When Dallas wrote its city budget last year, something was missing. The city had allocated zero dollars to its Skillman Southwestern library, effectively closing the branch. Seattle joined Dallas in slashing social services later in the year when it diverted money away from its high-profile affordable housing program.
Dallas and Seattle are not alone. In a study published last year (Beck 2024), I analyzed 390 US cities and found that nearly two-thirds of US cities have been cutting the share of their budgets dedicated to social services. What started as slower growth in social spending during the 1990s and 2000s turned into declining budgets after the 2008 financial crisis. Cities cut spending on housing, parks, health care, libraries, and community development. While the Trump administration’s cuts are accelerating the trend, the federal government has been decreasing its investment in social services, especially housing, for years (Rice 2016).
One area of municipal spending has proven remarkably robust, however. While Dallas was proposing its library closure, the city’s spending plan increased its police department’s budget to the highest level in 16 years. Seattle’s diverted housing money went to its police department, too. Seattle Police Department saw its budget increase by 15%.
As the graph below (Figure 1) shows, the average US city in the sample slashed funding to social services by 20% between 2005 and 2020 while increasing funding to police by 5%. The divide between municipal spending on social services and on policing has not been this large since the Census Bureau started collecting data in 1969 (Beck 2025). Comparisons between policing and K–12 education spending are difficult because school districts, not municipal governments, control school spending. However, even education, by far the largest local social service, has been growing more slowly than policing in the past 30 years (Beck 2024).
Figures exclude capital spending, adjusted for inflation, and weight by city population. Social services include housing, parks, health care, libraries, and community development.
“The path of least resistance”
What accounts for this historic shift away from social provision and toward criminal justice in US cities ? It is not rising crime. Murders saw historic declines in 2023 and 2024. Violent crime is down 23% in Dallas and 7% in Seattle over the past two years. If we look back to 2000, crime is down even more.
My research finds that austerity policies, not crime, best accounts for the city spending shift. When times are tight, cities cut police shallowly and temporarily while cutting social services deeply and enduringly. When city fortunes turn and local governments are flush again, they do not replenish their diminished social services, but they make police budgets more than whole. This kind of uneven belt-tightening gradually pushes money away from housing, parks, and libraries and toward law enforcement, creating ever more lopsided budgets.
This is partly because city officials see policing as the primary function of municipal government. As the former mayor of Evansville, Indiana, put it to me, policing is like a utility, and funding it is “the path of least resistance.” The mayor of Miami Beach, Florida, echoed this sentiment when he said : “the first job of a city government is to keep order.” Rental assistance, senior centers, and green space are seen as luxuries, while ever-increasing police budgets are necessities.
The partiality for policing is bipartisan. When a city’s mayoralty switched from a Democrat to a Republican or vice versa, its police and social services budgets did not appreciably change.
Addressing crime’s causes
A police-first approach can sound reasonable. Crime and violence destroy neighborhoods, and they hurt the most vulnerable communities the hardest. Adding more police officers to the city budget can reduce violence in the short term. However, cities sacrifice their long-term public safety when they defund social services because it is social programs that address the root causes of crime (Beck 2025).
Research has shown this is true of a range of social services. Affordable housing reduces violent crime rates across poor neighborhoods (Diamond and McQuade 2019 ; Freedman and Owens 2011). More green space and new library branches have brought down crime rates (Branas et al. 2020 ; Ferreira Neto et al. 2021). Housing, job training, and public assistance can provide the income, skills, and stability that help people avoid crime in the first place. By relying solely on policing, cities buy temporary relief at the cost of a more durable safety that would also reduce economic hardship.
Federal cuts to welfare like those made under President Clinton and massively accelerated under President Trump have rightly sparked public outcry. Local defunding of social services over the past three decades, however, has largely flown under the radar. Very little press coverage or political-party efforts have addressed the massive cuts in municipal social services. Black Lives Matter activists have been among the few to note this shift, with some of them calling for the “reallocation of funds from police and punitive school discipline practices to restorative services” (Movement for Black Lives 2016).
Social-movement demands for more social services and right-sized police budgets have largely been ignored—as the cases of Seattle and Dallas make clear. Some places, though, are bucking the national trend. Chicago’s jobs program hired 27,000 young people last summer ; Detroit’s hired 8,600. Counties in Maryland and Michigan are expanding their housing aid. Charlotte, North Carolina, and Santa Clara, California, have both greatly expanded their social-service budgets in recent decades. While cities are constrained by state and federal powers, such places show there is still much cities can do to address the root causes of crime. Robust local investments in housing will be especially important as the federal government continues to retrench its support for shelter under presidents of both parties. Despite difficult fiscal headwinds, social service cuts are very much a political choice.
Even Dallas ended up sparing the Skillman Southwest Library. At the eleventh hour, a city councilmember found $485,000 to keep the library’s doors open for one more year. Looking ahead to next year, though, the library’s fate—like so many social services in US cities—remains uncertain.
Bibliography
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- Beck, Brenden. 2025. “Local Government Spending : Policing Versus Social Services”, Annual Review of Criminology, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 505–528. DOI : 10.1146/annurev-criminol-111523-122639.
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- Movement for Black Lives. 2016. A Vision for Black Lives : Policy Platform. Accessed 17 April 2025. Available online at the following URL : https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms.
- Rice, Douglas. 2016. “Chart Book : Cuts in Federal Assistance Have Exacerbated Families’ Struggles to Afford Housing”, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 12 April. Available online at the following URL : www.cbpp.org/research/chart-book-cuts-in-federal-assistance-have-exacerbated-families-struggles-to-afford-housing.
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