How to Defund Your Police Department in Six Steps (And Why You Should Do It Today)
“The impossible is the least that one can demand.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
After the publication of our open letter on Tuesday of this week a colleague sent me a simple text message that read, “How do we start to dismantle. That is the million dollar question. I don’t want to be on no mo’ commissions. I want to lay waste to the undergirdings.”
And so I started to think about dismantling, and what that would look like. How might we go about the serious and methodical business of dismantling the police?
This should not be misunderstood to be six easy steps. Every one of these is complicated, complex, and a body of work unto itself.
The purpose of this six-point plan is to begin to answer that question on an operational front. This should not be misunderstood to be six easy steps. Every one of these is complicated, complex, and a body of work unto itself. But each one is essential if we are actually going to end the police state that has killed so many Black and brown people in this country.
it is not a reasonable assertion to state that “no one has thought about violent crime” when arguing for the dismantling of the police.
However, this is not a comprehensive assessment on what to replace the police with. There have been countless plans that seriously consider and discuss the development of interventions for crimes ranging from theft to murder. I won’t attempt to recreate that scholarship here. But simply put it is not a reasonable assertion to state that “no one has thought about violent crime” when arguing for the dismantling of the police. What is true is that the voices who have done the most serious and rigorous thinking about how to create those options have been Black and brown voices and so they have not been treated as worthy of legitimate consideration by policymakers.
And look where that got us.
As I write this the president of the Minneapolis City Council has tweeted out an intention to defund the police. Let this be the beginning of something good. Let it be the beginning of something great.
Marc Dones
Enact local legislation to cut police department budgets in half every year moving forward with corresponding matched investments in communities of color.
Look, defund means defund. It doesn’t mean cut this year but then increase next year or introduce new technological safeguards like Smart Guns™. It means defund. We must be honest that there is no reform that will work because there is no reform that has worked. We’ve seen what happens time and again: use of force continuums are ignored, “non-lethal” options leave people maimed for life or are used to the point where they become lethal, police turn off their bodycams or ‘forget’ to turn them on, police who have been through anti-bias trainings, been through sensitivity trainings and still create violence around them. These reforms often resulted in more money being funneled out of communities and into policing than before—creating a paradigm where police budgets were often rewarded with additional funding for each increasingly spectacular failure.
The legacy of policing has an unbroken line that begins with slave catching patrols which later on became the state and city police patrols—often down to the design of the badge. This is a system that cannot be salvaged—the roots run to the racist bedrock of the nation and the fruit is too rotten. The very nature of this institution is corrosive—it is an unreasonable power to ask a human psyche to bear without becoming warped. As the Stanford prison experiment and the Milgram shock experiment both famously demonstrated when normal people are given immunity from consequence and coached towards cruelty there is something in them that breaks. If nothing else, we must defund the police to save them from a system that will hollow them out until they are unable to recognize the dignity and inherent divinity of everyone around them. To see this we only have to look at the recent examples of police leaders recounting the number of shootings they’ve been involved in and asserting that they weren’t bothered by any of the lives they’ve taken. I’m reminded of James Baldwin, who wrote in 1966,
“the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. …and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty.”
I’m thinking now of a video released of an officer in Buffalo, New York striking an elderly man and he falls back and immediately blood begins pouring from his head. The officers, lined up and marching forward, do not break. They step over his body. If I stop to think about how hardened your heart would have to be to not stop immediately, to not attend to this man, I am saddened by what has become of these people and I cannot help but think of the years of work it will take to undo the harm that has been done to them by a system that demanded they lose their basic connections to other humans for the sake of a murderous “order”.
So little has changed in the 54 years since Baldwin’s writing. Black communities are still hyper-policed and the fundamental tension between those officers and the community they’ve been deployed into is the tension that exists between a population and an occupying army. This tension is not resolvable with community dialogue or foot patrols or “community policing.”
Let me be clear on the ultimate goal: we are here to end the harm that police cause in Black communities and there is no reform that ends more of that harm than police simply not being there.
It’s on local legislators who control the power of the purse to take the necessary step to begin reducing police department budgets in a methodical, automatic, and non-negotiable way. Phasing out policing should be done thoughtfully and must provide communities the opportunities necessary to ramp up the necessary community-based supports and alternative services that will be needed. We cannot repeat the mistakes that were made when we deinstitutionalized our mental health system and made grand promises of moving money into community supports that never materialized. Therefore, we’re calling on 1:1 matches in investments in affordable housing, schools, healthcare, and basic needs support for communities of color for every dollar drawn out of police budgets.
Move money into highly flexible supports focused on communities of color.
Spoiler: the flaw we need to fix is centuries of structural racism.
The services and supports we need to create in communities are those around affordable housing, economic opportunity, healthcare (inclusive of mental health supports), and basic needs support. In 2013 I was working in Massachusetts with one of the smartest teams I’ve ever had the pleasure to be part of when we were asked to redesign violence prevention in the commonwealth—with a focus on young people. The program we built prioritized identifying young people who are involved in violent activity and providing them unlimited support for their basic needs. We called that program the Safe and Successful Youth Initiative or SSYI for short. As described by researchers, “the distinguishing feature of SSYI is its lack of police suppression or police contact of any kind with young men who receive services, focusing instead on improving individual economic, physical, social, and emotional well-being through an intensive and ongoing case management and outreach process that is not time-bound and continues until the young men are self-sufficient and leading healthy, independent lives (Investing in Intervention, Giffords Law Center et. al.).”
