Pennsylvania's police funding crisis, explained

Pa.'s cops say they don't have enough money. Is that a good thing?

The cops in Pennsylvania don’t have a lot of money. The governor and legislature can’t agree on how to give them more money. This is a problem that is complicated and sometimes tedious to understand, but it is also crucial for imagining the horizon of the Defund movement across the Commonwealth. So I’ve written a super simple explainer on the state of police—how we got here and where we could be going next.

Pennsylvania has two forms of police coverage, funded in two different ways.

In Pennsylvania, you are either covered by a local municipal department or by a barracks of the State Police. Municipal police are funded very simply through local taxes. The tax rate varies by municipality, typically somewhere between $150 and $400 per capita.

The Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) has a slightly more complicated funding structure. Most of its operating budget comes from the Department of Transportation’s Motor License Fund, which is intended for infrastructure projects; and then a smaller amount comes out of the government’s General Fund. In FY 2015-16, for example, the State Police received about $757 million from the Motor License Fund and $246 million from the General Fund.

Local police departments are expensive; State Police coverage is effectively free.

Most municipalities are not required to have their own police departments, although many of them—1100, or almost half—have some form of police anyway. Those that don’t receive coverage from the State Police free of cost.

By any calculation, it is more expensive to have local cops. Police services typically make up the largest operating expense for municipalities, anywhere from 30 to almost 80 percent of yearly budgets, according to a survey by Lower Merion Township Manager Ernie McNeely. The state offsets certain expenses at the local level (pensions, for example) and periodically makes grant money available for general operating costs. Some departments also receive additional assistance under special circumstances, like if they police casinos. By and large, though, revenue for local police is raised through local taxes.

Most people agree that this cost disparity between State Police and local departments is unfair and arbitrary.

The problem with the current funding mechanism, in the view of some of its critics, is that everyone in Pennsylvania has some form of police coverage but not everyone is paying for it equally. The Pennsylvania Economy League estimates that “municipalities with their own police force have twice the average tax burden of municipalities with only State Police coverage,” a sentiment echoed by Governor Tom Wolf more recently in his calls for everyone to begin “paying their fair share” of police costs.

Some critics would go further and conclude that there is no reason to distinguish local from state forces at all, since in reality there is no clear boundary between them. As the Center for Rural Pennsylvania found in a 2013 study, between 2011 and 2015 the State Police responded to incidents in “nearly every Pennsylvania municipality,” including around 950,000 (or 24 percent of total incidents) in towns that had their own full-time departments.

Further complicating the state/local distinction is the fact that everyone in Pennsylvania pays for State Police anyway. In 2017, the State Police took an estimated 65% of its budget from the Motor License Fund, which is paid into by a tax on gasoline and by assorted license and vehicle fees. All of which in turn comes from Pennsylvanians’ wallets everywhere.

Municipal governments often choose to keep police, despite the cost.

Given the relatively simple price comparison, you might expect more municipalities to default to State Police coverage. Yet Pennsylvania has more individual police forces than any other state, notwithstanding a fairly average, if not below average, cop-to-citizen ratio. Many of these local forces are small, casual outfits, employing just one or a few part-time officers who often have day jobs doing things (working for the State Police, for instance). And while it is true that disbandment of local police is increasingly common across the Commonwealth, it is also true that a number of townships have elected to transition the other way, from full-time State Police coverage to a part-time municipal model.

The decision to retain local police is not, strictly speaking, an economic decision. In fact, according to the Pennsylvania Economy League, it is the towns with the greatest fiscal stress that overwhelmingly continue to pay for local police: 70 percent of municipalities in the lowest quintile compared with just 17 percent in the highest.

There are a number of possible explanations for this discrepancy. For one, towns that rely exclusively on State Police may have difficulty enforcing their own municipal codes, in which case residents are willing to pay the premium for a greater degree of order. Some moderate, reform-minded cop advocates also suggest that it is safer and overall healthier for communities to be policed by their own residents rather than out-of-towner state forces.

Nor can the deep, psychical entrenchment of police in American life be underestimated. Towns without a local department may find themselves struggling to attract new taxpayers, who (however erroneously) are likely to take such an absence as indication of an unsafe neighborhood. Municipal governments may just decide that people want and expect to see police around, even if they will never require their services, and that the burden of an additional local tax is better than the alternative, a stagnant or even attenuating tax base.

The State Police can’t really afford to replace local departments.

Another reason why more municipal departments don’t disband could be that State Police barracks aren’t equipped to cover the gaps. This is the case impressionistically, in the sense that towns feel like the State Police won’t respond fast enough or keep their residents safe enough; and it is also the case financially. As part of the 2017-18 budget, the legislature capped the State Police’s share of the Motor License Fund, which at that time had reached a height of $801 million, and moved to decrease that amount to $500 million by a rate of 4 percent per year. (A bill introduced last year aimed to double the reduction rate from from 4 to 8 percent. It didn’t pass, but it has been reintroduced for this session.)

