Roots of “Defund the Police”

Where did this movement come from?

“As activists across the nation call for defunding the police, many attorneys and non-attorneys alike find these calls unrealistic, naïve or even dangerous. Why not reform the police? We can ban abusive practices and hold officers responsible for misconduct but why abolish the police altogether? Who will keep us safe? We at Equal Justice Society honor the work that activists and community organizers are doing to answer these questions and create new models for community safety, justice and wellbeing. We offer this brief, non-exhaustive, research piece as an invitation for further reflection and conversation.[1]

Where did the call to #DefundThePolice come from?

The current demands for defunding the police are rooted in a long history of visioning and organizing toward abolition of prisons, jails and policing in the United States. Led by Black abolition feminists[2] such as Mariame Kaba, Angela Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, the movement for abolition offers a political vision and a framework for ending the prison industrial complex and “creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.”[3] It asks us to imagine a world where policing is obsolete, where no one is kept behind bars, and where all people have what they need to thrive.

In essence, policing is a system of control and punishment used through the centuries to uphold the dominant social order of white supremacist capitalism.[4] As Kaba writes in the NY Times, policing in the South “emerged from slave patrols in the 1700s that caught and returned runaway slaves.”[5] Policing in the North began in the 1800s in efforts to quash labor strikes and preserve power in the hands of the few. From the origins of the institution of policing to today, police have been given broad discretion in how and against whom they enforce the law.[6] It is not surprising then that this discretion, backed by state-sanctioned power, has resulted in horrific violence committed against Black, Indigenous and other People of Color (“BIPOC”).[7]

Over the last few decades, calls for abolishing the police have been met with resistance from White communities, but also many BIPOC communities, in part because of the deeply engrained myth that “police keep us safe.” This myth became widespread in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s as the Nixon, Reagan and then Clinton administrations poured billions of dollars into police departments around the country that waged a war on working-class communities of color under the pretext that they were fighting a “war on crime.”[8] As illustrated in the TV show COPS, police were presented as the “good guys” keeping people safe from “criminals” lurking in every corner. Federal spending on policing skyrocketed just as funding for critical social services was slashed.[9] Policing and incarceration became the government’s response to a whole range of social issues rooted in racism and growing income inequality.

Now, thanks to the work of abolitionist organizations, such as Critical Resistance, and more recently the Movement 4 Black Lives (“M4BL”), the myth that “we need police to keep us safe” is beginning to crumble. More people are waking up to the fact that despite so-called progressive reforms, improved training and added police cameras, police departments nationwide continue to disproportionately target, arrest and murder Black residents. Secondly, people are seeing that police are called to address situations they do not have the skills or the resources to address: from mental health crises to homelessness to addiction. According to a Vera Institute study, of the 240 million calls made to 911 each year, the vast majority were unrelated to emergency events or crimes in progress.[10]

Lastly, attention is finally focused on the fact that police are ill-equipped to prevent crime.[11] And when crime does occur, the police response is either to arrest or use force, which  does not address the societal root causes of crime or harm, often does not meet the needs of victims, and certainly does not lead to the rehabilitation and healing of individual offenders. Put simply, policing as an institution is more often the source of harm than a solution to harm.”

(Thank you Yoana Tchoukleva, Amalee Beattie and Josh Cottle)