The True Meaning of “Defund the Police”
By: Ja'Juan Burrell
Tags: Media, Police Reform, Law, Government, Politics

Our local law enforcements, and the duties that they are assigned, have stretched way too far and covered far too much ground. They’ve been detailed far too much, and it has left many departments ineffective as a whole.

Police departments have been militarized in terms of force, but not in terms of discipline. We honor the soldiers of our Armed Forces, not just for their service and potential sacrifice, but the discipline and honor that they exemplify both in and out of uniform. Like police departments, we often spend far too much on our military, especially for resources that the military does not ask for. However, our soldiers are often under intense scrutiny and held to as much intense accountability while on active duty than they are subject to overwhelming praise and admiration when they aren’t. On the contrary, our militarized police forces are not held to the same level of accountability. Police unions come to the rescue of bad police, early and often. Qualified immunity and ridiculous law loopholes grant the same bad cops a shield of protection that make them always right, even when they are dead wrong.

As a result, we’ve allowed unjust police operations in the event of a tragedy to open the door for predatory media pundits to pick and choose their targets, using implicit bias to rebuke protests against police brutality, and ask all the wrong questions in the name of character assassination.

In the case of George Floyd, how about asking these questions:

- Why did George Floyd’s $20 bill at Cup Foods require four Minneapolis police officers to intervene, arrest, and eventually kill him?

- Did George Floyd even know he was using a counterfeit $20 bill?

- Where in the hell is the $20 bill in question, and was it even fake to begin with?

All of the above questions are “due process” questions, meaning a group of questions that would allow an alleged suspect to actually be innocent before proven guilty, or, in George Floyd’s case, dead.

Yet, these important questions are the ones least asked about the case, and even less answered, from a cavalry of people who claim to be “all about the facts.”

The end result: A state-led, federally-backed investigation led by the Minnesota Attorney General into the wrongdoings of one deplorable joke of a police officer and his three ignorant, yet enabling accomplices, a string of riots, a wave of peaceful protesters gathering in the street, shouting the names of those who died at the hands of police, a president screaming Law & Order like he’s yelling at the White House staff for wiping his DVR clean, and a nation that has had enough… all over a $20 bill. “DEFUND THE POLICE!” they yell. The people have had enough of a system that creates far more unnecessary tragedies than it does necessary solutions.

While we’ve brushed the topic of the Attorney General, law, and police institutions: Why is it that you need 7 years of post-secondary education to practice law, but only 6 months of cadet training to enforce it… see the discrepancy here?

Police were never supposed to intervene as much as they do now, and it has visibly caused burnout and ineffectiveness. The constant funneling of resources into local law enforcement systems, some of which aren’t even needed, and away from other municipal programs, further polarizes communities that need a lot more than “law and order.” School budgets have been slashed consistently, as have useful community services.

In the past two weeks, protests have swarmed our cities, yet there has been more than enough footage of police using acts of force against those protesting peacefully, including the clearing of a Washington D.C. peaceful protest for a presidential church photo-op. As these militarized forces wreak havoc on our most peaceful, their overwhelming detail has limited police intervention in the riots that shook several major U.S. cities.

Is this all that our taxpayer dollars afford us in the public safety realm? Community recreational centers, like the Police Athletic League that used to entertain more than half of the youth population in Baltimore, are pretty much obsolete. Growing up in the late 80’s and early 90’s, I’m a product of these programs. Groups of kids could be playing basketball at the local PAL center and a cop would roll through, not to bust our chops, but to say hello, take a couple shots, and be on his merry way. Many times, these police also came from the communities they served, giving them an even greater sense of responsibility to protect it, while also limiting the chance for implicit bias. These programs kept kids active, engaged, and positively interacting with our local police officers.

Most importantly, however, these programs kept the kids off the street…

The Goodnow PAL Center in East Baltimore, the first of 27 centers to open in the early 90’s, and where I would spend time during my youth playing basketball with my cousins.

In 2009, Baltimore City began phasing out the 27 PAL locations throughout the city. There are now two, and they are run no longer run by the police department, but by the University of Maryland, Baltimore. The year following the phase-out, the homicide clearance rate fell below 50%, and has stayed that way ever since, even as the number of homicides in the city have skyrocketed since 2010, especially after the Freddie Gray riots in 2015.

The amount of inner-city lower and middle-class jobs paying a living wage are also scarce, but our resources have proven to be limitless when it comes to an organization that has become overworked, driven by the use of force and arrest quotas. If one person in the community has to get two jobs in order to make ends meet, that takes one job away from someone else that might need it, because they don’t even have one job. The pattern continues.

