FAQ

Why are organizers demanding we defund the police? What does this mean?

Although we often hear a different story, historically the reason the police were formed was to uphold systems which oppress poor, black, and brown people. Over the past 30 years, states, counties, and cities have defunded basic social services and instead used their budgets to create huge, militarized police departments to control the communities they have abandoned.

As explained by Interrupting Criminalization and the Movement 4 Black Lives, “#DefundPolice is a demand to cut funding and resources from police departments and other law enforcement and invest in things that actually make our communities safer: quality, affordable, and accessible housing, universal quality health care, including community- based mental health services, income support to stay safe during the pandemic, safe living wage employment, education, and youth programming.”

In short, “It is a demand to #DefendBlackLives by shutting off resources to institutions that harm Black people and redirecting them to meeting Black communities’ needs and increasing our collective safety.”

Why should this matter to faith communities?

As a multifaith coalition, we recognize that policing is a barrier to building multifaith solidarity. Historically, law enforcement has been the tool that white colonizing Christians used to suppress indigenous American and African religious practices -- many of which actually offer non-punitive approaches to harm. More recently, policing, surveillance, and incarceration have been used to terrorize Muslim people living in the U.S. and abroad through U.S. imperialism. For the white Christians in our Faith in Texas community, defunding the police and redirecting resources to meet Black people’s needs is one way to take accountability to repair the harm done for centuries by white colonizing Christians.

Furthermore, we seek to live into the liberative impulses in our varied faith practices. As people of faith we believe that all people have inherent worth and dignity. For this reason, we care deeply about harm and violence, and seek responses to harm that do not create more violence. We recognize that policing and incarceration have proven themselves unable to end violence, but instead reproduce violence and trauma. Police are not only ineffective at creating safety, they actively cause harm and violence. People of faith have a particular role to play in envisioning a better future in which all Black people thrive, free of police violence and cages.

Who came up with this demand?

The demand didn’t simply appear overnight. Black organizers and other abolitionists have spent the past six years building local infrastructures to support campaigns to shift public resources away from death-making institutions and to life-affirming ones. #DefundPolice is rooted in a larger Invest/Divest framework developed by abolitionist organizations over the past two decades, including the Movement 4 Black Lives, Critical Resistance, The People’s Response Team (Chicago), and Black Youth Project 100.

There are a lot of ways forward being proposed right now, how can we sort through which ones align with our faith values?

The simplest explanation for why we support defunding the police rather than reforming the police is that history has shown us again and again that the police cannot be reformed. Many of the popular reforms (e.g., implicit-bias training, community policing, body cameras, civilian oversight, use of force standards, etc.) have not reduced incidences of police violence because they have not reduced the police’s power to do harm.

As Hannah Bowman explains, “‘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.”

To sort through which specific proposals we should organize around right now, head to 8 to Abolition.

So what could real safety look like, without police?

So many things! We want our communities to have more support, not less. And there won’t be one single thing we need. Different situations will require different responses. Head to the transformative justice section for more but also check out these flyers to spur your own creativity.

Courtesty of MPD150, here is their set of FAQs:

Building a Police-Free Future: Frequently Asked Questions

We believe in the power, possibility, and necessity of a police-free future. We also understand, however, that this is a new idea for many people. What follows are some frequently-asked questions, and our responses to them.

Won’t abolishing the police create chaos and crime? How will we stay safe?

Police abolition work is not about snapping our fingers and instantly defunding every department in the world. Rather, we’re talking about a gradual process of strategically reallocating resources, funding, and responsibility ​away​ from police and ​toward​ community-based models of safety, support, and prevention.

The people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises. Rather than strangers armed with guns, who very likely do not live in the neighborhoods they’re patrolling, we want to create space for more mental health service providers, social workers, victim/survivor advocates, religious leaders, neighbors and friends– all of the people who really make up the fabric of a community– to look out for one another.

But what about armed bank robbers, murderers, and supervillains?

Crime isn’t random. Most of the time, it happens when someone has been unable to meet their basic needs through other means. So to really “fight crime,” we don’t need more cops; we need more jobs, more educational opportunities, more arts programs, more community centers, more mental health resources, and more of a say in how our own communities function.

Sure, in this long transition process, we may need a small, specialized class of public servants whose job it is to respond to violent crimes. But part of what we’re talking about here is what role police play in our society. Right now, cops don’t just respond to violent crimes; they make needless traffic stops, arrest petty drug users, harass Black and Brown people, and engage in a wide range of “broken windows policing” behaviors that only serve to keep more people under the thumb of the criminal justice system.

But why not fund the police and fund all these alternatives too? Why is it an either/or?

It’s not just that police are ineffective: in many communities, they’re actively harmful. The history of policing is a history of violence against the marginalized– American police departments were originally created to dominate and criminalize communities of color and poor white workers, a job they continue doing to this day. The list has grown even longer: LGBTQ folks, people with disabilities, activists– so many of us are attacked by cops on a daily basis.

And it’s bigger than just police brutality; it’s about how the prison industrial complex, the drug war, immigration law, and the web of policy, law, and culture that forms our criminal justice system has destroyed millions of lives, and torn apart families. Cops don’t prevent crime; they cause it, through the ongoing, violent disruption of our communities.

It’s also worth noting that most social service agencies and organizations that could serve as alternatives to the police are underfunded, scrambling for grant money to stay alive while being forced to interact with officers who often make their jobs even harder. In 2016, the Minneapolis Police Department received $165 million in city funding alone. Imagine what that kind of money could do to keep our communities safe if it was reinvested.

Even people who support the police agree: we ask cops to solve too many of our problems. As former Dallas Police Chief David Brown said: “We’re asking cops to do too much in this country... Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it... Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops... That’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all those problems.”

What about body cameras? What about civilian review boards, implicit bias training, and community policing initiatives?

Video footage (whether from body cameras or other sources) wasn’t enough to get justice for Philando Castile, Samuel DuBose, Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, and far too many other victims of police violence. A single implicit bias training session can’t overcome decades of conditioning and department culture. Other reforms, while often noble in intention, simply do not do enough to get to the root of the issue.

History is a useful guide here: community groups in the 1960s also demanded civilian review boards, better training, and community policing initiatives. Some of these demands were even met. But universally, they were either ineffective, or dismantled by the police department over time. Recent reforms are already being co-opted and destroyed: just look at how many officers are wearing body cameras that are never turned on, or how quickly Jeff Sessions’ Justice Department has moved to end consent decrees. We have half a century’s worth of evidence that reforms can’t work. It’s time for something new.

This all sounds good in theory, but wouldn’t it be impossible to do?

Throughout US history, everyday people have regularly accomplished “impossible” things, from the abolition of slavery, to voting rights, to the 40-hour workweek, and more. What’s really impossible is the idea that the police departments can be reformed against their will to protect and serve communities whom they have always attacked. The police, as an institution around the world, have existed for less than 200 years– less time than chattel slavery existed in the Americas. Abolishing the police doesn’t need to be difficult– we can do it in our own cities, one dollar at a time, through redirecting budgets to common-sense alternative programs. Let’s get to work!