In the weeks since the murder of George Floyd tore the lid off the long simmering discontent with the way we police ourselves, one term has been gaining significant traction and by virtue of its pithy concise framing has become the rallying cry in city after city across the nation. From sea to shining sea, the people, in significant numbers have raised their voices to cry out, "Defund the police!" and this is no idle demand, nor the anarchistic slogan feared by its opponents. As is my wont, I waited to acquaint myself with the topic in greater detail before giving voice to my opinion, believing that so significant a subject is worthy of deep consideration and that it were better to offer no words in place of hasty or ill-thought ideas. Whether the time was well spent or ill is not for me to say, but suffice to say that I have sought to see the subject from different angles and deal with it accordingly.
The problem with all slogans in a world with short attention span and even less appetite for nuance is that they convey a wealth of meaning. Defunding the police, as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez so eloquently explained, is not abolishing the police, but rather restoring to our police the duties it was created to fulfill and removing the many tasks assigned to them by resource-starved cities and towns. This is an important matter to remember and one that I will return to discuss in a minute. The idea behind the slogan is not wholly misplaced, though opinion is somewhat divided on which services should be pulled from the police and assigned elsewhere.
The funding issue is the first question that must be addressed. Whenever cities or towns face a budget shortfall, the gap is closed by defunding some of the social services. Police unions (ironically the one type of union on which the traditional political positions of GOP and Democrats are flipped) not only guard their budgets zealously, but in modern America, no politician is willing to be "soft" on crime by slashing the police department. Cutting funds for libraries or community centers, after-school programs or prisoner rehabilitation are easier sells, rarely debated too long, easy to pass public muster and quickly forgotten. Even when budgets recover, the money rarely flows back to the defunded programs. The default agency left to deal with myriad problems from stray critters to truant children are then the police and it is worth noting that their funding is not increased to cover the additional workload. American police already receive shorter training than their counterparts in many developed countries, and they are now tasked with far more roles, roles that they have not been trained to tackle.
This is actually not in the interests of the police, and while the "defund" tag has posited them as antagonists in this discussion, it would actually be far more in their own interests and the public's if they were to team up with the defunding proponents to find a better solution to the problems in our cities. As Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez explained, the suburbs already enjoy the sort of policing that would result if cities "defunded" their police force, i.e. assigned the many services not suited to law enforcement officers to people trained to fulfill those roles. And more importantly, it would assign those alternate agencies the funding needed to actually perform their duties. Imagine an effective crime prevention program in place of arresting and incarcerating thousands of youth. Imagine after school programs that helped kids tap into their talents and follow their dreams instead of curfews and harassment that provide no solution. Imagine positive action and positive role models in place of fear and confrontation.
The police are not, I believe, inherently racist. The policemen who stood by as George Floyd was murdered included an Asian American; Black policemen have acted as rough with Black men as their peers. Police have killed white people, albeit at a lower percentage, but nevertheless the color of skin does not protect a person from harsh police action. The police are simply a reflection of the world they come from, and in that world racism and classim are closely entwined and institutionalized. Our society was designed to keep Black people down; it was really designed to keep various groups suppressed at different points - Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese - but the Blacks were the one group that couldn't cross the divide. They were too large a minority and too heavily targeted, in far too many places and ways to break through as a whole. And that is why Black people in middle class neighborhoods attract suspicion. For far too many of us, the idea of a successful Black person - a Michelle Obama or Kamala Harris - is more than we can comfortably fathom and so we react negatively, aggressively challenging their right to be in "our" neighborhoods even to the point, increasingly, of summoning our police to remove their interlopers. Note that these are not cases of police racism, and that more often than not the police react with far greater wisdom than the complainants. Our police, like our society as a whole, is classist rather than straight up racist. And we have a very set idea on what a poor person must look like, and a corresponding idea of where a Black person fits on that economic scale - the high overlap in those two images is why so many interactions between police and Black people are negative.
In our society today, a poor man is in the wrong, because to start with he's poor only because he's lazy and refuses to work - that is the primary lie we tell ourselves to explain away the privileges we have set in place for ourselves; being so deficient in character, it follows then that poor people simply want to steal our wealth and so we can justify harsh police action, without proof. And we have created police to protect the privilege of the rich against any attempts by the poor to raise themselves. Privilege is very real, and it's why a dark-skinned Indian like I have less to fear than a Black person - Indians have been permitted into the good place, people do not question my presence in upscale neighborhoods and the worst stereotyping I face is the assumption that I work in IT. It's why police begin by assuming the worst of poorer people and why they act with so much violence towards them; the decades, centuries of oppression have ensured that the poor and Black people are often the same group. Eric Garner was selling cigarettes on a street when he was accosted and murdered by the police; I never saw police even bother the college kids hustling tickets in downtown State College PA on gameday. Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun in a park when he was murdered (whether the policeman shouted at him to put the gun down is irrelevant) while white men parade in Texas with rifles - the difference is that they are obviously middle class jerks. It's why Daniel Shaver, a blue collar pest control technician was murdered by police in a Mesa La Quinta but armed protesters can march into the Michigan congressional buildings without fear.
It's why we have to right fund our cities and government services. It's not about defunding police, it's about assigning resources to agencies that can do a better job because they are trained for those situations. It's about no longer having police handcuff eight year old kids because that's the only way they are trained to react (I suppose we should be glad that they did not taser the kid!) or have police threaten a victim of domestic violence with arrest for not inviting them into her home without a warrant - that footage, from the now discontinued show "Cops" shows everything that is wrong with our police services, I believe. The victim and the alleged perpetrator were white, but clearly lower middle class at best. The policeman requested to enter after a 911 call about a wife beating, but the woman wouldn't let him in; he ended up dragging her out and threatening to arrest her. There was no one to help the victim, but plenty of police with enough weaponry to re-enact Kitchner's slaughter of the dervishes, and that is why we need to change the way we fund our city government. Heavily armed police do not reduce crime; more officers with more interaction with communities they police may help, but only if they walk the streets and know the people. Instead the police are now an alien force, serving the privileged and not considered a part of the lower classes of society. We have to change that and for a simple reason - we have tried it the other way and it has failed so clearly it's time to try something new.
