The Consequences of Rejecting "Defund the Police"
Political cowardice is paid for in blood.
A paranoid and fearful man gets a bunch of loaded guns and leaves them in every room of his house. Eventually, his curious toddler, or his boastful teenager, or the man himself on a drunken bender picks one up, and something awful happens. When it does, we say to the man: “You shouldn’t have had all those loaded guns laying around.”
In our country, the loaded guns are referred to as “law enforcement.” But rather than listening to those who say that constantly increasing the number of armed men with badges is unwise, we mock and scorn them. We accuse them of being unrealistic, dreamy, overly radical, not tough on crime. Then, always, something awful happens. After a brief pause for collective head-shaking, we do it all over again.
In 2020, millions of Americans marched in the streets to protest police violence. Millions of people called for defunding the police. What did they mean by that? They meant that it is unwise to continually buy more and more loaded guns and leave them around our house in the name of safety. They meant, concretely, that our government at every level should spend less money on armed local police and armed state police and armed federal police, and spend more money on addressing the social and economic issues that are the underlying causes of what we call “crime.”
For this eminently wise and sensible suggestion, they were made fun of by the entire political establishment. They were dismissed by blow-dried pundits on television and in print. And they saw the Democratic Party politicians who had, only months before, been marching with them in the popular protests run away from their actual policy demands as fast and as loudly as possible. “The answer is not to defund our police departments, it’s to fund our police,” said Joe Biden, echoing all of his mainstream Democratic peers. You could almost hear the crunching of tires over the bones of Black Lives Matter as the Democrats threw them under the bus.
More than five years later, I still find the Democrats’ 2020 heel turn on policing to be one of the most despicable acts of political cowardice I have witnessed in my adult lifetime. Yet to this very day, the party and its favorite consultants and pundits still believe that they did the right thing. Guess what? You didn’t. Defunding the police is a good idea. By rejecting it, you have only allowed more and more guns to accumulate around our house. Yesterday, in Minnesota, one of them shot and killed Renee Good. Ironically, she was killed while protesting for the rights of her neighbors to be free from harassment by armed men. Her death is the latest awful and predictable consequence of our lunatic attachment to the myth that safety comes at gunpoint.
The cult of law enforcement is bipartisan. Democrats and Republicans differ only in degree, and the degree is minor, and often, Democrats decide to try to outdo Republicans on this issue in order to score political points, so the net effect is that there is very little real counterpoint to this cult in the entire political establishment. This cult worships the idea that spending more money on armed men is the path to safety, and to justice, and to peace. This cult is why we have so many local police, and so many of them are absurdly armed with weapons of war. And it is also why we have the largest military budget on earth, and a sprawling security state that reaches into every corner of the world with spies and drones and satellites. All of this is of a piece.
The problem with this approach to “public safety” is twofold. First, hiring more armed men does not, in fact, do anything to solve the underlying problems like poverty and inequality and oppression that produce “crime,” and therefore, with a fixed budget, every dollar that you spend on armed men is one that is not going to mitigate the actual systemic issues that create the conditions that the armed men purportedly exist to fight. Second, when you create large pools of armed, empowered men, sooner or later someone whose ideas you dislike will be in charge of them.
When people warned Barack Obama and Joe Biden about the worrying persistence of the huge armed global apparatus that America has built up since the “War on Terror” began, this is what they were warning about. Now, a bad man has it, and he is doing bad things with it. This was the easiest thing in history to see coming. This is what happens when you have an endless cycle of increasing the guns in your house, and you never get rid of any. You cannot just add police and soldiers and spies and weapons forever and expect that nobody will ever do anything bad with them. You have to actually take the positive corrective step of getting rid of them.
You can’t just talk about how the police should be better. You have to defund the police. You can’t just say that you hope nobody will ever pick up one of the loaded guns you have laying around. You have to get rid of them.
