Sam Podnar

4 May 2024

“Defund the police” was a major rallying cry of progressive activists calling for a radical rethinking of law enforcement and public safety in the wake of Minneapolis police officers killing George Floyd in 2020. The phrase, championed by Black Lives Matter, was used to indicate varying levels of reform, from shifting municipal funding away from policing and towards social services to a genuine, complete abolition of police forces [1]. It resulted in local officials across the country making sweeping promises in response to public pressure, like the mayor of Los Angeles suggesting he’d look to cut as much as $150 million from the police budget or the slate of Minneapolis city council members who publicly pledged in June of 2020 to completely disband the city’s police department [2]. The movement faced a great deal of backlash from Republicans claiming it harmed public safety and some Democrats concerned that the messaging would scare moderate voters [3]. 

While a contentious issue in 2020, as a summer of protests generated excitement and anger among both sides, the police abolition movement has since quieted down. A year and a half after its peak popularity, national Democrats and mayors seemed to be changing their tune on the issue, responding to concerns about rising crime rates [4]. Four years after the summer of 2020, the movement has largely fallen out of the mainstream national conversation. But during this time, “defund the police” was getting translated into actual policy—both minor and revolutionary budgetary changes were made, and the issue was put on local ballots across the country. What happened to “defund the police?” Did this movement pan out into the slate of potentially radical policy changes activists argued were necessary? Four years later, it seems that, while some municipalities turned promises into practice, “defund” largely slowed down, meeting the gridlock of butting branches of city government, voters’ distaste for the perceived radicalness of the movement, and powerful police unions.

One study estimates that police abolition advocacy groups won $840 million in direct cuts from police departments and $160 million in investments in other public services, like housing, education, mental health support, and domestic violence prevention. Austin, Texas led the country in shifting money away from its police department, reducing policing’s share of the budget from 40 percent to 26 percent by 2021 and reallocating those funds to pandemic response measures, mental health first responders, services for homeless individuals, substance abuse treatment, and food access [5]. 

But on the whole, cities across the United States did not reduce police budgets as 2020 receded into the past. In 2021, among the 50 largest cities, law enforcement spending as a share of general expenditures rose slightly from 13.6 percent to 13.7 percent. Most major cities swung left in the 2020 presidential election and simultaneously increased their police budget [6]. One 2022 study examining 109 city and county budgets found that only eight agencies decreased police funding by less than two percent, while 91 agencies opted to increase funding by at least two percent. While some local elected officials still emphasize the dangers of “defunding,” police funding actually increased by more than ten percent between 2020 and 2022 in 49 cities and counties [7].  

It seems that aspirations for more radical reform rammed up against popular constraints. A majority of the Minneapolis city council may have publicly supported completely disbanding the police department in June of 2020, but, that fall, a ballot question that proposed replacing the police department with a new Department of Public Safety failed, and the city council and Mayor Jacob Frey voted on a budget that did not cut police staffing [8]. Members of the Seattle city council initially committed to cutting the police budget in half, but intense police opposition reduced the cuts to 18 percent [9]. Some of the most drastic cuts to a city’s police budget were in Austin, Texas, but just a year after the changes, the state legislature voted to prohibit Texas cities from decreasing police budgets. Austin’s police spending went up by 50 percent in 2022 [10]. 

Some pilot programs in line with the police abolition movement remain across the country. A peculiar case is that of Camden, New Jersey, whose journey with the movement actually began before the movement did. Facing soaring violent crime, a thriving illegal drug market, and a police force despised for its perceived corruption, violence, and ineffectiveness, Camden’s city council voted in 2013 to abolish the city police department and establish a new county police department. By laying off all city police officers and forcing them to reapply to the county department, Camden essentially broke the city’s police union and completely overhauled the force. The crucial part of the change was eliminating all union-negotiated salaries, a cost-saving measure that actually enabled the city to hire more police officers and restore the force to the level it was before drastic 2010 budget cuts. The reforms also included major changes to how officers were trained, with a greater emphasis on de-escalation and integration into local neighborhoods [11]. 

