defund the police

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
by Fredrik Deboer
Published 4 Sep 2023

Then again, perhaps the George Floyd Justice in Policing bill failed to attract much attention because it was overshadowed by the demand that became associated with the entire movement for justice that erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s death, which became inescapable—“defund the police.” THE STRANGE LIFE OF DEFUND THE POLICE Defunding the police captured the public attention to a degree that I’ve really never seen before for a genuinely radical idea. And I believe it hurt the wider cause. I think that, at the exact moment that public support for racial justice was at its zenith, the call to defund the police sapped our attention, sucked the air out of the room, and scuttled the opportunity of more achievable reforms. The exact meaning of defunding the police was never entirely clear. A meta debate about what exactly was being called for bloomed—and became notorious.

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For now, it’s enough to say that a rigid sense of acceptable opinion developed among progressives—no opinion more acceptable than the quixotic quest to defund the police. DEMANDS ARE ASSEMBLED The idea of defunding the police has already attracted more debate than I can summarize, and I will deal with it in more depth later. For now, it’s sufficient to say that through the tangled and chancy process through which broad social movements operate, defunding the police became the central demand of the Black Lives Matter protests. Protests still simmered across the country, sometimes in defiance of Covid lockdowns.

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A handful of municipalities meaningfully redistributed resources away from police in 2020, but no national movement followed. It’s impossible to say what might have happened in a world where defund the police did not become the most-expressed demand associated with the George Floyd moment. I would certainly have been thrilled if “end qualified immunity” had gained similar prominence. Supporters of defunding the police, of course, would point out that the effort to end qualified immunity has not seen much more tangible success than the movement to defund the police, and they would have a point. As is so often the case, the most essential question is one of the hardest to answer—what are the boundaries of the possible in both the short or long term?

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

the share of murders: Madhani, “Unsolved Murders: Chicago, Other B-ig Cities Struggle; Murder Rate a ‘National Disaster.’ ” Since 2017: Charles, “After 3 Years of Progress, Chicago’s Murder Tally Skyrockets in 2020.” “security from government overreach”: Meares, “Policing: A Public Good Gone Bad.” “a relationship in which”: Meares, Goff, and Tyler, “Defund-the-Police Calls Aren’t Going Away. But What Do They Mean Practically?” In Boston, for example: “TenPoint Coalition Founder Departs,” WBUR. Coffee with a Cop: Coffee with a Cop, “About—Coffee with a Cop.” “defunding the police”: Ray, “What Does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean and Does It Have Merit?” Tracey Meares: Meares, Goff, and Tyler. “funding to recreational centers”: Ray. early childhood programs: Heckman et al., “The Rate of Return to the High/Scope Perry Preschool Program.”

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When “complaints brought against officers were cleared by videos,” the union started seeing the upsides of transparency. Moreover, a randomized control trial found that body cameras “generate small but meaningful benefits to the civility of police-citizen civilian encounters.” The union accepted the cameras. Should We Defund the Police? Defunding the police may seem like a natural response to the lawless behavior displayed by Derek Chauvin. But an underfunded police department will not improve the safety of minority neighborhoods. If fewer police lead to more crime, then the poor will suffer disproportionately. Moreover, a more stressed police force could easily become a more brutal police force.

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Cell 163, no. 3 (October 2015): 571–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2015.10.009. Rawdon-Hastings, Francis, Marquess of Hastings. The Private Journal of the Marquess of Hastings. Allahabad: Panini Office, 1907. Ray, Rashawn. “What Does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean and Does It Have Merit?” Brookings, June 19, 2020. www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/19/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-and-does-it-have-merit. “Reactions to Plague in the Ancient & Medieval World.” World History Encyclopedia, March 31, 2020. www.ancient.eu/article/1534/reactions-to-plague-in-the-ancient—medieval-world. Rector, Kevin.

