Yes, defund the fucking police.
You’re standing in front of a young woman’s car. The car slowly—barely—inches towards you. Do you A) Move out of the way? or,
B) Shoot her in the face?
21-year-old Ta'Kiya Young is alleged to have shoplifted some alcohol. Two police officers stopped her in the parking lot of an Ohio Kroger’s, yelled at her to get out of the car, and when she asked why, it looks like the car maybe slightly moved towards one of the officers. He shot her in the head, yelled “Shots were fired! Stop the car!” and she died. She was six months pregnant. (Sorry to be obvious, but I have to say it: Ohio bans abortion after 21 weeks. That’s about two months fewer than Young’s pregnancy).
Police training is designed to terrify cops. I’ve looked at the standard manuals; so many of the lessons are predicated on the idea they’ll die in encounters with civilians. This, I believe, means that your average blogger (a generally worthless occupation. Me!) might actually be better in emergency situations. Literally, even my dumb writer ass would just have moved out of the way of Young’s slowly moving car, instead of assassinating her for shoplifting.
I’ve been writing about Christina Yuna Lee, a 35-year-old woman brutally stabbed to death in her Manhattan apartment after a man followed her home and barged in behind her. Her neighbors called 911 when they heard her scream. Police showed up at the scene almost immediately. Then they waited for roughly an hour and 20 minutes, in her hallway, as she screamed for help, until her screams stopped, and they still waited.
Her attacker was a weird loser, not a criminal mastermind. When a special unit finally went into the apartment, he was cowering under the bed, as Lee lay dead in her bathtub. Her family, which is suing the city, believes a quicker police response could have saved Lee. I wonder sometimes if the neighbors who called the police (who did nothing for an hour and 20 minutes, just to reiterate) wish they’d intervened themselves. I don’t know anyone in my life (almost exclusively nerdy writers) who’d stand around doing nothing while a woman screamed for help.
I’m perpetually, and pointlessly, feuding with people about defund. The general sentiment is, “What if you were being attacked? Wouldn’t you want the police to come?” No, not really. I’d prefer firefighters (who have the added benefit of often being hot).
The fabulous Hamilton Nolan recently laid out a great argument for defund:
Let me just refocus one more time and say: defunding the police is good policy. We all know that what it actually means is “don’t spend money on cops to solve social problems that they can’t solve—spend that money in ways that can actually address these complex problems.” Don’t throw a bunch of people trained as killer soldiers out into poor and desperate communities and expect them to fix things. Instead of pouring money into soldier cops with guns, a policy impulse rooted purely in fear and ignorance, pour that same money into education and mental health and economic development and affordable housing and all of the other things that can mitigate poverty and legitimately strengthen communities and improve the lives of needy people. Anyone who does not agree with this basic proposition is, I’m afraid, either a bigot or a callous selfish person or someone with a profound ignorance about the causes and effects of things in society. Moving public money away from methods that don’t work (and actively cause harm) and into methods that work better is common sense. This is the substance of defunding the police. Most everyone on the left side of the political spectrum who is operating in good faith will agree with this overall premise. The Democrats just weren’t willing to expend a single iota of political capital for it. They just gave up. They just didn’t bother. It was easier to throw the entire BLM movement under the bus than to have an honest conversation about these things with a public that might be hostile.
Yep. The “reasonable” solution is reform, not defund. But JFC. WHAT incentive does an institution like this have to actually change?
Thank you!!!! My fallback is self-deprecation. Not sure if it's good humility or the Patriarchy. Who knows?
This is an extremely stupid take.
Obviously, police shouldn’t do everything. Police should do what they are effective at, and not do what they aren’t effective at.
This isn’t particularly profound. Calling this concept ‘defunding the police’ is just silly.
You point to a woman who died because of police cowardice in not stopping a homicidal armed man. Should they have sent social workers or economists instead?
No, that was a case where an armed police response – or at least some sort of armed response, government or civilian – was necessary. The fact that the police were cowardly, useless, and poorly trained doesn’t change that.
Criminality isn’t always, or even usually, the result of poverty. And the same character traits that lead to senseless crimes also contribute to poverty. The police are certainly flawed, as any human organizations are, but ‘defund the police’ is an incoherent concept.