14 June 20
As Calls to Defund the Police Grow Louder, Joe Biden Wants to Give Them More Money
Alice Speri, The Intercept
Speri writes: "As tens of thousands of Americans have descended into streets for nearly two weeks to protest police violence, they have articulated a clear demand among the calls for justice and accountability: defund the police."
Alice Speri, The Intercept
Speri writes: "As tens of thousands of Americans have descended into streets for nearly two weeks to protest police violence, they have articulated a clear demand among the calls for justice and accountability: defund the police."
EXCERPTS:
“I do not support defunding police,” Biden wrote in an op-ed for USA Today. “The better answer is to give police departments the resources they need to implement meaningful reforms, and to condition other federal dollars on completing those reforms. … Every single police department should have the money they need to institute real reforms.”
As the force of the defund police movement has taken some by surprise, Biden has hardly been the only politician to seek to defend the status quo. Even his one-time rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders, indicated in a recent interview that he objected calls to defund the police. “I think we want to redefine what police departments do, give them the support they need to make their jobs better defined,” said Sanders. “So I do believe that we need well-trained, well-educated, and well-paid professionals in police departments.”
That’s what officials have promised for years. Proponents of police reform, including some who sit on Biden’s criminal justice task force, have been pitching solutions to police violence that include more resources for police at least since the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The protests that followed ushered in an era of massive investment, much of it with federal dollars, to pay for things like bias training, as well as body cameras and, especially, more officers to staff “community policing” initiatives flooding already over-policed neighborhoods and schools.
These proponents usually call for “procedural” reforms that do little to tackle the underlying problems of the institution itself, said Alex Vitale, author of “The End of Policing.”
“School is a microcosm of society,” he added. “There is actually a very clear path towards abolishing police in schools, which I think presents an opportunity for the broader movement as we think about defunding police more broadly.”
Through the 1994 Crime Bill, the federal government has played a leading role in the escalation of school-based police. COPS, for instance, has provided some $1 billion for law enforcement initiatives in schools, most of it going toward the hiring of “school safety officers.” As The Intercept has previously reported, school-based police have greatly contributed to the criminalization of children, and their presence has proved particularly devastating to students of color and undocumented students.
But schools are also where calls to redirect funds from police to initiatives that keep students safe and thriving, like mental health counseling and job programs, have been the longest running and most successful. In Milwaukee, for instance, black students have led a campaign to rewrite the public school system’s racist discipline code. They have also won a $1 million divestment from school-based police, reducing the number of police officers in their schools from 16 to six, said Dakota Hall, executive director of Leaders Igniting Transformation, the youth group behind the effort. The group has now joined others across the country in calling for an end to federal incentives to police, particularly school-based police, and for a reinvestment of more than $300 billion into K-12 education.
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