San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 11 Oct 2021

And everyone had a cell phone camera on you.”79 Counter to the claims of those who advocate defunding the police as a way to reduce violence, the evidence suggests that fewer cops may mean more police misconduct, because the remaining officers must work longer and more stressful hours. Research has found that fatigue predicts a rise in public complaints against cops: a thirteen-hour rather than ten-hour shift significantly boosts their prevalence, while back-to-back shifts quadruple their odds.80 The public supports improving, not defunding, the police. In 2020, 58 percent of Oakland residents told pollsters that they wanted to either increase or maintain the size of the police force.

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“Mom, I love you. Love you. Tell my kids I love them.” He then said, “I’m dead.”3 Within a few hours the video had gone viral, triggering some of the largest protests in American history. In Washington, D.C., in 2020, protesters painted giant yellow letters on the street that spelled out, “Defund the police.”4 In mid-June 2020, more than 1,000 protesters marched peacefully under the banner of Black Lives Matter from Mission High School to City Hall in San Francisco to demand the defunding of the police department. They shut down several freeway entrances, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Bay Bridge.5 In Berkeley a large crowd marched and chanted, “Abolish police,” with drivers honking their support.

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“It’s the existence and persistence and pressure brought about by social movements that keeps these issues on the front burner,” he said. “Just as the women’s movement and the victims’ rights movement kept the issues of the victims of sexual assault and the victims of intimate partner and family violence on the policy front burner.” “But then you need Black Lives Matter to be making a very different demand than ‘defund the police,’ right?” I asked. “Of course, you do,” he said. “There is a social movement there, and it needs to hoist a banner proclaiming that minority victims’ lives matter as well.” “So, you need the moms of the boys who got killed to be like the #MeToo movement?” “Or Mothers Against Drunk Driving,” he added.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent
by Ben Shapiro
Published 26 Jul 2021

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested “archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future.”17 Members of the Lincoln Project, a group of former Republicans-cum-Democrats who raked in tens of millions of dollars in donations to attack Trump and Republicans during the 2020 cycle, called on members of the law firm Jones Day to be inundated with complaints for the great crime of representing the Trump campaign in court.18 Meanwhile, Democrats with the temerity to call out the woke, militant wing of their own party were subjected to claims of racism and bigotry. Even elected Democrats, it turned out, were deplorables. When moderate Democrats complained that they had nearly lost their seats thanks to the radicalism of fellow caucus members pushing “defund the police” and socialism, Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) called them bigots seeking to silence minorities.19 Progressive groups including the Justice Democrats, the Sunrise Movement, and Data for Progress issued a memo declaring that fellow Democrats who wished not to mirror the priorities of the woke were participating in “the Republican Party’s divide-and-conquer racism.”20 The battle to silence the silent majority remains ongoing.

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In the aftermath of Biden’s 2020 victory, moderate Democrats in Congress fretted that they’d nearly lost their House majority, and were unable to gain a Senate majority. Those moderates blamed radicals pushing idiotic positions for the tenuous Democratic grip on power: Representative Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) lit into her radical colleagues for their sloganeering about “defunding the police” and “socialism,” pointing out that Democrats had “lost good members” because of such posturing.59 Meanwhile, radical members of Congress—members such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN)—joined forces to savage Democrats like Spanberger, arguing in an open letter to colleagues, “The lesson to be learned from this election cannot and should not be to lean into racist resentment politics, or back away from the social movements that pushed Democrats to power.”60 Because the Democratic coalition is so fragile, representing at best a large minority or bare majority of Americans, it can be fractured.

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During the 2020 election cycle, Democrats, afraid of alienating black Americans, ignored the rioting and looting associated with Black Lives Matter protests; embraced the ideological insanity of CRT; indulged mass protests against police in the middle of a global pandemic; and fudged on whether they were in favor of defunding the police as crime rates spiked. Afraid of alienating LGBT Americans, Democrats embraced the most radical elements of gender theory, including approval of children transitioning sex; they pressured social media companies to punish Americans for “misgendering”; they vowed to crack down on religious practice in the name of supposed LGBT rights.

