Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi is defunding the police
Back in 2020, the George Floyd Uprising brought new clarity to millions of Americans on the unjust, racist treatment of Black people by police. Police kill Black Americans with impunity.
With this clarity came a demand: Defund the police. Different people and organizations had different views of the details, but the broad consensus was that police departments are given too much money to buy too many weapons and employ cops who should’ve lost their jobs (at minimum) for their lethal, racist misconduct. So rather than waste public money arming police to the teeth so they can more efficiently kill the people they’re sworn to protect, we could spend that money on things that actually create safety.
That demand never came to pass. A few jurisdictions—San Francisco among them—gave their police departments minor haircuts, only to restore that funding in subsequent years. And President Biden explicitly came out against it a couple years later, telling the country in his State of the Union address to “fund the police”. In that year’s budget proposal, President Biden included $3.2 billion in grants for state and local law enforcement.
So we were more than a little bit surprised to see Trump’s new attorney general, Pam Bondi, take action to defund local police this week.
The Washington Post reported on Attorney General Bondi’s day-one actions, including “an order to withhold Justice Department grant funding from sanctuary cities to pressure them to abandon their policies.”
The DOJ’s website has more information about that grant funding:
The Department of Justice offers funding opportunities to support law enforcement and public safety activities in state, local, and tribal jurisdictions; to assist victims of crime; to provide training and technical assistance; to conduct research; and to implement programs that improve the criminal, civil, and juvenile justice systems.
So the DOJ issues grants to “state, local, and tribal jurisdictions” for a wide variety of law enforcement purposes. (Most likely the same state and local grants for which President Biden sought increased funding a few years ago.) That’s the federal funding that Attorney General Bondi controls.
We certainly disapprove of seeking to punish sanctuary cities like San Francisco for protecting our immigrant communities, and we’re not trying to hold up Attorney General Bondi as some sort of racial-justice hero. And defunding proponents are not getting quite what they wanted: rather than money getting reallocated to things like diversionary programs or homelessness prevention, it’ll simply disappear from the budget entirely.
Still, it appears that Trump’s new attorney general, Pam Bondi, is going to defund local police in cities all across America.
The Washington Post article quoted above notes that Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, tried this back in 2017, and got smacked down by the courts. Some of those cases got overturned on appeal, so there are places where the DOJ is allowed to do this, but San Francisco is not one of them.
However, it looks like the new attorney general is going to try it here again anyway. Her memo makes no concession for existing case law, and City Attorney David Chiu has already sued the DOJ to block it again.
The City Attorney’s press release includes some mythbusting:
As a result of sanctuary laws, crime victims and witnesses are willing to come forward and report crimes to police. Trust between law enforcement and communities gets criminals off the streets and improves public safety. Eroding trust and targeting hardworking families with threats of deportation does the opposite. It makes individuals fearful to report crimes, go to school, or obtain needed healthcare.
Sanctuary laws do not protect criminals. They prioritize using local law enforcement resources to fight crime, not do the job of the federal government. Immigration enforcement is the federal government’s responsibility, not the responsibility of state or local governments. Sanctuary laws do not interfere with or impede lawful federal immigration enforcement in any way.
The federal government knows the identity and has the fingerprints of every inmate in San Francisco’s jails. If the federal government has legal reason to arrest someone, they can do so by obtaining a criminal warrant or a court order.
There’s not much for us to do in the short term but wait and see. In the meantime, we’ll continue to promote resources for immigrants in San Francisco who will need legal aid no matter what happens.
We also encourage you to call City Attorney David Chiu and thank him for suing to block Attorney General Bondi’s overreach. Even if you support defunding the police, the Attorney General’s actions will also harm actual public-safety programs for purely ideological motives, and it’s good that the City Attorney is taking action to defend our sanctuary-city status.
If you’d like to help spread the word that Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, is defunding the police, we have some graphics you can post on social media. We encourage you to link back to this blog post so folks can learn the details.
