Defund the Police Was a Slogan Cities Tried and Then Quietly Walked Back

Here is a political plan with a lovely, simple structure. Step one: announce that you will abolish the police. Step two: find out what the voters think. Step three: discover that the voters think rather a lot, and that they think it at the ballot box. Step four: issue a statement about how you always meant something more nuanced.

That is, in outline, what happened in a number of American cities between the summer of 2020 and the end of 2022. It deserves to be remembered accurately, because the people who ran the experiment would now prefer you remember it as a misunderstanding, and the people who suffered through it would like you to remember it as a lesson. I am going to tell it plainly, with the dates I am certain of and the claims I can stand behind, and then I want to draw out what it says about the distance between a slogan and a government.

The stage and the pledge

The story starts in Minneapolis, because that is where the summer of 2020 started. After the death of George Floyd in police custody on May 25, 2020, and the unrest that followed, activists called for the city's police department to be abolished. On June 7, 2020, a majority of the Minneapolis City Council, nine of thirteen members, stood on a stage at a park rally and pledged to dismantle the department and build something new in its place. Nine of thirteen is a veto-proof majority. That detail mattered, because it meant the mayor could not simply stop it with a veto.

The day before, the mayor, Jacob Frey, had been asked at a rally whether he would commit to abolishing the department, and he said no. The crowd booed him and he left. Think about what that tells you. The man who actually ran the city declined to promise the thing, and the crowd treated his caution as a character flaw. Hold that in your mind, because the election that followed was a referendum on whose instincts the rest of the city shared.

The council members were not coy about it. They spoke of ending the department as it existed and starting over. What they did not have was a plan with a list of who would answer the phone at three in the morning. That is not a cheap shot. It is the central fact of the whole episode, and the council itself came to it eventually: you can end a department in a speech, but you cannot end a burglary in a speech.

Why the slogan was a bad bargain from the start

Let me give the other side its strongest case first, because it deserves one.

The strongest case for the movement is that American policing, in its daily work, has been asked to do a great deal that police are not trained for: mental health crises, homelessness, school discipline, addiction. A reformer can say, fairly, that sending an armed officer to every one of those calls is expensive and sometimes dangerous, and that specialists would do some of that work better. Many conservatives agree with parts of this. Nobody wants a cop to be the only tool in the city's toolbox.

Now the answer. There are four points.

1. The slogan promised the wrong thing. "Defund" said to ordinary people that the money, and therefore the officers, would go away. A reformer who means "send some calls to trained responders" had a perfectly good sentence available, and it was that sentence. Choosing the slogan that scared your own neighbors is a communications failure, and then you blame the neighbors for hearing it.
2. Police are the one service people call when nothing else will come. Hospitals have waiting rooms, social workers have caseloads, and the police have a radio. When a person is afraid, the 911 call is the call that is answered. Take away the answer and you have not made the fear disappear. You have made it lonelier.
3. The cost of being wrong is not shared equally. The officers on a thinner force are tired, the residents of the highest-crime blocks wait longest, and the people who suffer most from reduced policing are the people who live in the neighborhoods where the police are most needed. A policy that fails the poorest blocks first is not a progressive policy, whatever its authors call it.
4. A pledge is cheap and a charter is not. Replacing a city department is a legal matter. In Minneapolis it required a change to the city charter, and a charter changes by a vote of the people. The council could promise, but the voters would decide. That is exactly how it should be. It is also exactly where the plan ran aground.

November 2021: the voters decide

On November 2, 2021, Minneapolis voters were asked to decide a ballot question, listed as Question 2, on whether to amend the city charter to remove the police department and replace it with a Department of Public Safety, a body with a broader, more public-health-oriented mission, under which police officers could be included if the council decided it was necessary. In plain English: the charter would no longer guarantee a police department, and the council would have the freedom to decide what, if anything, went in its place.

The measure failed. A majority of the city's voters said no. The city that had produced the loudest pledge in the country, in the very place where the cause had its strongest momentum and its most committed organizers, looked at the question and declined.

I like that. I like it because it is what the American system is supposed to do. Activists can protest, officials can pledge, and then the rest of us get a vote, and when the bargain is put to the people, in plain words, over a long campaign, the people can turn it down. There was no coup and no conspiracy. There was a charter, a ballot and a count. The Founders would have called this self-government, and they would have been pleased that it worked.

A note on fairness. The measure's backers argued that it was misrepresented, that it would have given the council room to build a better system, and that it did not itself abolish anyone's job. They have a point about the text, which was less sweeping than the slogan. But a campaign that tells voters one thing in a park and another in the fine print cannot be surprised when voters read the fine print.

Austin, and what Texas did about it

Now to Texas, where the legislature had other ideas about the matter.

In August 2020 the Austin City Council voted on a budget that reduced the police department's funding, in a package of about $150 million, widely described at the time as roughly a third of the department's budget. Much of that figure came from moving functions out of the department, such as some civilian and support services and a planned reorganization, rather than from a straight cut to officers' pay, and the city's own accounting of what was a cut and what was a transfer was a matter of dispute. The headline, though, carried the political message, and the message was that Austin had defunded the police.