Merchants of the Right: Gun Sellers and the Crisis of American Democracy
by Jennifer Carlson
Published 2 May 2023

One California gun seller in a rural area, far from the metropolises of San Francisco and Los Angeles, conveyed just how motivated buyers had become: “People are making calls on a massive radius from where they are located … saying, “Oh, I’ll be there in about three hours. I’m leaving here in about 15 minutes!’ ” By June 2020, gun sellers were already talking of a second surge, “even bigger than the first.” This surge was sparked by a more familiar terrain of racial unrest and rebellion—specifically, the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police uprisings in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. Unlike their lack of experience with pandemics, Americans alive today have not only experienced waves of racial unrest but have also inherited powerful, historically rooted narratives that frame Black protest and uprising as riotous acts of criminal disorder.42 Even though the vast majority—96.3 percent, according to one study43—were peaceful by any definition, many gun sellers associated the protests of 2020 with criminality, disorder, and violence, viewing racial unrest as a clear warning sign that people had to take their safety and security into their own hands—or, for that matter, holsters.44 In this regard, the insecurities upon which panicked buyers acted in response to the unrest were similar to the feelings of abandonment activated with the unfolding of the pandemic.

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Weighing the ramifications of ignoring public health recommendations aimed at preventing the spread of coronavirus with the consequences of ignoring yet another police killing (also a public health crisis), millions gathered, marched, and sometimes rioted for Black Lives Matter; formed and forwarded calls to defund the police, dismantle racism, and remake America; and joined reading groups and discussion circles on white fragility and racial inequality and engaged their friends and families to do the same. Millions of people—including white people in predominantly white areas of the country, in contrast to previous iterations of anti-racist uprisings in the United States55—found America’s systematic racial inequality to be as unacceptable as it was undeniable.

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The style of thinking deployed to make sense of the pandemic—rampant skepticism, a strident faith in political opportunism, and a reliance on first-hand experience—was reshuffled to discount the voices of those collectively mobilized against racism in American society. Though the Black Lives Matter movement included multiple factions, took shape in various manifestations, and intersected with adjacent mobilizations (such as the Defund the Police movement), gun sellers treated the Black Lives Matter movement as an umbrella, catch-all term for the protests, uprisings, and riots that occurred during the summer of 2020. Lacking the first-hand experience that would make racism palpable, many found the national focus on the Black Lives Matter movement unsettling and suspect.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “tear down the wall”: “Tell the Biden Administration: Respect Communities on the Border. Tear Down the Wall!,” Sierra Club, accessed Jan. 12, 2023, addup.sierraclub.org/campaigns/tell-the-biden-administration-honor-communities-on-the-border-tear-down-the-wall. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “defund the police”: Heather Smith, “What Does It Mean to Defund the Police?,” Sierra Club, June 17, 2020, www.sierraclub.org/sierra/what-does-it-mean-defund-police. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT increasingly radical causes: “American Philanthropy Turns Left,” Economist, Sept. 4, 2021, www.economist.com/united-states/2021/09/04/american-philanthropy-turns-left.

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The Sierra Club, for example, is an environmentalist group that has historically seen it as its mission to “promote the responsible use of the earth’s ecosystems and resources.” But the organization now issues statements on a bewildering range of different topics, from demanding that the Biden administration “tear down the wall” on America’s southern border to joining calls to “defund the police.” The ideological transformation of the nonprofit sector is unlikely to be reversed anytime soon. For, driven by the same generational and ideological trends, major grant-making foundations that serve as the key financial backers for a whole range of activist groups, think tanks, and arts organizations have increasingly embraced the core tenets of the identity synthesis.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the ACLU has called for: The ACLU published a letter from a student at Smith College that called for “affinity housing” for racial minorities on campus (Lucas Ropek, “Woman at Center of Smith College Incident Calls for ‘Affinity Housing’ for Students of Color,” MassLive, Sept. 14, 2018, www.masslive.com/news/2018/09/smith_college_student_pens_let.html). On defunding the police, see “Transformational Public Safety: Reducing the Roles, Resources, and Power of Police,” American Civil Liberties Union, June 8, 2021, www.aclu.org/news/topic/transformational-public-safety-reducing-the-roles-resources-and-power-of-police. On student loan debt, see “Cancel Student Debt: $50k for Every Borrower,” American Civil Liberties Union, accessed Dec. 16, 2022, action.aclu.org/petition/cancel-student-debt-50k-every-borrower.

