What Activists Mean When They Say Defund the Police
By: Andrea González-Ramírez
Tags: Police, BlackLivesMatter, George Floyd, Racism, Defundthepolice

What Activists Mean When They Say Defund the Police

The killings of George Floyd and other Black Americans have led to an increase in calls to defund or even abolish police departments

A participant holding a Defund The Police sign at a protest in Brooklyn marching down Flatbush Avenue to decry the death of 46-year-old George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. Photo: Erik McGregor/LightRocket/Getty Images

In the weeks since the nation became engulfed in protests against police violence following the killing of George Floyd — and Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade and a long list of other Black Americans — a clear message has grown louder and louder: It’s time to rethink policing as we know it.

The long-simmering effort to reimagine policing in the United States has not been unified. Activists have called for everything from reforming police departments to cutting their budgets to completely abolishing them. Those who demand defunding or abolishing the police believe that reforms — such as providing training in how to deescalate confrontations or avoid implicit racial biases, along with stricter use-of-force policies — have largely failed to bring change and new solutions are needed. “Five years ago, folks were saying, ‘We need to hold these police accountable,’ or, ‘We need to charge them.’ Now it’s shifted to, ‘We actually have no trust in this system anymore,’” says Oluchi Omeoga, co-founder of the Minnesota-based nonprofit Black Visions Collective, which has called for defunding the Minneapolis Police Department. “Instead of holding them accountable and reform, we actually have to get rid of this system and talk about what we can actually do as communities to keep us safe.”

On Sunday, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council promised to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department, which had been plagued with accusations of racism long before Floyd’s death.

In the past few decades, funding for law enforcement and the prison system has skyrocketed: State and local governments nationwide spent about $115 billion on policing in 2017 alone, according to the Urban Institute. Law enforcement spending accounts for up to 30% to 40% of the budgets in some cities, such as Oakland and Chicago. And there’s been an increase in spending related to the militarization of police at the same time that the scope of police responsibilities has expanded to a breaking point — something officers themselves have historically complained about.

A central problem confronting activists now is how these bloated police budgets have decreased public funds for efforts to pursue alternative anti-crime strategies through addressing poverty, homelessness, and educational inequality, says Kumar Rao, director of justice transformation at the advocacy group Center for Popular Democracy. “There’s policing in schools, policing of people in mental health crises, policing dealing with homelessness, dealing with substance abuse, dealing with sex work, of the enforcement of Covid-19 measures like the masks or social distancing,” Rao says. “Just basic things that police everywhere just somehow are responsible for, like street closures or concerts or parks. You could carve off massive amounts of police budgets just by eliminating these areas of policing that they currently do.”

Activists say years of watching Black Americans being killed by police and the high-profile acts of recent violence against protesters have underscored the urgency of rethinking policing in America. Protesters in the streets are now calling for defunding the police, a policy rooted in the sociopolitical movement of prison abolition. After years of intense grassroots work, activists have made “defund the police” a mainstream idea — one that has become a serious slogan and policy proposal in just a few weeks. National coalitions such as Movement for Black Lives have called for a version of defundment for years now, as have local groups in cities including Chicago, Minneapolis, Austin, and more.

Defunding proponents have generally focused on an “invest/divest” model: Cut spending on law enforcement, and shift it to social services such as education, health care, and housing that would benefit marginalized communities. “The Minneapolis Police Department budget is nearly $195 million, right? So, what we spend in housing, health care, education — all of those things combined — is less than the police budget,” Omeoga says. “It’s insane for me to think about: We invest more in the policing of people than we invest in the social services that we need in order to live.”

Defunding also means rethinking what type of role police fill in society, says Phillip V. McHarris, a doctoral candidate focusing on race, housing, and policing at Yale University. There are alternatives to having police respond to every emergency, as model programs currently operating on shoestring budgets show. In one pioneering violence interruption program in Washington, D.C., the initiative’s non-police staff members rely on their ties to the community and mediation to defuse potentially violent incidents. In Dallas, social workers have begun responding in person to 911 calls related to mental health crises, instead of dispatchers sending police or fire department personnel. “When you talk to people about police, it’s this idea around, ‘Well, we want safety,’” McHarris says. “But what I’m finding in my research and what I’ve written about is that police actually stand in the way of developing a robust set of systems that can really help people be safe, and when they are harmed, have processes of accountability that center giving the person what they need in order to be restored.”

While defunding has roots on the abolishment vision, these are two separate proposals. “It is correct not to confuse one with the other,” argues journalist Melissa Gira Grant in the New Republic. “‘Defund’ is part of an abolitionist project, but abolition is not necessarily a part of a project to defund police budgets.”

Opponents of abolishment say it is a radical idea. But for those who believe in it as a political project, the goal is to end a system that has failed communities around the country and replace police with new community-based initiatives that emphasize restorative justice instead of punishment. “Transformation is always uncomfortable. And what I want people to realize is that this is not something that’s going to happen overnight, right? We’re not proposing ‘Oh, every police officer is fired and that’s it,’” Omeoga says.

Questions they and others in the movement are asking, they say, include: “What do we want to see?” and “Why is it that we can’t envision that in this pattern? What’s happening that we’re not able to envision a society in which we don’t rely on the police?”

The belief that police and prisons are the only ways of ensuring public safety is entrenched and one of the reasons that the idea of changing policing in America via defunding or total abolishment meets so much political opposition. Those skeptical of defunding police departments worry that there would be an uptick in crime and all types of mayhem should police departments be eliminated. Meanwhile, police unions, which hold considerable sway, have pushed back against even the mildest budget cuts, arguing that some departments barely have enough resources to do their ever-expanding jobs in the first place.

President Trump, who paints himself as the “law and order” candidate despite his notorious corruption, has already seized on the message as red meat for his base. “LAW & ORDER, NOT DEFUND AND ABOLISH THE POLICE,” he tweeted Monday. “The Radical Left Democrats have gone Crazy!”

Former Vice President Joe Biden has said he doesn’t support defunding the police, instead calling for reforming departments and adding $300 million to the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. This grant provides law enforcement agencies with federal funding to hire more officers and increase community policing — but research has shown that the program has had little to no effect on reducing crime.

McHarris has pushed against the idea that defunding would inherently be harmful, saying that the police are a recent invention — one that in the United States has racist roots, with some of the earliest police forces being established out of slave patrols. “And when you go in many white, well-off communities, they don’t have the most police,” McHarris points out. “What they have is the most resources.”

Already the activist pressure is beginning to work.

Though specifics on how Minneapolis will dismantle its police force have yet to be released, the council intends to replace the MPD with a new system of public safety. Defunding police departments and reinvesting those funds in social services was also one of the demands in a letter sent last week by more than 200 people — including community organizers, representatives of civil rights organizations, elected officials, and public defenders — to mayors and police chiefs across the nation. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti recently announced he would cut $150 million from the LAPD’s $1.8 billion budget and redirect those funds to social services. And in New York, state lawmakers approved a package of bills targeting police misconduct, including a ban on the use of chokeholds and the repeal of a measure keeping police officers’ disciplinary records hidden.

As the nation continues to grapple with the uprising around racist policing, advocates believe it’s unlikely that calls to end policing as we know it and build something different will go away anytime soon. “People are realizing the reforms and the changes that were either promised or implemented in decades have not led to the reduction of the hardship and suffering that people experience on a day-to-day basis,” McHarris says. “They are really beginning to reenvision a country that actually works for the majority of us.”