The scenes of New York’s anarchy on social media have been gripping: children gleefully jumping in a playground, diners sipping cocktails on a sidewalk cafe, live music. Truth is that it’s easy to mock Attorney General Bill Barr’s claims that New York, where overall crime remains low, is an “anarchist jurisdiction.” But the statements are deeply alarming because of what they say about the dwindling rule of law not here, but in Washington D.C.
The whole process began earlier this month when the White House issued a memorandum that reads more like a compilation of Fox News talking points than a presidential decree. In that sloppy document, Trump declared that “anarchy has recently beset some of our States and cities.”
What was the evidence for these terrifying claims about New York: an all-too-real increase in shootings and a completely fabricated decrease in police funding. That is it. Evidently all it takes to qualify as a mad max hellscape in President Trump’s America is a slightly amended operations budget for police.
The whole thing would be laughable if not for what followed this week. Rather than dismissing their ludicrous mandate, the attorneys at the Department of Justice took it seriously, threatening to cut billions in federal tax dollars from New York and other cities in the coming years. And the Department of Homeland Security is likely to follow suit in just a few days.
The result is nothing short of a federal shakedown of state and local governments that respond to the growing national call to defund police. For a Republican Party that endlessly invoked “states’ rights” over the past 50 years, it’s a stunning reversal, a full-on assault on the power of states and cities to create their own rules and budgets. For the lawyers of the Justice Department, whose ranks are full of loyal members of the right-wing Federalist Society, it means the exact sort of centralization of power that the advocacy organization was created to combat.
Infuriatingly, in the case of New York, almost none of the reasons for this federal attack are true. While conservative pundits are quick to claim that New York has “defunded the NYPD,” the City Council did nothing of the sort. Rather than cutting the much-touted “billion dollars” in funding, independent budget reviews have found that the NYPD really lost a small fraction of that amount.
The only prospect of meaningfully defunding the NYPD comes from Trump himself, if he follows through on his threat to cut Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security funding. That’s the most preposterous part of this entire shakedown, that the Trump administration may be able to do what progressives failed to accomplish.
When Trump threatens to defund our police departments, many of us simply want to say “go right ahead.” But of course it’s not that simple.
Part of the reason is the grim increase in shootings and murders in most Americans cities, New York included. When police reformers and abolitionists took over City Hall earlier this year, they weren’t just demanding that the NYPD budget be cut; they were calling on the City Council to invest those funds in community-centered violence prevention programs. But with the loss of federal dollars, dollars that disproportionately come from New York’s own taxpayers, the city won’t have the money it needs to invest in policing alternatives.
Even more alarming is the broader trajectory we see in federal power, as the Trump administration systematically dismantles the guardrails on the presidency. As Barr and other Trump supporters help him commandeer federal agencies to fight culture war battles, they undermine the stability of our entire legal system.
If the president can punish millions of Americans on a whim for the choices they make in local budget battles, it brings us one step further away from the bedrock promises of a democratic system. Even worse, if the lawyers at the Justice Department are willing to sign off on the White House’s “alternative facts” here, what is the limit? How will they respond to his increasingly unhinged claims about election fraud in mail-in voting and the conspiratorial rhetoric of QAnon?
One man on his own can’t undo centuries of checks and balances, but this recent campaign against New York and other cities shows Trump is far from on his own. Now, as the machinery of the executive branch rubber-stamps his every talking point, and the nation mourns the Supreme Court’s tragic new vacancy, the president increasingly has a free hand to rewrite and ignore the law. By eroding the rule of law, and attacking the power of states to decide local policy and budget issues, Trump’s creating the very thing he claims to oppose: anarchy.
Cahn is the founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) at the Urban Justice Center and a fellow at the Engelberg Center for Innovation Law & Policy at N.Y.U. School of Law.