Defund the Police?
A Progressive Case Against Defunding
In light of the recent protests and developments in the anti-police brutality movement that’s been ongoing at least since the civil rights movement(if not much longer), the phrase ‘Defund The Police’ has gained so much traction that I hear some of the least political people I’ve ever met chant it.
My argument, while in full support of the protest, aims to evaluate the phrase ‘Defund The Police’. What does the call to ‘Defund The Police’ actually mean? Is it useful as a slogan for change? Above all, is this the best solution to police brutality?
Defund?
The major reason so many people are in support of the phrase is because if we defund the police we can instead shift the money to other measures much better at reducing crime and handling crisis situations: essentially investing in at risk or under-privileged communities, health care (including mental health), education and other measures such as employing violence interrupters.
While the research is undeniable that things like reduced inequality and better welfare are far more effective at reducing crime than policing (this is a well-documented phenomena that I have been referencing since long before the most recent protests), the idea that these should be funded because of the failure of police or instead of police is somewhat worrisome.
First off, investing in our communities and reducing inequality are things we should be doing regardless of their effect on crime. People deserve a decent chance at a good life not because they are at risk of committing crime but because they are people. Whether or not we make any changes to the police budget should have no effect on whether we invest in our communities to meet basic human rights and give individuals the opportunity to live a good life. These are not things to be bargained with but rather necessary investments for a society that is just and stable in the long run.
Secondly, the idea that any system is going to improve with cuts to its resources seems to me like a strange infection in progressive culture from the conservative obsession with budget. While defunding the police may force them to make cuts to the number of officers or may force them to demilitarize in some capacity it does not force any change to how the police departments function.
Some may ask why boycotting a business encourages change but cutting funding to a police department doesn’t. In most cases a business is neither good nor bad, it simply makes whatever decisions will create the most profit. Often, this means morally wrong decisions are incentivised by profit. Therefore, when we boycott a business, thereby hurting their profit, the incentive to act morally egregiously no longer exists, instead there is incentive to act the way the public wants. Conversely, a police department (or any government agency for that matter) is not motivated by profit. They are motivated by what they believe are the best ways to create a just and safe society — it is these beliefs that construct their culture and systems, which in turn informs the decisions of individual officers. The racist, classist and brutal decision making of individual officers, therefore, is not motivated by the budget of the police department but by deep seated flaws in the philosophies, culture and training of the department. Money or lack thereof is not an active factor in this. Police already aren’t paid that well, cutting funding isn’t going to make them reevaluate their beliefs and approach to law enforcement or their abuse of power. Fundamentally, defunding a broken government system does not change the fact that it is still broken. It does not address the police’s issues of race, class, oversight, training, vetting, mental fitness of officers or any problematic aspect of the justice system that exists beyond police.
While some people may want reforms on top of defunding it worries me that so much attention is on the budget and not on any of the proposed reforms. Getting the average or non-political person to care about making deep rooted change is difficult and getting them to care about the nuances of those changes, beyond simply the slogans, is even more difficult. For many who espouse dedication to the movement the conversation does genuinely end at ‘Defunding The Police’ and that should worry us. If we focus simply on the defunding of the police, then there is no doubt in my mind that police will continue to be a violent and destructive tool of the powerful against the weak — just perhaps with fewer officers.
Abolish?
I’m a lot more sympathetic to those that see ‘defund’ as a path to the abolition of police. However, unless you’re an anarchist (which if you are, power to you, but my target audience is people who take the state as a given) it seems impossible to imagine a world without law enforcement of any kind. No matter how perfect our welfare systems and violence interrupters are there’s simply a certain level of unavoidable violent crime — whether it’s because someone didn’t get the mental health services they needed in time, a domestic dispute gets out of hand or someone is prejudiced and commits a hate crime. If large groups of people exists, then someone is bound to commit some violent crime or another and in those situations we need some form of organized group to apprehend and/or neutralize a threat with the least force necessary.
This, however, does not mean we can’t abolish police departments as they currently exist and replace them with some new form of law enforcement, in fact this is the proposal I am most in agreement with.
Reconstruct
I very purposely chose to use the word ‘reconstruct’ as opposed to ‘reform’. ‘Reform’, while it can mean something radical, often suggests simply that we make changes. That is not enough, we need to dismantle and reconstruct policing as we know it.
