The protests that erupted nationwide after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd quickly blossomed into something larger than the core demand to “stop killing us.” Within days, pent-up anger over the persistence of police misconduct despite so many like-minded protests over the years, and over the heavy-handed tactics of police responding to the protests, introduced a new phrase to the mainstream: “defund the police.”

It’s actually not a new idea. For years, policing policy has coalesced around three camps: “back the blue” supporters of the status quo; police reform advocates, often police leaders themselves, advocating better forms of policing to try to win back the trust of communities threatened by both street violence and abusive policing; and critics of the reformers’ faith in incremental progress. The latter group often proclaimed themselves police abolitionists, and their ideas found their most prominent and detailed articulation in the 2017 book by sociologist Alex Vitale, The End of Policing. Both terms, abolition and defunding, simplistically gloss over what this movement advocates: rethinking the fundamental role of police by shrinking its footprint and shifting the burden to make change from the police themselves to the communities that want more safety and justice without more police, and without ceding democratic control over police accountability.

The most notable example to date of dismantling a deeply troubled police force and reinventing its mission from the ground up has taken place in Camden, New Jersey, a move often cited in the same breath as the defund movement (and which we’ve tracked here and here). But its detractors point out that replacing one police force with another to foster better safety and community trust has not solved the underlying problems. Simply cutting police budgets, as The Marshall Project found in Memphis and Chicago, has similarly foundered without deeper reforms.

What else have journalists found that works? This collection focuses on examples of responses that illustrate defunding-style ideas in two key areas:

ALTERNATIVES TO POLICING

In Milwaukee, Ashley Luthern (@aluthern) reported on 414LIFE, which uses an increasingly common violence-prevention strategy modeled on the Cure Violence, or public health, approach that says gun violence spreads like a virus and can be interrupted through outreach – counseling, conflict mediation, providing social services – by interventionists who have street credibility. Similarly, a program like Eugene, Oregon’s Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets (CAHOOTS) responds to mental health crises not with an armed police response but with counselors and medics, as LJ Dawson (@LJDawson0) reported. In programs like those in Milwaukee and Eugene, helping people who are experiencing a crisis by pulling them back from the brink has worked to lessen the police role in what is essentially social work – solving problems before police truly are needed.

Another form of crime prevention that Claire Goforth (@clairenjax) reported on from Jacksonville, Florida, seeks to prevent the crises altogether. A real estate developer has taken on a broader social role that goes far beyond cleaning up blighted neighborhoods, by turning itself into a provider of services geared to education, job training, and nutrition, among other remedies for the conditions that breed crime.

HOLDING POLICE ACCOUNTABLE

Cellphone videos aren’t the only technological solution to police impunity in instances of excessive force, as Molly Fosco (@MollyFosco) reported. In the wake of the Ferguson protests, a number of tech entrepreneurs and researchers have created platforms and created organizations to track police behavior, filling in the vast gaps in official data that often hamper effective responses to problems. Another type of data was explained by Eli Hager (@elibhager) and Justin George (@justingeorge) in their report on how prosecutors are blacklisting unreliable police witnesses, refusing to rely on their word in criminal prosecutions – a response devised by a new breed of progressive prosecutors elected by voters who demanded a different approach to law enforcement. And, back in 2016, Adeshina Emmanuel (@Public_Ade) showed how a New York system designed to reduce the costs of official misconduct was providing the public with a glimpse into the city's then-opaque records of complaints against police.

Finally, Michael Friedrich’s (@mfriedrichnyc) report shows how Stockton, California, sought to repair the damaged relations between police and their community. It’s a goal almost every police department pays lip service to. But Stockton went far beyond the traditional tools of community policing to candidly atone for the racist history of police generally and in Stockton specifically. And, based in large part on what the city learned through an ambitious exercise in listening to residents, it’s putting the words into action. Friedrich wrote, “Rather than broad gestures at police ‘accountability’ that promote measures like body cameras, the city has committed to changing departmental norms wholesale.”