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This image from the US Census Bureau identifies general expenditures from 2017 and where police funding falls with the spending. Police funding represents less than 5% of the expenditures. Proponents of defunding suggest that this funding should be reallocated to to support education and public services. These departments already see more than double the funding that Police do.

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This article presents several alternatives of where to start when it comes to police reform. Instead of defunding, we should start with looking into alternative legal reforms that impact police budgets, such as "structural marginalization of black people". The article then encourages the public to use this state of confusion that we are all facing in the demand for police defunding to consider alternative social reforms instead.

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Abstract. Much public debate circles around grassroots activists' demand to "defund the police," raised in public consciousness in the summer of 2020. Yet confusion about the demand is pervasive. This Essay adopts a literal interpretation of "defund" to clarify and distinguish four alternative, substantive policy positions that legal reforms related to police funding can validate. It argues that the policy debates between these positions exist on top of the ideological critique launched by grassroots activists, who use the term "defund the police" as a discursive tactic to make visible deeper transformations in government practices that normalize the structural marginalization of black people enforced through criminal law. By recognizing this socially contextualized meaning to the call to defund the police, this Essay offers two important insights for the public in this current moment. First, it urges the public to confront the structural marginalization of black people when evaluating legal reforms that may impact police budgets. Second, the Essay encourages the public to embrace the state of confusion produced by the demand to "defund the police" when considering social reforms going forward.

Introduction

But what does that mean? As a public-policy demand, the position is controversial. Pundits and politicians from both sides of the aisle have dismissed the demand outright. At the same time, the demand emerges during a pivotal moment when people from across the political spectrum are expressing interest in advancing criminal legal reforms-including to policing-although to very different ends. Unsurprisingly, even as they express discomfort with the term "defund the police," policymakers are proposing reforms that will, in effect, reduce funding to the police. Yet, because the demand to defund the police has emerged as a political lightning-rod, there is real confusion about how to interpret the significance of such reforms. Further, public debates have yet to fully explain why this demand, as a mode of discourse, is so controversial in this historical moment.

This Essay seeks to clear the air and thus to facilitate public discourse. It adopts a literal interpretation of defunding to clarify and distinguish four alternative, substantive policy positions that legal reforms related to police funding can validate. It argues that the policy debates between these positions exist on top of the ideological critique launched by grassroots activists, who use the term "defund the police" as a discursive tactic to make visible deeper transformations in government practices that normalize the structural marginalization of black people enforced through criminal law. In recognizing this socially contextualized meaning of the call to defund the police, this Essay offers two important insights. First, it emphasizes that the place to start when evaluating legal reforms that may impact police budgets is not with matters of funding or policing; rather it is with the structural marginalization of black people we have all been conditioned not to question. Second, the Essay encourages the public to embrace the state of confusion produced by the demand to defund the police when considering social reforms going forward.

The Essay proceeds in two parts. Part I offers a typology of legal reforms that substantiate four different ways to conceptualize the act of defunding the police in this moment. To defund the police can refer to a long-term policy aim to abolish the police, to recalibrate what police do in society, to create accountability measures through conditional funding, or simply to save government resources. Though these four interpretations of defunding are not mutually exclusive, Part I brings to light the significant implications each meaning carries for structurally marginalized race- and class-vulnerable people. Part II situates grassroots activists' demand to defund the police in social and historical context, so as to disentangle critiques of the demand as a discourse from debates between the policy positions described in Part I. It argues that the controversy around the call to defund the police derives in part from the substantive demand of grassroots activists to confront the structural marginalization of race- and class-vulnerable populations enforced through criminal law. The controversy also generates from grassroots activists' attempt to claim epistemic power over two concepts-policing and defunding-that legitimate changes in government practice and make structural marginalization appear beyond redress. Ultimately, this Essay encourages the public to see the demand to defund the police as socially constructed. It emphasizes that the state of confusion the demand creates opens space for us all to imagine different futures.

I. A Typology of "Defunding" Police Reforms

"Defund" is a transitive verb that means "to withdraw funding from" or "to withdraw financial support from." In the context of U.S. practices, to defund colloquially refers to either a reduction in, or the elimination of, funding. It is important to understand the literal meaning of the word because much public debate turns on social interpretations of the word in the context of policing. As Part II discusses in more detail, grassroots activists' demand to "defund the police" in 2020 in response to police killings of unarmed black women and men has a particular, contextualized meaning. To fully appreciate that meaning, we must disentangle it from the ongoing policy debates surrounding legal reforms that impact police budgets. This Part situates the literal act of defunding the police within four different policy positions about policing. It identifies different legal reform proposals that substantiate each of those positions. This Part moves from positions most willing to engage with structural marginalization enforced through criminal law to those least concerned with that reality.

