Defunding the police in the UK: Critical questions and practical suggestions
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Author | Jennifer Fleetwood,John Lea |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12468 |
Received: 17 March 2021 Accepted: 18 August 2021
DOI: 10.1111/ho jo.12468
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Defunding the police in the UK: Critical
questions and practical suggestions
Jennifer Fleetwood John Lea
Jennifer Fleetwood is Senior Lecturer and
John Lea is Visiting Professor,
Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths,
University of London
Correspondence
Email:j.fleetwood@gold.ac.uk
Abstract
Calls to defund the police emerged from Black Lives
Matter (BLM) protests of 2020, inspiring USA cities to
shift funding from policing to social welfare. Here we
consider how defunding might translate to the UK, rais-
ing critical questions about our distinct funding arrange-
ments, and social welfare traditions. Next, we consider
how the spirit of defunding could be adapted in the UK
drawing on the left realist proposition of minimal polic-
ing, radically restricting police powers and autonomy.
In contrast to many abolitionists, we foresee the state
continuing to play an important role in ensuring jus-
tice through the development of specialist non-police
led agencies to respond to serious crimes and residual
conflicts.
KEYWORDS
Black Lives Matter (BLM), defunding, policing, racism
1 INTRODUCTION
The slogan ‘defund the police’ emerged from Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the summer
of 2020. Protests began in the USA prompted by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis
police officer on 25 May (Court of Minnesota, 2021), then spread to the UK and globally.In simple
terms, the slogan calls for the transfer of police funding to social welfare as an effective means
of preventing crime and with the eventual goal of police obsolescence. However, we criticise an
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons AttributionLicense, which permits use, distribution and reproduc-
tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2022 The Authors. The HowardJournal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Howard J. Crim. Justice. 2022;61:167–184. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hojo 167
168 THE HOWARDJOURNAL OF CRIME AND JUSTICE
easy translation of the slogan to a UK context in which police have been ‘defunded’ by govern-
ment for at least a decade with no reduction in police violence against racialised minorities. Keir
Starmer, Labour Party leader and former Director of Public Prosecutions dismissed the slogan
as ‘just nonsense’ (BBC Breakfast, 29 June 2020). While Starmer’s comments were quickly con-
tested (Elliot-Cooper, 2020;Onapa,2020), there are profound difficulties in importing US policy
vocabularies (even radical ones) into UK politics.
The purpose of this article is therefore to re-articulate core elements of the defunding debate
for a UK context, acknowledging our distinct institutional structures and history,drawing on aca-
demic work proposing radical reductions in policing, in particular the left realist proposal of min-
imal policing (Kinsey, Lea & Young, 1986). After outlining key aspects of the US debate we argue
that we cannot adopt defunding wholesale. Rather than literal defunding (reduced financing),
we focus on radically restricting police powers and autonomy but retaining – in contrast to some
abolitionists – the key role of the state in delivering justice (Kinsey, Lea & Young, 1986,p.205),
particularly for crimes and harms by powerful offenders and institutions immune to community
control. Finally, we begin to sketch out how specialist agencies, rather than the police, could be
involved in responding to social conflicts. In this way we hope to apply the spirit of defundingto
the particular circumstances of the UK.
2ORIGINS OF ‘DEFUND THE POLICE’
The call to defund police is an international, activist response to excessive, long-standing
racialised violence by police against Black people, especially in the USA. On the face of it, the idea
is to take funding from police, and invest it in community initiatives that build safety. For some,
defunding is an end in itself. Defunding makes particular sense in the USA, where it confronts
escalating budgets and militarisation of the police (Bouie, 2014;Vitale,2017, p.28), even as crime
rates overall keep dropping (Morgan& Truman, 2019). For others, defunding is an immediate step
towards police abolitionism.
Police abolitionism mostly emerges from the USA (Chazkel, Kim & Paik, 2020; For a World
Without Police, nd; McDowell & Fernandez, 2018;Vitale,2017; Williams, 2004), and to a lesser
extent the UK (Abolitionist Futures, 2020; Duff, 2021). It emphasises state racism, capitalism and
the prison industrial complex, distinguishing it from liberal, European abolitionism (McDowell
& Fernandez, 2018). Following prison abolitionism (i.e., Alexander, 2010; Davis, 2011;Gilmore,
2007), abolitionists aim to make the police, eventually,obsolete. That is, to challenge the ‘assumed
inextricable relationship between the modern state and the police: the belief that violence is neces-
sary to the maintenance of public order’ (Chazkel,Kim & Paik, 2020, p.5). Here, we focus primarily
on defunding as an immediate, necessary and achievable intervention, setting aside longer-term
questions of abolitionism.
Calls to defund the police come from diverse academic and activist contexts and are, of course,
varied. Nonetheless, we identify three central aspects of the defunding argument. First the USA
police, historically tainted by slavery and labour repression, exhibit a history of armed violence
towards the Black community and are considered essentially unreformable(Chazkel, Kim & Paik,
2020; Duff, 2021; Vitale, 2017; Williams, 2004). It is argued that police and prisons are rooted in,
and so integral to, maintaining racial and class inequality that no racial justice is possible without
their abolition (inter alia, Chazkel, Kim & Paik, 2020; Davis, 2011;Gilmore,2007). Decades of
reform have failed to bring about change, instead reforms shore up a failing institution.
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