Defunding the Police: What does it mean and why might we want that?

graphic by Lauryn Alejo

graphic by Lauryn Alejo

This last week, people everywhere have been waking up to the myriad of injustices caused at the hands of police, the people meant to serve and protect us. Instead of protecting people, more often than not, we have seen the police unnecessarily instigating and exacerbating violence. As a result, people across the nation are calling for their cities to defund local police departments. 

Now, you might be asking: Wait? Defund the police? Like get rid of them? Don’t we need the police to keep us safe? 

In theory, yes. However, as we hear more stories of unarmed, innocent Black Americans being discriminated against, harmed, and brutally murdered for no reason other than the color of their skin, it is becoming abundantly clear that the police are not keeping people safe. This is especially true in vulnerable minority communities that need support more than anyone. 

According to the NAACP, Black Americans are incarcerated at over five times the rate of white Americans (Criminal Justice Fact Sheet). One PNAS study also reported that police use of force is one of the leading causes of death for young Black men, with Black men being 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police over the course of their lifetime than white men (Edwards, Lee, and Esposito, 2018). These disparities point to a larger systemic problem that people are looking to change. The question, then, is how we should go about changing the system. 

Many people who look at the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the countless other Black people killed at the hands of police may come to the conclusion that all of this is just the result of the police force employing too many racist people. Maybe with anti-racist training, the employment of more people of color as police officers, and increased accountability for police officers who commit violent acts, the way that police interact with their community will change. 

While these reforms may be good steps in the right direction, studies have shown that they do not actually reduce the rates of police violence or change the high rates of arrests of BIPOC over white people. One study done by the American Sociological Review found that the three most common approaches to addressing discrimination in institutions, including diversity training, promoting inclusion, and establishing institutional responsibility, were actually the least effective (Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelley, 2006). So why do these things happen? It’s clearly because of more than just a few racist cops. 

For starters, the police force and the prison system in the United States have extremely racist roots. Some of the first publicly funded police departments were created as “slave patrols” in the colonial south, dedicated to keeping slaves under control. In 1865, the 13th amendment was passed banning slavery in all cases except as punishment for a crime. As a result, black southern states began passing “black codes” that criminalized conduct common to the newly free Black population, such as walking at night. This allowed cities to arrest and imprison hundreds of Black citizens in order to use them for free labor. This practice largely continues today, as prisoners across the nation (which of course, are disproportionately Black people) are contracted cheap labor and paid at rates as low as a dollar per day. 

On top of this, there are widespread flaws in how the police force operates on a national level, from “broken-windows” style policing that encourages officers to aggressively target low-level misdemeanors, arming officers with military-grade weapons with little formal training, training that encourages responding to situations with violence, and arrest quotas and for-profit prison systems that pressure officers to arrest as many people as they can (Vitale, 2017; Delaney et al.; Childress, 2016). The result is a highly militarized group of people targeting everyday citizens in mostly poor minority communities with very low accountability (Hassonjee, 2018). Officers enter ordinary communities with what the author of The End of Policing (2017), Alex Vitale, calls a “warrior-like mentality.” Rather than looking for how to protect the citizens of the communities they enter, police officers instead look for people in those communities that they should arrest.

Think of what you see the police doing on a daily basis. They write traffic tickets, arrest people for using drugs or committing theft, find missing people or address situations of domestic violence. Of course these are situations that need external aid. But why do we want people trained to use excessive force and armed with lethal weapons to be the ones responding? Why don’t we respond with people like social workers, EMTs, addiction counselors or mental health professionals who are better equipped to de-escalate the situation and give people the help they actually need instead of meeting the situation with violence? 

On top of that, why don’t we redirect the money that pays violent officers into organizations that could help prevent crime in the first place? What if the money went to paying for mental health counselors in communities or to programs that alleviate poverty? What if we actually gave the community the support it needs instead of attacking it from the outside and expecting fear to drive crime away? Maybe if we did this, we might have a better chance at eradicating the need for a police force at all.

Additionally, police departments are grossly overfunded compared to other community resources, often taking around half of the city’s budget while the rest goes to programs like community non-profits, city hospitals, counseling services, and public schools who have to fight over what little money is leftover. If cities were to invest in these programs that look to support and uplift their citizens from the start, maybe there’s a chance that we could reduce the need for many people to commit crime in the first place. 

 Defunding the police is something that will happen as a step-by-step process. No one is trying to get rid of all the police by tomorrow. Activists instead see defunding the police as a gradual, step-by-step process. Just starting by redirecting some of the millions––or even billions in cities like Los Angeles and New York––of dollars that cities annually give to their police departments to community organizations could do a lot of good.

Risa Schneblybatch 1