Abolish Defunding.

Why talk of defunding the police only makes things worse

It is a huge mistake to support “Defund the Police“. I say this while being entirely sympathetic to the goal of ending abuses by law enforcement while actually doing something about crime. Once we understand what defunding means to those who hear it, it becomes clear why it is counterproductive to achieving these goals.

Emotionally, it refers to wanting to make radical changes to policing. This makes perfect sense, given the decades (or even centuries) of police being a threat to the law-abiding citizens they’re supposed to be protecting. These days, we are particularly sensitive to members of oppressed minorities being subject to police brutality, but there are also more class-oriented criticisms of the police reliably siding with capital, as well as more democratic concerns about them siding with fascism. The endless calls for reform have made some difference, but not enough. We want more.

Literally, it means taking public money away from the police. Practically, this is hard to distinguish from abolishing them entirely. When Republican misogynists talk about defunding Planned Parenthood, they don’t mean reform, they mean destruction. They’re not talking about shrinking; they want it to go away entirely. Let’s be blunt, though: nobody is abolishing the police. Nobody. We don’t even want to get rid of the entire institution because it serves an essential function.

Because of this, even though radical police reform ideas have broad support, the “defund” slogan is universally unpopular. You can find various statistics , but it typically polls well under 30%, even among Democrats, even among Black people. It’s even more overwhelmingly unpopular among whites and Republicans, to the point that it’s a handy wedge issue to drive out the vote. All Republicans have to do is associate “defund” with Democrats and they win elections.

This isn’t something I just noticed. Obama called it a “snappy slogan” that loses “a big audience the minute you say it”. Biden blamed it for Democratic defeats in Congressional races, saying “that’s how they beat the living hell out of us across the country, saying that we’re talking about defunding the police. We’re not. We’re talking about holding them accountable.”

At this point, you might be tempted to interrupt with an explanation of how defund doesn’t mean abolish, actually. Get in line. There is a cottage industry of articles trying to explain “defund” away, redefining it in terms of specific reforms. Not all of them are on message, though: some admit that it does mean “abolish”, undermining the rest.

As the polls show, this has not been successful. A proto-fascist leader known as the Great Communicator once said, “If you’re explaining, you’re losing.” If your slogan immediately needs explanation, you have already lost.

What’s going on here? Fundamentally, “defund” is hyperbole. It’s an excessive claim being used to try to shift the frame away from “reform”, which is seen as too mild. It’s an attempt to lowball the negotiation by offering zero, but the only result is that the other side walks away from the table. It is a motte-and-bailey strategy, where the plain meaning is exciting but dumb, and the nuanced meaning is smarter but dull. It’s clickbait.

It’s also fundamentally missing the point. The problem with police isn’t that they’re too expensive, although they often are. It’s that they are bad. Bad at doing the job we want them to do. Bad at avoiding abuses in the process. When something is bad, you need to fix it, and that’s not likely to be cheap. Reducing funding will not improve policing.

That’s because this is not about the money. Yes, there is a finite pool of resources and every dollar spent on paramilitary extravagances like tacticool police tanks is a dollar that could have gone to social programs that make people’s lives better and potentially reduce crime through its causes rather than punishing it after it happens. To the extent that, over the long term, we improve policing and address the sources of crime, we will likely be able to spend less on policing. Right now, though, we need to retrain the police, and that will cost more, not less.

If we reduce funding and change nothing else, we should expect policing to get worse. There is already a serious problem with the police being focused, not on public safety, but on bringing in revenue through everything from tickets and fines to civil forfeiture. The police are our hunting dogs, and keeping them hungry makes them more of a danger to us than to our prey. We need to provide for them while reining them in.

Of course, there will always be some truly idealistic and naïve people who imagine that the police can be gotten rid of entirely. In their defense, we can—to some limited extent—supplement the police by shifting tasks that they’re bad at to more appropriate resources. But social workers aren’t going to stop bank robbers. You don’t bring a pencil to a gunfight.

Others insist that the police are corrupt to the core and must be replaced with something else. This “something else” invariably turns out to be… police, albeit under some other name, which is simply misleading. The problem with the police isn’t what they’re called, it’s what they do, so this would amount to PR of the most shallow sort.

“Good news! We’ve replaced police brutality with peace officer brutality.” Nothing would fundamentally change with the label.

Consider Camden, NJ, where they disbanded the entire police force, only to immediately create a new one. This was mostly a way to bust the union, but the new police force was in some ways better. Yet neighboring Newark, NJ made successful reforms without ever disbanding. Obviously, you can’t get rid of the police and it’s not at all clear that abolishing and recreating them is either necessary or effective.

I could easily fill pages with a detailed discussion of the legitimate proposals for police reform, but it would be a digression. The point of this rant is to show that, if you’re serious about fixing the policing problem, you are doing the cause no favors by clinging to a toxic slogan that appeals to edgelords, not voters.

Defund appeals to the populist left, not liberals, much less the rest of the political spectrum. It is so politically harmful that talk of defunding the police only serves to perpetuate police abuses by keeping Democrats out of power.

If you actually want to solve our policing problem, you will join the DNC in rejecting this “defund” rhetoric, not only eliminating it from your own vocabulary but pushing back on it wherever you find it.