As a white person it hasn’t been easy to have a simple answer to, “If we defund the police, who will protect us?” In a passionate and loving effort to know more, this is the best answer I have, at this point.
Question: “If we defund the police, who will protect us?”
Answer: “The Police. But the police would be required to do ONLY that.”
The police’s primary duty is to protect people and property. Over the decades the duties (and budget) of the police have expanded to include 4 major responsibilities: enforcing laws, preventing crimes, responding to emergencies, and providing support services. There are other duties, all of which expand the Police budget.
The result of this expansion of responsibilities, and budget, has proven to be profoundly unsuccessful. Especially for minorities, people of color and low income people. These three characteristics mostly describe black American communities.
By defunding the Police the Police budget would be reduced to allow them to carry out, and focus on, only their primary duty. The rest would be assigned to other specialized institutions and organizations.
“Defund the Police,” can be somewhat misleading, because the words focus on the budget aspect of the program, rather than the needed actions. A different way to say it could be, Reorganize the Police, or, Restructure the Police. But it is important that “Defund the Police” stays unchanged, because it has deep roots in the history of Police abuse of power against black Americans.
In business this is equivalent to when a large corporation has grown over the years to include many ancillary, secondary businesses, on top of it’s core business. This has diluted the focus on and efficiency of not only the corporation’s core business, but also its other branches. Over time this made the corporation unprofitable and not competitive. The typical and often most effective solution is to restructure. Sell everything that is not the core business, and refocus energy and resources on what the corporation was created to do, and does best.
Defund the Police means get the Police to do what was created to do. Everything else would be assigned to other groups and organizations. What is now lumped up in the Police Budget, would be allocated accordingly.
To have a better and enormously more entertaining understanding of the subject, watch this. Please watch this.
The second and even more important question that must be asked is, why is defunding the Police relevant for black American communities? I’ll give it my best shot to an answer in another post.