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George Packer
Published 14 Jun 2021

Mastheads and tables of contents changed, pictures and statues were taken down, glass ceilings shattered, but no one honestly expected to do much about the material conditions of misery. The summer of 2020 became an affair of, by, and for professionals. It led to few concrete ideas for helping disadvantaged Black people and a slogan (“defund the police”) that created endless confusion and antagonism. Instead of a political agenda and strategy, it pursued a mystical vision that freezes us all in the ice of our own identity and makes ordinary communication with one another nearly impossible. In a memoir, Alicia Garza, who is credited with originating the term “Black lives matter,” criticized the movement for being too insular, too intolerant, too ready to pursue trivial causes and avoid high-stakes politics.

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Structural racism—ongoing disadvantages that Black people suffer from policies and institutions over the centuries—is real. So is individual agency, but in the Just America narrative it doesn’t exist. The narrative can’t talk about the main source of violence in Black neighborhoods, which is young Black men, not police. The push to “defund the police” in Minneapolis and other cities during the George Floyd protests was stopped by local Black citizens, who wanted better, not less, policing. Just America can’t deal with the stubborn divide between Black and white students in academic assessments. The mild phrase “achievement gap” has been banished, not just because it implies that Black parents and children have some responsibility but also because, according to anti-racist ideology, any disparity is by definition racist, as is any attempt to analyze the disparity with other terms.

Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections
by Mollie Hemingway
Published 11 Oct 2021

Rushmore Speech Showed ‘His Priorities Are All Wrong,’ ” The Hill, July 5, 2020, https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/505913-duckworth-on-trumps-mt-rushmore-speech-on-protecting-confederate. 90. Joseph Wulfsohn, “NY Times Op-Ed Clears Up ‘Defund the Police’ Confusion: ‘Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,’ ” Fox News, June 13, 2020, https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-times-op-ed-clears-up-defund-the-police-confusion-yes-we-mean-literally-abolish-the-police. 91. Don Lemon, CNN Tonight with Don Lemon, CNN, July 7, 2020, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/2007/07/cnnt.01.html. 92. Mark Hemingway, “Protest Violence and the See-No-Evil Media,” RealClearPolitics, August 28, 2020, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/08/28/protest_violence_and_the_see-no-evil_media_144086.html. 93.

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The media and their activist allies pushed the narrative that America was and is an irredeemably racist country and that the George Floyd video was just the latest proof of that reality. Despite the nationwide violence, the media insisted that the Black Lives Matter movement, which included calls to “defund the police,” was peaceful.11 Throughout his first campaign and during much of his presidency, Trump was known for gathering massive and exuberant crowds. He gave freewheeling speeches where he tested messages, made jokes, and pushed his policy ideas. But over the course of this campaign, he couldn’t hold as many rallies, thanks in large part to the pandemic.

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Rosenberg had at one time been sentenced to 58 years in prison for possession “of 740 pounds of explosives, an Uzi submachine gun, an M-14 rifle, another rifle with a telescopic sight, a sawed-off shotgun, three 9-millimeter handguns in purses and boxes of ammunition” before her sentence was commuted by President Bill Clinton.38 Despite its radical extremism, Black Lives Matter received a tremendous amount of support from corporations and other elite groups. Its website even proclaimed the movement wanted to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure” and sought to “defund the police.”39 The affiliated Movement for Black Lives, which claimed to be made up of over 150 organizations, called for an end to all policing and criminal justice, an end to capital punishment, and an end to cash bail. It called for reparations in the form of a minimum income for black people, with mandated “curriculums” that “critically examine the political, economic, and social impacts of colonialism and slavery.”

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

The protests carried on for weeks. Most were peaceful, though the anger of protesters was palpable throughout, as was their conviction that uprooting racism from American life required more than mild reform; it required drastic action such as “defunding the police.”43 In some locales, such as Portland, Oregon, protest turned violent. Biden never signed off on “defunding the police,” a solution he regarded as dangerous and unworkable.44 But he understood from the start that he could not do what his Democratic predecessors in the Oval Office had repeatedly done: subordinate racial justice to other, more “pressing” or “important” matters.

