Panelists Explain What Defunding the Police Means for the Community
August 04, 2021
What does “defund the police” mean here in the District of Columbia and in 2021? On August 3 the D.C. Bar Communities brought together a panel of activists and advocates to discuss what the social justice slogan really means and how it relates to police reforms currently under consideration in the District.
“We want to defund [the Metropolitan Police Department] and refund our community,” said Elizabeth Tang, senior counsel for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center. Tang is also an organizer for the Defund the MPD Coalition, a Black-led multiracial coalition of individuals who share a common vision of a city without police or prisons. “Abolition isn’t just about tearing down the death-making apparatuses in our society; it is also about building up life-giving systems.”
The coalition is seeking a transition from policing to empowering the community through food security, clean air and water, housing, education, health care, child care, public transit, and access to technology, among other things. “Violence prevention . . . these are the things that all will keep us truly safe,” Tang said.
The coalition has called for the MPD’s half-billion-dollar budget to be cut in half over the next three years, which would free up funding for the projects Tang’s group envisions. Addressing the security concerns of those who feel that police are necessary, Tang said that in many instances police themselves are the cause of violence. She condemned modern policing as the product of explicitly racist roots, calling it an institution built to support white supremacy.
Georgetown Law professor Christy Lopez, who recently co-chaired the D.C. Police Reform Commission that published the April 2021 report “Decentering Police to Improve Public Safety,” took a more moderate approach on how the District could reform policing, but one that shared many of Tang’s observations and conclusions.
Like Tang, Lopez saw opportunities to alleviate the conditions that lead to violence as an alternative to aggressive policing. The D.C. Police Reform Commission’s recommendations include reducing police workload by transferring the responsibility for response to certain incidents to social workers and conducting an independent audit to accurately determine the city’s policing needs and the attendant costs. Lopez said this would ultimately result in a reduction of the police force through attrition.
Lopez also found fault with the business-as-usual approach to policing. Referencing stop-and-frisk, she said, “We’ve normalized many of these practices despite the harm that we know they cause, and we don’t ask enough questions about whether policing is necessary or even effective.”
In late July, in response to a recent series of high-profile shootings, Mayor Muriel Bowser sent an $11 million supplemental budget request to the D.C. Council to add 170 police officers. The council rejected the request on August 3.
“I’m concerned, in part, because I think this demonstrates that D.C. is still a city whose leadership reflexively calls for more police without offering any evidence that this is the best way to combat increasing gun violence. I’m also concerned that there is no justification being offered for why more police now and why this number of officers. It doesn’t seem to be a number based on any assessment of a particular need,” Lopez said, adding that the District already has more police per capita than any other city in the country.
Tahir Duckett, a civil rights attorney for Relman Colfax and a founding executive committee member of Law for Black Lives – DC, addressed the reasons he thinks some advocates and activists in the defund the police movement have opposed proposals to reform or reimagine policing.
Body cameras, police diversity, implicit bias trainings, and other reform ideas may be appealing rhetorically, but there is no evidence of their efficacy, Duckett said. “It’s not really clear that officers don’t get enough training. There’s also not any study that shows that there’s a relationship between the total number of hours of training and the likelihood of using excessive force.”
There is, however, evidence that the institution of policing is adept at resisting reforms, or co-opting them, according to Duckett. He cited a George Mason University study that found no statistical difference in police accountability resulting from body camera use.
Duckett said Black communities have a hard time reimagining an institution that has always been unfair and oppressive. “There’s something deep within the institution itself that guarantees violence, that guarantees conflict, and that guarantees some level of oppression. Reform is, thus, not necessarily the right approach. We need to do something about the institution itself,” Duckett said.
“We’ve made this choice, both policy-wise and culturally, to resolve a lot of social problems with police and with prisons — homelessness, addiction, mental health, and even violence,” said Duckett, adding that there is significant cultural gravity to the notion that violence must be met with violence. “When you focus on reform, it continues to reinvest in that same sort of gravity instead of us shifting to think about what we could do that could make us safer.”
