On June 5th, the Washington DC mayor unveiled a statement, painted down the street leading
to the White House,
“Black Lives Matter.”
Within 24 hours, Black Lives Matter activists responded with their own message:
“Defund the Police.”
This slogan caught on rapidly among tens of thousands of people protesting police brutality
in the United States.
But what does it really mean to defund the police? And what if it’s not as radical
as it sounds?
A city budget, a county budget, a state budget, a national budget are all markers of what
our societies are prioritizing. The US spends $100 billion every year
on policing. Most of which comes from local municipalities.
New York City, for example, appropriated $5.9 billion last year to the police department.
For comparison, here’s what the city allocated for homeless services, health, housing, youth
and community development, and jobs programs. The disparities are huge, and they echo in
cities across the country. Like in Chicago, where the policing budget
is $1.7 billion. Nearly twice the budget of the Fire Department, Department
of Transportation, Public Library, and Public Health combined.
If you look at these budgets in the United States
What you'll see is that we have deeply de-prioritized providing people their basic needs. And instead,
we over prioritize punishing human beings.
The emphasis on policing in the US has led to over-policing and underpolicing all at
once. The police arrests over 10 million people
in a year. And the vast majority of those arrests, especially in black and poor neighborhoods,
are for minor offenses, like drug possession or drinking in public. That heavy-handed approach
is over-policing.
But when it comes to violent crime, the rate of police arrests is incredibly low. And
that’s under-policing, which leaves communities of color underserved.
People believe that the police are deterring violence.
Clearly they're enacting violence, but are they also deterring violence.
And that's highly questionable.
A lot of research suggests they are having no influence whatsoever
So if they're having no influence whatsoever on the phenomena that they're supposed to
be influencing and they're doing violence, what purpose are they supposed to serve?
The repercussions of prioritizing the police
over other services can also be seen at schools in the US.
1.7 million students are in schools with police, but no counselors. And 3 million
have police in schools, but no nurses. And when it comes to 911 calls, in many
cases, police officers are the first responders to mental health related emergencies.
That’s important because one in every four deaths from police shootings are people with
mental health problems.
I can literally imagine you just replace someone with a weapon, with someone who will actually
sit down on the ground with them and talk. Not throw them on the ground and sit on top
of them or lay on top of them. But someone
who will take them wherever they are, listen to their situations and
then try to figure out, diagnose their problem.
Police are doing the jobs of what other groups of people and workers can be doing.
Being tasked with jobs they're not trained to do, is an idea some police officers acknowledge
too.
The need to rethink police budgets has become even more glaring in the middle of the coronavirus
pandemic. Many have called attention to the fact that
hospital workers struggle to get personal protective equipment. While thousands of
police officers have riot gear at the ready for protests.
Even in response to the pandemic, while many agencies grapple with coronavirus budget cuts,
police budgets have largely remained intact. New York City’s proposal for the coming
fiscal year cuts only 5 percent of the NYPD budget.
But that same proposal, calls for a 12 percent cut to the Department of Health.
This is where the movement to defund the police comes in. It’s a push to take the billions
of dollars cities spend on police, and move that funding to other services, like education,
housing, jobs or mental healthcare. At its core, the idea is to rethink public
safety because the current form of policing isn’t built to serve everyone equally.
We live in an economy of punishment. We as in black people, as poor people, as in marginal
people, police are not used to keep us safe.
What we've seen over the last seven years is black people being killed, humiliated,
violated, sexually assaulted, maimed by law enforcement. We haven't seen it get any better.
Reimagining public safety in this moment is a matter of life or death.
For years, reforms like introducing police body cameras, have been proposed across
the country as a response to police brutality. But these reforms have only added more money
to police budgets, even when, as studies like this one in DC show, they have “no
detectable effect on police use of force”.
We absolutely need to try and hold law enforcement accountable. But what we've recognized is
all of our accountability measures, up until now have not worked.
In the case of Minneapolis, since 2016 their
police officers have received body cameras, bias training
and have a duty-to-intervene policy where other police officers
must step in if they see force applied inappropriately.
Yet, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd as three officers looked on.
So this idea that we could reform an institution
that has a blue code of silence, that we can reform an institution
that is one of the most powerful unions, that is no longer the conversation.
But the calls to defund the police have been polarizing and have led
to some fears about how it might affect personal and public safety.
How do you defund or dismantle and keep people safe?
When we all dial 911, we need to know there's someone coming.
If you defund the police or diminish their ability to police their communities,
you're gonna have a warzone.
I think we often hear issues of safety for mostly white, affluent people. And I have
to remind those folks that their safety is predicated on the unsafety of black people.
Opponents of defunding the police have cautioned that after cities
like Memphis had to downsize their police force,
there was an increase in violent crime.
But proponents point to a major difference between defunding the police then, and now.
Today, it’s not just about cutting police budgets. A key part of defunding is to
redistribute those resources and create better responses to crime.
That redistribution would still fund first responders, but could force cities to rethink
what kinds of responders would make communities safer for everyone.
Whether it's investing in a new crisis intervention team.
A mental health team.
Or social workers. In some cities, like Eugene, Oregon and Austin,
Texas, alternative models for safety have already been put in place to dispatch
mental health professionals to certain 911 calls, instead of the police.
And putting money into other agencies like housing and jobs to help people meet their
basic needs could also end up making communities safer.
So rather than have this, um, `I'm fearful of someone coming to take my stuff. Hey, can
I have a number that I can call, so somebody with some weapons can protect my stuff?` It's
more like if everyone had some stuff and if everyone had a reasonable existence, they
wouldn't be looking for anybody else's stuff and you wouldn't need to call anybody.
Black Lives Matter activists and local organizers across the country have been working to defund
the police for years. But for many, the calls to “defund the police” don't
stop at scaling down the scope of what the police do.
It could also be a first step towards eventually abolishing the police as we know it.
You could think that the defund movement is the gateway to a broader discussion of reprioritization
One position of which is, abolition.
The details of a plan like this differ from city to city, but there is a shared purpose
of altering what public safety looks like in the US.
Defunding the police, even at its most basic, will still be a difficult battle
for activists on a national scale. One poll conducted in early June, found
that only about a quarter of Americans favored cutting funding for police departments.
But in parts of the country, it’s already happening.
In Denver, the school district has broken their contract with the police department.
In Oakland, the school board pledged to do the same.
And in Minneapolis, the City Council voted to completely disband its police department,
and create a new model. All of these moves can be traced to continued
public pressure and protests against police brutality.
Protests which, in a matter of weeks, brought the slogan to ‘defund the police’ into
the mainstream.
This has been the most tragic three weeks and also the most inspiring three weeks. We
have seen death after death of black people. What are we going to do to be in defense
of black lives? That is the conversation we're asking. It's not just about black lives mattering.
That's not enough to claim that.
You have to step into a new role in protecting black people
and ensuring their lives are safe.