When I first heard this, I thought: that doesn't sound like a good idea. However, a conversation with some friends made me curious to learn more, and since then I've been going down rabbit holes trying to understand what it means. I now support it at a high level, but I still have a lot to learn. This is meant to be a living document of that process, shared in the hope that other folks will find it useful.
- Invest in community well-being via public services to prevent the problems that result in police response
- Police reforms haven't worked, so why keep investing in them?
- No amount of training will address the root causes of systemic police racism
- We're asking the police to solve too many problems
- Protect free speech and civil rights for everyone
- What's the argument against defunding? Are there any from BIPOC-led organizations?
- What to do instead of calling the police?
- What alternatives should be funded?
- What's the origin of policing throughout the US?
- List/map of police violence and killings
When I first heard of this organization and its campaign for police reform, it seemed like a great idea. Now, I don't support it. I wrote a separate document demonstrating why.
- What "defund the police" really means - Vox
- Succinct overview with accessible charts of statistics
- What Does It Mean to Defund or Abolish the Police? | The Daily Social Distancing Show
- Prominent voices offering explanations and addressing skepticism
- Police: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
- NSFW: Impassioned overview of a lot of things I've read in other places
- History, obstacles, what's next
- Why is it so hard to hold police accountable? - At Liberty
- The problem with police unions - Today, Explained
- What “abolish the police” means - Today, Explained
- The Talk - Today, Explained
- Can Congress reform the police? - Today, Explained
- Under the Blacklight: The Fire This Time - Intersectionality Matters!
- Police Abolition - Radical Imagination
- American Police - Throughline
Websites and articles that I've found useful. All non-italicized words were copied directly from the source, and lightly edited for readability in this context.
Short guides, curated from sources w/ bibliography. Reposted by ACLU of Massachusetts.
Why do people say defund the police?:
- Reduce police budgets & power and invest that money directly into poor communities of color through public services
- Reforming the police is not working
- Police response doesn't serve the best interests of poor communities of color
- Public institutions are being defunded while police budgets are decreasing
- Redirect resources into community-based initiatives
- Implement non-police solutions to social problems
- Demand city councils and mayors reject expanded police budgets
- Demand mayors de-escalate police forces
What does it mean to abolish the police?:
- Gradually defunding and disbanding an inherently racist system and making space for a new system
- Doesn't mean abolishing all law enforcement
- Reimagining safety in our society, prioritizing community support, phasing out the dependence on police
- NOT an easy fix, or something to be scared of
- Reduce police reliance by decriminalization and investing in more medics, social workers, and firefighters
- Provide officers an opportunity to retrain in another emergency response field
- Non-police solutions: make your community into a little self-sufficient city
- Essentially exists in rich white neighborhoods
- People call the police because they don't know who else to call
The racist history of American police
Why do cops over-police Black neighborhoods?
Police unions are also the problem
One of the first things I read that clicked.
A participatory, horizontally-organized effort by local organizers, researchers, artists and activists, working towards a police-free Minneapolis, through a gradual process of strategically reallocating resources, funding, and responsibility away from police and toward community-based models of safety, support, and prevention.
- Most of the time, crime happens when someone has been unable to meet their basic needs through other means. By shifting money away from the police and toward services that actually meet those needs, we’ll be able to get to a place where people won’t need to rob banks.
- We may need a small specialized class of public servants whose job it is to respond to violent crimes.
- We ask cops to solve too many of our problems.
- It’s not just that police are ineffective: in many communities, they’re actively harmful. The history of policing is a history of violence against the marginalized.
- We have half a century’s worth of evidence that reforms can’t work. It’s time for something new.
- On Instagram: This FAQ has consistently been one of the best tools for sparking conversations about a police-free future.
What are we talking about when we talk about “a police-free future?”:
- Read Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and all the books and articles on our Resources page.
- The goal is a city without police, and defunding police is one tool we have to reach that goal.
- Invest in prevention, not punishment.
- Many people in well-off, predominantly white suburbs already live in a world without police.
- Public safety is bigger than policing.
