Cori Bush's Private Security Detail Has Nothing To Do with Her Support for Defunding the Police
Attacks on the congresswoman from Missouri are not just unfair--they support a false narrative that the United States is in the midst of a crime wave that can only be resolved by more policing
This story has been on my mind for a few days, and I hope it has been on yours too. It’s still new subscriber recruitment month, so if you have been having conversations about crime with friends, please pass this column on to them!
As a Congressional candidate, Cori Bush rode to victory as a community activist allied with the Movement for Black Lives. Photo credit: Craig Currie via Photo News 247/Wikimedia Commons
Last week, Representative Cori Bush (MO-1), who was instrumental in pushing President Joe Biden to extend the eviction moratorium, came under fire for revealing that she has spent $70,000 on private security. So naturally, the GOP publicity machine immediately initiated a Dunk-O-Rama because Bush is also one of the Congressional proponents for defunding the police.
The mainstream media eagerly stepped in to help. At CNN.com, Chris Cillizza opined that Bush had “just handed Republicans a 2022 gift.” The New York Post printed a misleading headline that said Bush “will pay $200K for private security — but still wants to defund police.” In fact, what the Congresswoman said (in addition to a great many other things) was, “If I end up spending $200,000, if I spend $10 more dollars on it — you know what, I get to be here to do the work.”
In other words, she won’t be dead. Watching the interview, I had a brief flashback to a conversation I once had with a college friend, who played for over ten years in the NFL, about why he kept a gun in his home: “Because white people keep telling me they’re going to kill me,” he said.
So let’s be clear: Cori Bush does not have private security because she wants to take away police from everyone else and keep them all to herself. She has private security because people, most of whom are probably white, constantly threaten to assassinate her. And she is not alone. Numerous lawmakers in both parties hired private security after January 6, particularly in their home districts where Capitol Police do not protect them. From 2017 to 2020, the years of Donald Trump’s presidency, death threats to politicians rose 118.7%. In 2021, that number doubled after the assault on the Capitol on January 6.
Do you know who else is plagued with death threats and hiring private security? The election officials around the country, also in both parties, who refused to let Donald Trump steal the election.
But you won’t find any of this information in the superficial and racist attacks on Cori Bush. CBS, which set the whole thing in motion when correspondent and anchor Vladimir Duthiers asked whether it was “hypocritical” for Bush to want to defund the police and hire her own private security, framed “policing” and “private security” as more or less the same thing, a narrative that has held. You might recall that something similar happened to New York City Democratic primary candidate Maya Wiley during the recent mayoral campaign. When it came to light that Wiley’s block association employed a private watch service to patrol the neighborhood, ex-cop and ultimate winner Eric Adams blasted her as a “hypocrite,” too.
Private citizens, the “liberals like me,” are also willing to participate in political gaslighting. One of them is Leighton Woodhouse of Oakland, California, who wrote a guest post for Common Sense with Bari Weiss. He lambasts progressives who live in nice, safe neighborhoods, saying that their naïve campaign to defund the police only leaves the poor more vulnerable to crime.
Woodhouse features a community activist and former felon named Antoine Towers, “who has lost a cousin and a nephew to gun violence in recent years” as his local informant. “When I asked him about Bush’s interview,” Woodhouse writes, Towers said: `A lot of people saying, ‘defund, defund,’ aren’t acknowledging the real threat of the streets.’” Towers “believes one of the reasons that crime is surging in cities like his is that there are too few [police.].”
The logic here is so deeply muddled it is hard to know where to start—who made Antoine Towers an expert on the causes of crime? Who made documentary filmmaker Leighton Woodhouse a social scientist? But what is clear is that there is a concerted campaign on the part of the police lobby and politicians who are staking their reputations on being “tough on crime” to continue to invest in policing—and not the social programs that would affect crime.
So here’s some information that outrage about the so-called crime wave leaves out.
There is no question that major cities are experiencing a rise in gun violence. But that trend maps directly onto the Covid-19 pandemic, and the mass unemployment and social insecurity that accompanied it, not the Black Lives Matter protests of July 2020 or the movement to defund the police.
