TWIBS: Justice Department Cuts Grants to Give Cops More Money
Fox News and The Daily Wire are alleging that the Justice Department has cut “DEI” funds to pay the police, which is kind of the opposite of what we were asking for with the whole “defund the police” campaign, to be honest.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Several conservative outlets have claimed this week that the Justice Department, at the direction of Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Donald Trump, is diverting “funds formerly granted to groups supporting transgender ideology and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives” to law enforcement agencies. Is that necessarily true, though? If it is, do we think that will help Americans?
Sorry, I’m being facetious. Obviously it won’t. Come on now.
Just a heads up: I’m going to include links to a few different conservative rags throughout this piece, just so you can double check that they’re really saying what I say they’re saying, but I’ve made sure to provide archived links so that you aren’t rewarding these buttheads with ad revenue or site metrics or whatever words Zoomers are saying at me today.
Okay, so, just before noon on Wednesday, Fox News ran an article claiming that the Justice Department was magicking evil transgender DEI funds into the accounts of law enforcement agencies across America. They were supposedly told this by “a Justice Department official,” who they do not name, who is quoted as saying: “The Department of Justice under Pam Bondi will not waste discretionary funds on DEI passion projects that do not make Americans safer. We will use our money to get criminals off the streets, seize drugs, and in some cases, fund programs that deliver a tangible impact for victims of crime.”
They go on to remind us that Bondi, on her first day as Attorney General, “directed officials to ensure all DEI programs at the department were terminated” and “demanded the removal of all references to DEI in training programs.”
Sure. Whatever.
So, importantly, no hard facts have been provided by Fox News. Somebody who they haven’t named said something nobody’s explicitly verified. Very good journalism, to be sure. A few far right outlets, like The Post Millennial, just sort of regurgitated Fox’s claims without doing any significant work to independently verify these statements, as you might expect.
The Daily Wire, at least, claims to have obtained documents that verify this information. They provide no evidence of those documents, of course, but we can glean some truth from a Reuters report published 24 April. Reuters details how the Justice Department terminated 365 grants to fulfill the Trump administration’s anti-DEI obsession, including “a grant to the National Center for Victims of Crime to fund crime-victim hotlines, and a grant to the National Network to End Domestic Violence.”
In particular, Reuters alleged that a review of grants cut from the Office for Victims of Crime showed that “many provided a mix of direct and indirect assistance for domestic violence and trafficking victims,” which certainly confirms the supposed Justice Department spokesperson’s claim that Bondi’s actions would deliver a tangible impact for victims of crime. You know, they never said it would be a positive impact.
At the time Reuters published their article, seven of the 365 cut grants had been restored.
In its article about the death of DEI and the funding of law enforcement agencies, The Daily Wire rattles off some descriptions of cut grants that they think sound silly, like funding that provided support for transgender inmates at the Washington State Department of Corrections. I don’t see any value in rebutting the specific examples they give, but I would like to provide some examples and statistics of my own!
According to the Pew Research Center, via compiled data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Most violent and property crimes in the U.S. are not reported to police, and most of the crimes that are reported are not solved.” Specifically, “only 41.5% of violent crimes and 31.8% of household property crimes” were reported to the police. How many of those reported crimes were solved, or “cleared,” by police? In 2022, just 36.7% of reported violent crimes and 12.1% of reported property crimes were cleared nationwide.
Statistically, you may be more likely to solve a crime of your own accord than the police are.
Meanwhile, according to the Law Enforcement Epidemiology Project, 250,000 civilian injuries are caused annually by law enforcement officers, while more than 600 people are killed each year by the police. Black men, while comprising only 6.1% of the US population, represent 24.9% of all people killed by law enforcement officers. A 2022 UCLA of Southern California study showed that cops in California spent an inordinate amount of time on traffic stops without a reasonable suspicion of a crime, a policing strategy proven to be ineffective at increasing public safety, which is also regularly motivated by racial bias.
Police may not be particularly effective at solving or combating crime, but they are uniquely skilled at committing crimes. Studies show that police families are two to four times more likely to experience domestic violence than the general public, and statistics on crimes carried out by police suggest they are themselves arrested at an alarming rate… and those are just the crimes we know about and have data regarding.
At the end of April, President Trump issued an executive order intended to bolster the administration’s support of law enforcement agencies and officers, though much of that may have been bluster. What’s clear to those of us who understand American policing, however, is that law enforcement needs less or no funding, in addition to a very comprehensive overhaul of the scope and nature of their work… if American policing can be reformed at all.
Somehow, I don’t think slashing “DEI funding” is going to fix America’s police problem.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
