George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers has sparked outrage and action across the nation. As protests escalated over the last 10 days, so too has a growing call to defund the police.
Many have reacted to this call to action with enthusiasm, confusion, or fear. But this powerful demand does not eradicate our public safety system. Instead, it is a call for transformation, to ensure local investments reflect the world we want – including safe, healthy, and equitable communities. Our current system centers police as the answer to every problem. For example, 54% of the Los Angeles discretionary budget goes to police, while the LA County Jail functions as the nation’s largest mental health system. This is not only ineffective, but extremely harmful – it perpetuates violence in Black and Brown communities, bloats our prisons and jails, and ruins countless lives.
Reducing police budgets means we can reallocate those resources to invest in an array of public safety strategies that deliver healing and opportunity rather than destruction and pain. This primer outlines four key steps to reimaging justice at this urgent moment.
But don’t we need the police to do… all the things that police do?
No. The scope of policing has expanded dramatically over the last few decades. Real spending on police more than quadrupled in the last 30 years, with police budgets dwarfing investments in many of the critical systems that create safe and healthy neighborhoods. Our justice system has become the dumping ground for every social problem. Failing schools? Add police. Mental health services slashed? Call the police instead. Not enough drug treatment facilities? Send people with addiction to jail.
Solution 1: Restore core services to their proper lane. Police are not equipped to respond to many of the problems they’ve been given. Restoring vital services like social workers in schools, mental health services, and drug treatment keeps people out of the justice system and solves an array of challenges that should never have been handed to law enforcement in the first place. Those services are usually the first to be slashed in a budget shortfall, while police budgets hold steady or even grow. It’s time to reverse that trend.
OK, but we still need the police to deal with violence, right?
Actually, no again – there are other alternatives that can be more effective in reducing and responding to violence. The choice isn’t between policing or nothing. Reducing police budgets means creating space for the right things. Decades of research has shown that we already know what causes violence – and how to stop it. A number of community-led violence prevention strategies exist in cities across the country, and they have been successful at reducing violence by up to 60% without excessive reliance on policing and incarceration.
Moreover, policing often exacerbates violence in Black and Brown communities rather than reducing it. Over-policing, mass incarceration, and police violence create profound trauma, economic devastation, family separation, and other conditions that run counter to safety and healing.
Effective alternatives to policing include community outreach programs, violence interrupter networks, and hospital-based violence intervention. These approaches involve highly skilled specialists who mediate conflicts before they become violent, intervene to deescalate tensions, connect community members to resources that prevent violence like job opportunities and social support, help survivors of violence to address trauma and prevent future violence, and more.
These projects are rooted in values of healing rather than punishment, so they don’t just stop violence, they help communities to thrive. They are run by community-based organizations or local public health departments – not the police.
Solution 2: Expand effective, community-based violence prevention strategies. We can reduce the scope of policing by moving the purview for violence prevention into public health and community-based programs that are already effectively reducing violence in dozens of cities. When police do respond to violence, they would do so as part of a community-based ecosystem – collaborating rather than competing with – community-led responses. By reinvesting policing dollars into these alternative violence prevention strategies, they can become the norm – rather than an outlier – for public safety.
This sounds simple. Is that it?
No, this is just the beginning! Long term, we need to shift to a culture of healing, well-being, and equity in the way that we reduce and respond to violence.
In our culture, justice is presumed to mean punishing people who do something wrong. Embedded in this culture is a legacy of racism that positions Black and Brown people as always suspect of wrongdoing – if not this time then some other time. This has resulted in a disastrous system of mass incarceration, over-policing, and violence that has devastated communities of color, perpetuated racism, and fueled even more violence. Instead of rebuilding people and communities after harm, our justice system inflicts more pain, driving a dangerous cycle of trauma and harm. The system doesn’t work for anyone – even the police and corrections officers who work within it experience high rates of trauma and suicide.
If we are serious about delivering real healing and safety for communities, we would never build a system that looks like the one we have now.
Solution 3: Prioritize healing trauma as a central response to violence. Many of the people who commit violence have long histories of unaddressed trauma – which can lead to depression, health issues, job loss, and in some cases, even future violence. Neglecting the needs of survivors is wrong on its face, but it’s also wrong for public safety. And as a nation, we must also reckon with our legacy of racial trauma and create spaces and opportunities for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to heal from generations of trauma that has been passed down for centuries as a result of our country’s brutal history. Addressing that trauma for all survivors – individuals and the communities that have been plagued with generations of trauma – would go a long way to reducing future violence.
Solution 4: Rethink what accountability looks like. The concept of accountability has become so synonymous with punishment that we don’t even notice how we’ve collapsed those concepts. Models such as restorative or transformative justice can deliver accountability much more effectively than punishment – without causing more harm and while putting people on a path to healing and rebuilding their lives. True accountability requires people who commit harm to take responsibility, acknowledge the impact of the harm they caused, and work to repair the damage. It also involves addressing the root cause of why the harm was caused in the first place to provide healing for the person who harmed, ensure they don’t repeat the harm, and create continued safety for the whole community.
Like community-based violence prevention, these programs exist now, but many are small, operating on the side of our punitive justice system or decidedly outside of it. Restorative practices should be expanded in communities, greatly reducing the role of prisons and police. As we reshape our culture and vision of justice towards safety and healing, they can play an increasingly primary role in delivering accountability instead of punishment.
You say all these programs already exist. Why don’t they get more attention?
Many of these strategies were built by Black and Brown people over generations with little funding or recognition. For example, restorative practices have a centuries-long tradition in indigenous communities. Black women have founded hundreds of local healing and anti-violence organizations. Many of them are the only source of trauma care and grief support available in their neighborhoods. Formerly incarcerated people have been at the vanguard of designing and implementing programs to mediate disputes and deescalate conflicts. Faith leaders have stepped in to fill gaps where social services failed. These and other concerned residents across the country have identified challenges in their communities and invested their blood, sweat, and tears to meet those needs.
None of these strategies has the funding, visibility, or cultural prominence to compete with policing and incarceration, which devour not only our budget dollars but also our public imagination. But they should.
Taken together, all of these policies can strengthen communities, build resilience, eliminate racist criminal justice practices, and create more healing and safety for all – thus continually reducing our reliance on prisons and police.
That’s justice, reimagined.