A. Police Abolition

Abolitionists challenge the idea that imprisonment and policing are a solution for social, political, and economic problems in the United States. They believe that after years of trying to "reform" the police, reform efforts are doomed to fail. Abolitionists emphasize that the police are an institution designed to surveil and control marginalized populations, particularly black people. Accordingly, the aim should be abolishing the police and other arms of the "prison industrial complex" in order to reimagine public safety. The abolitionist project is both pragmatic-for example, reducing police presence should also reduce police killings-and existential-in that it reflects a long-term goal of replacing police with alternative means of ensuring safety.

When abolitionists talk about responding to police violence, they often point to the Illinois Reparations for Police Torture Victims Act drafted by survivors and activists in response to the heinous acts of torture by the Chicago Police Department under the leadership of the late Jon Burge. Passed in May 2015, this legislation provides non-financial reparations for survivors and their families, including an official apology, free psychological counseling, free education at the City Colleges, and job training; it mandates that public schools teach about the torture in eighth- and tenth-grade curriculums; and it approves creation of a permanent memorial in the city. In addition, the City of Chicago set aside $5.5 million to financially compensate living survivors of the torture.

The ordinance did not directly defund the police, yet the funding for the reparations ordinance did not derive from the coffer of money set aside by the city to cover police liability cases either. In Chicago, that coffer is set aside in the police budget to fund civil lawsuits that the City anticipates will result from police misconduct each year. The funding for the ordinance, in contrast, requires the city to pay torture victims with general taxpayer dollars. Regardless of whether the reparation ordinance deters police from engaging in wrongful behavior in the future, both its financial and non-financial conditions require the City of Chicago to invest in the futures of the marginalized communities most impacted by police violence. In effect, then, the reparation legislation requires the city to allocate taxpayer dollars otherwise available for the city to spend on policing and instead increase funding for alternative ways to connect and understand one another.

From the abolitionist perspective, defunding the police is a first step toward abolishing the police. It is a demand to enact "nonreformist reforms" of the police, by beginning to divest from police and from the expanding carceral state. Importantly, abolitionists neither seek to eliminate police tomorrow nor to exist in a world without replacements. Rather, they seek to create ways to connect that are sensitive to the needs of the most marginalized in society, particularly intersectionally vulnerable black people. In the long term, such a world would not include police, in any form or for any function. Defunding the police moves society in that direction.

B. Police Recalibration

To defund the police can also mean supporting the idea that we need to reprioritize existing public resources to create healthier communities. 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.

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. Thus, the police budget would provide city funding to supplement the mental health services currently provided in large part at the Cook County jail. This approach would directly impact police functions as well. In effect, the reform would narrow the scope of what Chicagoans expect police officers to do in their city.

Thus, the distinction between the first and second meanings of defunding the police is nuanced. While abolitionists may consider Rodriguez Sanchez's proposed legislation to be part of their agenda, recalibrationists would not consider the abolitionist-oriented reparations ordinance to be part of their agenda. 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.

C. Police Oversight

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. By attaching funding to technocratic metrics that measure lawful or effective policing, managerialists aim to "use the power of the purse" to shift policing practices. While incentivizing adherence to such metrics need not lead to reductions in funding to police departments, managerialists suggest that it could. In this sense, the manipulation of success measurements may reduce currently guaranteed funding to state and local police departments while incentivizing different department-wide, systemic policing policies.

Policies that fit within this interpretation of defunding the police are rarely described as such, though they surely could have that effect. As an example, in June 2020, then-President Donald Trump promulgated Executive Order 13929, requiring police departments to adopt "use-of-force policies [that] prohibit the use of chokeholds . . . except in those situations where the use of deadly force is allowed by law" in order to receive a certification that allows access to federal grant money. At the time, most state governments and localities did not regulate police chokeholds. In effect, then, Trump's single act could have eliminated federal funding for the majority of police departments across the country. Similarly, two congressional bills introduced in the summer of 2020 seek to incentivize chokehold regulation at the state and local level by withholding federal funds from law enforcement agencies that refuse to take action.

