Healthy, Safe Black Families Begin With Defunding the Police
By: Acre, Action Center On Race, The Economy
Tags: Defundthepolice, City Budget, Housing, Healthcare, Economic Inequality

Healthy, Safe Black Families Begin With Defunding the Police

The fight for justice must include economic and housing protections and access to quality health care.

Photo by Nechirwan Kavian on Unsplash

by Tracey Corder, Campaign Coordinator at ACRE

The executions of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless other people whose names we do not know have forced the United States into much needed upheaval. For weeks now, people have taken to the streets to demand accountability for the police officers who rain violence on the people they are supposed to protect and serve.

At the core of this national movement for Black dignity and safety is a deep understanding that the police have never existed to protect our lives. The very function of police is to protect capital and value property over people. It is not an exaggeration to say that police contact can be a death sentence for Black people. But firing into bedrooms and kneeling on necks aren’t the only ways that the police state threatens our lives.

Systematic racism ensures that Black people struggle to access health care and live in areas with poor air and water quality. It’s no wonder the COVID-19 pandemic is killing us at a disproportionate rate, forcing us to shoulder the burden of simultaneous health and economic crises as millions of Americans are poised to lose their homes because it is unsafe to work. A third of Americans missed their housing payments in June.

Despite recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to physically distance and shelter in place, landlords across the country are already attempting to evict tenants — even in places where moratoriums are still in effect. And guess who will carry out the eviction orders when the protections lift? The same deadly law enforcement forces that are terrorizing Black and Brown communities every day.

Those same police also have a long track record of targeting the unhoused under the guise of public safety, enforcing public nuisance laws that criminalize their very presence. Ejecting families from their homes without guaranteeing housing puts us on a trajectory for increased police violence against Black people. The result is that many more of us will die from COVID-19 without a roof over our heads, doubly victimized by a system that makes poverty a crime. This is why the current fights for housing justice, health care equity and defunding the police are intrinsically connected; we must undo the centuries of capitalism that have used Black labor as collateral to build white wealth and power.

At the beginning and the end of the day, budgets are about priorities. We need to respond to the fact that elected officials prioritize huge portions of our tax dollars to pay for the brutalization and murder of Black and Brown people by the police, instead of making sure we’re housed and safe. It is essential for a just recovery that public budgets divest funds from policing and incarceration to invest in crucial public services and infrastructure. If elected officials wish to protect our communities during the ongoing pandemic, they must extend moratoriums on evictions, support a homes guarantee and defund the police. Anything less is not a serious attempt at public safety, and makes these officials complicit in ongoing violence by law enforcement.

Action Center on Race and the Economy’s recently released calculator tool reveals the egregious percentage of tax dollars allocated to police departments in the 300 largest cities in the United States. Many jurisdictions spend up to a third of their total budget on policing, and some spend more than 60 percent. Oakland, California, where I live, dedicates 44 percent of its budget to police annually. That’s over $300 million every year. Meanwhile, our city officials only dedicate $77.4 million to affordable housing every three years. But more than 4,000 people here are experiencing homelessness — a number that increased 47 percent in just two years due to greedy real estate developers pushing longtime residents out of their homes. And this doesn’t even count the many Oakland families who are living in overcrowded or subpar housing.

But here’s the kicker. Our research reveals that billions of dollars of the money allocated to police departments — some of which is collected via bonds — is used to pay settlement and judgement costs for cases where officers use excessive or deadly force. These costs work to prevent accountability for violent police officers, and even function as a form of predatory silencing in cases where victims or their families sign away their rights to discuss the case in exchange for a settlement award. Sadly, cities issue bonds as a means to borrow money for these settlements, and Wall Street banks and forms profit.

We are calling to defund the police and allocate these funds to services that actually serve us. The only world in which we’re safe is one where health care, housing, transportation and education are fully funded. Our elected leaders must take bold action and create policies that allow us to not only survive, but thrive.

Learn More: Watch ACRE’s webinar on our Police Brutality Bonds Report: https://acrecampaigns.org/pop_ed-type/videos/ .