Some protesters want to abolish the police, but what does that mean?

• In the wake of George Floyd's death, many activists are calling for police forces to be defunded and the money put toward healthcare, housing, and social services.
• Other groups, like MPD150 and 8toAbolition, are demanding the full abolition of the police.
• On Sunday, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced he was cutting the NYPD's budget and moving resources to youth and social services.
• The same day, the Minneapolis' City Council voted to dissolve the city's police department. Council President Lisa Bender told CNN the goal is "to rebuild with our community a new model of public safety that actually keeps our community safe." 
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Over the past two decades, spending on police has continued to climb nationwide, making up one-third to one-half of some cities' entire budgets.

The police-related deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have taken police defunding, once considered a far-left issue, and pushed it to the fore. 

Calls to defund or even abolish the police have flooded Twitter, appeared on protest signs, and been echoed by lawmakers around the country. 

But what do these ideas mean in practice?

Defunding the police

Organizations like Black Lives Matter, People's Budget LA, and Black Visions Collective want to move taxpayer dollars away from surveillance and broken-windows policing toward addressing community needs. 

"We need divestment from the police and a radical investment in communities of color, including housing, jobs, and education," DeRay Mckesson, a Black Lives Matter organizer and cofounder of the police-reform think tank Campaign Zero, wrote on Medium. 

Most in the "defund the police" camp don't expect law enforcement to be stripped of all financing. Instead, they're asking for some of the billions poured into police coffers to be reallocated to services that better serve the community and result in less violence and death at cops' hands.

Currently, police in much of the U.S. are the ones responding to overdoses, homelessness, suicide attempts, and other social-welfare calls. When the Minneapolis City Council examined the city's 911 logs, for example, it found most really required the fire department, EMTs, or mental-health professionals. 

According to reformers, when law enforcement shows up the situation often escalates into a physical confrontation. An officer trained to see killing as "not that big of a deal" is more likely to choose a violent response rather than de-escalation tactics. 

About half of those killed by police had some kind of mental disability, according to a 2015 Ruderman Foundation report. 

The notion of taking these responsibilities away from law enforcement is gaining traction: According to a June 2020 poll from Data for Progress, nearly 70% of voters support creating a non-police agency of first responders to address situations involving mental health issues or substance abuse.  

In Los Angeles, the People's Budget was created to show exactly how defunding the police might work in the city. The report suggests just 5.7% of funds be allocated to law enforcement, with 24% going to "reimagined community safety" programs, and 44% on "universal aid and crisis management."

On Sunday, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio announced he was cutting the NYPD's budget and moving resources to youth and social services. Currently, the police force's $6 billion budget is more than the city spends on housing, homelessness, and youth and community development combined, according to The New York Post.

DeBlasio didn't share exactly how much of the NYPD budget would be slashed, but he said, "we are committed to shifting resources to ensure that the focus is on our young people," according to CBS 2.

New York City State Senator Julia Salazar, who tweeted Friday that "We should call to defund the NYPD," said the growing support is "surreal."

"To see legislators who aren't even necessarily on the left supporting at least a significant decrease in New York police department funding is really very encouraging," Salazar told the Guardian. 

Police abolition

Some activists do want to go further than just cutting budgets and completely abolish the police. 

The grassroots Minneapolis group MPD150, for example,  is calling for a "police-free future." 

"We're not abolishing help. We're abolishing police," MPD150's Arianna Nason said in a statement. "That's very different. We have to do the work to imagine something different and to listen to what people in different neighborhoods and communities want." 

MPD150 advocates combatting the underlying issues that foster criminality and police action with "good, well-paying jobs, affordable housing, healthy food, empowering education, accessible health care [and] removal of toxins."

8toAbolition, another police-abolition group, argues the kind of reforms forwarded in Campaign Zero's 8 Can't Wait campaign — like banning chokeholds and instituting a use-of-force continuum for cops — "have already been tried and failed."  

8toAbolition supports defunding law enforcement, but also removing police from schools, freeing people from prison, demilitarizing communities, repealing laws that "criminalize survival," and providing housing for all.

"The end goal of these reforms is not to create better, friendlier, or more community-oriented police or prisons," according to a statement on its website, "but to build toward a society without police and prisons." 

Total police abolition may not be a reality any time soon, but Minneapolis may see some of these ideas tested very soon. On Sunday, a veto-proof supermajority in the Minneapolis' City Council voted to dissolve the city's police department. 

Council President Lisa Bender told CNN the council's goal is "to rebuild with our community a new model of public safety that actually keeps our community safe." 

"The idea of having no police department is certainly not in the short term," Bender added.

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