Varieties of defunding the police in the US

I don't have any special insight into the kind of changes that are needed nationwide in the US. Because many of the problems are well known and longstanding. They aren't any big secret.

Defund the police?

I'm actually pleased with the verbal hot air over the "defund the police" slogan. I#m usually leery of the concept of left reformers setting the stage with radical slogans that liberal/center-left can then enact by pitching their solutions as more sensible and responsible. Because, espcially with the Democratic Party in the US, that actually means that the center-left stigmatizes left proposals because they are opposed to their substance.

The most dramatic recent example is national health insurance, which Bernie Sanders marketed as Medicare for All. This was a concept that was official Democratic Party policy from 1948 to 1992. Even after it was removed from the Democratic platform in 1992 as part of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) notion of making the Democrats sound more like Republicans, the Clinton and Obama Administrations in part argued for their incremental health*insurance reforms as a step toward comprehensive national health insurance of some sort.

In the Democratic primaries this year, it was clear that corporate Democrats oppose the concept of national health insurance because they want to please the insurance lobbies. They don't see lesser forms as a necessary compromise with larger political realities. They oppose national health insurance, aka, the standard health insurance approach in Europe and various other countries.

In the case of police reform, for the moment the "defund the police" slogan is forcing a real discussion on the real issues that most defund-the-police advocates actually want to have. Joe Garofoli reports that even George Lakoff, who has for years advocating more distinct Democratic "framing" of issues by Democratic politicians, is jittery about the suddenly-famous phrase (‘Defund the police’: Advocates say it means reimagining policing, not getting rid of it San Francisco Chronicle 06/102020):

... “‘defund the police’ is a terrible phrase,” George Lakoff, the retired UC Berkeley professor who has long been a messaging guru to Democrats and progressive groups, told The Chronicle. “You need the police. It’s irresponsible (to use it) because you’re not going to take away the police.”

The challenge, Lakoff said, is “that it takes several sentences to explain.”
The concept generally refers to shrinking police responsibility and delegating some of law enforcement’s duties to other experts — for example, having social workers respond to homelessness complaints or health care workers handle people with substance abuse issues. [my emphasis]

Most of the time for most issues, this would be a good point. But right now, thanks to the not-at-all-routine nationwide uprising that has been taking place, lots of people including TV pundits actually are listening to "several sentences" on addressing the radical problems with policing culture in the US.

"Several sentences"

Aside from a few romantics, even radical advocates of "defunding" the police are actually talking about "several sentences" worth of changes, including the ones just quoted from Garofoli's report. Some of the worst abuses and fatal encounters between cops and civilians involve people with mental illnesses or drug problems acting out in bizarre ways to which police respond with excessive violence. A major part of the cultural problem with Americans cops is that too often take the attitude that they have to appear to be the toughest gang on the streets, they have to "dominate" those streets, and therefore "respect" in the form of uncritical deference to cops is critical. So when a schizophrenic or over-drugged person responds to a cop with what he or she takes to be "disrespect," they are far too likely to be met with an aggressive or violent response from the police. And the person being clubbed or threatend with a gun in that situation are not necessarily in the optimal state to try to de-escalate the situation themselves.

Crises with the homeless and the mentally ill

Addressing that situation is more than just hiring a couple of social workers to tag along and watch while cops beat or shoot disturbed, unarmed people. It means having adequate services and physical shelter for homeless/unhoused people in cities and keeping them adequately funded. That means local politicians and activists also have to change the climate in which "hire more police" is a widely popular political promise while more help for the homeless is widely denigrated as wasting responsible people's money on "losers" who have mad "bad choices".

And, yes, that policy of having more social and health workers deal with the problems of the homeless and therefore expecting police to do less of that taks than they do now is very much part of the "defund the police" concept.

Toys for Boys

Another thing that needs to be defunded is the "toys for boys" programs than involved equipping local police departments with tanks, grenade launchers, tasers, and other gear that may be needed for counterinsurgency in a country with a literal shooting civil war going on. Those things for the most part are useless if not counterproductive in normal local law enforcement. But they reinforce a militarized attitude by police toward the people they serve.

Also, by the way, tear gas has been illegal in international war for decades as part of the post-Firsst World War prohibition of poison gas. It's scandalous that it's legal for police to use it on Americans.

The War on Drugs, on and on and on

A much larger but also well-known problem is the so-called war on drugs. In the US, it was the Nixon Administration that initiated the national War on Drugs as a national concept. And it has become completely institutionalized without "winning" the so-called war. Shifting more towards a medical-treatment model for dealing with drugs and away from the extreme criminalization model currently used in much of the US is badly needed.

It's hard for me to think of the "war on drugs" model without thinking of the need to reduce the massive flood of small arms in US cities that actually does greatly increase the risk of routine police actions ending up in shootouts, which of course tends to make cops more trigger-happy. Because a large part of the real gang violence in the US is the unholy marriage of guns and drugs in the never-ending "war on drugs" which also has devastating effects in various Latin American countries, notably Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia. The US is by far the biggest market for illegal street drugs.

A word on using guns for self-defense. That is legitimate and legal in the US and many other countries. For most legitimate self-defense purposes, a normal shotgun will serve the purpose. There is no legitimate self-defense need for a flood of pistols and semi-automatic rifles on the market in the US. But people also have to be responsible and realistic about what they are doing with their firearms. Despite the best efforts and imaginations of NRA advocates, the number of crimes prevented and lives saved in the US by using guns in self-defense is miniscule. And there are real downside risks that people using firearms for self-defense - or any other purposes, for that matter - have to be responsible about, e.g., keeping those firearms out of the hands of children in the house. (Incidentally, blabbing about your great gun collection - soemthing the NRA bizarrely encourages - is also not part of responsible gun ownership. Guns are one of the main things home burglars look for.)

The Second Amendment argument for unlimited gun proliferation is frivolous. The Amendment is about state-regulated militias, at a time when there was no standing army in the United States. (In the 19th-century, standing armies in the US and Europe were considered by definition a risk to democratic governance.) The main concern that prompted the Second Amendment was that states used local militias as slave patrols and a defense against slave revolts. When people talk about using armed violence to fight a tyrannical government, no one who likes the Declaration of Independence is likely to argue againt that on an abstract level.

But what that actually means is what is also known as partisan or guerilla warfare, i.e., sabotaging important infrastructure like bridges or power plants, assassinating politicians, kiling cops and soldiers. Rightwing "militias" are allowed to operate in the US with those avowed aims. But that's because justice in the US tends to be "blind in the right eye". Which means that law-enforcement may be sympathetic with them or just fail to take them seriously as a threat to US law enforcement, even though they actually are. And some of them have actually infiltrated police departments and sheriff's departments to some degree.

But by far the biggest beneficiaries of the small-arms proliferation are organized criminal gangs and common criminals. Dialing back police violence also involves dramatically reducing the supply of small arms in American cities.

The privatization trap

One pitfall in changing policing is that there are already large private security and actual mercenary firms that that can offer a way to "defund" the police without addressing the substantive programs. Entreprenuers and their lobbyists will try to work the defunding-the-police concept to fund private security services that are less accountable than public police forces.