding topic. U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, a Missouri Democrat, called the proposed city budget that would cut police funding in St. Louis “historic.” Meanwhile, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has led the charge to penalize cities in the Lone Star State that do that.

Seattle, one of the metros that has reduced its police budget since the Floyd death, is under a “staffing crisis,” officials in the Emerald City have said, after at least 66 police officers have quit since the start of 2021, according to a report from KING.

“We are at record lows in the city right now,” Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz told the news station, noting the department had already been low on numbers when the year began, as more than 180 Seattle police officers resigned in 2020. “I have about 1,080 deployable officers. This is the lowest I've seen our department.”

Inspired by the move in Austin, a bill that would penalize Texas municipalities that cut police funding passed in the state’s House of Representatives earlier in May.

“When crime is on the rise, the last thing we should do is defund law enforcement,” Abbott said in a news conference backing the idea behind the bill last August.

The proposed Texas bill would allow the state to move part of a city’s sales taxes to help pay expenses for the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Texas Tribune and others have reported.

A related bill that passed the Texas Senate would require cities to hold a vote on defunding police departments before such an action could move forward, according to the Tribune.

Calls for police reform, not necessarily defunding, have been answered more swiftly. Voters in at least five cities approved police reform-related ballot measures in the November 2020 election, Smart Cities Dive found in a report, which showed police budget changes from 2020 to 2021 in big cities and midsize towns across America.

Bans on tear gas or chokeholds are among the measures that have been enacted or proposed in a number of those places, according to a police reform summary from Axios.