If summer 2020 had a slogan, it would be "abolish the police", with "defund the police" a close runner up. In the wake of the officer involved deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd calls for both were centerpieces of protests across the country. The Minneapolis City Council went so far as to vote yes on placing an initiative on the ballot in November to replace the city's police force with a new public safety agency.
The problem? Neither abolishing nor defunding the police are ideas with popular appeal in the Black community. In a Gallup poll of 36,000 adults conducted June 3rd to July 6th, 61% of Black respondents said they would like police presence in their community to stay at the current rate and 20% said that they would like an even larger police presence. Multiple leaders in the Black community have slammed the idea of abolishing or defunding the police as something that sounds good to bourgeois latte sipping liberals but not to the lower income classes of people they claim to speak for.
Which I sure sounds counterintuitive at first - why would anyone want the same level of police let alone more, especially since the same people calling for the same level if not more policing also have very little trust in those police to treat them fairly?
The answer lies in the history of underpolicing in poor communities. While we may have all laughed along with Public Enemy's "911 Is A Joke" the message wasn't funny; having a non existent police force doesn't do great things for a community. To those who have lived under such circumstances the idea of fewer or no police sounds like the height of privledged nonsense. That leaves those who want to push the "abolish the police'' agenda in a quandary; they're pushing an agenda that is wildly unpopular with the groups of people who are theoretically supposed to be helped by it.
To get back to Minneapolis' plan to defund their police department - at this point it's DOA. The mayor has rejected the plan and it has very little support in the community or among community groups. In response the Minneapolis City Council is in backtrack mode, with several members explaining that there was some misunderstanding as to what the pledge to "end policing as we know it" meant. Some on the Council took it as a vague statement of intent, others took it to mean diverting some funds from the police department to fund social services. Activists, however, took the pledge as a literal statement of intent to completely defund and eventually abolish the Minneapolis Police Department.
Further frustrating the issue, it seems that nobody bothered to ask those who live in the communities that would be most affected how they feel. From the New York Times article on the situation in Minneapolis
“Cathy Spann, a community activist who works in North Minneapolis, which is home to many of the city’s Black residents, said those paying the price for the city’s political paralysis were the exact communities that leaders had pledged to help. She is in favor of more police officers.
‘They didn’t engage Black and brown people,’ Ms. Spann said, referring to the City Council members. ‘And something about that does not sit right with me. Something about saying to the community, ‘We need to make change together,’ but instead you leave this community and me unsafe.’”
To be fair there seems to have been some serious disagreements behind the scenes, with some Council members refusing to put their support to the pledge. Unfortunately the City Council's decision was presented as a united one and the message received was that abolishing the police department was a finalized decision. Now the City Council is stuck between the activists that unambiguously want the Minneapolis Police Department abolished, a community that doesn't support the initiative, and the Minneapolis Charter Commission that voted 10 - 5 to keep the initivate off the ballot in November.
The mess the Minneapolis City Council finds itself in could have been avoided by doing three simple tasks: asking residents what sorts of police reform they'd like to see, taking the time to craft a proposal that reflects that input, and using unambiguous language to describe what the initiative will be. Insead the Council rushed through a proposal informed by progressive and activist voices and are now left to deal with the aftermath.
There is a lesson here for other cities looking to enact police reform. Despite support for protests waning, police reform remains popular and a topic that needs to be discussed. That discussion can't exclude members of the affected communities however, especially if what those community members have to say contradicts the plans of those who claim to have their best interests in mind.