It turns out that supporting people’s needs works “Evaluations of SSYI grantees, however, paint a clear picture. Between 2013 and 2016, Lowell, Massachusetts, saw overall firearm-related activity drop by 22%, gang-related criminal activity decline by 31%, and nonfatal shootings plummet by 61%. (Investing in Intervention, Giffords Law Center et al.).”
We live in a society that has produced only two options for citizen on need of intervention: state sponsored murder or nothing at all.
The other day a friend said to me, "I saw a man stealing a bike the other day and I felt like I wanted to stop him but I didn't feel safe. Then I thought about calling the police—but I didn't want to kill him either." We live in a society that has produced only two options for citizens in need of intervention: state sponsored murder or nothing at all.
Imagine if we had the $100 billion this country spends a year to spend on creating the supports that people actually need?
Create accountability and liability.
At its core policing is an institution that lacks accountability. A friend texted me to critique yet another recently released reform plan that suggested that officer violations be required to be reported. Reported to who? she asked. The problem with accountability framed through reporting of this fashion is that it isn’t real. How many of us have had a boss we didn’t respect, didn’t think was really our boss and so we simply ignored them? The network of accountabilities that frame us—that makes us who we are—are formed out of relationships to the people and places that we call our community. And a fundamental problem with the structure of the system of policing is that it does not require community—they do not have to wield the power they’ve been entrusted with on their friends, families, or neighbors. They don’t have to look those people in the eye when they clock off or answer for their actions in the grocery store.
The fetishized notion of the small-town sheriff who you run into at the diner simply does not exist.
The fetishized notion of the small-town sheriff who you run into at the diner simply does not exist. To see this, we can look at the recently revealed reality that Minneapolis was operating with only 8% of a police force that actually called Minneapolis home. As I was drafting this plan I sent it to a friend of mine whose father was a state trooper in a relatively rural area of upstate New York for many years and she responded, “It’s funny that my dad was as close to this as people get, I think, and for most of my life he was stationed over an hour away or more. It wasn’t until he was almost retired that he worked closer to home—but still two towns over.”
Therefore, in order to create accountable policing structures for the remainder of the time jurisdictions are operating police forces they should require that officers not be allowed to exercise their responsibilities as officers outside of the zip code in which they live. To be clear this should not be understood as permanent measure or a replacement for defunding police but rather a tool to decrease harm for the limited period of time that the current policing structure is still active in any form.
“But! Whole areas of the city would suddenly be without police then!”
This is not enough. We have to ensure that police who cross the line are liable for the actions they’ve committed. Communities should strip police departments of the qualified immunity they’ve held until now. The simple fact of the matter is that qualified immunity, the legal shield that protects individuals who create harm while still allowing the governments they work for to be sued, was created out of whole cloth by the court system itself. While legislative action has been taken at some levels in order to create a stronger legal basis for liability exemptions while government officials (most noticeably police) are discharging their on-duty responsibilities it still remains, largely, an issue of judicial precedent and not legislative action.
Federal, state, and local legislative bodies could, and should, eliminate qualified immunity for police officers. What an incredibly asymmetrical structure where an entire group of people are armed, deployed into cities across the country, and told that there is almost no way they can be held responsible for any lethal action they take. How could you possibly take the situation seriously when you’ll never be implicated in it—regardless of the outcome?
Terminate police union contracts.
As mentioned above, police are a literal outgrowth of local militias. In keeping with this, they have been treated as, covered by the same broad liability waivers as, and armed as soldiers.
Despite this they negotiate as collective bargaining units that drive the policies that make it incredibly difficult to discipline, let alone fire or hold accountable individual police offers.
This simply doesn’t make sense.
The Department of Defense does not have unions for active duty personnel who are responsible for these kinds of life and death decisions.
Only civilian, non-combatant, personnel have union representation.
In comparison, the Department of Defense does not have unions for active duty personnel who are responsible for these kinds of life and death decisions. Only civilian, non-combatant, personnel have union representation.
Why should local law enforcement, given the same tools and tasks, be any different?
Change your leadership.
Current police leadership is not equipped to dismantle the departments they have successfully shepherded to radical expansion.
In order to ensure that departments are actually being accelerated towards dissolution leadership will have to be replaced with wind down administrators who answer to citizen oversight panels comprised of community members from neighborhoods who have historically been the most oppressed by police.
I don’t know why you have a tank. Really. I don’t get it.
This weaponry must immediately be liquidated.
The rapid hyper militarization of the police that took place post 9/11 has placed sophisticated war machines in local police departments across the country. These tools serve no purpose other than to needlessly escalate situations and create unbelievable harm in communities. This weaponry must immediately be liquidated.
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