Read on Twitter
Previous tweet was crafted poorly and interpreted as a critique of the defund movement, lots of people were angry and not interested in reading my attempts to state more clearly what I meant, so I deleted it (and muted half of Twitter). W apologies, here’s what I meant to write:
Debates about policing are taking place at a time when violence is rising and many big cities are facing budget cuts for the foreseeable future. This is a terrible combination, and we’re in a crisis.
To effectively deal with violence, the push to move away from police as the central institution responsible for controlling violence has to come with new investment in other institutions that can play a more central role.
People who have written the seminal work on defunding the police know this, and do not disagree with this. Again, this is not a critique of the movement.
The danger lies in any number of actors agreeing to demands to reduce funding for police but not agreeing to making an active investment and commitment to a new institution or coalition.
Taking funds from police and shifting funding around to other agencies is not enough here. IA new institution or coalition has to be built to take central responsibility for confronting violence and building stronger communities.
I think we can learn a lesson from what happened in the movement to scale back the prison system. Lots of disparate actors jumped on board the effort to scale back, but new investments to support people whose lives were decimated by this system were never made at sufficient scale
Anti-tax advocates stood at the same podium as advocates for justice, and the result is a policy shift that is slowly scaling back incarceration without sufficient investment in the institutions that are essential to helping people remake their lives.
That’s what I’m worried about. Policy and budget debates have to center around the next model for confronting violence and building stronger neighborhoods, and the investments and commitments that will be needed.
If there is no clear model, and only an end to the old model, I worry that violence will continue to rise.
