What If... We defunded the police? | What If

While defund the police makes for a catchy slogan,

the logic behind it is nuanced.

MPD150, a Minneapolis campaign group,

and one of the key proponents of the idea,

explicitly calls for a police-free future.

Others use the term to mean small cuts to the police,

or simply stopping increases to policing budgets.

Across the board, the idea is that money

that would usually be spent on the police

would instead be funneled into other initiatives

that might improve public safety.

Although the slogan was popularized

by the George Floyd protests in the US,

theorists in the UK have been discussing

whether we should reallocate police funds for decades.

My name's Dr. Adam Elliott-Cooper.

I work at the University of Greenwich

in the department of Sociology,

and my research looks at policing and racism in person.

The origins of defunding the police

are identifying the fact that police and prison system

has expanded enormously over the past 100 years,

but we haven't seen any improvement in public safety

or reduction in harm.

The other thing that's important about it

is that we see racism and the oppression

of working class people and other oppressed groups

also being reproduced by the police and prison system.

Taking that into consideration, defunding the police argues

that we need to think of new ways of solving social problems

that don't involve putting people into cages.

[bars slamming]

Prison and police abolition doesn't mean

closing all the prisons tomorrow

or ending all policing the day after.

What it does mean is that we need to think about

social policies which can envisage a world

in which prisons and police are no longer needed.

So one of the ways in which we can do that

is by saying rather than expanding the power of the police,

what preventative measures can we put into place

to prevent people from coming into contact

with the police and prison system?

Reinvesting in youth services would be one important way

of improving public safety.

Improving mental health provision,

particularly for young people, whether it be in schools

and other youth services will be another one.

Reinvesting in our women's refuges or women's centers

so victims of domestic violence have a safe place to be

would be a really important place too.

In the longer term, we need a massive investment

in council housing in this country to ensure

that the people that need it now

and the people that will need it in the future

have safe homes to live in.

We also need, of course, huge investment

in education, training and jobs,

to ensure that there are well paid, secure jobs

for the next generation of young people coming up too.

These types of things will be hugely important

for improving levels of crime and safety

within this country.

African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated

in the US, at the same rate as Black people in Britain

are incarcerated over here.

Furthermore, we see other problems

in relation to stop and search and excessive use of force

disproportionately affecting both Black people in Britain

and African-Americans in the United States.

In the US, we can see a legacy of slavery, Jim Crow,

and the current problems of racism

in the police and prison system.

But in British history, most of British policing

hasn't taken place on the British mainland.

The British empire involved policing

Britain's enslaved people in the Caribbean,

or its colonized subjects in Africa

and South Asia and elsewhere.

And so we should be unsurprised that the racism

of British policing didn't begin with the Windrush,

it began with the British empire,

and we're still living with those legacies today.

One of the biggest hurdles in defunding the police

will be the fact that gangsters, immigrants and terrorists

have been one of the ways in which the police

and the government have legitimated

their power over decades.

Identifying the facts that the immigrants

and Black and minority ethnic communities which are used

to justify the expansion of police and prisons

isn't helpful either to them or to wider society.

It's a fundamental barrier in overcoming the ways

in which police and prisons have become so normal

in how we're supposed to solve social problems

in this country.

[tense music]