Opinion: An Activist’s Perspective on Defunding the Police

As protests across the country continue, local and national calls-to-action have been issued for defunding, disarming, and wide-spread divestment from the institution of policing. In response, police departments are making claims that such demands, if implemented, would impede law enforcement’s ability to effectively intervene and properly investigate alleged crimes. 

The relatively unchallenged notion of law enforcement as a moral authority has created both a lack of clarity and concern among some people about the implications of defunding police on public safety and security. However, it’s essential to ask critical questions about the police’s historical and ongoing role. Most importantly, who and what exactly are police designed to protect and serve? 

As history teaches us, the answer is seldom Black people or their property. 

Police violence against Black people and communities is not anything new. The recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks, and countless others underscores the origins of police in the United States as fugitive slave patrols. To be clear, slave patrols were designed to find, apprehend, terrorize, and punish Black people outside the law’s purview. This was made possible, in part, because Black people were not legally recognized as full human beings. And, despite the eventual passage of the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution, Black dehumanization as a social and political practice has remained.

So why is defunding the police a central demand by protesters? Today, the institution of policing requires considerable financial resources. In fact, in several cities in which large populations of Black people live, police budgets eclipse the investment in public education, healthcare, housing solutions, and other critical social services combined. In Los Angeles, for instance, law enforcement accounts for 54% of the city’s unrestricted budget while the New York Police Department costs the City of New York $6 billion annually. 

This over-investment in policing is considered reasonable because law enforcement has been positioned to intervene in situations better suited for well-trained educators, social workers, medical and mental professionals, and restorative justice practitioners. Instead of addressing the needs of Black people, which are a result of centuries of continuous anti-Black discrimination, police have been used to criminalize an already vulnerable community that society deems disposable. Through state-sponsored brutalization, killing, and forcible incarceration, the institution of policing has obscured and attempted to erase society’s failures through the facilitated disappearance of Black people. 

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Furthermore, years of research make clear that the presence of police neither decreases violence nor the occurrence of crime in our neighborhoods. In many instances, the presence of police escalates tensions that result in violence and increase the criminalization of Black people. 

But what about violent (and heinous) crimes and their perpetrators if we don’t have police? Consider that police almost never prevent intimate partner violence, murder, and sexual assault from happening. At best, law enforcement officers arrive well-after an incident with little to offer survivors and their families in the way of justice, especially to Black women, Black trans and gender non-binary folks. At worst, which is often, they are themselves responsible for those offenses and never held to account, disciplined, or punished under existing laws. For these reasons, the rationale offered to maintain or increase their current funding fails to account for a complete lack of organizational efficacy within the institution of policing.

It is not to be misconstrued or misunderstood: police abolition is not merely about the removal. Instead, abolition is about the presence of what is necessary for Black lives to thrive without the constant threat of state surveillance, interference, obstruction, or vigilantism. For these reasons, demands for defunding come with a simultaneous demand for (re)investment into the types of humanizing services and supports Black communities need to redress, repair, and restore harm done by centuries of systemic and structural racism. By defunding police and funding Black futures, we can deeply invest in the sustainability of Black peoples’ right to self-determination. In no uncertain terms, such an investment would effectively eliminate the need for policing Black people and communities.

Now, at this moment, decades of work by police abolitionists is contending with another opportunity to radically reimagine public safety. In particular, state and local governments have a chance to shift the climate and conditions that necessitate police altogether. In the last week alone we have seen cities offer new models of possibility to divest from police. In Minneapolis, for example, the city has moved toward permanently disbanding its police department completely. In San Francisco, police will no longer serve as first-responders in non-criminal matters. These two examples, especially in Minneapolis, represent pathways toward a world without police. The only remaining question is, “are we ready?”

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s viewpoints and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BlackLove.com or its entities.