'Defund the police painted in large yellow letters ...'
There are a lot of people out there who hear defund the police and think it meansabolishing a police department.
Abolish the police. It sounds pretty out there but scholars
like Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others
have been studying police and prison abolition for decades.
Recent events have put the movement to abolish police at the forefront of public debate
like never before.
So what does it mean to abolish the police?
There's a lot of evidence to suggest that policing just isn't working and it's especially not
working for black people in America.
There's a hugely disproportionate impact on black and brown communities in terms of policing
and and who has negative interactions with police, so certainly police disproportionately
brutalise and kill black and brown Americans.
And the statistics back this up.
Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people
and they are also more likely to be charged with an offense.
African-americans are four times more likely to be arrested for drug use
even though they use drugs at the same rate as white people.
They are also 20% more likely to be pulled over by police than white drivers.
These are stark problems that are deeply embedded in the culture and structure of American police
because of the power of police unions and legal protections that are in place
for officers, police rarely face any consequences for wrongdoing and
brutality and violence.
99% of killings by police from 2013 to 2019 have not
resulted in any officers being charged with a crime.
The police officer who killed George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, had 18 prior complaints against him.
Another reason for abolition is that policing in America has become hugely expensive.
Many major cities spend as much as 40% of their budgets on policing.
New York spends nearly 6 billion a year that's more than the city spends on
health, homelessness and youth services combined.
So how would police abolition actually work?
The police would be defunded and communities would invest in preventing the causes of crime,
spending the money they would have spent on policing on schools, hospitals, better housing,
mental health support and domestic violence interventions.
'For too long, we have asked police departments to do things which they are not trained or prepared to do
and have criminalised societal problems like addiction and homelessness and
mental illness.'
It's not just about creating a vacuum where the police were,
it's recognising that we have a lot of things that the police are meant to handle
and they're just not equipped to do it and are doing it kind of poorly.
So we would rather pay people who are actually trained to do those things to do them.
But what about dealing with violent crime?
What happens when you have a scenario where there is a very serious need for somebody with a gun ...?
This is a common concern with the argument for abolition but the thing is, despite what
you see on TV and in the movies the police do a poor job of protecting the
public from violent criminals.
In 2018, US police only solved 46% of the violent crimes that were reported to them
and just 33% of rape cases reported to US police in 2018 went ahead to trial.
And when the NYPD staged to slow down to protest the mayor and to illustrate how essential they were,
violent crime actually went down.
Given the fact that the vast majority of police work has nothing to do with the kind of crimes
that we think police do in popular culture whether it's, you know, responding
to violence, murder, assaults, things like that, means that we could immediately
remove these services and it would simply make for safer communities,
that is the argument.
Police abolitionists are still trying to work out the best solutions to violent crime prevention
but they would argue that police violence poses a bigger and more immediate threat.
When we remove police from a society that is heavily armed and very fearful like America is,
there will not be a vacuum of violence but there will be a vacuum of police silence
and that is what we are asking for in our community right now.
So why abolition and not reform?
Campaigners argue you can't reform an inherently racist institution.
You can only overhaul it entirely.
Police forces were founded in the southern states to track down escaped slaves.
And after slavery was abolished, police enforced racial segregation also known as Jim Crow laws.
The 1960s and 70s saw huge investment in the police.
It was a period of policing that prompted the formation of the Black Panthers
which was established specifically to defend black communities from police brutality.
Zero-tolerance or broken window policing in the 80s and 90s saw black men incarcerated at
unprecedented rates.
African-americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of white people.
Successive administrations have attempted police reform.
Body-cams, more diverse police departments, bias and de-escalation training,
they've all been instituted by many police forces
but police brutality keeps happening.
Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray,
Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd ...
The list goes on.
So is the movement finally breaking through?
Will the police actually be abolished?
In a stunning move announced just last night, the city of Minneapolis is doing just that.
Our commitment is to end our city's toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department.
And to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe!
The Los Angeles City Council has voted to cut its police budget by up to 150 million
and the Abolish The Police campaign in New York is also gathering steam.
But there's still a long way to go.
I think it's a big question mark how this is going to play out.
We've certainly seen the power of police as
well as the power of police unions who will aggressively fight any cuts.
However, we are seeing that there's mass movement to keep pushing for these substantial
and systemic changes to how we think about public safety.
There's definitely a feeling of hope and optimism and change.
If you want to find out more about the history of the police abolition,
check out the writings of Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
I've put some extra reading in the description and for the latest reporting,
you can read my colleague Sam Levin at Guardian US.