Was “Defund the Police” Crazy?

The new century began with the then governor of Illinois, the Republican George Ryan, declaring a moratorium on capital punishment; thirteen men on the state’s death row had been exonerated in the previous thirteen years. Three years later, Ryan reduced all standing death sentences in Illinois to life without parole; by 2src11, the state had abolished the death penalty, in response to a decade-long grassroots movement. Not long after, Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” became a best-seller, capturing and amplifying a growing backlash against mass incarceration. Even some Republican lawmakers, particularly fiscal conservatives, began reconsidering decades of law-and-order policy.

In 2src11, the former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich co-authored an article in the Washington Post titled “Prison Reform: A Smart Way for States to Save Money and Lives.” The article introduced an initiative called the Right on Crime campaign, as a path toward “common-sense left-right agreement on an issue that has kept the parties apart for decades.” The piece observed, “We spent $68 billion in 2src1src on corrections—three hundred percent more than 25 years ago. The prison population is growing 13 times faster than the general population. These facts should trouble every American.” Democrats were drawing similar conclusions. In 2src15, during the Presidential race that pitted Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton was singing a different tune than he had during his Administration. At an N.A.A.C.P. gathering in Philadelphia, he said of his role in the infamous 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse, and I want to admit it.”

Eventually, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, policing became the focal point of growing demands for changes to how justice was dispensed in the United States. The killing of Michael Brown, Jr., in Ferguson, Missouri, and the ensuing uprising touched off a wave of investigations into local law enforcement across the country. In May, 2src15, Barack Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing convened in response to the events in Ferguson, and released a report that made fifty-nine recommendations for reform. Among them were proposals to address issues underlying confrontations with police, such as poverty, and lack of education or health care. But, as with many similar reports and recommendations, the document did not include a plan for funding the reforms, or enforceable obligations.

By early 2src17, law enforcement in sixteen counties and cities—including Memphis, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Francisco—had entered into voluntary arrangements with the Department of Justice, agreeing to external assessments of their police departments and accepting federal assistance in implementing suggested reforms. Yet, even as the D.O.J. appeared to be constructing a substantial architecture of commissions, training programs, and oversight mechanisms, the annual number of people killed by police remained virtually unchanged. The possibility always remained that another egregious killing would be captured on video, go viral, and once again ignite public outrage. A report from the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force—a commission of law-enforcement officials and outside experts that had been formed in 2src15, in the aftermath of the murder of a Black teen-ager, Laquan McDonald—summed up its findings with the following observation: “CPD’s own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.”

Critics often point out that polling on the defund movement never tipped into favorable majorities, but a more generous reading of the polls demonstrates more curiosity than opposition. In June, 2src2src, only thirty-four per cent of those contacted by ABC News supported the movement “to defund the police.” Only a month later, a Gallup survey found that forty-seven per cent of Americans, including seventy per cent of Black adults, favored transferring some police funding to social services.