In the wake of the latest killings of minority citizens by police there are passionate calls to defund the police or to abolish police altogether. As to abolition, it’s worth remembering that this country made do without organized police forces for nearly its first century of existence, but that approach proved inadequate as society became more populous, diverse, and complex. Without doubt, many U.S. police forces were not established out of the noblest of intentions: some were established to capture and return escaped slaves, and many were established to suppress civil uprisings as an alternative to using either the military or vigilante groups for this purpose.
Most modern U.S. police agencies, although not wholly free of racist and classist origins, at least aspire to providing a wider array of services and to do so more equitably. Quite obviously, that aspiration has yet to be fully realized.
Whether calls to defund or abolish police agencies are intended to punish the police for misconduct, express a political viewpoint, or be an actual remedy to improve policing is not yet clear, but such calls are unlikely to be ignored without political consequence. This essay offers some ways to think about the proposition.
Entirely abolishing police agencies would seem the more unlikely, and unwise, course of action. If done, society would still require some government officials to enforce laws, quell violence, and investigate harmful conduct. And in the absence of a massive disarming of the populace, at least some of these “new” officials would need to be armed and have law enforcement powers. By whatever title given to such government officials, they will in effect be police officers.
The more plausible proposal to defund police agencies merits closer consideration.
If defunding is to be achieved by reducing the number of police officers in an agency—the quickest path to large budget reductions—that might compel police officers to reconsider how they use force. As officers who work in remote communities can attest, not having a lot of other police officers for back-up requires officers to be better communicators so as to reduce the risk of violent encounters. It can also reduce officers’ inclination to take some low-level offenders into custody as it risks leaving too few officers on the street while the arrest is being processed. However, having fewer officers in an agency could also lead some officers to escalate their levels of force, using weapons rather than words. In short, the full effects of having more or fewer police officers in an agency are highly variable and difficult to predict, and, accordingly, is not a surefire means of reducing force and improving police treatment of minority citizens.
There are several police funding measures that could have a more direct impact on reducing police misconduct and excessive use of force. One is to modify the standard budgeting arrangement whereby civil liability payouts arising out of lawsuits alleging police misconduct are not charged against the police department budget, but elsewhere. Internalizing at least some of those costs to the police department budget would create financial incentives among police administrators to reduce the misconduct leading to the payouts. The objective is to better align police departments’ fiscal interests with good policy and practice.
A second budgeting measure that could help reduce misconduct is to prohibit expenditures on police training and equipment that promotes policing practices widely regarded as being harmful. This, of course, requires local government administrators and elected officials to be well-informed about what types of training and equipment promote good professional police practice, and what types do not. It’s tempting to defer wholly to the police chief’s judgment, but local government overseers need to know that there usually are different points of view within the police field as to what is and is not good practice and policy. Calls to “demilitarize the police” are far too simplistic to properly inform police fiscal and policy issues.
As to the argument that public money should be shifted away from police agencies and spent instead on social services or education, the net effect on police conduct would depend heavily on how that money were spent.
Contrary to popular understanding, policing does not solely—nor even predominantly—entail addressing serious crime, although it definitely includes it. Much of policing entails addressing a very wide array of social problems that can only crudely be classified as “crime,” “disorder,” and “accidental injury.” A more refined classification of common policing problems runs to at least two-hundred and fifty discrete problems. To compare it with other occupations in terms of complexity, it is more akin to medicine and psychiatry than it is to, say, firefighting. And most of the problems that police address overlap with the functions of other agencies and organizations, one implication of which is that effective policing necessarily involves collaboration and shared responsibility.
For example, addressing school shootings requires that police collaborate with educators; traffic crashes with traffic engineers, alcohol distributors, medical providers; noise complaints with sound engineers, architects and builders; theft with scrap dealers, pawn brokers, merchants, and product designers; family violence with social workers; animal abuse with veterinarians and humane societies; abandoned and dilapidated properties with owners, lenders and city/county attorneys; commercial robbery with corporate executives and loss prevention managers; financial fraud with bankers and bank regulators; missing people with dementia with nursing homes and family members; acquaintance rape with college administrators and alcohol distributors; disorderly youth with school officials and recreation directors; and so on. Especially when the goal is to prevent these problems, and not merely to apprehend offenders, effectiveness depends heavily on collaboration and cooperation.
In the context of specific problems, shifting some public resources from police to other agencies and organizations, can make good sense. I have myself, as a police chief, urged a city council to provide adequate funding to the parks and recreation department—even if it meant less for the police budget—because the absence of youth recreation programs would undoubtedly create more work for our police officers.
Traditional government budgeting approaches that fund agencies rather than social problems can inadvertently foster competitive, rather than collaborative, budgeting, pitting the police department against other government agencies for scarce resources. A more sensible approach would budget around large community problems—traffic safety, school safety, commercial security, homelessness, mental health, etc.—in which portions of those problem-based budgets would be allocated for all the government workers needed to properly attend to that set of problems, police included.
Properly understood, “policing” is not synonymous with the “police department”: public safety and security, being one of government’s core functions, needs to be a shared responsibility among police, other government agencies, non-government organizations, businesses, and community groups.
In many jurisdictions, there is a great need to distribute this responsibility among all entities that possess some ability to prevent and control these problems. The less society relies on its police officers to address these myriad problems alone and with primary reliance on invoking the criminal process, the less resources need be devoted to police agencies and the less risk there will be of violent and antagonistic encounters between police and citizens.
This “problem-oriented approach to policing,” first developed at the University of Wisconsin Law School four decades ago, has been demonstrated to be more effective, efficient and equitable than the conventional approach to policing based principally on trying to deter crime through police presence and the threat of apprehension and punishment.
In summation, if people don’t like how their local police are behaving, don’t necessarily get rid of the police or slash their budgets; use them differently—as community problem solvers, not just as law enforcers. In my experience, good police officers will meet that challenge and will welcome the help, and communities will notice the improvement.
Michael S. Scott, J.D. is a Clinical Professor at the Arizona State University School of Criminology & Criminal Justice and Director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing. He has previously served as a police officer and police chief.
Suggested citation: Michael S. Scott, Defunding the Police, JURIST – Academic Commentary, June 13, 2020, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/06/michael-scott-defunding-the-police/
This article was prepared for publication by Tim Zubizarreta, JURIST’s Managing Editor. Please direct any questions or comments to him at commentary@jurist.org
