Defund the Police: ‘Politically Toxic’, or Absolutely Necessary?

 Though Joe Biden ended up with more than the 270 electoral college votes required for the US election, commentators rushed to ask, why did this election at times appear so narrow? The speed at which commentators – self-proclaimed conservatives, liberals, and social democrats - claimed that anti-police messaging had done severe damage to the Democrats was incredible. It was clear, they claimed, anti-police rhetoric was, simply, ‘politically toxic’. This is of course, odd, considering the condemning of protestors that Biden and Harris made only weeks prior, and their historical unwavering commitment to the carceral state.

Black Lives Matter in the US is an organisation that refuses to take endorsements from political candidates. It has no affiliation with any political party. Some take issue with this, but is there any wonder why they insist on this distance? Joe Biden, for example, is a firm believer in police reform. During his presidential campaign, and following the murder of George Floyd, he pledged £300million for police departments. With this money, they could introduce, for example, body cameras. The same “on and activated” cameras that captured Derek Chauvin holding Floyd down for nine minutes with his knee in his neck. What use did the body cameras have for George Floyd? In fact, the Minneapolis police department was named as a “national leader” in police reform, with all four officers at the scene of George Floyds’s murder having had implicit bias and historical trauma training, and procedural justice theory and application education. Reducing the funds police departments have access to means reducing the opportunity they have to brutalise people of colour.

£300million in the hands of the police is not only dangerous in the short term, but it will also, as Angela Davis reminds us, only serve to render policing more permanent. Most importantly, reforms of the kind Democrats are so fond of are dependent on the silencing of history. Policing in the US emerged from slave patrols of the 1700s, and the violent suppression of workers’ riots and strikes against the rich. Criminality is constructed by the ruling class, it functions to manage surplus populations, to keep them from disrupting the white supremacist capitalist order. When the police are filmed with their knee in the neck of George Floyd, an unemployed black man, with a history of eight prison terms, accused of another ‘crime’ he did not commit, they are fulfilling their role.

The paradox of the claim to political toxicity of Black Lives Matter is clear. Joe Biden made history this election; he won the most votes of any presidential candidate in history. In the 1980s, it was Biden, with the help of an arch segregationist Senator, that pushed a reluctant President Reagan to back the war on drugs policy. One of Joe Biden’s self-proclaimed greatest achievements is the Violence Against Women Act, which is actually found within Clinton’s 1994 Crime Act which oversaw huge levels of mass incarceration. This is a man that once boasted, “Give me the crime issue… and you’ll never have trouble with an election”. Biden’s campaign boasted of his ‘law and order’ achievements in the past, made a £300 million pledge to police departments and made former District Attorney of San Francisco, Kamala Harris (nicknamed ‘Top Cop’) his Vice President. The idea that Black Lives Matter may have diminished Biden’s election chances is nonsensical. Placing Biden in the context of his actions makes his refusal to consider the demands of Black Lives Matter inevitable. So, what excuses the lack of imagination from everyone else?

A commentator of the popular left-wing media group, Novara Media, joined the conversation on where Biden’s campaign may have gone wrong, to write that ‘Defund the Police’ is a slogan that should go nowhere near an election. Elections and electoral systems have become the altar at which we sacrifice black life. In the large part, liberals are not motivated by the desire to partake in the violence of racism, but rather a desire for a better world that does not require them to be uncomfortable, in this case, to confront how deep-rooted the legacy of racism actually is. The history of the police is erased and silenced because it would make us too uncomfortable to let go of. There is, for these people, an overwhelming belief that the world that we live in now is, most of the time, orderly. That black people are murdered on a sporadic basis, in tragic and shocking circumstances, and this murder can be separated from the intentions of the state. Who wouldn’t want this fantasy? Because, at first, it might seem that this is better than existing in a world in which George Floyd is killed for the sake of a supposed ‘counterfeit note’. Or a world in which police officers can discharge 32 rounds into Breonna Taylor’s body, or a world in which Black Lives Matter activist, Oluwatoyin Salau, can tweet about her sexual abuse, and be found dead days later. These are events of one summer alone. We do not live in an orderly world. To be in this world becomes a lot easier, though a lot less human, when we deny that these deaths are entirely avoidable, but only if we are willing to cast the myths of white supremacy and capitalism into the fire.

