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What’s "Defund the Police"

“Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need.”

Christy E. Lopez, a Georgetown Law professor and co-director of the school’s Innovative Policing Program

“I’ve been saying we have an economy of punishment over an economy of care.”

Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement

What does ‘defund the police’ mean and why some say ‘reform’ is not…

From my perspective, Defund the Police advocates are promoting a Partnership approach to public safety to replace the Dominator approach we have now.

On CNN one activist said that only 5% of what police do is related to violent crime. More than half of arrests are about weed. In case of mental health emergencies, it would be better to have mental health specialists show up rather than someone carrying a gun.

Cities Ask if It’s Time to Defund Police and ‘Reimagine’ Public Safety

“One model that members of the Minneapolis City Council cite is Cahoots, a nonprofit mobile crisis intervention program that has handled mental health calls in Eugene, Ore., since 1989. Cahoots employees responded to more than 24,000 calls for service last year — about 20 percent of the area’s 911 calls — on a budget of about $2 million, probably far less than what it would cost the Police Department to do the work, said Tim Black, the program’s operations coordinator.”

Defund the Police activists claim that reforms have failed.

Many in Minneapolis have said that Mr. Floyd’s death provided a stark illustration of how far efforts to institute reforms in the wake of the 2015 police shooting of Jamar Clark, a 24-year-old African-American man, had fallen short.

After that shooting, police officers received implicit bias training and body cameras. The department appointed its first black police chief. Community policing was emphasized. Policies were rewritten to include a “duty to intervene” if an officer saw a colleague endangering a member of the public — a policy that was key to the swift firing and arrest of the four officers involved in Mr. Floyd’s death.

But none of those reforms were sufficient to prevent Mr. Floyd’s death.

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Permalink Reply by Ruth Anthony-Gardner on Monday

In 2015, Minneapolis was one of six cities selected by Barack Obama’s Department of Justice to pilot a new kind of policing. Said to be grounded in rigorous social science research, the new initiative aimed “to build trust” between the police and the community being policed. The Minneapolis Police Department would undergo implicit bias training, wear body cameras, and practice mindfulness and “racial reconciliation” as part of a three-year, $4.75 million project tied to Obama’s “My Brother’s Keeper” campaign. The national reform program was described by then–Attorney General Eric Holder as “groundbreaking.”

Alex S. Vitale, a sociologist at Brooklyn College and the author of The End of Policing, told me (on the day that Chauvin was arrested and charged with third-degree murder for Floyd’s death) that milquetoast, technocratic reforms are a dead end. The only leverage left, he pointed out, is to cut police budgets and shrink police power.

“The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviors of poor and nonwhite people,” he writes in The End of Policing. Those who bear the brunt of police use of force, he continues, are “those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements.”

So, instead of questioning why we’re using police to wage a war on drugs, they [the current reforms] respectfully ask the narcotics units to take anti-bias training. It completely ignores the fact that the War on Drugs is an inherently racist legal program designed by politicians to meet a racist political agenda. And they just have nothing to say about that. So procedural justice is the reigning theory, yet it’s morally and intellectually and scientifically bankrupt. What they never measure are the number of arrests, the amount of police use of force, the justness of the arrests that are made, the ethics of why we’re using police to manage homelessness and mental health problems or wage a war on drugs. [emphasis mine]