Should either of these bills pass, it would have the same effect as Trump's executive order-conditioning funding upon enactment of specific police policies. While local police departments are largely funded by local taxes, federal funding has expanded in recent decades. The possible reduction of federal funding to a state or municipality is significant. States and localities will change-and have changed-their policies to maintain federal funding. 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.

Unlike the first or second interpretations, the managerial or oversight interpretation of "defunding" is oriented around the lawfulness or effectiveness of the police. 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. If manipulating funding streams reduces the significance of structural marginalization, that is a welcome side-effect of the reform. 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.

D. Fiscal Constraints

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. The primary aim is reducing costs, not transforming policing institutions, though fiscal-constraint-type reforms tend to have that effect as well. 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.

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. While managerialists are concerned with shaping individual officers' behavior through systemic reforms, cost-reductionists are preoccupied with savings. Any influence that the cost-cutting measures have on systemic practices, such as increased efficiency in police work or alterations in persistent officer conduct, is a welcome benefit. But it is not the primary aim.

II. "Defund the Police" as Discourse

To "defund" is a plastic and malleable term in the context of policing. Each of the above reforms could literally defund the police, yet only some of these reforms fit within the frame of grassroots activists' demand to "defund the police" in this moment. That many would not interpret some of these reforms as defunding the police illuminates the simple point that the meaning of "defund the police" is socially and historically situated. Thus, when considering whether and what kinds of legal reforms can satisfy the demand in this moment, we must begin by understanding both what the demand means in social context, and why the demand is politically and historically significant. As this Part points out, the demand to defund the police emerged as part of a critique of the structural marginalization of race- and class-vulnerable people and its enforcement through criminal law. Because activists use words central to the historical shift in government practices as the means to critique that marginalization, the entire discourse challenges existing worldviews. The intersection of this discursive critique with debates about police reform creates genuine confusion.

Discursively, the social meaning of "defund the police" emerges from "[o]ne of the most contested planks" of the Black Lives Matter movement: the call to "invest/divest." According to the Movement for Black Lives' policy platform, this means "investments in Black communities, determined by Black communities, and divestment from exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police, surveillance and exploitative corporations." In recent years, the "invest/divest" demand has morphed into the demand to "defund the police." In the wake of George Floyd's death on May 25, 2020, "defund the police" emerged as a new slogan among protestors of police brutality alongside the slogan "Black Lives Matter." As activist and law professor Justin Hansford explains, the call to defund the police developed not only as a symbolic call to affirm black lives, but "a substantive slogan that includes the [policy] proposal" for how to do it.

Thus, the social meaning of defunding the police embeds a critique of the historical transformation in government logic. The demand to divest and invest is a demand to address structural marginalization, which in turn illuminates its disproportionate concentration among black people. Treating police violence as a symptom makes the racialized nature of structural marginalization visible. So, to the extent that public discourse orients around what to do about policing, it is too narrow in scope. The place to start is with the structural marginalization of black people that we all have been conditioned not to question. From this perspective, disagreements between abolitionists and recalibrationists, while important as an academic matter, are less significant as a policy matter in this moment. One can support reforms that would directly redress the structural marginalization of black people through criminal law without demanding total police abolition.

But even this insight does not resolve the controversy surrounding the phrase "defund the police," because the fact that the demand is so controversial requires deeper analysis. That, as a discourse, to defund the police is jarringly confusing illuminates the epistemological implications of neoliberalism. Government did not simply change; we changed it by thinking differently and accepting different concepts as logical and beyond question. Two central concepts that changed are policing and defunding, which operate not only as things or acts, but as sub-worldviews that sustain neoliberalism. As a discourse, the call to "defund the police" destabilizes these concepts. It demands that we engage with worldviews we are all trained not to see, let alone question.

Start with policing. That the demand to defund the police challenges our worldview about policing is quite obvious, but bears explaining. Police offer "an interpretive lens through which people make sense of, and give order to, their world." This ontological commitment emerges from a way of thinking that suggests the place where government should exist-the thing it is good for-is first and foremost criminal law enforcement. This worldview has influenced politics and social policy in numerous ways, in part by driving politicians and policymakers to frame social issues as crime issues. That is, we came to see the world through policing. It emerged as the last place to critique and the first place to invest local finances.

