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Did governments shift funding from their social welfare functions to their criminal justice functions after the 1980s? Studies investigating this possible "punitive turn" have been inconclusive and have been conducted at the state or national scale. Cities, however, are increasingly important as government responsibility devolves downward and social movements target municipal police budgets. This study contributes to ongoing academic and political debates about welfare‐state retrenchment and police department funding using data on 390 U.S. cities between 1990 and 2019. In contrast to conventional explanations for budgetary restructuring that foreground across‐the‐board cuts or macroeconomic causes, this study proposes a fiscal crisis model that emphasizes localized budget deficits, beliefs about policing's primacy, and police agencies' political power. Data reveal gradual and considerable municipal budgetary restructuring toward law enforcement between 1990 and 2019, with police funding growing 32% relative to social spending. Fixed‐effects regression models with asymmetric predictors find that when municipal revenues fell by 10%, cities reduced police expenditures by an associated 1% and social service expenditures by 4%, with parks and housing seeing the biggest cuts. During austerity, municipalities cut police shallowly and temporarily while cutting social services deeply and enduringly, accelerating welfare‐to‐carceral realignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Summary: Following high‐profile police killings, many U.S. cities banned officers from using chokeholds and other neck restraints. The evidence for such bans, however, is limited. To test whether use‐of‐force policies prohibiting neck restraints are related to fewer police killings, we use three modeling approaches to analyze 2183 U.S. cities between 2009 and 2021. Police killings were lower in places that adopted neck‐restraint bans and the bans were associated with less crime and fewer assaults on officers, net of controls. Because officer labor unions can affect use‐of‐force policies and the frequency of police killings, we also analyzed them, finding unionization increased the likelihood a city had a neck‐restraint ban and had a null or negative association with police killings. Policy Implications: Adopting a neck‐restraint ban is likely an effective way to reduce deaths due to police use of force with minimal collateral consequences. The bans operate through a diffuse discouragement of many types of lethal force or as a part of an array of use‐of‐force policies. Their direct relationship to asphyxiation deaths remains unclear. Officer unionization is unlikely to change the frequency of police killings, except through its association with stricter use‐of‐force policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for the steady decline in misdemeanour arrest rates in the United States following their peak in the mid-1990s? This article links the fluctuation in low-level law enforcement to changes in the budget and staffing resources cities devoted to policing. This materialist explanation contrasts with accounts that emphasize policy changes like the adoption of community policing. Dynamic panel regression analyses of 940 municipalities indicate low-level arrest rates declined most in places that reduced their police expenditure and personnel, net of crime and other controls. The adoption of community policing was unrelated to misdemeanour arrests. Findings suggest lawmakers should consider how increasing police budgets or police force sizes will likely be accompanied by increases in misdemeanour arrests and their attendant harms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]