Defunding the police is, ultimately, a step towards abolition. To accept this slogan is to accept that the violence embedded in every aspect of society is not inevitable, but the result of a racist capitalist system that makes of us objects whose lives can be pulled from underneath us as swiftly as they are given to us. Defunding the police is not a new, rebellious call of angsty ‘woke’ teens, it is a historical movement. It isn’t a misunderstanding of what is possible, realistic, and achievable. Not only has the theoretical case for abolition been being built for decades, but it has also been practiced out of necessity by activists. Take, for example, the volunteers that handed out re-distributed resources as the police descended upon the community that grieved George Floyd in Minneapolis. As liberals have been telling us to be realistic, to beware the constraints of white supremacy, to act as though the survival of black people was even too much to ask for, black women and communities have been on the ground building the foundations of transformative justice, and community-based solutions to harm.

With the claim that defunding the police is ‘politically toxic’ comes an admittance that people are not willing to put in the work to unite the struggles of the people. The state, as Max Weber famously wrote, has a monopoly on violence. This is why the ruling class can get away with the degradation of people’s lives, not to mention life on this planet, whilst George Floyd is murdered for the sake of a counterfeit banknote. Though state violence is experienced most regularly by Black people, the working-class has long felt the effects of police brutality. One of the earliest police forces was created in Pennsylvania, in which militant trade unions had a strong presence. Local enforcement was being trialed, but the owners of the mines and factories demanded the state assert an armed presence. The local police were useless to the bosses, they were too sympathetic to workers. The result was the state’s ‘Coal and Iron Police’ who were willing to shoot strikers on demand. Numerous atrocities were committed, the worst being the Latimer Massacre which killed 19 unarmed miners and wounded 32. This force eventually evolved into the Pennsylvania State Police, inspired by the ‘Philippine Constabulary’, the force that maintained the colonial occupation of the US. The Pennsylvania State Police turned from outright violence to spies and agent provocateurs. Revolting workers were no longer shot in the back, their rebellion was anticipated, and they were disappeared into prisons before union action could take place. This is capitalism at work, the police performing their duty. Until we confront this history, we’re doomed to repeat it.

Issues of violent crime and severe poverty have always existed in American society, and neoliberal austerity has exacerbated this and left a path of destruction that leaves communities looking for answers. The ruling class has always sold the solution as more policing and further incarceration, but what if we changed the conversation? What if, instead of demanding the individual that steals be punished and locked up, we ask why they had to steal in the first place. What if, instead of treating gang crime as inevitable, we asked why the education system was unable and unwilling to support young people? What if, instead of imprisoning individuals caught up in problematic drug use, we asked why people have to turn to illegal activity to make ends meet? Alex Vitale, author of ‘The End of Policing’ explains that the “police are managing the symptoms of a system of exploitation”. What the police mean when they say they manage ‘suspect populations’, is that they manage ‘surplus populations’. It would take another piece of writing, equally as long, to delve into the effects for sex workers, migrants, and victims of sexual violence. Though the extreme violence people of colour experience under racial capitalism should never be reduced, it is clear that the existence of the police relies on the subjugation of the many. Despite the clear opportunity to craft a multi-layered political case against the police, elected officials refuse to engage with it, and the media feeds us the idea that this is the only way forward. In 2020, demands from Black Lives Matter were never able to be ‘politically toxic’ because they have never been allowed near an election.

The right for the police to be able to continue to slaughter black populations is the status quo. To suggest that this might be unacceptable is to be ‘politically toxic’, unrealistic, naïve. Through claims that Black Lives Matter may have harmed Biden’s electoral chances, it is becoming clearer and clearer that the boot in the neck will not be removed by voting alone, ‘reform’, or by any kind of ‘respectability’. Through activism on the ground and political education, we could bring ‘Defund the Police’ into the status quo. Abolition emerges out of necessity for black people to survive, to be able to breathe. As Angela Davis says, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time”. 

Every right and form of social and political justice we experience now was once deemed an idea that should never be brought to the table. A world without slaves was pragmatically impossible, a world in which gay people were worthy of equal rights was dangerous, a world in which the working class could vote was preposterous. We don’t have to accept the conditions of white supremacy, in any of its manifestations.

The police have had one hell of a head start in creating the conditions in which we live now. They carry the weight of political respect from all sides because highly racialised ‘law and order’ discourse is utilised from all sides. Our culture is embedded with the idea that the police are the good guys, keeping us safe from unavoidable and inevitable crime. As we see the 46th presidency unfold, the streets will still be the playground of police officers to brutalise, only with an extra £300million to utilise. Being brave enough to envision it now brings a future without police and prisons closer to us in the present.

Diane di Prima’s 23rd revolutionary letter reads, “a lack of faith is simply a lack of courage, one who says “I wish I could believe that” means simply that he is a coward, is pleased to be spectator, on this scene where there are no spectators, where all hands not actually working are working against.” Black Lives Matter is a slogan that is hard to avoid in the current political climate, yet not enough of us have reconciled with what it really asks of us. Get uncomfortable, challenge what we have been led to believe is politically acceptable because only then we end police violence.