The term also challenges our assumptions about defunding and the government. In the United States, we similarly ascribe an interpretive lens to the demand to defund. The concept has deep roots in efforts to transform the welfare state in the United States since the 1970s. By 1982, the term was commonplace in news and media debates about "liberal causes" ranging from abortions, to education, to unionism, and more. In law-and-policy parlance, then, to defund means to destroy, specifically in the public sector. The connotation is negative and exclusionary. It suggests an absence of government resources and, more precisely, an absence of government all together. That is, to defund has been a political tool to increasingly subject the U.S. population to market forces. It is the embodiment of neoliberalism.

The real controversy around defunding the police, then, arises not just from the demand that we address structural marginalization; it arises also from the demand that we suspend the assumed meaning of both concepts to interrogate policies without a preconceived notion about their meaning. As a discourse, to defund the police creates the space to politically and normatively question the status quo. These words challenge power where force ends-in our minds. Without a doubt, we should expect deep resistance, which the public is demonstrating in droves. For example, mainstream media publishes vehement critiques of the call to "defund the police." Public polling suggests significant ambivalence toward "defunding the police," but receptiveness to investing some money in programs other than policing. Policy advocates from across the political spectrum hesitate to embrace the phrase even if they support reforms that may reduce police presence. These facts suggest that the substance of more structural critiques in this moment has gained some public support. But the demand for power over the words that shape dominant worldviews has not.

Yet this Essay goes further by encouraging the public to embrace the uncomfortable space where we cannot rely on preconceived ideas when interrogating social reforms in this historical moment. By illuminating how diverging interpretations of defunding can lead to different legal reforms, this Essay demonstrates that the very notion of defunding the police is socially and politically constructed-it is a concept that acquires meaning through social and historical interpretation. This insight should remind us that local funding to the police is a distributive project shaped by independently constructed concepts, and that those concepts can obscure normative and political questions about the kind of society in which we want to live. Seeing the concepts as constructed rather than naturally occurring creates the space to engage with those deeper questions. It denaturalizes our understanding of this present. As such, embracing the state of confusion the demand produces is an important component in thinking about the transformative project of imagining different, more inclusive futures going forward.

Conclusion: Why "Defund the Police"?

To defund the police can mean many things. As a substantive policy, it provides a path to abolition for some, and a path to police transformation for others. For still others, it provides a pathway to continue transforming governance by making police more effective or, at least, by saving constrained public resources. This Essay illuminates how these substantive meanings of defunding reforms can challenge or entrench structural marginalization. It asks that we remember that the place to start in thinking about reforms in this moment is, quite simply, structural marginalization, not policing or defunding.

Yet, as a matter of discourse, the term "defund the police," also means something else entirely. This Essay illuminates how and why the demand to defund the police challenges existing worldviews. That public discourse even debates the question, "why 'defund the police'?" signals the possibilities this challenge presents. To those activists on the ground demanding that the public should critically reflect on the assumptions that shape this present, thank you. To the protestors that took to the streets during the summer of 2020 in the midst of a pandemic to demand that these questions would not be ignored, thank you. This Essay invites us all to see the expansive possibilities that the demand seeks to evoke going forward.

* Professor of Law, Indiana University Maurer School of Law. This Essay was written for the 2021 Policing, Race, and Power Symposium hosted by the Stanford Law Review and the Stanford Black Law Students Association, and for the cross-journal Reckoning and Reformation Symposium. For helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay, the author thanks Trevor Gardner, Eisha Jain, Aaron Littman, Tracey Meares, Sunita Patel, Nirej Sekhon, and Aaron Tang.

The featured image " Minneapolis Police Officer in Squad Car - Shooting Crime Scene" by Tony Webster is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

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To 'Defund' the Police | Stanford Law Review

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Much public debate circles around grassroots activists' demand to "defund the police," raised in public consciousness in the summer of 2020. Yet confusion about the demand is pervasive. This Essay adopts a literal interpretation of "defund" to clarify and distinguish four alternative, substantive policy positions that legal reforms related to police funding can validate.

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This article, from the New York Times, examines different view points on what needs to happen to rebuild trust among Police Departments and the citizens. It is an open dialogue among a group of activists, police personnel, politicians and academics to discuss what it means when people talk about police reform and defunding the police. They also discuss some of the problems that could occur with specific types of police reform, or even a lack of reform.

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DealBook D.C. Policy Project

A group of police chiefs, activists and policymakers gathered to debate how to reform law enforcement in America in a time of unrest and upheaval.

Credit... Illustration by John Gall; Photographs by The New York Times

In a year of near universal upheaval brought on by the global spread of a new disease, Americans also confronted a crisis that has long plagued the nation: racism and its brutal manifestations in policing.

