Maybe Abolishment Isn’t Such a Bad Idea

I’m a proponent of defunding the police. As it turns out, a lot of people are (even if they don’t understand the term). It’s a practical, straight-forward, very doable process, which would lead to better public safety outcomes for literally every single person in the country.

Defunding the police can be done immediately by cities. In large cities, once or twice a year, police departments hire new recruits and put them through a training academy. Cities can halt this process indefinitely, and instead hire employees who will fulfill duties that are currently undertaken by police officers, or take up new roles that adhere more closely to the goals of public safety.

In this way, resources can be shifted within city budgets away from armed law enforcement response, and toward functions that have a greater impact on public safety without compromising it. The public gets better resources and police officers are given more reasonable job goals. Everyone wins.

But there’s a problem with this model. The problem is the police.

There have been three main rallying cries relating to the high-profile police killings in the past year (and beyond). Reform the police, defund the police, and abolish the police.

Reforming the police is a dead-end. It means giving more money to police departments for increased training. We’ve been doing this for years and years, and it doesn’t work. It also doesn’t make sense on any kind of theoretical level. The police don’t have a problem with what’s happening, so giving them more resources to address something they don’t recognize is a fool’s errand.

Defunding the police should be a winner. It benefits literally every stakeholder in the conversation (i.e. every single person in the country), it costs nothing (in fact, it would save huge amounts of money overall), and there is no practical reason that is holding it back.

Abolishing the police is what scares people the most. It sounds like the people who chant this want the country to turn into some anarchical wasteland, ruled by gangs and drug cartels. Like the criticisms of defunding the police, these are simple scaremongering tactics designed to plaster over the real message, which is that we need to create a new public safety system from scratch.

Abolishment is a radical step. It has the most unknowns, it has the highest upfront costs, it creates the largest change to public life in the shortest amount of time. Questions that come up immediately are: how long would it take to create this new system, and what would happen in the time from abolishing the police to putting a new system in place?

I have previously written that I think abolishing the police is a step too far, but with recent events in Minnesota, the police are making a powerful argument that nothing else will work to create a functioning public safety system in this country. Abolishing the police may very well have the highest practical likelihood of securing a safer future for all of us.

As I said, reforming the police will do absolutely nothing. Giving police departments more resources will never get us to where we need to be. Defunding the police could get us there, but it requires the participation of the police. In theory, they should be all for the idea. It would have an immediate positive impact on officer safety, both in the field as well as in their own personal lives, that only improves over time. But in practice, they completely reject the idea and are actively fighting against it.

Current police culture is antithetical to the goals of public safety. It breeds an antagonistic relationship between the police and the community, in which public safety is irrelevant. In this environment, we simply cannot get meaningful progress on improving public safety.

I honestly don’t know what a practical solution of abolishing the police would look like. In power vacuums, bad things tend to happen, and that’s a very real danger if we were to suddenly pull all the police off the streets. It’s possible for a solution to be constructed while police are still functioning, and then implemented while simultaneously shuttering police departments. This is an unwieldy proposition that would have to be done without the vast amounts of data and information that police departments already have.

Starting from scratch would be a painful, time-consuming, inefficient process. But it might lead to a functioning public safety system that actually prioritizes public safety. Reforming the police will never lead to that. And defunding the police is looking less and less hopeful the more that police departments dig in their heels at policies that would save their own lives.

It’s all theoretical at this point, because almost all city leadership lacks the resolve to make even marginal steps toward meaningful reform, let alone defunding, let alone an entirely new public safety system. But if you hear someone calling to abolish the police, just recognize that they might have the best argument.

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This post was previously published on Medium.

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