Abolition is not just a divestment from policing, but the creation and resourcing of fundamentally different priorities.
For many of us, this current moment is all too reminiscent of 2016, following the deaths of Philando Castile, Alton Sterling and Korryn Gaines, when it seemed like social media had nothing to share but Black death. However, instead of calls for increased police training, revised use of force policies and diversity in hiring, a new and important call has taken hold — defunding the police.
This could be because, for all intents and purposes, Minneapolis had a reformed police department. The city had developed implicit bias training and community outreach initiatives in order to “build trust.” They’d revised their use of force policies, implemented de-escalation training as well as early intervention systems to identify potentially “troubled” officers and a requirement for officers to intervene if they witnessed improper use of force. Multiple years and millions of dollars later, what has the result been? Derek Chauvin, an officer with at least 15 conduct complaints, kneeling on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe while three other officers assisted.
There has been a reckoning with why these initiatives failed in the first place — because policing is not broken. This anti-Black violence is exactly what it was designed to do.
Now the call for defunding the police has reached mainstream consciousness, but something has been lost in translation, for some pundits and politicians. In a conversation with a friend recently, she provided me with a very important reminder: When it was threatened with decreased budget allocations due to a shortfall in taxes, Missouri’s Ferguson Police Department didn’t transform into a progressive entity — it simply funded itself by preying on Black residents through fines and fees.
