What Gov. Kim Reynolds got wrong about ‘defund police’ in her State of the Union response

It was not surprising to hear Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds bring up “defund police” during her rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address this past week. It has become a common Republican talking point against Democrats.

“We now live in a country where violent crime is out of control, liberal prosecutors are letting criminals off easy, and many prominent Democrats still want to defund the police,” Reynolds said in her nationally televised speech.

The line struck me so I posted on Twitter: “Literally who? Democrats love to increase police funding.”

It got a lot of attention compared to my usual tweets. Democrats embraced it because they misread it as a compliment. Republicans lashed out and insisted Democrats actually do want to defund police.

They’re both wrong. We have two major parties whose politicians overwhelmingly favor never-ending budget hikes for law enforcement agencies that already consume exorbitant sums of taxpayer money at every level of government. That’s a bad thing.

Several of the conservative fact checkers in my mentions replied with a video titled “7 Minutes of Democrats Saying Defund The Police,” posted in October 2021 on the GOP YouTube page.

Using that video for reference, let’s dissect Reynolds’ claim that many prominent Democrats still want to defund the police. Here are a few of the keywords — many, prominent and still.

How many? The video includes about 20 Democrats.

Are they prominent? The highlight reels’ subjects range from the speaker of the U.S. House and a couple governors to city council members and a one-time mayoral candidate from Buffalo, N.Y.

You can make up your own mind about what constitutes “many'' and “prominent” in this context. It’s the “still” where Reynolds’ quote about Democrats wanting to defund police gets mucked up by the facts.

Most of the interview clips spliced together by the RNC are from June or July 2020, when the nation was in the midst of historic police accountability protests following George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis cop. Indeed, Democrats in that moment made a lot of bold promises about fundamentally reshaping law enforcement — basically none of which they followed up on.

“Defund police” as a political statement and a policy prescription quickly fell out of fashion with Democrats. Today there are only a handful of Democrats in public office who still talk about defunding police, most notably “the squad” in the U.S. House. Other federal politicians have repeatedly disavowed it. State and local officials who once embraced it ended up increasing police funding instead.

I saw this dynamic up close in Iowa City. Members of the City Council spoke at rallies and marched alongside protesters who were explicitly demanding the defunding of police. The Iowa City police budget has grown by about $1.7 million or 13 percent since then.

They just keep piling on money and hoping it makes us safer. It is as senseless as it is bipartisan.

My response to Reynolds’ response earned a response from the Iowa GOP after Democratic Iowa Auditor Rob Sand retweeted it.

“It is not just national Democrats calling for police to be defunded, the Iowa Democrat party has been crystal clear on the issue,” they wrote on the party website.

For national Democrats, they linked to the aforementioned video, two news stories from June 2020 and just one recent tweet from U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, a “squad” member.

For Iowa Democrats, they pointed to Jaylen Cavil, a primary candidate in a safe Democratic legislative district in Des Moines. Cavil openly supports defunding police but he’s hardly in good standing with loyal Democrats. He frequently calls out his own party and in 2020 ran a write-in campaign against the Democratic sheriff of the state’s largest county (that office got a $7.8 million budget hike this fiscal year).

Reynolds’ view of the “defund police” debate doesn’t square with reality. Yes, many Democrats in the summer of 2020 called for fundamental reforms to policing, but almost all of them have since flip-flopped. Yes, there are a few politicians who still support decreasing police funding, but they are decidedly outliers within their party.

The idea of abolishing police was never going to be popular but is it so outrageous to think there might be opportunities to downsize certain law enforcement programs? To refocus resources on activities proven to have positive effects on public safety? And maybe save some taxpayer money?

The partisan frenzy surrounding police spending has deprived all of us of a serious conversation about the size and scope of law enforcement.

Police departments and sheriff’s offices are often the highest funded departments in municipal governments. The federal government exerts its influence through multi-jurisdictional task forces and grant money. Biden is encouraging cities to use some of their American Rescue Plan funds, ostensibly for pandemic relief, to hire even more police. And yet you rarely see politicians at any level scrutinize the outcomes the way they do on other spending.

They just keep piling on money and hoping it makes us safer. It is as senseless as it is bipartisan.

(319) 339-3156; adam.sullivan@thegazette.com