Black People Never Wanted to Defund the Police
Black People Never Wanted to Defund the Police
“What’s at Issue is the White Progressives’ Belief That They’re Helping Us”
“We committed to dismantling policing as we know it.”
That’s what then-Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender declared in early June of 2020. She spoke for nine of 12 of her fellow council members, and she uttered those words mere weeks into the George Floyd saga that would place her city at the center of the most polarizing story in the nation, perhaps the world.
During an interview with CNN’s Poppy Harlow, the host pressed Bender. “To be clear, you’re not talking about reform … This is more than reform, this is dismantling.”
Bender stood her ground: “I know that statement was bold and I stand by that bold statement.”
Harlow continued, “What if, in the middle of the night, my home is broken into. Who do I call?”
Bender responded with that familiar retort that substitutes an ad hominem attack for real engagement: According to Bender, Harlow’s question “comes from a place of privilege.”
Bender, a white woman, framed her position as being in touch with the desires of the black community. She invited Harlow to consider what it’d be like to live in the reality where “calling the police means more harm is done.”
According to her, Bender was responding to the calls from minorities: “[We need] to listen, especially to our black leaders, to our communities of color, for whom policing is not working and to really let the solutions lie in our community.”
So did Bender’s plan come to pass?
In 2021, Minneapolis voters rejected the effort to dismantle the police, but Bender and her ilk still scored something of a victory. Citing low morale, the Minneapolis Police Department reported that officer headcount plummeted by more than a third, falling from 900 to about 560.
Violent crime spiked in Minneapolis and disproportionately harmed black communities. Other cities that followed a similar script experienced similar fallout. Today, Black Lives Matter still stands by “defunding the police,” but few others do.
Good luck finding a politician willing to champion that cause during an election year.
Brave?
Recently, New York Times columnist Pamela Paul examined How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement, a new book by the Marxist writer Freddie deBoer. He notes that “police abolition and incremental efforts to reduce policing could easily result in more hardship for the very community that we’re ostensibly fighting for.”
deBoer recognizes a gulf between elite activists and the vast majority of black Americans, and Paul concurs with his analysis:
What’s easy for radical activists and academics to write on a placard turns out to be hard for many black Americans to actually live with. Taking police off the streets may minimize the possibility of police violence against black people, but it will do little to mitigate the far greater problem of all other violence against black people.
Turns out, says deBoer, that “significant majorities of black Americans want not less policing but better policing.” For pointing this out, Paul calls deBoer brave. Indeed he is. They both are. Paul and deBoer are progressives who aren't afraid to call out the excesses of their tribe. Whatever our tribe, we should all be more like that.
But why should pointing out black people’s opposition to defunding the police require bravery? All it takes is a smidgen of curiosity: “I wonder what black people really think about this issue.”
Did Lisa Bender ever ask herself that question?
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Manufacturing Reality
Back in 2020 Minneapolis, Bender surely encountered black people who supported defunding the police. But Bender was also the only elected official in Minneapolis to endorse Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential election. In other words, the black people she knows might not represent black opinion in general.
Yes, news outlets showed protest footage of many black people who wanted to defund the police. And they interviewed black experts who supported that plan, while avoiding those who did not. The media mixed together many pictures, sounds and words that made it easy for Americans to assume that black people supported defunding the police.
But that assumption was wrong, and it’s always been wrong.
Just a couple of weeks after Bender spoke to CNN, Gallup conducted a survey that examined Americans’ attitudes about police. Black respondents supported substantial reforms and were somewhat more likely to support abolishing the police compared to respondents in general. Even so, only 22% of black Americans sided with Bender.
Gallup conducted another survey at the same time and found that 81% of black Americans wanted police to spend the same amount or more time in their area.
Other pollsters have reported similar findings since 2020, and even less extreme proposals that would decrease funding were not popular among black respondents.
Prominent progressive voices like Slate and New York Times columnist Charles Blow highlight such surveys, yet at least one pollster noted that “the lack of support from the black community may come as a surprise.”
But it’s only surprising to people who don’t know that America’s progressive tribe is overwhelmingly white and only 3% black. Blacks actually represent a slightly larger share of America’s most conservative tribe. Still, pollsters feel the need to bolster their findings by pointing to election results:
These sentiments were affirmed in the 2021 local election cycle, when a handful of major U.S. cities introduced ballot measures that would weaken traditional police department operations in favor of more community-centric approaches. These efforts in Minneapolis, MN, and San Antonio, TX, were rejected by the black and Latino neighborhoods of those cities at an even higher rate than among the whiter areas.
How can such an obvious and widely-reported fact—that black people never supported defunding the police—remain so taboo in progressive circles? Pamela Paul suggests that, for those on the left, acknowledging such uncomfortable truths is “tantamount to serving the enemy:”
Many white progressives are so terrified of being labeled “racist” themselves that they prioritize self-protection and fear of their critics over helping out the very people they profess to want to help — people they may not understand well at all.
If she’s right, we now live in a world where many Americans believe it’s more important to oppose the right than to support black people.
“I think what’s at issue is the white progressives’ belief that they’re helping us,” Lisa Clemons told CNN.
Clemens, who is black and runs a gun-violence organization called A Mother’s Love in north Minneapolis, continued, “Oftentimes they are hurting us.”
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a soon-to-be-released feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.