1990s Policing: Overrated or Underrated?
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
On Tuesday, Joe Biden declared that, “when it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not defund the police. It’s fund the police.” He was speaking in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. “I know we expect so much from our law enforcement officers, so we need to support them,” he said. “That’s why my crime plan is to help communities recruit, hire, and train nationwide more than 100,000 additional officers—accountable officers—for community policing.”
Biden is more than old enough to remember the crack epidemic of the 1980s, the murder spike of the early 1990s, the 1994 crime bill (the Senate version of which Biden himself drafted), and the unexpected decline in crime that made major American cities feel safer in the aughts than they had in generations. He has also witnessed the more recent rise of cellphone cameras documenting egregious police abuses, the ascendance of Black Lives Matter (a movement that perhaps saw its influence peak in 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing), and the dramatic increase in homicides that disproportionately ended Black lives in 2020 and 2021, culminating in a Democratic president who sounds a lot like he did in 1994.
What are your thoughts on crime and policing? Wide-ranging answers are welcome, whether about the politics of the issue, policy, or the rise and arguable decline of the Black Lives Matter movement. I’d also be interested in hearing observations from your life experiences, or testimony about what’s going on in your neighborhood today. If you want more fodder for reflection, just keep reading.
Send responses to conor@theatlantic.com.
Conversations of Note
Here’s more from Biden on Tuesday:
I’m old enough to remember when cops used to walk the beat in Wilmington and Scranton, because they knew everybody. They knew the
