READER: The Economics of Defunding the Police
An Economy of Our Own seeks to amplify feminist perspectives on economics and reveal the ways in which patriarchy and white supremacy permeate our economic structures. Our regular READERS are compilations of resources, issue-area primers and other media on trending economic topics that put feminism at the center of the discourse.
News in May of the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville sparked protests nationwide. Activists rose up with a familiar rallying cry—#BlackLivesMatter—but they also advanced a conversation that, for many of us, is less common—one calling for the defunding, and even abolishing, of police.
The Basics: What #DefundThePolice Means
On May 30, Black Lives Matter released an official statement demanding the defunding of police budgets—and calling for the money to be invested, instead, in Black communities and resources.
Enough is enough.
Our pain, our cries, and our need to be seen and heard resonate throughout this entire country.
We demand acknowledgment and accountability for the devaluation and dehumanization of Black life at the hands of the police.
We call for radical, sustainable solutions that affirm the prosperity of Black lives.
George Floyd’s violent death was a breaking point — an all too familiar reminder that, for Black people, law enforcement doesn’t protect or save our lives. They often threaten and take them.
Right now, Minneapolis and cities across our country are on fire, and our people are hurting — the violence against Black bodies felt in the ongoing mass disobedience, all while we grapple with a pandemic that is disproportionately affecting, infecting, and killing us.
We call for an end to the systemic racism that allows this culture of corruption to go unchecked and our lives to be taken.
We call for a national defunding of police. We demand investment in our communities and the resources to ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive.
Understanding this call to action requires that we acknowledge the racist history of policing. Modern policing in the U.S. began with “slave patrols” formed to crush rebellions before the Civil War, and after slavery ended, policing continued to be used as a mechanism for restricting Black freedom. Today, police are part of a criminal justice system that profits off of Black suffering—and which was built to deny Black communities true freedom.
- The Conversation’s primer on the racist roots of policing illuminates a key concept: “Policing’s institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters, because policing culture has not changed as much as it could.”
Activists are arguing that this is why police “reform” is futile. We have attempted to limit the use of force, diversify police forces and hold “bad apples” accountable. None of that has stopped police brutality, and none of it has challenged the racist roots of policing.
Envisioning communities without police has also raised new conversations around the centrality of police in our communities. Why do police get dispatched for medical emergencies, even if there is no criminal motive for the harm that has occurred? Why are police discipling children in our schools, instead of administrators who won’t criminalize them? Why do police respond to sexual assault, instead of trained and licensed care professionals?
The movement to defund the police is about envisioning a new future—one in which communities are better equipped to care for one another without force and violence.
“The world is speaking right now,” said Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter-L.A., her voice choked with emotion. “They’re saying we don’t want a system of policing that puts targets on the backs of Black people especially, but also is a regular assailant and traumatizer of our entire community.
“We are saying defund the police,” Abdullah added later. “We’re also saying reimagine public safety.”
Why Police Funding is an Economic Issue
Conversations around defunding the police have also raised an urgent issue: the disparity between budgets for police forces and social services, in many cities, is a gulf. Every day, Americans go homeless and hungry. Every day, countless workers toil just to scrape by. Lawmakers have long claimed they cannot “afford” to provide our communities with critical services—good public schools, safe community spaces, a strong social safety net, publicly-funded health care and other public services—but the priorities of the state are now as clear as ever. We fund police in excess because our economy puts property and profit before people.
- The Progressive, in Why It’s Time to Defund the Police, pointed out the injustice in that imbalance of power.
Massive disparities between law enforcement and social services budgets exist in cities throughout the country.
The result of these spending disparities is a massive, militaristic police force that leeches resources from every other city department while oppressing minority communities for mostly non-violent crimes.
- Inequality.org connected the dots between bloated police budgets and police brutality. They found that police violence is enabled by massive spending.
Seeing widespread disinvestment in Black communities and investment in police budgets as both interconnected and purposeful is key. Massive police budgets that allow departments to cover up and ignore harm caused by officers, and give officers license to behave badly without impunity, are an extension of the racist idea of policing—and the racist motives of our nation’s institutions. The push to abolish police and shut down the prison-industrial complex are part of an urgent movement for economic and social justice for Black communities.
What She Said: Women Leaders to Listen To
- UC Berkeley professor of African American Studies Nikki Jones shared her own thoughts on the movement to defund the police means in an interview with UC Berkeley’s alumni magazine:
I try to not even talk about crime because we are at historic lows when it comes to crime. It’s been mostly on a downward trend over the last 20-plus years. Mass incarceration explains very little of that drop. But we also know that policing is bad for young people. Experiencing contact with the police is not good for young people. Witnessing aggressive encounters is not good for young people. Aggressive policing has a negative impact on the mental and physical health of people in the neighborhood — even those who aren’t the target of the encounter. It has an impact on schooling. There are a number of ways to stomp out crime, but if they’re doing this degree of harm to young people, should that be the approach we take anyway? We should be thinking less about a public safety approach and more about what it looks like to build the capacity of young people. What does it mean to have a healthy neighborhood and healthy communities? What institutions do we invest in for our young people?
- In an interview with AEOO Advisory Board member Carmen Rios, Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, explained the larger perspective that informs this work:
The work we’re doing here — and I’m going to use this term that I’ve talked about, I didn’t coin it, but I’ve talked about in a lot of my writings — is we have to create a non-reformist reformance. We are reform movement until revolution, but a non-reformance reform is the idea that you are going to reform an institution by not making it stronger. Non-reformance reform is something like, you know, take a half of the police budget and give it towards schools — not reform that would actually enhance the police. It’s like body cameras, right?
We’re not interested in giving more money to law enforcement to do a job that is about harming and violated communities. We’re interested in taking away that power so that we can put power into places that will empower our communities.
- Angela Davis has been a leader in the prison abolition movement, and in a recent interview with Democracy Now!, lent her own perspective in this critical moment:
The call to defund the police is, I think, an abolitionist demand, but it reflects only one aspect of the process represented by the demand. Defunding the police is not simply about withdrawing funding for law enforcement and doing nothing else… It’s about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions — mental health counselors, who can respond to people who are in crisis without arms. It’s about shifting funding to education, to housing, to recreation. All of these things help to create security and safety. It’s about learning that safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety.
And I would say that abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but it’s about reenvisioning. It’s about building anew. And I would argue that abolition is a feminist strategy. And one sees in these abolitionist demands that are emerging the pivotal influence of feminist theories and practices.
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