Defunding the Police

“Defund the police” is the demand that municipalities cut police budgets and redirect the money to housing, mental health services, education and violence interruption programmes. It moved from activist circles to mainstream American politics in the weeks after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020. Conservatives opposed it on the ground that the first duty of government is the protection of persons and property, and that a state which withdraws that protection does not liberate the poor but abandons them.

The argument is not that police departments are beyond criticism. It is that public order is the precondition of every other good a neighbourhood can have, and that the people who lose most when order collapses are the residents of the poorest districts, not the commentators who proposed the cut.

Key Takeaways

• The slogan covers a range of positions, from modest budget reallocation to full police abolition, and its ambiguity became a political liability for its supporters.
• Minneapolis City Council pledged in June 2020 to dismantle its police department; voters rejected the resulting charter amendment 56 to 44 per cent in November 2021.
• Homicide in the United States rose about 30 per cent in 2020, the largest single-year increase in the modern record, and the rise concentrated in the neighbourhoods the policy claimed to help.
• Conservatives ground opposition in the classical account of the state: the monopoly on legitimate force exists to be exercised, not withheld.
• Several cities that cut budgets in 2020 restored or increased them by 2022, including Minneapolis, Portland, Austin and New York.

History And Context

Modern professional policing in the English-speaking world dates to Sir Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, which created a uniformed, unarmed, publicly accountable force in London. The principle long associated with Peel — that the police are the public and the public are the police — expresses the case for policing by consent rather than by garrison, though the Nine Principles circulated under his name are of disputed authorship. Conservative defenders of the institution return to this founding: the constable derives authority from the community he serves and the law he is bound by.

American calls for abolition draw on a different lineage. Prison abolitionist writing from the 1970s onward, and later work by Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, treats police and prisons as instruments of racial and economic control that reform cannot repair.¹ Before 2020 this was a marginal academic position.

The proximate trigger was the death of George Floyd under the knee of officer Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murder in April 2021. Nine members of the thirteen-seat Minneapolis City Council appeared on a stage on 7 June 2020 and pledged to end the city’s police department. Los Angeles cut roughly $150 million from its police budget; New York shifted about $1 billion in the 2021 fiscal year; Austin cut about a third of its department’s funding.

The reversal was rapid. Minneapolis voters rejected the charter amendment replacing the department with a Department of Public Safety in November 2021. Austin restored its cuts in 2021 after state legislation penalising reductions. By the 2022 midterms most Democratic candidates had abandoned the phrase, and President Biden used his State of the Union address of 1 March 2022 to call for funding the police rather than defunding them.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives begin from the premise that order precedes liberty. Thomas Hobbes stated the extreme version in 1651: without a common power to keep men in awe, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Burke’s version is gentler and more useful — that liberty is the child of settled law, and that a people cannot be free while their streets are unsafe.² On this account, policing is not one public service among many, competing with libraries and parks for budget share. It is the service that makes the others possible.

The empirical case follows the distributional argument. Thomas Sowell and others have pressed the point that reduced enforcement falls hardest on low-income black neighbourhoods, where violent crime rates are highest and where residents consistently poll in favour of the same or more police presence rather than less.³ Gallup, surveying between 23 June and 6 July 2020, found that 81 per cent of black Americans wanted police to spend the same amount of time or more in their area. The constituency the slogan invoked did not endorse it.

Conservatives also object to the substitution logic. Redirecting patrol funding to social workers assumes that the calls police answer are chiefly social service calls badly routed. Some are, and conservative reformers support crisis response teams for mental health calls. But an unarmed responder cannot serve a warrant, interrupt a robbery in progress, or investigate a homicide, and clearance rates for murder in large American cities had already fallen below 60 per cent before 2020.

The deeper claim concerns deterrence and legitimacy. When enforcement withdraws, informal order does not spontaneously replace it; private violence fills the space, and the strong prey on the weak. James Q. Wilson and George Kelling’s 1982 argument about disorder cascading into serious crime remains the reference point for conservative urban policy, whatever its contested details.⁴

Differing Positions

Supporters answer that the conservative case assumes the current arrangement works. American police kill roughly a thousand people a year, a figure without parallel among comparable democracies, and departments have resisted accountability through union contracts, qualified immunity and internal discipline that rarely sanctions officers. Reallocation, on this view, is not the withdrawal of public safety but the purchase of more of it per dollar.

The strongest version narrows the claim: no one seriously proposes eliminating homicide investigation. The argument is that police have absorbed functions — mental health crises, school discipline, homelessness, traffic enforcement — for which they were never trained, and that transferring those functions to specialists produces better outcomes and fewer fatal encounters. Denver’s STAR programme and CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon are cited as working models.

Supporters also dispute the causal reading of the 2020 crime rise, noting that it occurred across cities that cut budgets and cities that did not, during a pandemic that closed schools, courts and social services simultaneously. Attributing the increase to reallocation, they argue, mistakes correlation for cause in a year where almost every variable moved at once.

References

1. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007).
2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (J. Dodsley, 1790).
3. Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, rev. ed. (Basic Books, 2019).
4. James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows,” The Atlantic, March 1982.