Lakayana Drury, Marcia Perez and Elliott Young
Drury, Perez and Young are members of the racial equity subcommittee of the Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing.
Police need to stop killing black people. Despite more training, more dialogue with the public and other reforms adopted over the years, police continue to murder black people with no consequences from a legal system that provides officers almost total immunity. The time has come to stop talking about reform and begin to think about transforming policing as we know it.
That starts by cutting funding.
The nationwide movement to “defund the police” is spreading from Minneapolis to New York City to Portland as people tire of the unfulfilled promises that reforms will curb police violence. The answer instead is to shrink the scope of activities in which police engage. While for some, the idea of a society with fewer police is scary, for others, especially black, indigenous, communities of color and other marginalized people, the reduction of police officers in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces and streets is a long-overdue change.
The Portland Committee on Community-Engaged Policing, which was created to provide police oversight as part of a federal justice settlement over excessive force allegations, stands with those advocating for a better solution. The committee, of which we are members, voted on Sunday to recommend that the city “defund the police and refund our communities.”
What does that look like?
We can begin by institutionalizing community accountability, redirecting funds and focusing on public health needs.
We need to invest in our communities. Over the past 40 years, Oregon’s investment in schools, housing and health care has not kept up with the public’s need. Meanwhile, as the general fund has grown over the past decade, the city has continued to devote about a third to the police budget alone. Portland spends a higher percentage of its general fund on police than Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, and New York City, according to the Center for Popular Democracy.
As police budgets have grown, police have been increasingly outfitted like soldiers going to war rather than as community safety officers. At the same time, the role police have been asked to play in society has expanded. Today, police are the first-responders for the houseless, people with mental illness, those suffering from addiction and misbehaving schoolchildren. All of these functions can best be handled by trained social workers, public health professionals, and educators rather than armed police. The removal of police from Portland schools is a positive step to ending the school-to-prison pipeline, but more money is needed to hire counselors in the schools to address the root causes that lead to inequitable student outcomes.
Shrinking the police also means decriminalizing a range of activities including drug possession and use. In its place, we should adopt harm reduction strategies, such as safe injection sites and drug and alcohol addiction counseling. Drug task forces should be ended and raids banned. Similarly, vice units that criminalize adult consensual sex work should be ended and support services should be offered to those sex workers who want them.
The police model must shift from a focus on petty-offenses and more investment should be made to support those in need. We can resolve discriminatory fare-evasion policing by making mass transit free. Police disproportionately target black and brown youth for low-level, victimless crimes and these interactions too often end in violence or death. Eric Garner was killed for allegedly selling cigarettes and George Floyd was killed for passing a fake $20 bill. The police should never be involved in these situations in the first place.
Shrinking police does not mean getting rid of all police. Police will still be needed to investigate homicides, rapes, and other violent crimes. But the goal would be to bring perpetrators into a restorative justice process rather than incarceration and trying to remediate the causes of such social ills. However, given that violent crime has declined dramatically in Portland since the mid-1980s, and today such crime stands at about one-fifth of where it was, the need for police has diminished. After reducing the scope of policing, there will need to be a small group of community safety officers who can respond to active-shooters, but, in reality, these situations are extremely rare.
Defunding the police does not mean chaos and anarchy. It means reinvesting in our communities, especially the black community and other communities of color, the poor, and the disenfranchised. We can spend the next 50 years talking about police reform or we can begin to build a better world in which police are not the answer to everything. The lives of so many depend on which we choose.
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