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History,” New York Times, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html, accessed September 28, 2021; Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, June 12, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html, accessed September 28, 2021. 44.Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns, and Thomas Kaplan, “Biden Walks a Cautious Line as He Opposes Defunding the Police,” New York Times, June 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/politics/biden-defund-the-police.html, accessed September 28, 2021. 45.Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June 15, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/, accessed September 27, 2021; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations,” New Yorker, June 10, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/ta-nehisi-coates-revisits-the-case-for-reparations, accessed September 27, 2021. 46.Marantz, “Are We Entering a New Political Era?”

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream
by Alissa Quart
Published 14 Mar 2023

Celina Su surveyed twenty-five thousand PB participants: Celina Su: “Beyond Inclusion: Critical Race Theory and Participatory Budgeting,” New Political Science 39, no. 1 (2017) 126–42, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07393148.2017.1278858. according to Alexander Kolokotronis, a young scholar: Alexander Kolokotronis, “What to Do Once We’ve Defunded the Police,” Current Affairs, July 9, 2020, https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/07/what-to-do-once-weve-defunded-the-police. Chapter 16: Unmaking the Self-Made Myth hybrid narratives: This sort of narrative was proposed as the most effective format in the Norman Lear Center’s March 2021 report “Stories Matter” by Erica L. Rosenthal. While “personal responsibility narratives” in films or television shows “focus on individual choices and responsibility” with an “emphasis on willpower or lifestyle choices,” “hybrid narratives” combine “personal responsibility with external factors, situating individual stories within a larger structural context. . . .

Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes: Essays
by Phoebe Robinson
Published 14 Oct 2021

Racial uprisings happening against a backdrop of a global pandemic is something that no one should live through, and as heartbreaking as it was to have footage of George Floyd’s murder circulating all over social media and news outlets,* it created a collective fury. While the jury is still out on whether that passion will bring about substantive change, there’s no denying that it was a historic summer. A groundswell of outrage, marches, and demands to defund the police mixed with a “Well, the world is on fire, so I gotta do something” energy was a chaotic combination that birthed something no one expected and very few wanted: social justice “warriors.” These weren’t the sjdubs of the past or recent past—Kimberlé Crenshaw (professor of law at UCLA and Columbia Law School), Alicia Garza (cofounder of Black Lives Matter), Rashad Robinson (president of Color of Change), and Marsha P.

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I know the societal narrative is that women are allegedly delicate little flowers who are too emotional, and songs such as Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” and Jazmine Sullivan’s “Bust Your Windows” certainly help reinforce the idea that women can’t let anything go, but, y’all, any time at the end of the night at a club or a bar, when a woman doesn’t give a guy her number, instead of cutting his losses, he’s out here acquiring JG Wentworth’s services in order to get a structured settlement for the three vodka sodas he bought her throughout the evening while still applying uncomfortable pressure in hopes of wearing her down and getting the number. Because rejection or anything that doesn’t positively reinforce his fragile sense of self cannot be accepted. Same for whiteness. That’s why calls for substantive changes such as defunding the police are generally met with pushback, requests to slow down and let bureaucracy do its thing, or deflection tactics, which, even if there are good intentions baked within them, are not really meant to bring about long-lasting results. The call to action to buy books written by Black authors and Blacking out the NYT bestsellers list comes to mind.

Free Speech And Why It Matters
by Andrew Doyle
Published 24 Feb 2021

This was misinterpreted as racist because he was replying to a black Twitter user, even though it was a phrase he had used previously in conversation with white people. In June 2020, Nick Buckley, the founder of charity organisation Mancunian Way, which is committed to helping young people from ethnic minority backgrounds to find work, was ousted for criticising the radical politics of the Black Lives Matter movement (most notably their calls to defund the police and abolish capitalism). Although Buckley’s opposition to racism was never in doubt, the charity capitulated to pressure from online campaigners who smeared him as racist and demanded his dismissal. It was only after a petition and counter-campaign that the decision was reversed. In August 2020, Sasha White, an assistant at the Tobias Literary Agency in New York, was fired after a campaign by trans activists who took offence at statements posted on her private Twitter account expressing her view that gender-neutral pronouns were unhelpful to the feminist cause.