The May 25 killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, who crushed the breath out of him for more than eight minutes, called attention to official violence, again. Police brutality has been caught on camera before, but amid the frustrations of a pandemic and mass unemployment, the outrage sparked mass protests across the country - and reverberated around the world.

The topic of police reform became a matter of popular debate, with one phrase in particular inflaming passions. As part of the DealBook D.C. Policy Project, The New York Times convened activists, academics, law enforcement officials and politicians to discuss public safety, racism and the different things people mean when they say " defund the police."
The participants:

Carmen Best, former chief of police for Seattle

Justin Blake, founder of Black Underground Recycling and uncle of Jacob Blake

Cat Brooks, activist and former Oakland, Calif., mayoral candidate

James E. Craig, chief of police for Detroit

Brandon Dasent, activist and Parkland shooting survivor

Katherine Levine Einstein, associate professor at Boston University

Quinton Lucas, mayor of Kansas City, Mo.

Chris Magnus, chief of police for Tucson, Ariz.

Rod Rosenstein, partner at King & Spalding and former deputy attorney general

Moderated by John Eligon, The Times's national correspondent covering race

A striking - and strikingly common - theme emerged from formative encounters with the police.
To begin, each panelist described a personal meeting with police that proved influential in their lives. Notably, the police chiefs all recalled formative injustices that would shape their work, revealing a kinship with the activists who are working to change their profession.

Chris Magnus, Tucson's police chief, was a teenage activist supporting a farm union boycott at a grocery store when he was handcuffed and put in the back of a police car, although store workers had physically threatened the boycotters. "It left me with a very bad taste," Mr. Magnus said. "It caused me to think how I really wanted to treat people differently. And it had an influence, that's for sure."

Carmen Best, Seattle's retired police chief, saw a family member handcuffed and arrested at home when she was a teenager. "It was pretty shocking," she said. "So that was my first encounter and certainly made me think about, you know, my place in the world and how we are viewed when we interact with police."

Detroit's police chief, James Craig, has spent more than four decades in law enforcement, but his first weeks on the beat in 1977 were not auspicious:
"What I was met with was my partner, who probably was a 25-year-plus veteran, who was white. He says, 'You're not gonna drive this police car. You sit over there. Don't talk to me. Don't touch the radio. I don't want you here. All you need to do is just sit there and be Black.' That was my welcome to Detroit Police Department and I thought, this is absolutely not something I wanted to do."

For the activist Justin Blake, who had been a college athlete, a chance meeting with police after a party his freshman year turned violent and changed the trajectory of his life. He was beaten and arrested, and spent the next year and a half fighting felony charges while nursing injuries. "That would have put us in jail for 45 years if we lost the case," he said. "It was a big dent in our football career."

Similarly, the activist Cat Brooks discovered her calling as a young woman after an arrest. Her white ex-husband beat her but Ms. Brooks, who is Black, ended up in jail. The experience informs her quest to find "the places in our communities where we can disentangle ourselves from law enforcement, where we have community care and response to community crisis, as opposed to a badge and a gun."

"Defund the police" means different things to different people.
The participants also provided their perspective on the contentious phrase "defund the police."

The former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, now in private practice, noted that "people mean different things" when they use the term "defunding," not all of which he saw as viable options:
"I think abolishing is not practical. Because there's, you know, there's violence that needs to be addressed. You need law enforcement. But I think maybe refunding, you're focusing on where the money is spent and how it's spent."
Chief Craig supported that contention, arguing that a tailored approach that meets the needs of each community is the most appropriate:
"There tends to be the sweeping one-size-fits-all 'defund the police.' Where's that coming from? As a municipal police department, who do we work for? We work for the community. What does that community want? I can tell you very candidly, here in Detroit, people, especially in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in our city, do not - absolutely do not - want defunding of the police."

The Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas said the "defund" discussion problematically centered debate around police, instead of prioritizing related investments, like mental health services that divert arrestees from jail to treatment. The conversation then becomes about whether police should even exist, when that's not at issue, in his view. "I think what we're trying to say is there was a lot more stuff we should be doing, and recognizing that there are finite dollars in a budget," he said.

Brandon Dasent, who survived the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., suggested that the term "reallocation of funds" might be less daunting than "defunding." Based on his experience, generous police budgets that buy tanks and assault rifles don't save lives. He lost friends and teachers to a lone teenage gunman. "So all of this gear, all this equipment, all this funding, for pretty much nothing," he said.