Most modern police departments come from historically racist environments and were invented, on some level or another, as methods of protecting the interests of the ruling class. They were invented in a time when our understanding of crime and what a criminal is was very different to now and when an emphasis on minimal and controlled force just didn’t exist. Brutality, class and racism are built into the DNA of most modern police departments and they simply can’t be salvaged through reforms alone. Certainly, there is a lot of evidence that some reforms reap extremely positive results, but with the amount of effort it would take to reform all police departments in all the necessary ways, it seems like it may be more effective to simply dismantle and reconstruct from the ground up.
We should not be focused on the budget assigned to police. The issue isn’t that we give too much money to a brutal and oppressive institution; the issue is that an institution which should exist to serve and protect is brutal and oppressive. More than that, while police brutality might look like the most disturbing aspect of our criminal justice system, it is by no means the only brutal and oppressive aspect. If we are concerned with true justice, then we can’t only think of those who lost their lives to police like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We need to think of the spiral of systems which overlap to produce an unjust society. Police are just the tip of the iceberg — courts, jails, outdated laws and prison practices are all less visible but equally damaging parts of our society. If we are concerned with justice, then we need to think bigger and think harder — budget won’t cut it. If nothing else ‘Defund The Police’ is a reductive slogan to lead our charge with.
The Slogan
For a moment I want to compare ‘Defund The Police’ as a phrase to ‘Black Lives Matter’ to show what a strong and effective slogan does look like. Both are three word phrases that came into existence as a response to police brutality, yet they say very different things.
‘Black Lives Matter’ is a fantastic slogan that communicates so much with so little. The oppression of people of colour is something that runs much deeper than just the police’s treatment of them. A justice system which fails them, racist institutions that keep them down, lack of investment in their communities among many more things all work in tandem to enforce one another. ‘Black Lives Matter’ as a phrase calls not for an end to police brutality, nor for an end to racism or anything of the sort. It calls for a beginning to compassion. It asks not that we end something but that we start something, it focuses not on the institutions it wishes to destroy (although those are implied) but rather on the systems it wants to create. Systems that ensure that black lives matter. Simultaneously it’s not only about systems, but individuals, it calls for us as individuals in the society to care, to ensure and to remember that black lives matter. In those three words the revolutionary image of its supporters is captured with incredible depth but also a catchy simplicity.
‘Defund The Police’, on the other hand, is concerned very specifically with one thing. The budget of the police. Most people say it wanting to then invest in neighborhoods and communities that need it, but the words don’t imply that. The phrase doesn’t call for reform implicitly in a way that someone uneducated on the issue and its solutions would understand. All it does is get more people hooked on an approach to politics that reduces issues to budget and nothing more. To me it simply says: all we have to do is budget less for police and more for welfare.
So, can we have it all?
Some may see my incessant insistence on requiring both funding for law enforcement as well as welfare and community investment as a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ situation. After all, most people calling for the defunding of police aren’t doing it believing that less money will equate to better policing, rather they think shifting that funding to welfare would simply be a better use of the money. I, on the other hand, believe (provided we reform policing) we can and should invest in both. But can we really have it all?
There are two ways for me to answer this. The first would be to talk about taxes, government spending, the history of austerity and different potential economic ideas and policies to essentially make the case that the governments of most developed countries could actually be spending more and in more effective ways than they currently are. However, Mark Blyth (a political economist from Brown) has already dedicated his entire body of work to exactly that argument, and does a much better job of presenting the argument that the obsession with needing to cut budgets is ridiculous and that we already can and should invest in welfare. So instead, I’ll simply link to some of his work at the bottom and move onto the second answer.
We have no choice but to do whatever we can to afford both. An organization like the police, whose job it is to use force when necessary, cannot be underfunded. Resources to properly educate, train and constantly evaluate whether officers are fit (and not racist enough) to properly do their job is pivotal. A lack of such resources could very well mean police existing as they are right now. Similarly, a lack of resources for education, healthcare and welfare is likely to lead to a similar situation to right now as well. Justice and the ability to lead a good life (relative to what the society can offer) are what create a sense of security in people’s lives. Without said sense of security, we will continue to constantly teeter on the edge of collapse if a recession hits too hard or one too many people of colour are killed. Perhaps achieving these things will require some creativity and ingenuity with our economic policies and visions for criminal justice, but it certainly won’t happen through simply defunding the police in favour of welfare. As my politics professor once tweeted: “think harder”.
Recommended work from Mark Blyth:
Lecture — Can we have it all?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOGc6XZwVxA
Podcast — Do Deficits Matter (MMT explained): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfKiW0Gfn04
Book — Angrynomics
