After the murder of George Floyd, the vast movement of opposition to police violence seized a slogan until then reserved for the margins: “Defund the police. “ It can be understood by “defining”, “reducing budgets”, or outright “abolishing the police”: the ambitions covered by the slogan are varied. But they are all based on the observation of the failure of reformist approaches, such as anti-racist training, on-board cameras or the diversification of recruitments. So many choices made and implemented by the city of Minneapolis and which did not prevent its police from killing an innocent person. In addition, for supporters of defund, the police take charge of situations that should rather fall under social services – homelessness, drugs, mental illness, domestic violence -, fueling in the process a devouring prison system.
Army to the teeth
During the campaign, the idea caught on to embarrass Joe Biden, who was careful to distance himself from it. “We cannot understand the radical nature of the response if we do not understand the radical nature of the problem”, Judge the sociologist of the police Sebastian Roché. The budget of the American police force has almost tripled in thirty years, despite the drop in crime that began in the 1990s. It is armed to the teeth, with more than $ 7 billion in military equipment bequeathed by the Pentagon, and faces the most armed civilian population in the world. About 1,000 Americans are killed by police each year.
The police are everywhere, including in schools. Even the education department has its own SWAT team. The New York Police Department’s budget is $ 6 billion. In the New York Times, in June, abolitionist activist Mariame Kaba wrote: “What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? “
Abolitionism is directly linked to the history of resistance to slavery, within a community which, far from feeling protected, has everything to fear from the police. The latter would carry with it the stigmata linked to its conditions of emergence: in the Southern States, the first police patrols were created to put down the slave revolts. In 1935, the sociologist WEB Du Bois supported, in Black Reconstruction, the idea that the abolition of slavery was not yet complete. The slaves freed from their chains, the institution abolished, ” the whole penal system came to be used as a method to keep black people working and intimidate them “.
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