In recent days, those words have spread on social media, been asked of politicians and been painted onto streets.
Protests around the country in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery have reignited conversations around the role of police in society, and a growing voice among some activists has been calling to “defund the police.”
In Minneapolis, a veto-proof majority of the city council committed to dismantling its police department, breaking with Mayor Jacob Frey’s desire to make reforms but not break up the embattled police force.
“It is clear that our system of policing is not keeping our communities safe,” council president Lisa Bender said. “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period.”
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti vowed to cut as much as $150 million that was part of a planned increase in the police department’s budget, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Sunday that the city would move funding from the NYPD to youth initiatives and social services, while keeping the city safe.
Here’s what’s behind the movement to defund the police.
What does it mean to defund the police?
In one sense, the movement to defund the police is quite simple: It means taking funding away from police forces across the country. In many cases, a city’s or county’s legislators allocate money in yearly budgets to fund police departments. Defunding the police is just that literal.
But the larger push to defund the police is about more than just taking money away. It’s also a push to reallocate those funds into social programs.
“It’s not just about taking away money from the police, it’s about reinvesting those dollars into black communities. Communities that have been deeply divested from, communities that, some have never felt the impact of having true resources. And so we have to reconsider what we’re resourcing. 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, told WBUR.
In an Op-Ed in the Washington Post, Christy E. Lopez, a Georgetown Law professor and co-director of the school’s Innovative Policing Program, writes that defunding the police is not necessarily something that comes overnight or by just zeroing out a police department’s budget.
“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,” Lopez writes.
MPD150, a Minneapolis-based initiative by local organizers aiming to bring “meaningful structural change” to police in the city, similarly writes that shifting police’s responsibilities is central to the defund the police movement.
“The people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises,” the group says on its website.
