For those recently learning about abolition and looking for a 101 guide to defunding and abolishing the police, I’ve gathered some new (and older) basic resources.
What does “defund the police” mean?
Broadly speaking, “defund the police” means “take money away from police budgets and move it to other resources.” “Defund” is proving to be a useful demand for a coalition movement in part because it can mean different things to different people, letting abolitionists and not-yet-abolitionists work together as far as we can. But it’s essential to recognize the abolitionist framing of “defund the police.” The goal is not to “reform” police or to “reimagine” police departments as some new form of law enforcement.
Why “defund” or “abolish” rather than “reform”?
One key abolitionist principle is the distinction between crime (socially constructed, and the model is that a law is broken and so the culprit is caught and punished) vs. harm (focuses on the victim, and how to build structures in our communities that prevent harm from happening in the first place and then address it in ways that promote healing and transformation of the community to stop further harm). Fundamentally, policing as law enforcement addresses crime rather than harm. And as such policing functions more to maintain social control than public safety: see, for example, Alex Vitale, “The police aren’t here to protect you.” Defunding insists on a model of public safety which isn’t primarily about punishing people who break the laws, but about a positive vision of “safety” which promotes meeting the needs of every person.
But even further, history has shown that “reform” of policing doesn’t work. See, for example:
“Reform” has historically meant giving more resources to police departments (for new training, body cameras, etc.) and not challenging their social power. “Community policing” efforts or other rules aimed at police accountability haven’t worked because of the disproportionate influence held by police unions and by police departments, as the arm of the state authorized to use violence. See, for example, Mariame Kaba, “Police ‘reforms’ you should always oppose.” Combating police violence means reducing the systemic power of policing, not just encouraging cops to behave better in a system that leaves power in their hands.
This is why abolitionists emphasize what we call “non-reformist reforms”: reforms that are incremental steps toward abolition that move power, money, and influence out of police departments and back into the wider community. A great chart describing non-reformist reforms is available from Critical Resistance here. Non-reformist reforms, like defunding the police, are a place where abolitionists and non-abolitionists can come together as far as we agree. They harness the immediate need for change as a form of “harm reduction” against police violence, while still being compatible with an eventual goal of abolition.
So what are some non-reformist reforms being proposed right now?
The #8toAbolition campaign has a fantastic set of 8 policy areas where non-reformist reforms can have a real impact and move us toward abolition of policing:
How does this all fit into the broader context of prison abolition?
Abolitionist scholars and organizers, especially Black women, have been developing abolitionist theory for years, largely in the context of prisons. For example:
It’s important to recognize that prisons and policing are both parts of a broader carceral system that functions to maintain social control through coercion, banishment, punishment, and violence. Abolitionists reject this system in favor of models of public safety that are focused on meeting needs, transforming the conditions that lead to harm, and promoting healing when harm has been done.
It’s also important to look critically at possible alternatives through this lens of whether they function by coercion, banishment, punishment, or violence. The “carceral mindset” and carceral structures of the prison-industrial complex have affected other spheres, e.g. in punitive models used in education, or in replacing arrest or incarceration with mandated drug or psychiatric treatment. Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law’s new bookPrison By Any Other Name: The Harmful Consequences of Popular Reforms (for which, full disclosure, I’m their literary agent) addresses these various carceral systems in detail, and argues for a real transformative alternatives. As Mariame Kaba says, we have to remove the “cop in our heads and the cop in our hearts.” We have to develop an abolitionist imagination to guide us toward better alternatives.
What does public safety without prisons or police look like, though? What do we do about serious violence?
I address the question about violence (what do we do with murderers with rapists if we can’t call the police?) here in our FAQ.
The challenge with alternatives is that different communities will have different needs and different methods for addressing harm. There’s no single alternative. More here: “The ‘Alternative’ to the Prison-Industrial Complex.”
The point of defunding or abolishing the police is to move our money and our collective energies toward supporting local efforts that are already working “outside the system” to reimagine new, compassionate ways of meeting needs and keeping each other safe. That might be putting money into schools or unarmed crisis-response teams or social workers, or any variety of restorative- and transformative-justice programs. Building new forms of community and getting to know and care for one another in our local communities is a form of abolitionist work!
