George Floyd’s death has activists calling to ‘defund the police.’ Here’s what it means
From Freddie Gray to Eric Garner, George Floyd is the latest black man on a roster of high-profile police-related deaths in the last decade to set off weeks-long protests and to reignite activists’ calls to “defund the police.”
Floyd’s death would be no different — except that it occurred against the backdrop of a global pandemic.
COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted communities of color in the U.S., with early reports showing black people dying at a higher rate than their white counterparts, McClatchy News previously reported.
Their combined impact on black communities prompted a coalition of black organizations known as The Movement for Black Lives to write an open letter calling to defund the police and reallocate funding to community resources and a national health care system.
“Despite continued profiling, harassment, terror and killing of black communities, local and federal decision-makers continue to invest in the police, which leaves black people vulnerable and our communities no safer,” the letter states.
Several celebrities including John Legend, Lizzo, The Weeknd, Common, America Ferrera, Natalie Portman and Megan Rapinoe have signed it, Business Insider reported.
So what would defunding the police look like?
Most aren’t advocating for governments to abolish police altogether. Instead, they’re seeking a reallocation of resources.
Community spending
The U.S. spends more than a $100 billion dollars a year on policing, Kumar Rao of the Center for Popular Democracy, told The Appeal — an independent media outlet focused on criminal justice — in 2019.
Social justice advocates calling to “defund the police” want to see that money used elsewhere.
“A lot of what we advocate for is investment in community services — education, medical access… You can call it ‘defunding,’ but it’s just about directing or balancing the budget in a different way,” Lynda Garcia, policing campaign director at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told Rolling Stone.
She called a budget “a moral document,” saying where cities chose to spend their money “speaks to their values.”
The Center for Popular Democracy laid it out in a 2017 report titled “Freedom to Thrive.”
In the report, the left-leaning advocacy group called in-part for something called participatory budgeting, in which a community decides how to spend government funds — “thus giving marginalized communities power over the pots of money that most affect their lives,” the report states.
It cites Greensboro, North Carolina, as an example, where nearly 41% of the population is black.
Community members there opted to redirect $500,000 of the city budget usually spent on policing to “pools and recreation center upgrades, crosswalk upgrades and bus shelters,” according to the report.
Opal Tometi, one of the organizers who started the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, pointed to New York City as another example in an interview with The New Yorker.
In the wake of Eric Garner’s death, Tometi said the city planned to allocate $100 million dollars for new officers. The move prompted BLM to seek community feedback on what they needed to feel safe if it wasn’t more police.
“What we concluded is that we need social workers,” she said. “We need these resources to go to our social workers and educators. We need it to go to our schools. We would love to have mental-health professionals when we have certain crises in our communities.”
Six years later, those requests look nearly identical in other parts of the country.
In Minneapolis, Rolling Stone reported, activist groups have pushed to reallocate $45 million of the city’s police budget, which was $193 million in 2020, to “violence prevention programs, youth homelessness programs, an opioid task force and mental health response team.”
Outliers and push back
There are some who would like to see the entire police system dismantled, such as Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College.
In an interview with Mother Jones, Vitale points to “concrete prevention strategies” in place of police. That means addressing what drives people to commit crimes — such as drug addiction or mental health issues — and putting better community resources in place to address those issues.
Others think it’s unrealistic to expect a world without police immediately.
Civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson, who is a proponent of reducing police use of force, told GQ that shrinking the role of police is “gradual work.”
“Police are still going to be here tomorrow,” he said.
As for defunding them, “even the most aggressive proposals don’t take away any money from the police that they currently have,” he told GQ, “they normally prevent the police from getting more money.”
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has called for overhauling police use of force but stopped short of “slashing their funding,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
He said most law enforcement officers “are in the profession for the right reason so the idea of completely disassembling police in the state or Milwaukee, I couldn’t support,” according to the Sentinel.
Police are equally skeptical.
In Los Angeles, the city has proposed cutting between $100 and $150 million from its police budget.
“I look forward to better understanding what steps can be taken to meet this ambitious goal,” Police Chief Michel Moore said in a statement Friday. “I remain steadfast in my belief that the continued funding of essential functions of our Department equates to public safety.”
This story was originally published June 5, 2020 at 1:02 PM with the headline "George Floyd’s death has activists calling to ‘defund the police.’ Here’s what it means."