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam
by Vivek Ramaswamy
Published 16 Aug 2021

Anyone who sincerely cares about important causes like female empowerment, racial equality, and environmentalism ought to be offended when these causes are cheapened by corporations that pawn them off to advance their own goals. For example, are black communities really going to be better off if we “defund the police”? Or if we “clear the jails”? Or if we “dismantle the nuclear family structure”? Or do these slogans simply make those who utter them feel more noble? Satisfying our own moral hunger is just another form of self-indulgence. Sure, maybe in the short run, some progressives will be happy that there are more women or black people on boards because Goldman Sachs and Nasdaq decided to mandate it for companies that go public.

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Woke activists fail to focus on more tangible examples of truly systemic inequality just because they aren’t quite as fashionable to talk about. The existence of summer break as an institution is probably one of the greatest systematic inequalities in our educational system. But there’s something about going out and chanting “End Summer Break” that doesn’t quite have the same moral ring to it as “Defund the police.” It’s boring to campaign against long summer breaks. It’s much easier and more satisfying to say that we should just end structural racism and then everything else will follow. Liberals complain about trickle-down economics, but they believe in trickle-down politics—don’t worry about boring little policy fixes, just raise your voice against racism instead.

The Wake-Up Call: Why the Pandemic Has Exposed the Weakness of the West, and How to Fix It
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 1 Sep 2020

Camden, a rough town in New Jersey, reduced its police violence problem with education in de-escalation and conflict management. More broadly, the job should be redefined. The police are a classic example of the overloaded state, with cops being asked to deal with problems such as mental health, family breakdown, and juvenile delinquency. “Defund the police” should become “deconstruct the police,” with some functions handed over to trained (and unarmed) social workers. Police reform by itself will not right the system that throttled Floyd to death. Gladstone made a habit of creating big commissions into pressing social problems and then implementing their recommendations.

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 15 Nov 2021

In all these instances, progressives have argued for the need to enhance prior court-approved restrictions on the easy sale and use of particular weapons, given new existential challenges. America is an increasingly urban and suburban society. There are ever-fewer rural residents, who are most likely to grow up and use weapons for hunting and personal defense. Consequently, some of these restrictionist efforts enjoyed majority public support—at least until the national defund-the-police efforts in summer and autumn 2020 in reaction to the death of George Floyd. Urbanization, along with the end of national conscription, accelerated the general trend in which millions of Americans had not only never bought or used a firearm but likely had never seen one. Yet gun sales reached record heights during the 2020 COVID-19 quarantines and in reaction to rioting, looting, and arson in the streets of major cities.

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Mostly African American and other inner-city citizens, many of whose stores and businesses were closest to the downtown violence and thus left vulnerable to the looting and burning. As it turned out, the wages of not enforcing the law fell most heavily upon the citizens with the least ability to object to the nullifying of enforcement of the very statutes that civilization relies upon to protect the vulnerable. Indeed, in the midst of defund-the-police movements and reluctance among dispirited officers to enter dangerous crime-ridden areas, murders in 2020 soared in most American cities. In some cases, district attorneys failed to prosecute crimes; in others, law enforcement simply lost all sense of prior deterrence on the assumption that either criminals would not be arrested or, if arrested, would not be prosecuted.50 In sum, state and local nullification erodes the rights of the citizen.

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy
by Jamie Raskin
Published 4 Jan 2022

And I don’t know if the reports are true, but the Washington Times has just reported some pretty compelling evidence from a facial-recognition company showing that some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters. They were masquerading as Trump supporters and, in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group Antifa. Now, we should seek to build America up, not tear her down and destroy her. And I am sure glad that, at least for one day, I didn’t hear my Democrat colleagues calling to defund the police. In fact, all those hot-off-the-presses reports about Antifa organizing the attack were a lie, pure propaganda. Antifa had had nothing to do with it, but pumping that concoction into the media bloodstream on the night of the attack gave Republicans a rhetorical antidote to counter the spreading outrage against Trump and his assembled violent insurrectionary forces.

