Do You Know What "Defund the Police" Means?
You may have to carve out your own distinct territory; also: how effective are protest movements, anyway?
an Alton Drew feature
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Over the past 72 hours, protests against the police brutality leading to the death of George Floyd have spawned a new rallying cry: “Defund the Police.” Out of the confusion over what the phrase actually means has come two primary definitions.
First, defund may mean the diversion of funds away from traditional police operations into areas like health rehabilitation or job training. Protests around Mr Floyd’s death have raised the conversation beyond police brutality. The discussion now includes discussion around discrimination in corporate board appointments, unequal hiring practices, unequal access to health care, and increased funding for college education. Mr Floyd’s death is being held out as the culmination of all the socialills emanating from racial bias.
As his assailant’s case moves closer to trial, I expect the conflation of his death and all these racial ills will settle as the prosecution will need only focus on the evidence viewed by the entire world: the needless pressing of a knee on the neck of a human being for approximately eight minutes and the depraved indifference of the killer as demonstrated in his body language.
Second, defund could also mean zeroing out a police department’s budget effectively taking them out of existence. The black and white meaning of the word is to withdraw financial support, particularly as a tool of legislative control. If this is not the definition that protesters meant to use, they should have chosen a phrase like “replace the police” or “reduce the police.” By using the word “defund” it is clear they meant to sensationalize public policy surrounding current racial tensions and play to the pain and suffering of Afros.
Due to its on-the-face clarity, I will go with the second definition and the consequences that flow from it, the elimination of the police. I have not heard a lot of Afros in America jumping on board with the idea. Afros in America tend to complain more, in my opinion, about the lack of adequate public safety in their neighborhoods versus police killings of unarmed black men. The latter incidence is less common than thugs hanging on a street corner threatening the beat your ass for no other reason than your existence. If this is truly the case, where Blacks are more concerned about police protection, then what would be the result of a defunded police force?
One result would be the establishment of private police forces on the part of a city’s more affluent. Assuming the necessary local and state legislative measures are implemented, the affluent would take advantage of higher living costs to drive out any remnants of poor or lower middle class citizens from the core urban areas. They would negotiate a lower property rate in exchange for deploying private security forces in their neighborhoods or around their properties to conduct patrols or privately investigate events of theft, larceny, arson, etc.
As the affluent reduce their reliance on the “police grid”, there will be a cost shift on to poorer neighborhoods where a disproportionate amount of Afros live. They will be left to either pick up the increased costs of a public police infrastructure or, as that public police infrastructure begins to wane, be forced to finance their own private security forces. So far I have heard no one on the political left express this possible scenario. Costs as well as Black lives do matter when it comes to cops.
Rising police costs in an environment calling for defunding the police does present an opportunity for Afros to establish their own municipal corporations if for any reason than to drive down these costs and hire and train a police force more in tune with Afro cultural norms and values as they pertain to conflict resolution and property protection.
The fact that defunding the police is an emerging narrative tells me that the ground work has already begun at least on the part of the affluent to deploy a private police infrastructure. Afros are not ready for a police agency with an operational efficiency reduced as a result of fewer available funds. If defunding policy further materializes, Afros as a voting bloc should negotiate for territorial partitioning within their respective municipal corporations or start their own local governments.
How to Make Protests Effective
America is not unfamiliar with protests occurring after deadly encounters between the police and Afro-American men. The precursor to the modern American police force, the slave patrols, lynched and tortured runaway slaves, and the metropolitan police departments that the slave patrols spawned have carried on their deadly activities through the Jim Crow era into today.
What Afro-America is too familiar with is the lack of effectiveness these protests have. Protests are an emotional reaction to a violation of justice that police departments apparently carry out. Citizens, particularly in a democratic and “free” society, expect their government to provide them with safety and opportunity. Afro-Americans feel neither a sense of justice or sense of security when witnessing via viral social media the killing of an unarmed, subdued member of their community. Reacting non-emotionally to police brutality becomes increasingly impossible when individuals (for example, White, male “Antifa” members) who do not share the lineage of the community are allowed “at the table” from whence they encourage non-effective behavior or conduct violence themselves in order to pursue their own agenda at the expense of Afro-Americans.
To craft an effective response to acts of police violence, Afro-Americans once and for all have to come to terms with an inconvenient truth: that government’s role is not about justice. It is about maintaining law and order so that capital, trade, and commerce can flow beneficially for those who control the interests in capital, trade, and commerce. Petitioning government for “justice” may win Afro-Americans a few crumbs in the form of the firing of a few police officers or a conviction or two, but petitioning on a case-by-case basis (because this will happen again) will not provide any long term solution to police brutality.
To enact a longer term solution, Afro-Americans should focus on the revenue stream of businesses that donate to the campaigns of local elected officials.
Take for example Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey. While his financial reports do not reflect receiving donations from large corporate businesses, he has received donations from political action committees affiliated with smaller firms and a number of labor unions. In addition, he has received endorsements from a number of media outlets and labor unions. By boycotting or even publicly challenging the donations or endorsements provided by these labor unions, media outlets, and PACs, pressure is then placed on employees that support corporate or union PACs to require that their leadership consider carefully who donations are going to. Also, consumers will be able to consider boycotting businesses that either donated to or endorsed elected officials like Mayor Frey that allowed the cancer of bad cops to fester in their cities’ ranks.
The leadership for such efforts cannot come from political incumbents, their strategists, or other supporters. They are too wedded to their first responsibility which is to protect the smooth flow of capital, commerce and trade in their cities. By targeting donors via months-long boycotts, Afro-Americans can flex their pocketbooks and spending habits to get their political wants instead of wielding sticks, stones, and baseball bats.