But Ms. Best had limited patience with the talk about words. Whatever vocabulary people choose to use, the time has come to do something, she said.
"Whether it's defund or divest or reinvest or refund or whatever the terminology is - those things are all very fine. Those are part of the discussion. But what, succinctly, is the plan to move it forward?"

Ms. Brooks answered by warning against thinking small, and instead called for a total cultural overhaul:

"We're talking about the elimination of patriarchy. We're talking about the elimination of race capitalism. We're talking about a complete transformation about how our society lives, breathes and moves, and that's what I'd be looking for. "
Progress requires confronting uncomfortable truths.
Slavery has shaped American policing, and ignorance of U.S. history hinders reform, Chief Magnus noted. (Policing arose from early slave patrols.) He added:
"They take it very personally when someone says police are racist or when they even hear the term 'systemic racism.' But part of the problem is they haven't gotten any education about the history of policing. And they don't realize what the role of police were, going back as oppressors, and how that carries over even into the modern day."

Mr. Blake said this history tainted every aspect of African-American lives. But he believes there is a way forward by investing in communities - he called poverty "the elephant in the room" - and changing aspects of policing:
"Just like our Constitution has a lot of things wrong with it, we believe some changes can be made to preserve what we have instead of imploding and trying to build anew. So, for instance, some of the times when there's family issues, street issues, mental health issues, we should not be calling our police force to respond to that."
Jails and prisons are packed with people who need counseling and treatment: By some estimates, about 40 percent of prisoners are mentally ill. The United States imprisons more people per capita than any other country, and Black people are five times more likely than white people to be stopped by the police, which makes mass incarceration a race problem.

Police and activists all called for alternatives to arrest, and Ms. Brooks noted that in Oakland, counselors already field calls that once went to the police. The Boston University political scientist Katherine Levine Einstein was heartened by their message:
"I think dialogue is like this really important first step. But all too often in our local communities, that's where we stop. Like OK, we had the dialogue. Now, we're good. We talked to each other. I'm really enthusiastic hearing about these ideas about bringing social workers on to police forces, having more mental health professionals."
But the police chiefs also warned that counselors could not necessarily help in every dangerous situation that officers faced. And Ms. Best cautioned against blame and oversimplification:
"We have to recognize that we haven't, as law enforcement, have not always been on the right side of history. But in recognizing it, I think we also need to acknowledge now the many advances that have been made either to reform processes, programs - like you mentioned, Katherine, dialogue and discussion and policies." Even constructive dialogue has limits
Ultimately, the discussion revealed the problems that reform efforts themselves face. Solutions exist. But with lives at risk, there's also frustration over incremental fixes.

An exchange between Ms. Brooks and Ms. Best highlighted the gap between participants who shared a desire for change. Both are Black women who cite systemic racism as the root cause of policing problems. They are impatient with the current situation. Yet, they are at odds.

"I feel like maybe we should have started here," Ms. Brooks said as the conversation ended. "We are talking about what some of us call genocide." Waiting any longer for meaningful change strikes her as dangerous, she said:
"We've given law enforcement an opportunity to address it. We've tried cultural competency training. We've tried, you've got to hire from the community. We've tried all these other things. What we are saying is that it is intense enough, it is bad enough, it is dire enough, is desperate enough. It is time. We are done with what we have been doing and we are clear that that does not work. And what we want is something radical, revolutionary and transformative, and we want it right now."
Also eager for change and ready to make it happen, Ms. Best responded with a plea: "What is it, Cat? What is it? That's the question I come up with."

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How to Reimagine Policing and Public Safety that Works for Everyone

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DealBook D.C. Policy Project A group of police chiefs, activists and policymakers gathered to debate how to reform law enforcement in America in a time of unrest and upheaval. In a year of near universal upheaval brought on by the global spread of a new disease, Americans also confronted a crisis that has long plagued the nation: racism and its brutal manifestations in policing.

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CBSN Documentaries presents an up close and personal look at the debate around defunding the police. Those in support of defunding the police discuss how they have been victimized by over-policing and police brutality. Those against defunding argue that it isn't just funding that helps create these issues, it is racism at the center of the problem. They argue that systemic racism needs to be eliminated from the police force, not money.

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"Defund the police" became a rallying cry during Black Lives Matter across the U.S. and around the world in the summer of 2020, following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others at the hands of police. But in the months since, how has the debate developed, and what does it mean for American communities?

A new documentary from CBSN Originals features voices on different sides of the issue to help shed light on the movement and the future of policing.

Different definitions of "defund"

"Defund the police means many things to many people," said Arjun Singh Sethi, adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law School.

At its most basic, "defund the police" means reallocating money from policing to other agencies funded by local municipalities. Advocates are split on the question of how far it should go: whether to reduce funding and reform some aspects of policing, or completely abolish police forces as we know them.

The movement has grown out of anger at police violence disproportionately targeting Black Americans, and a long history of unequal treatment in the criminal justice system. Statistics show that Black people in the U.S. are imprisoned at five times the rate of Whites, and are three times more likely to be killed by police.

"The Black community is over-policed for minor infractions that would draw virtually no attention anywhere else," Gary Potter, a criminology professor at Eastern Kentucky University who has written about the history of policing in America, told CBS News last summer.

Police departments, and their budgets, are overseen by local governments; there are about 800,000 police in the U.S. in varied roles from city street patrol officers to specialized units like school police. Dozens of police departments have spoken out against defunding, with some police chiefs saying that reducing their budgets would be reckless.

Many reform advocates argue police departments are overburdened, and that other agencies would be better equipped to deal with civil matters like mental health and homelessness.

"I think at the core of the defunding movement is the idea that we want to take money out of city and local budgets that has traditionally been devoted to paying for police services, and to redirect it [to] better housing for low-income people, better schools, better mental health treatments," Harvard Law professor John Goldberg told CBSN Originals.

Others say it will take more to solve deeply rooted problems in the system.

"What we were calling for wasn't simply just to reduce the budget of police, but to reduce the scope of policing," said Jawanza Willians, director of organizing at VOCAL-NY, a grassroots organization that works with people impacted by homelessness, incarceration and HIV/AIDS.

"[Defund] is about how do we radically transform, how we deal with issues in our society - because police and prisons for 200+ years haven't solved the problems of our society."

President Joe Biden has opposed defunding but supports police reform measures including more oversight and training, barring use of chokeholds, and increased funds for community policing and other initiatives. Those provisions and more were included in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House in early March.

Alternatives to calling the police

"I'm always questioning how money is spent," said New York City Councilmember Alicka Ampry-Samiel. "Just to use an example, in Brooklyn North, we spent about a million dollars in overtime on the [police] gang unit. But yet we still had a rise in gang activity.

"So what would it look like if we took that million dollars and gave it to the community-based organizations that address violence?" Ampry-Samuel said more funds for alternatives to policing are needed, especially when it comes to responding to homelessness and mental health crises.

The Treatment Advocacy Center estimated in 2015 that people with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during a police encounter than other civilians approached or stopped by law enforcement. A study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that from 2009-2012, one in five deaths involving lethal force by law enforcement were linked to the victim's mental health or substance-induced disruptive behaviors. Surveys by the National Alliance on Mental Illness have found that people in a mental health crisis are more likely to encounter police than to get medical attention, resulting in 2 million people jailed every year.

Between 2012 and 2020, police responded to at least 1.2 million mental health crisis calls in New York City alone. The NYPD is the largest police department in the nation, with a total budget of $10.9 billion in 2020.

"Police officers are called things that most people would never believe," NYPD Lieutenant Edwin Raymond told CBSN Originals. "Pretty much the day is usually emotionally disturbed persons, car accidents and medical emergencies."

Many of those types of incidents, he believes, could be handled without law enforcement.

"The thing is, when there's not an agency that already exists to deal with something, or if an existing agency is lacking personnel, or other types of resources, it's thrown at police," said Raymond.

There are a handful of pilot programs in communities across the U.S. that have attempted to reassign some of the responsibilities police are tasked with to other agencies. Most notably, in the case of mental health distress calls, there have been efforts to have social services respond. In Colorado, more than 55 law enforcement agencies participate in co-responder programs, pairing law enforcement and behavioral health specialists. Denver's program has grown from four co-responders to 32, although its services are still limited the central downtown area.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced plans for a similar pilot program in two neighborhoods. In July 2020, de Blasio and the city council approved cutting $1 billion from the NYPD, shifting $350 million to the Department of Education for school safety and $4.5 million to the Department of Homeless Services.

Minneapolis city council members endorsed the idea of disbanding the police department as protests erupted over the death of George Floyd, who was pinned down under an officer's knee. But six months later, the city opted not to cut police staffing, passing a budget that shifted about $8 million to violence prevention programs, mental health and other services in what Mayor Jacob Frey called a "both-and" approach to policing and public safety.