More importantly, as The Guardian’s Lois Beckett and Abené Clayton wrote back in June, there is no general crime wave:
many crimes, from larcenies to robberies to rape, dropped during the pandemic, and continued to fall during the first few months of 2021. “Crime” is not surging. Even the broader category of “violent crime” only increased about 3% last year, according to the preliminary FBI data from a large subset of cities. It’s homicide in particular that has increased, even as other crimes fell.
What also maps onto a murder spike occurring almost exclusively in neighborhoods that previously experienced gun violence is a precipitous rise in gun sales.
Opponents of police defunding want you to believe that criminals have been emboldened, both by Black Lives Matter rhetoric and politicians speaking out against police funding. The research argues that this is a lie. As Beckett and Clayton write, “Community groups say that the pandemic forced them to shutter prevention programs and created huge challenges for the work of violence interrupters, who rely on close relationships and in-person interventions with people at risk of shooting or being shot.”
One researcher “examined 60 cities and found no correlation between the number of Black Lives Matter protests, and the size of a city’s homicide increase,” while another
cautioned that any policing-focused explanation for the homicide increase needed to explain why the change would have only affected serious and deadly violence.
“Most crime is down, including most felony, serious crime,” he said. “If the de-policing argument is correct, why did it only affect an uptick in violence and not other street crime?”
Attempting to link changes in how police operated to the political protests after George Floyd’s murder also made less sense than looking at the sweeping disruptions in operations due to Covid-19, he argued.
“If there has been substantial de-policing, suspect number one is the pandemic,” he said.
This researcher predicted that crime would continue to fall in summer 2021: in New York City, that has been the case, with homicides down 49% and shootings 35%. Robberies and auto theft are slightly up: burglary is down.
But in these statistics is a bigger truth that the attacks on Cori Bush seek to conceal: what reduces crime is full employment for adults and youth, fair and secure housing for the poor, health care, good schools, and community services. Enhanced police budgets contain and punish crime—they don’t stop it. Crime stops when the communities where crime occurs are made whole—a process that police violence impedes. That’s what defunding the police is about: not punishing cops but getting the money that currently goes to crime suppression to the people who are effective at crime prevention.
And by the way? Cori Bush’s security detail might keep a crazed Trumper from getting to her—and she’s not paying for it with taxpayer dollars.
Short takes:
You may remember that Charlotte passed a bill in 2016 affirming the right of trans people to use the public bathroom that corresponded with their gender, which the North Carolina state legislature promptly overruled, launching a boycott of the state by businesses and athletic organizations. Well, the Charlotte, NC, city council is at it again! It has just passed an LGBT civil rights bill that “amends an existing nondiscrimination ordinance to include sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, pregnancy, familial status, and natural hairstyle as protected classes.” As of October 1, James Factora writes, “it is unlawful for employers to discriminate against protected classes based on that protected trait. The bill also expands these protections to employers with fewer than 15 employees, protections not otherwise provided under federal or state law.” (them, August 10, 2021)
Things are getting worse in Alabama. It is the least vaccinated state in the country at lower than 35%: only 6% of ICU beds are available, and all elective surgeries are canceled (that includes people getting heart stents and joint replacements.) Medical officials are becoming increasingly concerned about the Alabama hospital system’s capacity to care for Covid patients and perform any routine functions for people who become ill, injured, or require care for chronic diseases. The number of younger people infected continues to increase, with 33 children hospitalized and at least six on ventilators. Meanwhile, Alabama schools are set to open this week with no mask mandate in place. (Eddie Burkhalter, Alabama Political Reporter, August 9, 2021)
At The American Prospect, Amelia Pollard reports from Mississippi on how pro-abortion activism is alive and well—and staffed by the young. They are protesting, filing court challenges, and lobbying for sexual education and access to birth control that could help women avoid pregnancy in the first place. (August 5, 2021)
Cori Bush's Private Security Detail Has Nothing To Do with Her Support for Defunding the Police
I am so glad you've written this piece, Claire. I have been so indignant both about the unfairness of these attacks against Bush, but also about the intellectual dishonesty involved in this ongoing attempt to smear a courageous woman. Thank you.