Significant amounts of public resources go toward police, yet more policing does not always make a community safer, particularly when considering economically disadvantaged black and brown communities. Other forms of public spending could increase safety more effectively while also creating a more equitable society.
While abolitionists seek to transform society by ending policing, recalibrationists seek to transform it by altering police responsibilities. Those changes can occur through reductions in funding to police. In so doing, the legislation could reduce police violence by reducing the incidence of police responding to people in mental health crises.
This reform would explicitly defund the police. The funding for this mental health services system would be appropriated from the Chicago Police Department budget, including its overtime budget. Significantly, the public health initiative would not be housed in the police department or any other criminal justice arm of the government, even if the police budget provides funds for it. Weill-Greenberg, supra note In effect, the reform would narrow the scope of what Chicagoans expect police officers to do in their city.
Like abolitionists, policymakers urging recalibration-oriented defunding reforms are deeply concerned with structural marginalization. As an example, the lack of mental health services in Chicago has disproportionately affected race- and class-marginalized populations. Louis U. Thus, the distinction between the first and second meanings of defunding the police is nuanced. Both seek to build alternative ways to ensure safety in communities, yet recalibrationists seek to explicitly change police organizations as well.
Because abolitionists envision a long-term end to policing, such transformations are, at best, a side effect. For recalibrationists, the effect on policing is the point. From the recalibration perspective, to defund the police can be a first step toward foundationally transforming police, which can in turn transform society, too.
Defunding the police could also fit within the managerialist idea that we need to reprioritize allocation of our constrained public resources to better shape the behavior of police departments and individual police officers.
That police lack accountability is a well-established problem in legal and policy circles. Managerialists suggest that funding can be the lever to create needed police accountability. Shelley Hyland, U. This tracks the observation that policing remains a mostly local matter. Rachel A. Policies that fit within this interpretation of defunding the police are rarely described as such, though they surely could have that effect.
Order No. Similarly, two congressional bills introduced in the summer of seek to incentivize chokehold regulation at the state and local level by withholding federal funds from law enforcement agencies that refuse to take action.
While local police departments are largely funded by local taxes, federal funding has expanded in recent decades. Reaves, U. That police departments can reclaim their status for federal funding does not negate the fact that the law could reduce or withdraw funding from police departments. The point of funding reform is not to change society, but to make police better at the existing panoply of tasks society expects them to do. That is, the central purpose of this kind of defunding would be to control individual officers through systemic reforms.
But it is not the central purpose. Thus, proponents of the managerialist frame are more likely to speak of individual bias and discretion. And they are more likely to consider structural forces that subordinate racial minorities to be beyond the reach of police reforms. So while there is nothing wrong per se with police lawfulness or efficiency or the intersection between the two, this oversight perspective creates a foundation for lawmakers and policymakers to embrace reforms that obscure and entrench structural inequality enforced through criminal law—a foundation that those adhering to the first and second meanings seek to contest.
Compare Chettiar et al. Finally, defunding the police could relate to the idea that resources are scarce in the public sector, so all government agencies have a responsibility to tighten their belts. Whether this is a good or bad thing has been debated. For critiques of this trend as contrary to efforts to address mass incarceration, see Jessica M.
Under this interpretation, defunding the police is just that—an effort to reduce government spending in the area of criminal administration without any commitment to changes in practices and policies.
In the face of severe financial deficits brought on by the COVID pandemic and its effect on the economy, Mayor Bill de Blasio set out to reduce police funding as early as April This fiscal-constraint interpretation of defunding the police likely conflicts with efforts to address structural marginalization as such reforms tend to entrench the marginalizing structures.
Times Sept. Online Indeed, budget constraints have been the catalyst for numerous reforms that exacerbate structural marginalization. For example, a fiscal-constraints orientation can facilitate the expansion of proprietary, data-driven technology to allow police to continue proactive policing at a lower cost while avoiding critical engagement with whether the practice should continue at all.
Jacobs, The Eternal Criminal Record For an insightful explanation of the racially discriminatory implications of the creation and expanding use of criminal records outside the criminal justice system, see Eisha Jain, The Mark of Policing , 73 Stan. Bell, Anti-Segregation Policing , 95 N. The third and fourth interpretations are similar in important respects. Like managerialists, cost-reductionists may not consider themselves to be defunding the police. Rather, both envision themselves as embracing principles of good management.
Both focus narrowly, emphasizing the allocation of money within police budgets. Both are committed to actively funding police departments rather than intentionally removing funding from their budgets. In this sense, managerialists and cost-reductionists are both a world away from abolitionists and recalibrationists. However, managerialists and cost-reductionists diverge in one very important way. It would destroy America!
Even as Trump and Republicans were working to make "defund the police" a national issue Joe Biden had made clear he did not favor defunding , the Minnesota politicians who were at the forefront of the "defund" movement were beginning to back off in the face of rising crime in the city. As Minnesota Public Radio reported in September More people have been killed in the city in the first nine months of than were slain in all of last year. Property crimes, like burglaries and auto thefts, are also up.
Incidents of arson have increased 55 percent over the total at this point in After several fits and starts, Question 2 was added to the ballot. Among its provisions was replacing the Minnesota police department with a department of public safety, getting rid of language that requires a minimum number of police officers to be employed by the city and forcing the mayor to win the city council's support for someone to run the new department. While the vote was expected to be quite close, it was, in fact, not.
As CNN wrote of the results :. Opponents of calls to "defund the police" will point to the vote as fresh evidence that the backlash to police abuse that fueled last year's protests, which followed the killing of Floyd by then-Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Talk of curbing police departments by cutting or limiting their resources has run into a countervailing wall of concern over public safety and waning support from early allies -- including leading Democrats who largely view it as political poison.
The question now for Democrats is whether they totally abandon efforts to remake policing in this country. He gave a speech on June 23 that was largely about guns. But he leads a national party that is largely incapable of seriously grappling with a problem that requires resisting the years-long intellectual and political campaign to delegitimize law enforcement and the criminal justice system. You know why? The left wing of his party is driving the car and Biden is just sitting in the backseat, going along for the ride.
But Democrats may want to start talking about the things that make them uncomfortable — if for no other reason than that the midterm elections are just over the horizon. Rising crime has become a major political issue in America, an issue that could cause Democrats a lot of harm. People care about their safety. They care about it a lot. But they just might blame Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
And nothing focuses the attention of a politician more than the prospect of losing the next election.
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