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I get it. You hear racial justice protesters calling for “de-funding police,” and you think they are advocating a society without any protection from violence. You worry about what will happen if law enforcement isn’t there and ready to answer the call in case you need them.
As I said, I get it. First, because the slogan works far better on a placard among the like-minded than as a strategic message for the masses. And second, because as a white man, I’ve been told all my life that the cops were there to protect me. To the extent you think of them in this way, I’m guessing you’re probably white too, and certainly not black and poor. Don’t get me wrong: I know there are plenty of folks of color who are also unsure about de-funding the cops, and who worry about what would replace them. And I’m not saying that police don’t sometimes prove helpful to black folks victimized by crime — they do. I’m just saying that to be black or brown is to have a much different relationship to the institution of policing and to be far more open to the idea that there must be better ways of protecting the public.
And this is what I’d like for us to consider. To whatever extent the cops serve legitimate ends, might there be different ways to serve those ends that…
