Not unlike the debates over slogan efficacy discussed above, those who animate this logic suggest that “defunding the rich” would serve as a better marketing strategy to advance a resource redistribution agenda. There is no absence of slogans that call for taxing the rich, even if those calls have yet to be heeded. However, reframing the problem of policing as solely an issue redistribution collapses the full scope of the movements’ demands to a crudely economic rendition. But the movement roars: bloated police budgets are not only wasteful, but they also cause harm.
If there is a logic of scarcity at play here, it is the starved political imagination that fabricates false antinomies in the fashion of opportunity cost. We can demand to tax the rich and reduce our reliance on militarized police.
Consider this bizarre abstraction:
“Defund” falls prey to austerity in another way: by focusing the fight on the small part of the pie that is the municipal budget. This is where the race/class short-circuit is particularly pernicious.
Let’s talk about municipalities.
Seattle’s socialist city councilmember Kshama Sawant, who led and won a long and bitter struggle to Tax Amazon (no “small part” of the proverbial pie), was successful in centering both racial and economic justice. This entailed dedicating funds to build affordable housing for displaced and incarcerated members of Seattle’s Central District’s historically Black community.
As US cities raged against police brutality, Seattle too became embroiled in its own confrontation with its police forces. Sawant subsequently put forth a motion to defund Seattle’s Police Department, arguing for reinvestment in a gamut of transformational and restorative justice social policies. This is bold socialist strategy that does not subordinate its vision to the receptiveness of ruling elites with timid demands that fray, not strengthen, working-class solidarity.
Most importantly, policing is not merely incidental to austerity. Austerity’s deleterious effects on our everyday lives necessitates the state’s authoritarian tendency to discipline and punish working and unemployed people displaced and dispossessed by capital – a phenomenon explored meticulously in Stuart Hall’s Policing the Crisis.
A 2018 report published by the Action Center on Race & the Economy reveals that the increasing cost of police misconduct gets downloaded onto the very same communities that are brutalized by police. This happens through a debt relation. The authors of the report refer to “police brutality bonds” to describe the funds that counties and municipalities borrow, in the form of bonds, to cover the costs of police violence-related settlements. This represents a direct transfer of wealth from poor overpoliced communities to Wall Street, which in turn only further encumbers taxpayers whose money (often double the amount of the original civil settlement) could have gone to expand capital projects like public schools, health facilities, and public infrastructure rather than to the pocketbooks of big banks and wealthy investors.
“But poor racialized communities actually want police…”
From this broad quibble flow a number of different dubious and unfounded claims. “But if you talk to people in poor communities, they’ll tell you that they want police protection” is perfectly in line with a what a plethora of criminology research refers to as the condition of being “over-policed and under-protected.”
The phenomenon of overpolicing and underprotection underscores a situation in which residents who live in racialized working-class neighborhoods “want police to provide protection and safety in the community while knowing that police presence often came with harassment, potential violence, the threat of incarceration, and likely an inadequate response to their problems.” These fears are entirely valid and not incongruous with the multifaceted demands made by the “defund the police” movement.
How these fears get taken up by skeptics, however, begins to take on a life of its own: “this is a movement propped up by white woke liberals who don’t live in crime-ridden communities.” It’s statements like these that reveal the inconsistencies of the “class only” Left. Anyone paying close attention to the unfolding of this political conjuncture would know that it is Black women community leaders (see also here and here) who have led this mass insurrection against violence.
More troubling is the subtle implication that racism ought to be fought by those looking down the figurative (and literal!) barrel, as though racism does not distort the lives of all who share and traverse the same social relations that construct differential experiences and the unequal distribution of resources and life chances.