We Need to Defund the Police to Fight Fascism

Moderates hate the slogan. But it’s more necessary than ever.

Image: Carwil Bjork-James, DSA protestors in SF, 2018. CC

“Policing has never been about preventing violence,” Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie write in their 2022 manifesto No More Police. “It has always been about fabricating and maintaining ‘order’ by using violence—directly and indirectly—to control and contain racialized and gendered populations of people in service of a capitalist economic order.”

Kaba and Ritchie, in this passage, are succinctly stating a core abolitionist claim. Police, in their view, aren’t failing at their jobs when they shoot unarmed Black men, or harass peaceful protestors, or leave murder cases unsolved, or make us less safe in a whole range of ways. On the contrary, the job of police, their whole reason for being, is to make certain people less safe. You can’t reform a concentration camp. The only way to prevent a concentration camp from violating rights and perpetrating violence is to abolish it. The same goes for the cops.

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This insight is behind the call to defund the police, and to use police budgets to fund mental health resources, schools, health care, and an expansive social safety net. The police don’t actually keep anyone safe; they are not intended to keep anyone safe. So instead of giving them more money to make people less safe, we should fund institutions that actually make people’s lives better.

The right and many in the center hate this argument. They insist that police are necessary to keep order, and that we just need to tweak the system (more body cams, more oversight, more training) and all will be well, or at least better. The fact that all these reforms have been tried and that they don’t work is just treated as evidence that we need to try harder—generally by spending more money on police.

If you hate “defund the police,” you should love Trump’s new beautiful murder budget, which doubles, triples and quadruples down on the logic of policing, slashing the social safety net to pay for more and more and more cops.

Starve the people so you can pay to shoot them

Abolitionists have pointed out that rising police budgets have kneecapped social services in many cities. In These Times reported that in 2020, as the George Floyd protestors called for decreases in police budgets, Louisville KY increased the annual police budget by $750k annually, even as it cut $1.35 million in education spending. At the same time, Atlanta increased police budgets by $14 billion while Georgia cut $1 billion in education funds and slashed 4% from the health care budget. Chicago used $281.5 million in federal Covid relief funds not for education or to support local businesses, but to pay for police overtime. Cities have consistently chosen to point more guns at their residents rather than giving them more support in difficult times.

That blueprint has been picked up enthusiastically by the Trump administration. The horrific Republican budget provides a ton of tax cuts for the rich. It also though enshrines a brutal tradeoff between health and cops. The budget cuts $1 trillion from Medicaid; it uses those savings in part to fund $75 billion for Trump’s fascist gestapo, ICE. That includes $45 billion for a brand new nationwide gulag of immigration detention centers—almost as much as the spending for the entire federal prison system.

One of the bleak ironies of the bill is shifting money from health care to detention centers and fascist cops will almost certainly increase crime in dramatic fashion. Medicaid reduces economic desperation and increases access to mental health and substance abuse services, all of which help keep people out of the criminal justice system. It’s no wonder that in 2005, when Tennessee cut Medicaid by 200,000 people, crime rose 7% over two years at a time when crime rates nationwide were falling. Similarly, a 2022 study suggested that increasing substance abuse treatment funding by $1.6 billion would reduce crime enough to save $5.1 billion.

There’s every reason to believe that the brutal attack on health care nationwide will lead not just to mass death, but to rising crime, instability and chaos. If past experiences with police budgets are any indication, that increased instability will then be used as an excuse for more spending on police and law enforcement, which will be paid for by starving health care, education, and the safety net.

The situation will be worsened by the fact that police themselves escalate violence and despair. One study found that increased police funding actually led to higher rates of suicide and police related deaths in Black communities. And ICE raids in LA are already causing economic damage, as state terror drives workers into hiding.

Maybe antifascism is good?

Masked assholes kidnapping people off the street with no due process is not popular; 54% of voters, including 59% of independents have said that ICE is going too far with its raids. People disapprove of ICE workplace raids by 54% to 45%. Trump’s shit murder budget is also massively, almost unbelievably unpopular; one typical poll found 55% opposed and 29% in support, which means the bill is around 26 points underwater.

Democrats have been willing to criticize Trump’s horrific budget of course—but they mostly focused on the Medicaid cuts and the giveaway to the rich, rather than on the inflated ICE spending. They also have been willing to criticize ICE directly—but generally only in terms of very obvious excesses.

California Senator Alex Padilla, for example, told CNN that “If [ICE] was only going after dangerous criminals, there would be no debate. I agree with that.” The problem, for Padilla, is that the ICE agents aren’t targeting the right people. He doesn’t make the case that massive spending on law and order is actually counterproductive and increases chaos, violence, and harm by targeting marginalized people and stripping the social safety net for parts.

The calculus is clear; Democrats like Padilla hope that if they make cautious, bipartisan-y criticisms of ICE, they will win the votes of voters who generally like the police but who are worried that the police are going too far, or might target the wrong people (ie, them.) Like all those Democratic city mayors, national Democrats want to present themselves as the party of responsible policing. You don’t need to get rid of ICE—you just need to point them in the right(er) direction.

Reform always presents itself as reasonable, rational, a moderate compromise. But after decades of expanding police budgets and stagnating social services, it’s worth asking if we have, in fact, ended up with a more reasonable, more rational, more moderate America. Did all the reforming and compromising lead to more law and more order? Have we attained steady progress towards a more just and safer America?

I would argue that we have not. Instead, the effort to improve policing with thoughtful reform and ever more money has led us directly to terrifying, open fascism, and laid the groundwork for a vicious, unrelenting police state, complete with escalating atrocities and what sure looks like a run up to genocide.

Maybe it’s time to stop whining about how “defund the police” somehow lost Democrats this election or that election, and start to think about how funding the police has eroded literally all of our rights and shredded our constitution. We have come to the end of the road paved with bottomless billions for police and prisons, and can now look down and see that we have dead-ended in an abyss. We do not need reform of fascism; we do not need more moderate fascism. We need to abolish fascism. That means abolishing ICE. It means creating a real, substantial safety net for all. And it means defunding the police.