Expanded thought on Femi's question: “What are my issues with defunding the police?”
In 2019 or 2020 [it is a little foggy in my head now] I read an essay that helped me refine, and give a name to, a phenomenon I had been observing at the time. The essay was about luxury beliefs, and it helped me put into context why people who are objectively in the higher material, social, or otherwise privileged classes of society sometimes advance ideologies whose harmful consequences they are unlikely to bear themselves.
I believe “defund the police” falls somewhere under this harmful + luxury umbrella.
I’m going to pause here and attempt a hyper-summarized historical version of how we got here.
America had a long and terrible history of slavery and eventually fought a Civil War in which slavery sat at the centre of the conflict. Yet, even after the war, Black people like me had to fight tooth and nail for rights that White Americans already possessed. And some parts of the institutional architecture of America [the police, in this instance] continued to retain elements of that history.
Over time, the names and numbers of Black people killed through extreme, unwarranted, or unjust police actions kept piling up. Up, up, up. Until George Floyd.
But it wasn’t Floyd by himself, or the awful nature of his death. There was also the zeitgeist: COVID, lockdowns, months of confinement, economic uncertainty, a certain restlessness in the air. Then it happened. The video travelled around the world, and there was rage and fire and burnings.
But afterwards came questions too: What needed to be done? What reforms would prevent something like this from happening again? What policy actions could change the nature of policing as it currently existed?
I am going to pause the historical hyper-summary here and return to the present.
I think [and believe] that a plurality of people in America support the idea of reforming the police. America is a country that has always, eventually, found ways to reform itself. And there were brilliant ideas within that conversation that I support: defining police roles more clearly, providing more funding for social workers and mental-health professionals, improving accountability, reconsidering which situations actually require armed law enforcement, and investing seriously in social policies that reduce crime before a police officer ever needs to become involved.
So you might be surprised that you and I are not far apart at all in our support for social policies that prevent crime and improve outcomes. But I see those "reform" policies as wholly different from the "defund" political argument that suddenly became the rave of that time.
Because, you see, I support the existence of law enforcement in this first-world country I have been fortunate enough to find myself in. I believe the rule of law [and, importantly, the enforcement of law] is one of the major distinctions between this country and Nigeria, where I lived for most of my life.
And yes, I have read most of the arguments explaining that people who said “defund the police” did not literally mean “end policing”; that what they really wanted was what you and I both want: reform + more social investment.
But words have meaning, Femi.
When we protested in Nigeria to End SARS, we were not asking for SARS to be reformed. We were not asking for it to receive a new name or some cosmetic makeover. We wanted that brutal police unit dissolved. We wanted the name to become ignoble, powerless, incapable of exercising the same terror over us.
When, during the Jonathan administration, Nigerians protested against the removal of the fuel subsidy, we were not asking for some vague policy adjustment. I was younger then, and in retrospect I am no longer particularly sympathetic to fuel subsidies, but the demand itself was clear: people believed the subsidy was essential to their survival and wanted it to remain.
Political slogans are supposed to compress complicated demands into language ordinary people can understand.
America is not a country that generally treats political messaging as an exercise in ambiguity. Its politicians go to extraordinary lengths to simplify ideas for the electorate so that people know exactly what the ask is. Remember George W. Bush and “No Child Left Behind” meme? Whether or not the policy itself succeeded, nobody needed a seminar to understand what the phrase was trying to communicate.
So if a political slogan requires an elaborate explainer every time someone takes its plain meaning seriously, perhaps the problem is not entirely with the listener.
And while there certainly was a school of thought for whom “defund the police” meant shifting some police responsibilities and funding towards social services, the frenzy [and deserved high emotion] following Floyd’s death also brought much more radical ideas into the mainstream. There were people who genuinely wanted policing, prisons, and society’s relationship with punishment fundamentally transformed. Some were prison abolitionists. Some believed the institution of policing itself was irredeemable.
And I began to notice something about the class profile of many of the people most enthusiastically advancing these ideas. It was not usually the poor, blue-collar worker or the single mother living in a dangerous neighbourhood who was shouting loudest for fewer police. It was not usually the person who had to depend every day on buses, light rail, trains and other public transportation systems, where the possibility of some unseen, formless violence always lurks somewhere at the edge of consciousness.
It often appeared to be people who were insulated from what happens when the physical, hard part of policing disappears. People living in high-brow neighbourhoods. Highly educated people. People with money, or parents with money, or neighbourhoods where private security, geography, property values and social capital already performed some of the functions the police performed elsewhere.
And this is where the “luxury” part of luxury beliefs becomes important to me. It is easy to philosophize about the coercive power of the state when you are unlikely to need that power urgently at 1 a.m. It is easier to imagine a society with substantially less policing when your daily life already takes place behind layers of protection that you barely notice.
For some of us, those layers do not exist.
I do not have a car. I take buses. I take light rail. I walk. Sometimes I am outside late at night. I do not live in some high-brow gated neighbourhood where the violence of the world is kept conveniently outside.
So when people tell me that concerns about crime, public disorder, violence on transit, shoplifting or deteriorating public safety were simply Republican panic or Fox News talking points, there is a part of the argument that immediately loses me. Because I was there. I experienced some of it.
Following the Floyd protests, amid an already difficult period for policing and during the early Biden years, police departments in many places struggled with recruitment and retention. At the same time, Americans were having very real arguments about violent crime, murders, shoplifting, disorder and whether certain public spaces had become less safe. There are people on the political left who dispute how these things should be causally connected, and that is a fair argument to have. But it is very different from saying that the underlying experience of insecurity was imaginary.
It wasn’t imaginary to everyone. There is a large class of people like me in America: people without cars, people who use public transportation, people who walk home at night, people who live in ordinary neighbourhoods, people who cannot simply purchase their way out of public disorder.
And over time, “defund the police” became a losing political message because many of those people encountered the practical question hiding underneath the slogan: what happens when there are fewer police, or when the police who remain become demoralized, understaffed or unwilling to intervene?
That does not mean every increase in crime was caused by “defund the police.” It does not mean police reform was wrong. It does not mean the anger after George Floyd was misplaced. And it certainly does not mean American policing did not [and does not] require serious reform. It simply means that reform and abolition are not synonyms, and neither are reform and defunding.
And here we are, back in this moment.
I am guessing your question was triggered by my criticism of AOC and what I see as her walk-back from some of the farther-left positions she once supported.
So now you have my position, and my answer.
My problem was with turning the security of people who cannot afford to privately insulate themselves from disorder into an ideological experiment.