What happens when someone commits murder in the wake of a defunded police department?
The importance of not getting caught up in the hysteria of a spike in crime
This is a piece I wrote weeks ago and multiple news outlets declined to publish it. No, that’s not censorship but is one of the reasons I decided that maybe it was time to do something like this on my own:
A black man murdered a white man not long after the town moth-balled its mostly-white police department. The murder happened during a heated defund the police debate in the town that preceded the national one we are having by a few decades. Residents were angered, believing police had turned their town into a speed trap and that officials had begun to rely upon traffic tickets to keep the general fund afloat. The residents’ anger had grown so fierce the police department was temporarily shuttered.
The town was Bonneau, S.C., a county over from where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, a town built in a forest named after Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox” of American Revolutionary War and guerrilla warfare fame. The murdered man had briefly helped keep the town’s lights on when it ran into financial trouble and owned a “juke joint” where black and white residents alike oftentimes congregated to play pool, drink beer and shoot the breeze.
Bonneau is a place where a murder happens maybe once a generation. That one event rocked that small town, left people grappling for answers as fear spread. Residents began locking doors that had never been locked. It was 1982. The murder happened late on April 27 under cover of a dark sky. A man in his early 20s crept into the yard of the storeowner, startled and eventually stabbed him dozens of times. A fire was accidentally started during the tussle and burned the home. It was a brutal crime for which the defendant faced the death penalty before pleading guilty to first-degree murder and receiving a life sentence. He spent 32 years in prison, including at least 7 in solitary confinement, and another 5 under the supervision of a probation officer. The victim’s family spent years arguing the killer should forever remain behind bars before eventually ending their protests against the possibility of parole – but never forgetting. The town never forgot, either.
“James (Jim) Bunch has become another statistic in the evergrowing [sic] annals of the criminal justice system,” a May 5, 1982, an editorial in the local weekly paper, Berkeley Democrat, read. “While at the national level his death will only reflect a number under MURDER, we suspect he will long be the topic of discussion in Bonneau by friends, neighbors and citizens. Years from now, people will still be talking about the crime and the circumstances that led to it.”
Law enforcement in the area had a ready answer for why the murder was allowed to happen: There weren’t enough men in blue around.
“In my short time as the chief of police for Bonneau, this was exactly the situation I was trying to prevent,” George Farrey wrote in a letter to the editor in the Berkeley Democrat a week after the murder. “If at the time in question Bonneau still had a professional police department, would Mr. Bunch’s assailant still have attempted his plan? Or would he have changed his mind if the Bonneau police car, with that so-much-disliked blue light operating was writing a traffic summons on U.S. 52?”
I know Farrey was wrong because I know the man who committed the murder. He’s my oldest brother. I was a 9-year-old boy that April in 1982. I know Farrey’s wrong because even after all these years I still don’t fully understand why my brother did what he did. That’s after spending years researching the crime, questioning the emergency officials and police officers who showed up on the scene first and interrogated my brother. That’s after spending years using every journalistic skill I have to quiz my brother, having him take me step-by-step through what happened in the hours before the murder and, more importantly, the years that led up to an event that changed the course of two families and scarred a small town.
I know Farrey’s wrong because having a police officer on patrol somewhere in the town that night would not have mattered to my brother. He was high on drugs and alcohol. He wasn’t in his right mind. His plan that night, if you can call it a plan, was to kidnap, not kill, the man he eventually murdered to convince him to drop charges of petty theft my brother has facing. He wasn’t thinking about police. He wasn’t thinking about long-term consequences. He was barely thinking at all, certainly not clearly. Once he had made it to that night, only luck – or God – could have prevented what happened.
I know those who want quick answers, simple solutions, those who are using the recent rise in the crime rate in major cities throughout the country, won’t like to hear this. But the seeds of the murder were planted long before that April night. Maybe during the time he spent in the U.S. Army and was discharged for fighting and debilitating-chronic migraine headaches that scared my mom enough she asked a bevy of counselors in the area to intervene, to help my brother, to no avail. Maybe the times he watched my alcoholic father beat my mother before my brother grew strong enough to protect my mother from my father’s fists but only after years of enduring beatings himself. Maybe they were planted when he was born to a black woman who had been forced into marriage at the age of 13 to a much older man in the Deep South where they all endured poverty and daily racism and lived in a sundown town where we all grew up in schools woefully funded yet segregated decades after Brown v. Board of Education.
Though it may be tempting to believe that murder was spur-of-the-moment and could have been deterred by a man wearing a badge driving a patrol car, that April night in 1982 was simply the culmination of a series of ugly events. There’s no other honest way of looking at it. Unfortunately, discussions involving race and violent crime often aren’t honest. They are often overheated and misleading. They are used to ease the minds of frightened people by people hoping to gain or retain power, and by those who’ve convinced themselves that the solution can solely be found in the spark, not the conditions that turned the spark into a wildfire.
It speaks to why criminologists really don’t know why crime rates rise and fall, and why no one may ever really know. [https://newrepublic.com/article/162539/defund-the-police-crime-statistics] It’s why the late ‘80s and early ‘90s was proclaimed the beginning of the age of “super predators” of remorseless young black men who would devastate communities for decades to come. Instead, it was the beginning of a historic downturn in the crime rate that mostly lasted until the onset of a once-in-a-century plague that literally changed the world. Maybe the shock of covid was the spark or additional fuel on a fire that had been simmering in the preceding years. This maybe a short-term, though painful change or the beginning of disturbing new trend no matter how we interpret the police funding data. [
I don’t know. None of us knows. But I know that if we give into fear today, we’ll make the same mistakes that made things worse the last time crime rates spiked.
I’m encouraged by voters in Philadelphia who did not give into those fears even as many were predicting they would during a recent high-profile primary election for district attorney there. Neither did American voters give into Donald Trump’s blatant stoking of that fear in 2018 or 2020, though election analysts suggest fear played a role in how Democrats fared in House races. Just the thought of defunding or reimaging police apparently affected political outcomes long before either became a reality. That’s why my fear is that the damn might break and we will once again resort to the kind of thinking that former police chief in Bonneau articulated in 1982, which led to mistakes, including by black politicians and activists who went along with a push for harsher laws and more policing advocated and executed by the man and woman we recently elected president and vice president.
Those mistakes led to families like mine being targeted and my youngest brothers following my oldest brother’s path into prison – without improving the plight of families like the one on the wrong end of my oldest brother’s knife. Bloodlust and ignorance were our guide then. We shouldn’t allow them to lead us again.
Background: Issac Bailey is a veteran journalist, a 2014 Harvard University Nieman fellow and the James K. Batten Professor of Public Policy at Davidson College in N.C. He’s the author of “My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South” and more recently “Why Didn’t We Riot? A Black Man in Trumpland.”
It's not that difficult to commit murder in this country. Getting away with it is a different story, but very few Americans are comfortable admitting that there really isn't anything stopping a stranger from gunning us down as we walk around outside. It's no surprise so many Americans habitually carry firearms.