As Renee Good, a mother and wife, lays dead, I would like for the sober and serious members of the Democratic Establishment, and the well-intentioned liberal voters across the country, to take time to look very hard in the mirror and think about the broader consequences of their knee-jerk dismissal of the very concept of defunding the police. The consequences that have rippled far out past a single election cycle. The consequences of establishing very publicly that there are not two positions on the question of whether or not more armed men produce safety. The consequences of saying to voters, “There are two parties in this country, and on this, they both agree: More police. More guns. On this, there is no other choice.”
ICE is police. Liberals may object to what ICE is doing. They may find it scary that Congress has appropriated tens of billions of dollars to hire ten thousand ICE agents who will constitute an army of Trump loyalists empowered to purge our nation of brown people. But you, liberals, Democrats, must recognize that you teed this up for them. We had a historic opportunity to have a grand national reckoning with the thesis that more police are always better. In Washington, the Democrats very deliberately chose not to have that reckoning in any substantive way. They, and the good liberal establishment, chose to cling to the belief that defunding the police was unwise, unpopular, and unrealistic, and that America would be able to somehow progress past our blood-soaked legacy of oppression even while leaving all of those armed men in place. Just by asking them to be better.
It doesn’t work. By rejecting the very idea of defunding the police, our political leaders left open the door for what is happening now. They left voters with no opposition party, with no alternate scenario. They left the Overton window of our mainstream political commentary with no faction of intellectuals making the wild, controversial argument that filling your house with more and more guns does not make you safer, and that filling your cities with more and more armed men does not solve our social problems, and that making the United States military more and more powerful does not make the world a more just and peaceful place. The entire vision that peace, justice, and happiness might increase as a result of moving resources away from armed men and into health and education was tossed in the trash by a united, bipartisan front of political leaders.
So here we are. Now Trump has all of it. He uses the very same logic of policing and safety to launch a Nazi-esque immigration purge. Armed ICE agents are kidnapping people in the streets. They are shooting and killing people. Do you feel safer? This is bipartisan logic in action. Trump uses the mighty U.S. military machine that generations of bipartisan administrations have built up to assassinate boaters and invade foreign countries and threaten global stability at will. Are you proud of this, all of you hard-nosed military realists? This is the manifestation of what you have built.
Give guns and special powers to thousands and thousands of men everywhere, and bad things will happen. Spend your money on armed men instead of schools and housing and teachers and doctors, and your population will have worse lives. I guarantee it. Everyone with common sense knows it. This is the simple argument that everyone asking to defund the police was making. They were mocked. Now, there are more armed men and more oppression. Please, for god’s sake, let us be smarter than this. It is the idea that is wrong here. We will never get rid of bad people. But we do have the power to stop leaving all these loaded guns around for them to pick up.
Also
Related reading: Talk Louder About Defunding the Police; How to Murder a Good Idea With Conventional Wisdom; Building the American Brownshirts; New Orleans Is Watching You, ICE.
A GoFundMe to support Renee Good’s wife and son can be found here. There are ongoing protests against ICE around the country—go to one where you live. And one more request from me, as these issues unfold: The public conversation around defunding the police has always been plagued by tedious and beside-the-point meta-commentary about whether or not it is a “good slogan.” Please do not do that in your comments here or elsewhere. Focus on the underlying issues.
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See the note above about focusing on the substance of the issue and not the slogan. Please talk about the issues themselves. The reason we did not defund the police has nothing to do with "branding" or "finding a better slogan." If that were the case, Democrats would have in fact rolled out another slogan. They didn't because they did not want to do the policy. The question is why they did not want to do the policy. Please do all the musings about branding somewhere else. I have heard them for five years and they are not interesting. Thank you.
"Defund the police" has always been too simplistic and overly broad to be effective. De-militarize would be a better angle.
We need educated, well-trained police. Police who can de-escalate a situation. Police who don't put themselves at unnecessary risk. Police who can recognize when a mental health advocate is needed — and can access one. And we need better communication between departments and agencies to avoid recycling bad apples. Those all take money.
We don't need fancier weapons, tanks in our streets, and our own citizens treated as The Enemy. The situation, as always, is more nuanced that black & white, us vs them.