Defund the Police … No, Really
“Defund the police.”
You are likely to read this statement in one of two ways — by nodding solemnly in agreement or recoiling in horror, with ‘ACAB’ or ‘not all cops;’ you are either Black Lives Matter or All Lives Matter.
For card-carrying, Biden-voting, Pelosi-stanning Democrats, ‘horror’ will most likely be the response of choice, visions of “a thousand memes about the lawless anarchy to come” running through the mind on a loop. This, because Democrats, as they do near every time a grassroots movement for change arises, have attempted to co-opt the moment for their own ends. With more vigor than they’ve fought for anything in recent memory, they have battled to appropriate the meaning of ‘defund the police.’
But who can really blame them? After all, they are fighting to stave off an inevitable reckoning, decades in the making; they’re fighting to stave off both their own irrelevance, and the collapse of a status quo now crumbling around them.
Contrary to the narrative of those in government and mainstream media, the concept of defunding the police is not all that radical, nor is it particularly complicated. Most simply, it means cutting police budgets. You know, like both Republicans and Democrats do with social services all the time.
It might help to think of it like this: this week, in response to the economic strain brought about by the COVID pandemic, 30 Democrats signed a letter suggesting cuts to Social Security, healthcare, and infrastructure to deal with growing debt. That is to say, they would like to defund Social Security, healthcare, and infrastructure. When, in February, the Trump administration announced a 26% budget cut to the Environmental Protection Agency, the administration was defunding the Environmental Protection Agency. When, in 2013, the Obama administration proposed cutting Social Security by $130 billion and Medicare by $380 billion, the administration was proposing those services be defunded.
See how that works? Defunding the police is not about an apocalyptic wasteland of “lawless anarchy,” it is, as described in Jacobin, about “cutting bloated local police budgets and diverting the resources to social programs.”
Make no mistake, ‘bloated’ would be a gentle way to describe what’s become of police budgets.
Consider, between 1977–2017, the population of the United States grew by about 50%. Meanwhile, state and local spending on police grew by 173%. The city of New York spends more on its police budget than it spends on homelessness, youth development, and workforce development put together; the city of Los Angeles spends more than half of its general fund on police, as in, they spend more on police than they spend on everything else put together. In fact, a 2017 report analyzing twelve major metropolitan jurisdictions found police spending “vastly outpaces expenditures in vital community resources and services.”
If New York City’s $6 billion police budget was the military budget of a country, it would be the 38th largest in the world, just behind Sweden and just ahead of the Ukraine; if the $115 billion total US police budget was the military budget of a country, it would rank 3rd.
This represents a system where “communities have been told that the only resource they can have to address their community problems is more policing and more incarceration,” a system where failing schools have been filled with police officers rather than teachers and counselors — in New York City, there are 5,000 NYPD personnel in schools, more than all the counselors and social workers combined — a system where mental health problems are dealt with by jails rather than healthcare professionals, where homelessness and poverty are criminalized. Criminologist Alex Vitale describes it as a system in which “we use criminalization as an alternative to having a decent social welfare system, a social safety net, and economic opportunities for people that are distributed more evenly.”
Dallas Police Chief David Brown put it another way in 2016, stating, “we’re asking cops to do too much in this country. Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it. Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops. That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”
At its most benign, ‘defund the police’ means not asking police to do things they shouldn’t be doing; it means not using law enforcement to uphold criminalization as a replacement for social welfare.
Of course, ideologically, ‘defund the police’ is much more than that. Spending less on the police state and more on social welfare, solving problems with opportunity rather than punitive justice, these are concepts which shake the foundation on which the American experiment rests.
If police can be defunded, then why not the military-industrial complex? If money can be moved from policing towards social services, then why can it not be moved from oil to green energy? Why should Americans be funding the private health insurance industry, rather than using the much less expensive Medicare for All?
More simply, if Americans are in fact allowed to choose what to spend their money on, why would they keep spending it on bloated, harmful, outdated things? Why would the pillars of systemic racism and capitalist oppression be upheld, when they can simply be defunded?
And therein lies the secret of why Democrats are working so hard to undermine the meaning of ‘defund the police.’ Because at its core, it represents a challenge to the status quo which Democrats champion so unrelentingly. Thus, the great monolith of purportedly liberal thought has rolled out its heaviest hitters.
