Rifles, Tasers and Jails: How Cities and States Spent Billions of COVID-19 Relief

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Anastasia Valeeva
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Sep 7, 2022
@anastasiajourno
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The American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) delivered $350 billion for state, local, territorial and tribal governments “to respond to the COVID-19 emergency and bring back jobs.” They spent much of it on police, prisons, and the courts.
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Anastasia Valeeva
@anastasiajourno
·
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A @MarshallProj analysis by me, @Weihua_Li1 and @susie_c, searched 43,000 reports that local governments submitted to the Treasury, and discovered that much of #ARP money is being spent on the criminal justice system.

themarshallproject.org
Rifles, Tasers and Jails: How Cities and States Spent Billions of COVID-19 Relief
President Biden’s signature American Rescue Plan Act gave local governments $350 billion to recover from COVID-19. They spent much of it on police, prisons and the courts.
1:20 PM · Sep 7, 2022

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/09/07/how-federal-covid-relief-flows-to-the-criminal-justice-system

After signing the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) last spring, President Joe Biden touted what the economic stimulus bill would deliver: food assistance to millions of people in need, lower healthcare premiums for millions of Americans, and $350 billion for state and local governments to spend on COVID-19 recovery. Economists say it was the largest infusion of federal funding in local governments in almost 40 years.

A year later, ARPA became one of President Biden’s talking points to demonstrate Democrats are not out to defund the police.

“[T]he American Rescue Plan … provided $350 billion that cities, states, and counties can use to hire more police, invest in more proven strategies like community violence interruption, trusted messengers,” Biden said during his State of the Union address this year.

“We should all agree the answer is not to defund the police,” he continued. “It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with the resources and training — resources and training they need to protect our communities.”

That’s indeed what thousands of state and local governments did with the federal COVID-19 relief funds they received. While the Treasury Department’s lax reporting requirements make it difficult to track exactly how much was spent on law enforcement, corrections and courts, a Marshall Project review of the latest data shows that billions of dollars flowed to the criminal justice system by the first quarter of 2022, from covering payroll to purchasing new equipment. So far, governments have allocated $101 billion of the total $350 billion.

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