The changes—a result of a strange partnership between Democratic city leadership and Republican governor Chris Christie—completely transformed Camden. Excessive use-of-force complaints and the homicide rate decreased, and officers developed better relationships with the local community. The action was not without its critics or flaws. Progressives in favor of police reform argue that the city still didn’t go far enough, and the new county department struggles with high turnover rates, likely because of the much lower pay afforded to officers in the absence of a union [12]. Dire circumstances motivated Camden to essentially start its police department over, a measure in accordance with activists’ arguments in 2020 that police in America were beyond reform. 

The U.S. still struggles with a police- and prisons-focused public safety approach that has not effectively lowered crime rates across the board. The police abolition movement is motivated by this fact and the argument that police are more often than not the main perpetrators of violence against many citizens, Black communities especially. The American bubble obscures how abnormal police violence is in many other nations; in the first 24 days of 2015, for example, U.S. police fatally shot more people than police did in England and Wales over the past 24 years [13]. The police abolition movement, which ultimately failed to secure a sweeping overhaul of city budgets across the country, at least over the last four years, succeeded in persuading many Americans that there is another way to do public safety, one focused on well-being and rehabilitation instead of criminalization and punishment. But as public support for the “defund” campaign dwindles, as Republican lawmakers reanimate the slogan as a foil to their own “tough on crime” approach, as the pendulum swings the other way and annual U.S. police spending soars far over $100 billion, we might do well to remember “defund the police”—what it promised, what it achieved, and why it failed to achieve the rest.

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Photo by Eden, Janine and Jim under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Lives_Matter_Defund_the_Police_%2849978692262%29.jpg

Works Cited

[1] Levin, Sam. 2020. “What Does ‘Defund the Police’ Mean? The Rallying Cry Sweeping the US – Explained.” The Guardian. June 6, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/05/defunding-the-police-us-what-does-it-mean.

[2] “Minneapolis City Council Members Say They Plan to Vote to Disband City’s Police Department.” n.d. http://Www.cbsnews.com. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minneapolis-city-council-intent-disband-police-department/.

[3] “In Leaked Recording, Biden Says GOP Used ‘Defund the Police’ to ‘Beat the Living Hell’ out of Democrats.” 2020. NBC News. December 10, 2020. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/leaked-recording-biden-says-gop-used-defund-police-beat-living-n1250757.

[4] Seitz-Wald, Alex. 2022. “How Democrats Went from Defund to Refund the Police.” NBC News. February 6, 2022. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/democrats-went-defund-refund-police-rcna14796.

[5] ‌Levin, Sam. 2021. “These US Cities Defunded Police: ‘We’re Transferring Money to the Community.’” The Guardian, March 11, 2021, sec. Global development. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-defund-police-transferring-money-community.

[6] Akinnibi, Fola, Sarah Holder, and Christopher Cannon. 2021. “Cities Say They Want to Defund the Police. Their Budgets Say Otherwise.” Bloomberg, January 12, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-city-budget-police-funding/.

[7] Manthey, Grace. 2022. “Despite ‘Defunding’ Claims, Police Funding Has Increased in Many US Cities.” ABC News. October 16, 2022. https://abcnews.go.com/US/defunding-claims-police-funding-increased-us-cities/story?id=91511971.

[8] “Minneapolis Voters Reject Replacing Police with New Agency.” 2021. AP NEWS. November 2, 2021. https://apnews.com/article/2021-election-minneapolis-cc108d1707d9cb8cbaa6135bb60e7fbd.

[9] Levin, Sam. 2021. “These US Cities Defunded Police: ‘We’re Transferring Money to the Community.’”

[10] Manthey, Grace. 2022. “Despite ‘Defunding’ Claims, Police Funding Has Increased in Many US Cities.”

[11] Landergan, Katherine. “The City That Actually Got Rid of the Police.” Politico PRO. https://www.politico.com/states/new-jersey/story/2020/06/12/the-city-that-actually-got-rid-of-the-police-1950952.

[12] Landergan, Katherine. “The City That Actually Got Rid of the Police.” 

[13] Lartey, Jamiles. 2017. “By the Numbers: US Police Kill More in Days than Other Countries Do in Years.” The Guardian. The Guardian. July 14, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries.