Tuesday, July 21st, 2020 Defunding the Police: Rethinking Public Safety so that Black Lives Matter

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Defunding the Police: Rethinking Public Safety so that Black Lives Matter   

What does it mean to defund the police, and for whom? On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derrick Chauvin murdered George Floyd. Cell-phone footage of this public lynching sparked protests in Minneapolis that quickly spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the nation and beyond its borders. Protestors displayed righteous anger that was met with tear-gas, batons, rubber bullets, and, in some cases, live ammunition. State violence spared neither peaceful protestors nor journalists. This political crisis has provoked a global reckoning with anti-Black racism and the failure of liberal “police reform.” Protestors have instead amplified radical demands to defund or, in some cases, to abolish police departments, which they argue are fundamentally irreformable. Legislators are now taking seriously demands that once seemed utopian. On June 12, 2020, the Minneapolis City Council voted unanimously to disband the city’s police department and replace it with a community-led safety model. In San Francisco and Los Angeles, municipal leaders have proposed slashing police budgets and substituting social workers for police officers as first responders in cases involving mental health issues and potentially deviant but non-criminal behavior. In Toronto, too, calls to defund the police are gaining traction and several City Councilors have embraced the idea. These efforts reflect a growing belief that we cannot continue to fund a militarized police department, underfund social services, and expect to solve the problem of racial inequality and racist policing. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, the slow death of “social abandonment” is intimately connected to overt state violence.   

This forum took up the question of what exactly it might mean to “defund the police” and how this demand can help us to realize the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” Is this the right demand? If so, which of the many models for defunding the police should activists and policy makers pursue? Is it possible to maintain community safety without a police force as we currently understand it? Can we simply talk about de-funding or divestment without thinking about investment? Is the reduction of police budgets sufficient to fund critical social programs or do we also need to think about raising taxes on the wealthy? Is police reform also a question of tax policy? Are there any parallels between new calls to defund the police and long-standing efforts to reign in military spending in the United States and Canada? Is defunding a step towards the outright abolition of police? Should it be? What kinds of enduring political coalitions might emerge from the current protest movement?