Primary Submission Category: Structural factors
CIty LIFe (Community Investment vs Law enforcement and Incarceration Funding): A novel database to assess the impact of local police versus social service funding on public safety
Authors: Jonathan Burke Joshua Ross Tizeta Wolde D. Akeim George Bryce England Howard Chernick Charles Cleland Magdalena Cerda
Presenting Author: Jonathan Burke*
Introduction: Violence continues to be a major source of death and suffering in United States cities despite decades of criminalization strategies to address the issue. But, delineating the effect of city budgetary decisions on public safety outcomes is limited by data that have too few cities, short duration, and are too general in their funding categorizations.
Methods: Using the 2020 Census, we identified cities with populations >100,000 that constituted >70% of their respective county and had complete county-level data for violent outcomes in the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System (WISQARS) from 2010-2019. For these cities, we perused publicly available city budgets for actual funding in the categories of police, carceral, and support services to directly (primary) and indirectly (secondary) meet essential needs like food, housing, and health care. Two reviewers independently collected the data for each city with ambiguities resolved by detailed investigation and consensus decision. We summarized budgetary allocations in the support/police funding (SPF) ratio.
Results: Among the 34 included cities, the median population was 465,264 (Interquartile Range [IQR]: 252,868-663,985). From 2010 to 2019, police funding across cities had mean 22.6% increase (Standard Deviation [SD] = 19.4), primary support service funding had mean 25.2% increase (SD = 28.4), and SPF ratios had mean 4.0% increase (SD = 26.3). 2019 SPF ratios had median 0.48 (IQR: 0.34-0.87). In simple linear regression, cities in the top 25% of SPF ratios in 2019 had 1.6 (95% Confidence Interval: -7.3-10.6) more homicides per 100,000 people than those in the bottom 25%.
Conclusion: We created a novel longitudinal database of budgetary allocations to police and support services in 34 cities that are approximately co-synchronous with their counties. This will allow more accurate assessments of the effect of local budget allocations on public safety outcomes.