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Of course, the premise of this Bizarro World insinuation is that the “fake” MAGA and extremist protesters, who were actually Antifa fighters, according to right-wing dogma, had attacked a police officer . . . because they thought he was Antifa—which of course makes no sense. In right-wing conspiracy theory and the land of the Big Lie, we had transcended the world not only of fact but of simple logic, too. By the same token, Gaetz knew that there was no Democratic support for any actual legislative effort in Congress to “defund the police,” but he was anticipating the GOP’s need to promote this fiction, as the party would be working overtime for months or years to downplay and dismiss the brutal face-to-face violence unleashed against hundreds of our police officers, more than 140 of whom were injured by insurrectionists wielding baseball bats, hockey sticks, steel pipes, flagpoles, bear spray, and other unknown chemical irritants.

The New Snobbery
by David Skelton
Published 28 Jun 2021

Addressing these kinds of issues will make a more profound difference to people’s lives than endless discussions about Empire or street names – arguments that often seem to exist solely in order to boost the profile of activist academics. This copyism of the US was taken to an extreme when parts of the British left started campaigning to ‘defund the police’ only a few months after standing on a manifesto that promised to massively increase the policing budget. The modern left often lacks subtlety or originality as much as it lacks an authentic sympathy with the working class. It reached absurd levels when a desire to copy the reasonable campaign to topple statues in the American South led to bizarre claims that Grey’s monument and statues of Gladstone should be torn down.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

Rather, they are so dehumanizing and so incriminated in the reproduction of race and class hierarchies that they must be eliminated altogether. This position often invites the accusation that abolitionists are hopelessly utopian. In fact, they are everywhere involved in daily politics. They have waged successful campaigns across the country to stop the construction of new prisons, to reduce incarcerated populations, and to defund the police. But, as Davis explains, “abolition is not primarily a negative strategy.” It’s also about “building anew.” Abolitionists are not just trying to decrease the number of cops and prisons until both disappear. They are also coming up with better ways of keeping people safe. To do so, Davis argues, it’s essential to “let go of the desire to discover one single alternative system of punishment.”

Happy-Go-Lucky
by David Sedaris
Published 30 May 2022

She’s, like, twenty years older than me and has four kids! Plus I’m already married. To a man.” Eventually, though, I’ll be right, and my host will say, “May I just thank you for being the one person in my life who’s not a horrible racist?” As the weeks passed, I saw more and more protest signs reading DEFUND THE POLICE. That won’t be doing us much good come election time, I thought, worried over how this would play on Fox News: “The left wants it so that when armed thugs break into your house and you dial 911, you’ll get a recording of Rich Homie Quan laughing at you!” Amy worried too. It wasn’t taking money allocated for law enforcement and redirecting it toward social services that bothered her—rather, it was the language and how Trump would use it to scare people.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

The police began pop-up neighborhood parties, where they’d rock up with Mister Softee ice-cream trucks, grill hot dogs, play basketball with kids, and get to know the residents. Seven years later, when American cities were up in flames, literally, over the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and protesters chanted “Defund the police,” Camden was cited as a success story. Murders were down 60 percent, crime had almost halved, and complaints of excessive force by police had fallen by a stunning 95 percent. The reframing had worked. A symbolic moment came in June 2020. A new Camden police chief, Joseph Wysocki, not only authorized a big Black Lives Matter street protest—he asked the organizers if he could join them at the head of the procession.

American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin
Published 12 Jul 2021

And during the violent riots last summer and this spring, which involved looting, arson, and even murder in multiple cities over the course of several months, and where Antifa and BLM had prominent organizational roles, the Democratic Party’s leadership mostly regurgitated the rhetoric and claims of the anarchist/Marxist groups and rioters, including the broad condemnation of law enforcement as “systemically racist,” and were not only loath to denounce the violence, but, incredibly, declared the rioters as “mostly peaceful” and their demand to defund the police (later, changed to slash their budgets) as legitimate. In fact, a BLM cofounder declared in the summer of 2020 that one of their “goal[s] is to get Trump out now.”2 Democratic-controlled cities named streets after the group. And numerous Biden campaign staffers donated to a fund that paid the bail for the release of those who were arrested and jailed.3 Obviously, the Democratic Party and Biden campaign perceived an overlap or synergy of political interests and objectives with the rioters.

