A worse chant would be ‘Defund! Reallocate! Empower! Invest!’ but it might help people get on the same page(?)
In the past year since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis Police Officer, I’ve done my best to have a conversation about “Defunding The Police” with anyone open to having it. Generally, I find that there is more alignment on the topic than one might expect. If we agree there is a problem, we can work toward a solution, together.
I wanted to take this moment to share my own thinking/approach on the off-chance that maybe it will be helpful for you as you speak with your own friends and family.
Let’s just start with the numbers to recognize and agree that something has to change. Our current institution of law enforcement is flawed and regularly results in a major discrepancy between how black people are targeted, incarcerated, and far too often injured or killed at the hands of police. According to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than are white men.” The article finds that police use of force is one of the leading causes of death for young black men and the study “reinforces calls to treat police violence as a public health issue.” PEW Research found that despite a narrowing gap over the past decade, “The black imprisonment rate at the end of 2018 was nearly twice the rate among Hispanics and more than five times the rate among whites.” If we can agree that change is needed, we can start to talk about what that actually means.
“Defund The Police” is easy to chant at a march or print on a sign but it does not adequately describe the full ambition of the movement to someone new to the conversation and concerned about its implications. That said, it sounds better than “Defund the Police and reallocate their responsibilities and associated budgets to community-led groups better equipped to respond to those aforementioned responsibilities.” But when I say the former, I really mean the latter.
According to their website, there are 21 distinct programs or units run by the Minneapolis Police Department each with subcategories. Take a quick look at this list of responsibilities and consider how many of them should be overseen by police:
- Auctions
- Background Investigation
- Business Technology Unit
- Community Engagement Team
- Community Navigator Program
- Community Response Team
- Honor Guard
- MPD Explorer Post
- Patrol
- Police Reserve
- Canine Unit
- School Programs
- Training
- Crime Lab
- Minneapolis Police Band
- Mounted Police
- MPD Chaplain Corps
- Property & Evidence
- Special Operations Division
- Internal Affairs Division
- Investigations
Let’s put aside whether these personnel are armed and “warrior-trained” (aggressive tactics). How many of these programs need to be run by the police? Aren’t there community groups that can better manage most of these listed responsibilities?
Could police responsibilities be scaled back to:
- Training
- Special Operations Division
When we (or at least when I) say defund the police, we (I) mean reduce the department to its core function: responding to violent crimes in progress. By replacing armed officers with specialized community services, the police can remain focused where we need them most.
The reality is that police deal with so much more than what we think of as urgent police work. The NY Times reported that the share of time police spend “devoted to handling violent crime is very small, about 4 percent.”
But what if an unarmed community unit encountered a situation that required armed backup? In 2019, 45% of MPD 911 calls in Minneapolis originated FROM the MPD asking for assistance. With proper communications tools and training, these newly empowered services would be just as capable of calling for support when and if a situation warranted it.
Warrior training is not relevant to the vast majority of police calls and can lead to escalation rather than peaceful resolution. We do not need armed officers with an us-versus-them mentality doing most of the work currently handled by the police.
911 is triage, it is not the police. While sometimes managed by the police, it shouldn’t be. When you call 911, it is already police, fire, and medical dispatch. We should fund and improve 911 and it should not be overseen by the police. With proper investment in personnel and technology, dispatchers could route calls to far more specialized community response services.
Every year, the Police Department is allocated nearly three times the budget of the Fire Department by the City of Minneapolis.
According to the Star Tribune, the Minneapolis Police Department has an average response time of just under eight minutes. Meanwhile, with 19 stations strategically placed around the city, the Fire Department is positioned to reach 97% of residents in four minutes. That doesn’t necessarily happen but their average response is between five and six minutes. Far faster than the police.
The Fire Department does not patrol for fires nor should armed officers patrol for violent crimes. A far smaller ‘Police Response Force’ could be stationed, much like the Fire Department, ready to respond when needed. Let community safety be left to community organizations with the ability to call for police when needed. By being strategically positioned and ready to respond, we would likely see a faster response and a safer community limiting the risk of violent escalation.
Some have questioned if communities (community volunteers) wouldn’t assume the same discriminating actions, or worse, that we see from various Police Officers. This is legitimate but a well-trained, on the ground, community service that is largely made up of people from and around the communities with which they interact is more likely to deescalate then a group of outsiders like the MPD which consists of 92% non-Minneapolis residents. We already see armed vigilantes profiling and harming people they see as outsiders and that is a problem we need to confront with or without non-resident, armed officers patrolling our communities.
This is an opportunity. We are a culture that reinvents everything. We innovate. We have different tools and knowledge and needs than when police were first institutionalized. Every industry has changed in the last 300 years and community safety needs a new, modern approach. What would we create with the technology and knowledge we have today to better serve our communities and the people who live in them? There are a lot of groups worth tracking to understand what this future could really look like (MPD150, Reclaim The Block, and Black Visions Collective — to name a few).
The resources exist to reimagine public safety. It’s about finding, funding, and promoting suitable alternatives. A defunded police looks like:
- Reducing police responsibilities to the limited functions that require an armed response and related training
- Stationing units at distributed locations to respond and not patrol
- Reallocating funds to services better equipped to deal with the 96% of interactions that are not violent
- Investing in and empowering people with vested interest in the safety of others in their communities
- Implementing technology that facilitates better communication and faster responses
These steps don’t solve all of our problems. We have many. But hopefully steps like these can shed some light on what a defunded police would look like and with some level of common understanding, we can start to inch forward toward the change we need.
There is so much more to the problems we face than police and police brutality but it is a real and important place to start. Speak with the people around you. Speak from love and trust and share the concerns of the people you speak with. Their fears are legitimate and deserve empathy and understanding but we can create a better world together.
It is as simple (and difficult) as asking for a conversation. Then, have one. We must evolve together. Leave no lives behind. Black Lives Matter.
