Five Years After 2020’s “Racial Reckoning,” Defunding The Police Is As Necessary As Ever

The 2020 uprisings feel like a fever dream. May marked the five-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, and there’s no doubt that the dizzying whitelash that predictably follows groundswells for racial justice is here, replete with its manifold macroscopic abuses against Black psyches — including rumors and calls from noted conservative public figures for President Trump to consider pardoning Mr. Floyd’s murderer, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The most charitable reading of the whitelash and its champions would assume they think there were scores of new policies implemented in response to the so-called “racial reckoning”, and that those imagined policies went “too far.” Well, that’s far from the truth. 

In 2020, the “Defund The Police” movement saw more mainstream coverage than ever before. 

And what were those policies activists were calling for? For decades, we have been calling for governments to invest in programs and services that prevent harm, address social issues that can lead to unsafe conditions, and create new emergency services for the crisis issues people may experience and for which a police response is inappropriate. For example, ensuring there are enough properly trained adults in public schools to support child development, like nurses, counselors, and librarians, rather than police; investing in housing support for people who find themselves struggling with housing, rather than policing and harassing the homeless; and implementing new mental health emergency services, through which people in crisis can receive professionally trained medical intervention. 

There is such a large proportion of tax dollars allocated to policing as a stand-in strategy for education, housing, mental health, and other social issues, and we are calling for policies that actually address these issues directly, rather than tossing them over to the police to deal with through the only tools they have access to: violence. And yes, some of these recommendations began to get public traction in 2020 – many of which are codified in the M4BL-sponsored People’s Response Act, and which have the support of several lawmakers, including Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib.

But like everything else emerging from white supremacy, there is nothing rational about the ideas behind the whitelash. Their justifications are based in fantasy. While some major cities, like New York, Los Angeles, Austin, and Minneapolis, initially committed to defunding their police departments and reinvesting in public services and programs to prevent violence, most walked back their promises. In Minneapolis, the 2024 police budget is about $50 million more than what was spent on police in 2020. 

And popular meager reforms that allocated more funding to police — like adopting the use of body cameras, providing additional training, or new oversight bodies — have failed to make a dent in police violence. In fact, more people were killed in the United States by police officers in 2024 than in any other year in the past decade. The problem is getting worse; not better. Some successful measures providing non-police options for emergency response, like the CAHOOTS crisis assistance program in Eugene, Oregon, have had to be discontinued due to a winding down of federal support. Trump issued an Executive Order to review and potentially rescind existing consent decrees issued by the Justice Department under previous administrations mandating police reform. And the license the Trump administration is giving policing agencies like ICE to terrorize migrants is indefensible — resulting in the harassment, detention and banishment of veterans, students, children, and hardworking people just trying to provide for their families. 

All the while, the police continue to fail at the main thing we’re told we need them for: safety. 

There is a reason why the activists and advocates who have been doing this work the longest say the only way forward is to defund the police, and put that funding into programs and services that create conditions of safety, preventing violence and harm before it starts. Besides the fact that policing has proven itself largely ineffective at addressing violence over its 250-year modern history, there is no way a service focused on response could ever address our myriad safety needs in a way that prevents violence altogether. Policing doesn’t even accomplish its punitive agenda successfully — BYU Law professor Shima Baradaran found the conviction rates after an arrest was less than two percent per year. Her investigation found “97 percent of burglars, 88 percent of rapists, and over 50 percent of murderers get away with their crimes.” 

And consider gender-based violence, one of the most common expressions of violence in our society. Intimate partner violence, sexual violence, and other forms of gender-based violence are shamefully permitted to fester in our society because we  continue to devote the lion’s share of the responsibility to address it to police. More than 80 percent of women in the United States have experienced some form of sexual harassment, and one in five will experience a completed or attempted sexual assault — and yet, less than 22 percent of rapes are even reported to the police, in part because victims and survivors are aware of how futile a report can be. The cyclical attempts at reforming police that occur after yet another unbearable incident of police violence or corruption reaches public consciousness never seem to solve the problem because they can’t. There is no reforming an institution that was created for the purpose of violent coercive control into a service that provides safety. These objectives are at cross purposes.

Just think of the safest places you know. Are they surrounded by cops? Of course not. But they are well resourced.

While we seemingly always have to do with less public funds for services we know create safer communities, like education, healthcare, housing, and public infrastructure, there is an unending pile of money for police.

Police are a threat to safety. Black communities know it. Migrant communities know it. Students and faculty engaging in peaceful protests on their campus know it. Journalists who are attacked by police while trying to cover demonstrations know it. 

That’s why it’s crucial that we interrupt the cycle. We cannot have another 2020, followed by a series of attempts to implement ineffective reforms, followed by yet another whitelash. Activists and advocates must stay the course. Sometimes movements for justice look like the eruption we saw in 2020, but more often they are slow and steady refusals to stay silent as injustice persists. For all you who were moved in 2020, remember that the only way to prevent the systematic interruption of life caused by police is to remove the resources that enable them to harm us. The only way forward is to defund them.