"A police officer will never walk away"

Some police proponents warn diminishing their role could be a risky move.

"We're talking about switching responsibilities from the police officer on the corner to other agencies," said Patrick Lynch, the president of the largest police officers' union, the New York City Police Benevolent Association. "Why were those responsibilities placed on the shoulder of the police officers in the first place?" He answered his own question: "Because those other agencies failed at their job, and a police officer will never walk away from a crime victim."

In situations arising from homelessness and mental illness, Lynch said he agrees in principle that the responsibility shouldn't be in the hands of police officers - but that no viable alternative currently exists.

"So to say you don't need police officers, OK, I don't agree. I think we do. We do in my neighborhood," he added. And he warned that major budget cuts could lead to a repeat of the 1970s, when "crime was out of control."

The backlash against defunding includes initiatives like one proposed by Texas state Senator Dawn Buckingham, who filed a bill that would withhold state grants from communities that cut their police budgets more than 5%.

In public opinion surveys, a majority of Americans seem convinced of the need for reform but don't support total defunding. A July 2020 Gallup poll found 58% of Americans - and 88% of Black Americans - agreed policing needs "major changes," and nearly half of those surveyed supported reducing police funding. But only 15% favored abolishing police departments in favor of different public safety models.

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"Defund the police" made headlines. What does it look like now?

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"Defund the police" became a rallying cry during Black Lives Matter across the U.S. and around the world in the summer of 2020, following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others at the hands of police. But in the months since, how has the debate developed, and what does it mean for American communities?

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This popular hashtag on Twitter is home to public posts and opinions on whey police defunding should or should not take place. Though many of the stories, whether for or against are likely to grab your attention, there are also many stories that are simply tagged with the hashtag to grab attention, regardless of the connection to the topic. The hashtag, much like many others is used as a sort of dumping ground for media outlets and everyday people alike to share stories, statistics, etc to support their view point. Recently, many of the tweets using this hashtag are pointing out the stat that in 2020 crime rates went down, data that shows survey results that the majoirty of people don't want to eliminate the police department, just restructure it. But there are also many stories that discuss the events surrounding the Met Gala and the police presence trying to eliminate protestors.

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Major Cities Looking at Measures of Defunding the Police

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Major Cities Looking at Measures of Defunding the Police

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National Police Support Fund has published this image on their website of 16 major cities that have pledged to consider measures to defund police. This does not mean that they are going to, but that they are looking into alternatives to funding the police department. NPSF represents themselves as the voice of true Americans that support law enforcement. They believe that with the consideration of these 16 cites, more cities could follow suit and it sets a dangerous precedent to other cities that may follow suit.

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This scholarly article presents an argument in support of defunding the police on the basis of immigrants being under attack by law enforcement officers, specifically ICE. Their argument focuses on the idea that abolishing
ICE and defunding the police would create more deliberate integration of youth and their families. It would make immigrant communities feel safe and would promote stability in other parts of the world.
parts of the world.

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This podcasts represents the debate around defunding the police. This podcasts references George Floyd and protests surrounding the debate. They discuss using the funds for social services instead.

Reimagining public policing with a debate between a Minneapolis City Councilman who voted to disband the city police department and retired Rochester, NY Police Department Deputy Chief Wayne Harris.

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Munk Debates Podcast Episode #33 - Defund Police

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On March 3, the House of Representatives began hearing testimony from representatives on a House reform bill that would ban chokeholds and “no-knock” warrants and make lynching a federal crime. This debate is in direct response to the Death of George Floyd and the much needed reform that many believe needs to occur within the police departments instead of defunding. The act in debate is the George Floyd Justice in Police Act.

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The House debated a police reform bill, which would ban chokeholds and "no-knock" warrants and make lynching a federal crime.

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This article takes on the stance that isn't usually widely discussed, that police departments may actually support defunding, if it meant less responsibility. Vermeer, Woods and Jackson present information that show that police departments currently handled calls and communities needs that go above and beyond maintaining peace. They present data that suggests the additional types of reform that could be happening if funds are reallocated to other services, thereby taking the responsibility off of the police departments.

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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This political cartoon represents that reallocation of funds that should take place when some refer to defunding the police. It is not just a matter of taking away funding and not spending it. It represents all of the other programs and services that could benefit when those funds are given to them instead, allowing police to focus on keeping the peace, not all of things they currently try to manage.