State Police leadership has warned—or promised, depending on your proclivities—that it will have to cancel future cadet classes or otherwise reduce services if it loses much more of its funding. If too many more local departments close up shop or shift to part-time status, it could easily be full crisis mode for the state force, all the more so as it tries to mitigate its losses to a sustained wave of retirements.

Governor Wolf has issued a proposal to fund the State Police with a fee assessed on everyone in every municipality of the Commonwealth. The fee structure is somewhat complicated but is essentially determined by weighting several factors like population density, median income, and the extent of existing local police coverage. This new system would not only (at least purportedly) level out municipalities’ relative contributions to the State Police—it would also, exactly as it is intended to, expand the presence of state troopers across all of Pennsylvania.

The legislature has not yet taken up Wolf’s universal fee proposal. Whether that is good or bad is an open question.

Wolf’s proposal has so far not convinced the majority-conservative legislature that having more state troopers is worth the additional burden on constituents. Insofar as legislators represent the interests of townships with local police—and, again, there are a lot of these townships—it is unlikely to gain traction anytime soon.

Which is not to say the legislature has any particularly good alternatives to the Wolf plan. Rep. Jack Rader, Jr. (R-Monroe) has introduced legislation to allow municipalities, pursuant to a public vote, to devote up to three mills of the property tax—or three dollars for every thousand of the assessed value of a property—to fund local police services. Sen. James Brewster (D-Allegheny/Westmoreland) has proposed part-time police grants, funded by a $10 surcharge on certain vehicle violations, to support “recruitment and retention” of local forces. There are also two related resolutions by Rep. Austin Davis (D-Allegheny) that aim to create pathways towards consolidation for Pennsylvania’s many local police departments.

These are, however, all stopgap and partial measures. Rader’s property tax plan would more or less just shift money around without providing material relief to municipal budgets; Brewster’s part-time police grants would be capped at $5000; and Davis’s consolidation resolutions provide only circuitous solutions to the problem, establishing programs to “encourage” and “explore” consolidation rather than legislating it outright.

In any case, there are negative implications to the chronic underfunding of police.

I highlight the weakness of these proposals not because I want to see the police funded—like a lot of people, I think the police should be abolished—but because I want to point up a certain way police power is valorized under conditions of partial defunding. In reality, the real police funding crisis is not whether the government can find a way to pay police or not, but rather, what it will allow the police to do in the meantime to keep them (and their rabid unions) happy. A simple and rather mild example of this is a bill by Rep. Robert Merski (D-Erie) that would allow local departments to purchase used State Police vehicles at a discount before they go to public auction. A more serious example is the legislature’s refusal to limit the ability of departments to obtain free military surplus equipment from the Department of Defense (which I’ve written a little about here).

Local departments may also turn to dubious private partnerships to make up for budget cuts. Amazon’s Ring doorbell program, for instance, allows police to obtain video from the Ring devices of residents in their jurisdiction for use in investigations. There are obvious data privacy concerns around a program like this, as well as constitutional privacy concerns, since there isn’t a comprehensive legal framework for this specific kind of surveillance. But the legislature would be very hesitant to curb this kind of power, however it may be abused, because it costs them nothing.

Nor is it out of the question for departments to respond to budget impoverishment by developing parapolice power, outsourcing enforcement to an unsworn factotum class of citizen-volunteers—more likely than not under the guise of Second Amendment advocacy. The Clearfield County Sheriff’s Posse in central-northwest PA, while not an enforcement arm per se, does volunteer at community events and maintain an armed presence in the area. Gun-toting activists like this group could increasingly take it upon themselves to “maintain order”—with the blessing, of course, of local cop leadership.

Consolidation of the police is the lesser of two evils and should be a near-term goal for abolitionists and reformers.

Progressive lawmakers should push for the consolidation of policing under the aegis of the State Police as an intermediary step towards more meaningful defunding efforts. The reason for this is simple: it is easiest to supplant the police monopoly on social services, replacing them piecemeal with other, demilitarized providers, if those services are subsumed under one agency. Decentralized police power, being weak by definition, is more volatile, prone to entrenchment in both the corporate surveillance complex and the revanchist far-right paramilitary movement. It is therefore in the interest of the government, for the broadest protection of all citizens, to consolidate and effectively regulate its police forces.

Abolitionists and reformers should also be prepared for a move by legislative conservatives to credentialize the police, granting exclusive training and licensing opportunities (along with increased funding) to preclude their replacement by other social services. One recently introduced bill, for example, would give money to the State Police for the training of troopers as “Drug Recognition Experts” who “can be called out in the event of a traffic stop or accident to evaluate drivers for the presence of drugs in their system, helping to accurately identify such drivers and take them off the road.”

Legislation like this pretends to be about addressing social problems—this particular bill claims to be a response to the opioid epidemic—but is really about arrogating every last public crisis as an excuse to pump more money to the cops. It is proof that consolidation alone is not, and will never be, enough; that it is in fact perfectly compatible with the aims of police supremacy if it is not carried out with great integrity, great care, and an unflagging eye toward the ends of abolition.