President Obama appeared at a much-ballyhooed virtual town hall to trumpet more of the ineffectual reforms his administration was famous for. Meanwhile, the current Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, offered his own thoughts on reform, suggesting police could shoot unarmed people “in the leg instead of the heart” and proposing a $300 million increase in federal funding to police departments.
The Democratic chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus, Karen Bass, proclaimed during an interview with CNN, “I don’t believe that you should disband police departments,” misrepresenting what ‘defund the police’ means, presumably, for someone as intelligent as Rep. Bass, in an intentional way. Then, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn declared, “this movement today, some people tried to hijack it,” projecting, as he himself tried to hijack the moment, “don’t let yourselves be drawn into the debate about defunding police forces.”
The New York Times hinted that ‘defund the police’ was not meant to be taken literally, but rather as “symbolic commitment to end systemic racism,” while ABC News asserted ‘defund the police’ was “not necessarily about gutting police department budgets.”
No, that’s actually exactly what it’s about, no matter how hard Democrats and the tall foreheads of mainstream media wish it wasn’t.
In a last-ditch effort to regain control of the narrative, Democrats in Congress led by Nancy Pelosi have introduced the Justice in Policing Act, a bill which, while touted by Pelosi as “transformative structural change,” openly rejects the idea of defunding the police, and instead focuses on another round of police reforms. Its highlights include a ban on the use of chokeholds by police, which are already banned in many jurisdictions, such as New York City, where the practice has been banned since 1993. Incidentally, New York City is where Eric Garner was choked to death by a police officer in 2014, a police officer who was not even charged with a crime, let alone imprisoned.
Texas Democrat Al Green, unable to help himself, revealed the purpose of such reforms, comparing them to when the ‘Department of War’ was renamed the ‘Department of Defense.’
But the fact that the Justice in Policing Act is a platitude-laden smorgasbord of meaningless nonsense is irrelevant when considering its intent. The bill is not meant to enact change, but rather to reclaim what Chomsky called the “spectrum of acceptable opinion.” In his words, “the smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
For decades, if not longer, the spectrum of acceptable opinion around policing in the US has been defined by, on one side, Republicans arguing for expansion of the militarized police state, and on the other, Democrats, also arguing for expansion, but perhaps with some unenforceable and valueless reforms, if the cops are ok with it.
‘Defund the police’ has pushed the boundaries of acceptable opinion — suddenly “expand” is not countered by “how much?” but by “reduce.”
It is interesting to note, earlier this week, as nationwide calls to defund the police intensified, far-right Republican Senator Ted Cruz tweeted, “let’s just do police reform. Everybody should be on board for that whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, conservative or liberal.”
Since then, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, the only black Republican in the Senate, has been tapped by Republican leadership to begin work on a GOP version of police reform, while Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, one of President Trump’s staunchest allies, announced that he would be constructing his own police reform bill in the House. Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy proclaimed his belief that Republicans and Democrats could “find common ground” on the subject, while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, himself the great-great-grandson of slave owners, asserted, “it’s perfectly clear we’re a long way from the finish line” on police reform and racial justice.
Soak it in; the Republican Party is now to the left of where Democrats were last month on the issue, to the left of where Joe Biden still is. In other words, two weeks of direct action by Black Lives Matter and their allies, two weeks of people in the streets in every state in the nation, has accomplished more than the Democratic Party has in decades, more, in fact, than they ever intended to accomplish.
This is why Democrats must fight so hard in this moment to reclaim the narrative, to retake proprietorship of the spectrum of acceptable opinion. If people were to view the Democratic Party for what it is, an instrument of control rather than one of change, if people of color, the poor and working-class recognized they can and must represent themselves, most explicitly through direct action, the Democratic Party would be finished; we already have a Republican Party.
Further, and much worse for the Democratic Party and the big money interests which prop it up, if people realized the power they held, who knows how they would use it. If the police were defunded and the money rerouted to social programs, what’s to stop people from examining other places where harmful spending could be diverted towards social good?
Thus, just as militarized police are used to violently assault peaceful protesters, the Democratic Party must forcefully wrestle back control of the spectrum of acceptable opinion before ordinary people can realize the power of solidarity.