We're Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation
by Eric Garcia
Published 2 Aug 2021

The public deaths of Black people that disturbed the public consciousness led to a call for defunding police departments. Supporters of that movement make the case that psychiatric services or other types of intervention might be more effective at helping people with mental illness than police intervention. Whether one supports or opposes defunding the police, it is likely that finding alternatives to police could benefit mentally ill, autistic, or otherwise disabled people. The fates of Watts, Rios-Soto, and Hayes reminded me of my own interactions with police. As a Boy Scout, I was taught to see the police as respected civil servants meant to protect the community.

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice
by Jamie K. McCallum
Published 15 Nov 2022

Heads rolled only metaphorically during the nationwide protests that summer, but street skirmishes with police and right-wing counterprotesters meant the movement took a more aggressive stance than many liberal onlookers were comfortable with. More than three hundred fires burned across Philadelphia, where four hundred people were arrested even before the National Guard arrived. Police precincts burned in other cities, and it seemed like the protest slogan “defund the police” might go mainstream. Why were the protests so large and militant? It’s possible that mass unemployment left people with more time to join the movement. As scholars Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have shown, widespread welfare relief has often been deployed to contain mass unrest.23 In the summer of 2020, it could have been the opposite.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity
by Devon Price
Published 4 Apr 2022

The criminal justice system and mental health system are deeply interwoven, and they both serve to perpetuate ableism. As I described earlier in the book, disabled people are at extremely high risk of being shot by police. Black and brown Autistic people are, in particular, at an elevated risk of police violence and incarceration. Defunding the police and prisons and working to abolish these oppressive institutions will help liberate Black Autistic people, as well as others with disabilities and mental illnesses. Many people who oppose racist police violence argue that cops be replaced with social workers or therapists, and that a state-run mental health force should be dispatched when emergency calls are made.

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis
by Beth Macy
Published 15 Aug 2022

“The controversy around race and around harm reduction is very different in the state outside of Charleston,” Prosperino said. In one community they don’t care to name, needles get passed out from a Black-church van under the umbrella of a program designed to help Black sex workers. Asked how to fix the opioid crisis, Prosperino said, “We won’t have real harm reduction unless we defund the police.” But in large rural swaths of the country where many decry universal health care as socialism and American flags hang upside down as a symbol of distress, I asked them the same question I’d been scratching my head about for years: Was it a worthy goal for police officers to shepherd people who use drugs into treatment instead of jail?

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

Or that democracies never start wars, except for ancient Greece, but it had slaves, and Georgian England, but the commoners couldn’t vote, and nineteenth-century America, but its women lacked the franchise, and India and Pakistan, but they were fledgling states. They can move the goalposts, demanding that we “defund the police” but then explaining that they only mean reallocating part of its budget to emergency responders. (Rationality cognoscenti call it the motte-and-bailey fallacy, after the medieval castle with a cramped but impregnable tower into which one can retreat when invaders attack the more desirable but less defensible courtyard.)14 They can claim that no Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge, and when confronted with Angus, who puts sugar on his porridge, say this shows that Angus is not a true Scotsman.

The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland
by Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham
Published 10 Jan 2023

And speaking up can only reveal problems; it’s only the first step toward change. But altogether, whistleblowers, civil rights attorneys, courts and monitors, and especially regular people banding together in protest movements can successfully reform policing. Long before reimagining policing became a topic of public discussion, or “defunding the police” became a boogeyman on Fox News, countless Oakland residents agitated and organized to change policing in their city. Oakland’s story shows that accountability isn’t something that can ever be fully and finally achieved. It was only through continuous protest and obsessive scrutiny of the police department that Oaklanders were able to bring about progress.