Defund the Police: Anarchy In The West?

The slogan 'defund the police' is seen by some to be the epitome of the far right's portrayal of the Black Lives Matter movement - a radical, revolutionary extremist group looking to push socialist ideals under the veil of racial equality. But what does this policy actually involve?

This argument has been used by the far right to denounce other movements in the past - the right-wing news outlet the Washington Examiner, for example, claimed in September 2019 that climate change protests were a "Trojan horse for socialism" (and also that then-16-year-old Greta Thunberg was "the leader of the climate cult"). Feminists and LGBTQ+ activists have also been subjected to such arguments, all aimed at undermining their respective causes by falsely associating the entire group with an unpopular concept, in this case, socialism, which for many in the US is merely a code-word for a full-blown Stalinist gulag kingdom (it is, of course, not).

In reality, defunding the police is far from what the right would like it to be. Commentators like Tucker Carlson claim that it means eliminating all police, abolishing police departments and firing officers, leaving America to descend into lawlessness and anarchy. Defund the police does not mean this.

The policy actually involves reducing the role of police, who are currently overstretched beyond where their presence is necessary. The murder of George Floyd is one such example of this - is four heavily armed police officers an appropriate response to a call of an unarmed man accused of using a counterfeit bill? The focus of police has become too broad, meaning that minor offences, like that which George Floyd was accused of, are heavily over-policed, contributing to astronomically high incarceration rates, particularly amongst Black people. Comparatively, violent crime, which in most cases does require a trained police presence, has become under-policed as departments become stretched.

Moving funds away from unnecessary policing would achieve two aims: first, the police could focus on crime which requires their trained response - in the UK, for example, this could enable the police to focus on knife crime, which has increased 49% since 2011 (ONS). Second, the money saved could be spent on other social issues, by investing in services which help people with basic needs - funding homelessness projects, food banks, mental health services and so on. This support further reduces the numbers of individuals becoming involved in crime through necessity, further reducing the need for police.

But what does this have to do with race? Well, we know that not only are Black people disproportionately affected by excessively violent policing, they also tend to have higher rates of unemployment, lower incomes and make up a disproportionate number of homeless people. The lower socioeconomic status of Black people in both the UK and US means that this policy would benefit this group the most, reducing societal inequalities.

This is by no means a sufficient policy to all solve racial inequality in our societies. The systemic racism which disadvantages Black and other ethnic minorities at every stage of life requires a far more comprehensive overhaul of state institutions and more effective regulation of the private sector in order to make adequate progress. But defunding the police in the right way would be a significant step in the right direction to reducing said systemic inequalities, as well as the symptoms of these, most notably police brutality against Black people.

More to come from me soon on why this is NOT just an 'American issue'. Stay tuned.

#SayTheirNames #BlackLivesMatter #DefundThePolice