A Practical Guide to Defunding the Police

A Practical Guide to Defunding the Police
Activists are demanding cities ‘defund the police.’ Here’s what they mean
By Tessa Stuart Rolling Stone June 8, 2020
The year Philando Castile was shot and killed during his 49th routine traffic stop, this one for a
broken taillight, the Minneapolis Police Department was halfway through a highly respected,
three-year program designed to restore trust between the community and police. Two years later,
MPD had, by its own account, implemented a host of the trendiest police reforms: body cameras,
de-escalation and crisis intervention training, mindfulness training. It even rewrote its use-of-
force guidelines to emphasize “the sanctity of life.” Two years after that, George Floyd was
killed — handcuffed, flat on his stomach, held down by three MPD officers, including Derek
Chauvin, pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck.
Now activists in Minneapolis are calling for more than just reform: They want the Minneapolis
Police Department defunded — and those calls are catching on elsewhere as demonstrations
against police brutality sweep across the country and peaceful protesters are met with more
barbarism for speaking out against it.
Defunding the police does not mean stripping a department entirely of its budget, or abolishing it
altogether. It’s just about scaling police budgets back and reallocating those resources to other
agencies, says Lynda Garcia, policing campaign director at the Leadership Conference on Civil
and Human Rights. “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.”
The concept is simple: When cities start investing in community services, they reduce the need to
call police in instances when police officers’ specific skill set isn’t required. “If someone is
dealing with a mental health crisis, or someone has a substance abuse disorder, we are calling
other entities that are better equipped to help these folks,” Garcia says.
When people get the specific help they need earlier, they’re less likely to end up in the kind of
dangerous situation police might be called to defuse — situations that often turn deadly for those
individuals. According to a study from the Treatment Advocacy Center, a person with an
untreated mental health issue is 16 times more likely to be killed by police than other members
of the community — a statistic borne out in the deaths of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, reported
“behaving erratically” before he was shot in Pasco, Washington, and Jason Harris, said to have
been “exhibiting bizarre behavior” before he was shot in Riverside County, California.
Police themselves will admit this — that they are being called to respond to situations beyond the
scope of their job. “We’re asking cops to do too much in this country,” Dallas Police Chief
David Brown said in 2016, after five of his officers were targeted by a mass shooter. “Every
societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops
handle it… Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs.
Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops… That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve
all those problems.”
The same logic, Garcia says, can and should be applied to nonviolent crimes as well — as it was
before the “Broken Windows” era of policing, when the philosophy that small visible crimes
must be punished or they’ll beget larger crimes became popular in police departments around the
country.
Consider the fact that four Minneapolis police officers responded to a 911 call that described a
minor, nonviolent crime. “George Floyd is the perfect case to look at,” Garcia says. “What he
was accused of — what the police were called for — was a nonviolent offense: trying to use a
fake $20 bill. If we reduce the number of crimes that exist or repeal ordinances which are really
bloated with nonviolent offenses that were created during Broken Windows, it will allow police
to focus on violent crime — on the crimes where they are actually needed — instead of
criminalizing the poor.”
In Minneapolis, the groups Reclaim the Block and the Black Visions Collective are lobbying for
$45 million worth of MPD’s budget – $193 million in 2020 — be redirected into violence
prevention programs, youth homelessness programs, an opioid taskforce and mental health
response team. They’ve had a track record of success — last year, they convinced the city
council to shift $1.1 million from the police budget to violence prevention efforts.
As the protests continue around the country, activists in New York, where the police
department’s budget is poised to swell to nearly $6 billion in 2021, and Los Angeles, where
LAPD’s funding was increased this year to $1.8 billion, are mounting their own defunding
campaigns. The first step for anyone interested in pushing for a re-thinking of their city’s
priorities is to get involved in the budgeting process by attending city council meetings and
speaking. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human rights created a toolkit, praised earlier
this week by former President Barack Obama, with more resources and information on how to
get involved.
Divesting from police and re-investing in social services isn’t the end of the solution. It wouldn’t
fix the systemic problems that caused Breonna Taylor’s death or Tamir Rice’s or the deaths of so
many of other black men, women and children senselessly killed by police. But it can be a start.
“A budget is a moral document, and where cities invest their money speaks to their values,”
Garcia says. “People actually have a lot more power than they realize and they can make a ton of
change at the local level.”

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A Practical Guide to Defunding the Police

By Tessa Stuart Rolling Stone June 8, 2020

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