Defund, replace, rebuild
“I believe therefore that it would be better, instead of imprisoning thieves and concerning ourselves only with punishing crimes, to run the country in such a way that no man would ever be hungry or cold. When a man lacks steady employment, his heart is not steady, and in extremity he will steal. As long as the country is not properly governed and people suffer from cold and hunger, there will never be an end to crime. It is pitiful to make people suffer, to force them to break the law, and then to punish them.”
- Kenko, c.1330
The past two weeks have pulled most of us out of our socially distanced torpor into a fundamental argument over the place of police in modern democratic society. I’ve actually found it really, really difficult all week to sit down and gather my thoughts in writing, as I’ve found my own beliefs and positions shifting and evolving with each day. (In fact, looking at my word count for this week before sitting down here, I’m sitting at 54 words. I try to average 1,500-2,000 a week.) Consider this my first attempt at tabulating my thoughts.
Sometime last week, the Defund the Police movement gained so much traction in national media that it’s become, at least right now, the primary political manifestation of change stemming from the murder of George Floyd. I’ve found myself, in many conversations with my friends and family, thinking on the ramifications of this idea. Just as much, though, I’ve found myself in seemingly semantic arguments with many friends and allies on the name of the movement and what it entails. And I don’t use the term semantic with any intended negative connotation. The words matter.
As #DefundThePolice gained traction, I took a small part last week in the #BuildCommunities movement with JustLeadershipUSA to encourage the mayor to reallocate funding from the NYPD, especially considering the police was the only city function that had no projected austerity cuts in the mayor’s proposed budget. Thinking on the comparative nomenclature of “Build Communities” and “Defund the Police” led me back to an oft-cited denominator of modern mass politics: Conflict.
I’ve found many people this week looking at their city budgets and examining the sometimes-extraordinarily inequitable police budgets when compared to other social services. Every city budget is essentially a conflict of interests, with definite winners and losers. It’s also a statement of collective morality: We invest our collective wealth in the areas we consider most important. And whether intentionally or not, most if not all of our municipal budgets reflect a system of values that tells people, You’re on your own, but we’re watching you. And when you mess up, we’ll be there to arrest you.
This is when the term reallocation is probably more useful, if less sexy, than defund, implying not one binary choice but an ecosystem of collective needs to be provided for. I’m thinking now of my first teaching job with the CUNY Language Immersion Program (CLIP), in which I taught new immigrants enough writing to (hopefully) pass the CUNY entrance essay exam. At the time potential CUNY students had to write this essay in response to a basic prompt that gave a situation and two choices for addressing that situation, and the student would pick one and form a written argument around it. One of the most common prompts I saw CUNY give went something like this:
The mayor, in proposing his budget, has asked for help from citizens in deciding where to maximize funding to fight crime and increase stability. One option is to increase funding for police, and the other is to increase funding for education. Choose one option, and argue its efficacy.
This prompt’s ubiquity is perhaps due to the universality of the question at its core: In order to most effectively address crime, do we simply increase enforcement and punishment, or do we, in the words of the Archbishop Desmond Tutu (with thanks to my friend Jennifer Bottom Sobecki), “stop just pulling people out of the river…[and]…go upstream and find out why they’re falling in?
While I believe in personal responsibility, I also believe in our responsibility to each other. One way that we in a democratic society fulfill that obligation is by properly allocating our resources to build the social structures that allow that care. Some crime is the result of individual choices, but excessive crime is a result of a porous safety net. That safety net includes public education, but it also includes ensuring adequate housing, mental health services, and helping build an economy that works for everyone. And right now our safety net has more pores than material.
Over the weekend the New York Reentry Education Network (NYREN), of which I serve on the Coordinating Committee, is composing a letter to Mayor De Blasio advocating for him, as part of his promise last week to impose austerity defunding on the NYPD that bears a closer equivalency to the city’s austerity measures to its other responsibilities, to put more support behind educational and restorative programming in the city’s correctional facilities. This is just one hole in the safety net, but it’s a start.