The discrepancy continues even further when many major cities have police forces that do not fully represent their municipality’s constituents. A study conducted in 2015 noted that only 25% of Baltimore’s 3000+ police fleet actually lived in Baltimore City. For a city that is roughly 65% Black, the discrepancy increases when broken down by demographics: nearly 40% of Black BPD officers live in the city, while almost 15% of White officers do. This greatly contributes to the divide between police and citizen, especially when nearly 75% of the large sum of money that makes up the police salaries budget in the city is then funneled out of the city to the officer’s respective suburban communities.

Polarized partisan politics have been much to blame for the constant systematic failures that have swept our nation, though the issue really isn’t as partisan as one might think. Just as democratic leaders in major cities have been scrutinized, and rightfully so, for entertaining policies that have led to the overwhelming use of force and lack of results in our major cities, opposing delegates living two counties over would try to convince you how one-sided the failure is, even though they do their best to stay out of the city, yet push laws at the state level to keep the mess going. Currently, and far too often, we see people in our federal government targeting major cities that are largely democratic at the local level, not realizing that every democratic locality is not governed by democrats at the state level. Politics have more of a trickle-down effect than many would like our economy to have, and it is shown when Governors and Federal legislature push bills that impact local governments without giving them a say in the matter.

To make matters worse, our U.S. Congress, which is one of the oldest congresses in history, has become increasingly ineffective. Career politicians battling over partisanship rather than policy, while also legislating for corporations rather than the people they serve, has taken the shape of a kindergarten recess fight rather than a federal legislative branch. It’s a constant finger-pointing game with no real solutions. Both political parties have blood on their hands.

We invest more in arrests than we do solutions, and that’s a BIG problem. Private prison management corporations such as CoreCivic, as well as investment management firms that invest heavily in private prisons such as BlackRock and Vanguard, are publicly trades on the New York Stock Exchange. The correlation between arrest & prison quotas and maintaining the profitability of maintaining the prison-industrial complex is devastating. Localities also rely on fines, tickets, and court fees to help funnel additional funds into their respective local governments.

But if we are not funding police, then where do those funds go?

For one, pulling homeless people off the street should not be a cop issue, it’s a social work issue. Ask the large number of college graduates with degrees in social work who still struggle to find a job without field experience, even as social workers tend to burn out quickly because other daunting factors negatively impact the process, and leave the profession.

If opioid use is a public health epidemic and not a criminal overhaul in moderately rural/extremely White neighborhoods such as those in Harford County, Maryland, then overdoses and abuse should also be treated as such in urban/largely ethnic communities such as those in Baltimore City.

If mothers and fathers both need to go to work in order to support a family that could be broken otherwise, then subsidizing child care without the loopholes attached that benefit some and reject those that need it the most should be a primary focus.

If our inner-city schools are unkempt and broken, we need to fix them. Not only do they need to be fixed structurally, but also foundationally. More schools need additional before and after-school programs that entice students to remain engaged, stay active positively among their peers, and not feel the temptation of being pulled back into the streets. Middle schools should have sports teams that compete against other local middle schools. The best educators, not just the ones that want a pay increase and a Title-I student loan benefit, should be enticed to come and do their best work with our nation’s most vulnerable.

If the decriminalization and eventual legalization of marijuana does more good than harm by keeping more black and brown boys out of jail with a possession charge that will haunt them for the most important years of their adult life, then do it.

These are just some of the possible solutions to the myriad of problems we’ve faced and looked for the police to solve, but to no avail, because they are simply doing too much.

If these solutions are not enough for you, perhaps you need to take a look at Camden, New Jersey, a city once considered one of the most violent cities in America, with a murder rate 18 times the national average. Camden took the bold steps in 2013 to disband its police department and start over after excessive force complaints hampered their ability to do their job effectively. Much of the police force was rehired, but not without an extensive, highly-rigorous application, interview, and psychological testing process.

Camden, New Jersey

The results of this drastic change: a 63% drop in murders since 2012, and a 95.3% drop in excessive force complaints in the same time frame.

Police need a better relationship with the community that they serve in order to be effective. The disconnect has gradually increased as community programs have been cut, arrest quotas have become the norm, and the wrong people have been put in uniform, making the right people also look bad. If their only focus is to swarm neighborhoods, locking up everyone from drug dealer to people that they think look like one, they’re only victimizing the same communities they have sworn to protect, without their permission, thus losing the communities trust and cooperation. A protest shouldn’t be the only time a citizen engages in conversation with a police officer they’ve never met before.

So yes… Defund the Police. Resist the push from selfish police unions that are infested with ulterior motives and funnel those resources elsewhere, especially in services that uplift the community. Give responsibilities that do not require police intervention and use of force to the people serving the community that are most capable of generating success. Enforce a national database so that bad cops cannot be hired in another jurisdiction. Stop the school-to-prison pipeline and give underprivileged areas the proper resources in their school systems that make learning a fun opportunity rather than a hindrance.

Most importantly, protect and serve the community.