Texas responded in 2021. The legislature passed House Bill 1900, which targeted large cities that reduced police funding below set levels and attached financial penalties to a city that did it, including a freeze on property tax revenue and a requirement to hold elections on disannexing territory the city had annexed. It became law that summer. Supporters said it protected public safety from the budget fashions of a single council. Opponents said it was the state meddling in the work of local government.

Here is my view, which I hold with a clear conscience. The argument from local control is a good argument, and conservatives make it all the time, about education, about land use, about nearly everything. But public safety is the first duty of a government, and a state that has a stake in the safety of its own residents, who live in cities, is not a stranger to the question. I would rather the city council had never needed correcting. Having needed it, the correction was legitimate, and the lesson of HB 1900 is that when local officials treat a core function as an experiment, the higher level of government is entitled to ask what happens if the experiment fails.

Austin did later restore money. The 2021-22 budget, adopted in August 2021 after HB 1900 passed, set a record police allocation, which is the quiet way a government says it has changed its mind.

The slow walk back

Austin and Minneapolis were not alone. Several big cities trimmed police budgets in 2020, in the same season, under the same pressure, with similar language about reinvesting in communities. In the following budget cycles a number of them put money back, restarted hiring, and added officers, usually while avoiding the word "restore." Budgets, you will notice, tell the truth after the speeches are over. If you want to know what a city really believes about police, do not read the press release. Read the line items. We lay out how in How to Get Your City Council to Fund Police Hiring Instead of Slogans.

And in Minneapolis the council that had made the pledge found itself, after the ballot, working through staffing problems of the very department it had said it would end. The department lost a large share of its sworn officers in the years after 2020, and the city had to make a case for hiring them back. Why cities cannot hire enough officers, even when they want to, is a story in itself, and we tell it in Why Cities Cannot Hire Enough Police Officers, and What Would Fix It. The short version is that it is far easier to lose a trained officer than to make one.

Let me stay on the comedy for a moment, because it is the real thing. Imagine a city government explaining that it did not defund the police, it merely reallocated, rebalanced and reimagined them, and that the officers who left had simply discovered other opportunities. That is a government that has walked backward so smoothly that it has not noticed it is facing the other direction. I salute the footwork. I just wish the residents had not been asked to hold the lamp.

What the economists found

I want to be careful here. I am not going to give you a crime statistic from memory and call it settled, because crime numbers are slippery, and we have a whole post on why in Seven Things Crime Statistics Cannot Tell You, and Two Things They Can. What I can point to is a body of academic work that asks a simple question: does hiring more police officers reduce crime? Economists who study it, using different methods, have generally found that more police, in the places they are added, tend to mean fewer serious crimes. We go through that evidence in What Economists Found When They Counted Police Officers and Crimes. If that finding holds, and it is the most reasonable reading of the research, then a policy of fewer officers is a policy with a predictable direction of effect. You do not need a slogan to see which way it points.

What the episode says about activists and voters

Here is the heart of it, in four numbered points.

1. Activists optimize for the committed; governments serve everyone. A movement can win a council vote by being the loudest and best organized. It cannot win a city that lives in the block next to the one with the burglary.
2. Voters care about the daily thing. Ask a voter about systemic theory and you get a shrug. Ask whether the police will come when she calls and you get an answer. The 2021 ballot was the second kind of question.
3. Institutions correct. The system that produced the pledge also produced the vote, the state law and the budget revisions. It is slower than the slogan and it is also wiser.
4. A slogan is a tool for a rally, not for a budget. What works on a stage fails in a spreadsheet. The word "defund" survived on signs long after it had left the line items.

The Founding anchor

The Declaration of Independence says that to secure our rights, "Governments are instituted among Men." The Constitution's Preamble lists the purposes of the new government, and among them is to "insure domestic Tranquility." That is a phrase that a lot of us skim over, and we should not. Domestic tranquility is the quiet of a street where you can walk at night, and the founders thought it important enough to put in the second sentence of the national charter, before the welfare and before the blessings.

A police department is how a free people delegates the use of force to a body that answers to them, rather than keeping it as every household's private arrangement. It is one of the oldest and most democratic ideas in the book. The case for reform is a case about how that body behaves. The case for abolition is a case against the idea itself, and in 2021 the voters of Minneapolis heard it, weighed it and said no.

Which brings us to the great irony of the episode. The movement that said it wanted to listen to communities was, in the end, answered by communities, and the answer was not the one on the sign. A slogan that outruns its voters has to be walked back, and the quiet walk is better than the alternative. We should say so out loud, and we should remember it the next time a clever phrase comes along promising to fix a hard problem by removing the people who show up when the phone rings.

The case in brief

1. In June 2020, nine of thirteen Minneapolis council members pledged to dismantle the police department, and the plan needed a charter amendment that only voters could pass.
2. In November 2021 Minneapolis voters rejected the ballot question to replace the department with a Department of Public Safety.
3. Austin cut and reorganized police funding in 2020, and Texas answered with House Bill 1900 in 2021, penalizing large cities that defund.
4. Other cities that trimmed police money in 2020 put money back in later budgets, which tells you what budgets say when slogans fade.
5. The lesson is about the gap between activists and voters: a pledge is easy, a charter is hard, and the people who live where the calls come in tend to know what they want answered.

What you can do: find your city's police budget this month, read the line for sworn officers and vacancies, and ask your council member one specific question about it at the next public meeting.