- We’re abolishing the police, not abolishing “help.”
Author of The End of Policing:
- Free ebook
- Widely recommended and cited
- From a friend: Worth reading, with the caveat that there are others (e.g. Angela Davis) who’ve been saying this stuff for forever.
- In the immediate aftermath of Brown’s and Garner’s murders, the Obama administration responded by calling for more federal investigations and commissioned a report that laid out a host of reforms—which I and others criticized at the time.
- These kinds of federal interventions have failed to show any signs of positive changes in policing.
- They assume that the professional enforcement of the law is automatically beneficial to everyone.
- A totally lawful, procedurally proper, and perfectly unbiased low-level drug arrest is still going to ruin some young person’s life for no good reason.
- Democratic members of Congress appear to have learned few lessons from the failures of six years of police “reform.”
- Lawmakers can take steps to undo the damage done by the 1994 Crime Bill.
- We must move to significantly defund the police and redirect resources into community-based initiatives that can produce real safety and security without the violence and racism inherent in the criminal justice system.
- One of the problems is the massive expansion in the scope of policing over the last 40 years or so.
- We keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers...nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations where the average citizen would be arrested.
- If we don't want violence, we should try to figure out how to not get the police involved.
- I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police
- The protests today are a much more kind of existential threat to the police. And the police are overreacting as a result.
- I think this will look like a series of local budget battles. It's about rallying city council members and mayors around a new vision of creating healthier communities.
Movement for Black Lives, 6/5/2020, behind paywall
- Regulations are important as they can function as a guide for police departments of any size or scale. But they are insufficient as a solution to the problem of police violence.
- We have seen the totality of police violence in its horrifyingly broad scale.
- The way to reduce police violence is to reduce the scope, size, and role of police in our communities.
- Why would we continue to throw money away at something we already know is not working? We need those resources in schools, toward our health, and for our futures.
- We have enough evidence to know that regulations alone do not stop police from killing us.
- The data being used to support these regulations is fatally flawed.
- Elected officials would love a quick proposal that gives them an easy out. This is why it is patently dangerous to propose these regulations as solutions.
Launched in response to #8cantwait. Each point contains further bullet points on implementation.
We hope to build toward a society without police or prisons, where communities are equipped to provide for their safety and well-being.
- Defund police
- Demilitarize communities
- Remove police from schools
- Free people from jails and prisons
- Repeal laws that criminalize survival
- Invest in community self-governance
- Provide safe housing for everyone
- Invest in care, not cops
We believe that #8cantwait is dangerous and irresponsible, offering a slate of reforms that have already been tried and failed, that mislead a public newly invigorated to the possibilities of police and prison abolition, and that do not reflect the needs of criminalized communities.
Widely shared and respected. Lots details.
Charts that break down the difference between reformist reforms which continue or expand the reach of policing, and abolitionist steps that work to chip away and reduce its overall impact.
Reformist reforms:
- Body cameras
- Community policing
- More training
- Civilian review
- Jail killer cops
Abolitionist steps:
- Suspend the use of paid administrative leave for cops under investigation
- Withhold pensions and don' t rehire cops involved in excessive force
- Require cops to be liable for misconduct settlements
- Cap overtime accrual + ot pay for military exercises
- Withdraw participation in police militarization programs
- Prioritize spending on community health, education, affordable housing
- Reduce the size of the police force
Some of the best of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) work on abolition which has been generations in the making.
SURJ is offering this for white folks who:
- are newly politicized around abolition and defunding
- are trying to understand or deepen their understanding of what it means
- want to join the ongoing organizing to defund the police
Table of Contents:
- What is policing?
- What do we mean by ‘defund the police’?
- What do we mean by the ‘prison industrial complex’?
- What do we mean by divest and invest?
- What do we mean by abolition?
- #8toAbolition
- Resources and Examples of Local Defund Police Campaigns
- Resources and Examples of Alternatives to the Police
- Creating alternatives ways of dealing with conflict and harm
- Interested in Continuing to Learn More?