Michigan Democrats craft legislation that would provide an additional $100 Million for police departments across the state

Last week MLive posted an article with the headline, Sales tax fund would help Michigan police fight violent crime. The article states, “Democrats in the legislature want to divert millions of dollars of sales tax revenue to fight violent crime in Michigan’s worst-affected cities,” even though there are no sources cited in the article to support the increase in violent crime.

As for the legislation itself, the MLive article states: 

House Bills 4605 and 4606 would create a “public safety and violence prevention fund” to give monthly payments to municipalities proportional to their share of violent crime in the state.

These two bills proposed by Michigan Democrats primarily focus on how the sales tax funding would occur, but nothing about violence prevention or public safety is included, since there is bipartisan belief that police actually prevent crime and stop violence. The problem with the belief that more funding for cops leads to less violence is; 1) more funding for cops means less funding for housing, education, health care and other basic necessities for communities; and 2) research has shown that more policing does not lead to safer communities. See the excellent report by the group Interrupting Criminalization entitled, Cops Don’t Stop Violence: Combating narratives used to defend police instead of defunding them.

The MLive article is just another example of how commercial news outlets don’t question or challenge systemic issues and how to combat them. In addition, if one reads the MLive story and then reads the Media Release from the Michigan House Democrats, there isn’t much of a difference in what was reported and what the Democrats wanted the news to know. This type of journalism, which is called stenography journalism, not only is lazy journalism, it does the public a tremendous disservice by not being more combative of those in power.

Lastly, this decision by Michigan Democrats to propose legislation to get more funding for cops in nothing knew, since the Democratic Party has for decades been equally committed to funding the police as their GOP counterparts have been, as we have shown in previous GRIID articles.