accreted to police would be better dealt with by
someone else, including traffic enforcement (which
parts of New Orleans have awarded contract rights
to a civilian firm to handle), care of the homeless
(fielded in Denver by volunteers), drugs (more
widely understood since the opioid crisis as an
addiction grounded in despair) and mental-health
crises (which Eugene, Ore., has dealt with since
1989 using counselors from a nonprofit that fields
some 20% of 911 calls).
Mental illness accounts for a growing share of the
jail population nationwide. That, in turn, argues for
a public-health approach to safety, says Ebony Mor-
gan, whose father was killed during an encounter
with police in Eugene in 1996. A registered nurse,
she works with the CAHOOTS program (short
for Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets),
which last year sent a crisis counselor and a medic
to 24,000 calls. “If you have the option that doesn’t
have the potential to escalate into something fatal,
that is just so important,” she says. “It’s about trying
to shift that lens back to the community responsibil-
ity, for folks to acknowledge that the way that we as
a society treat people will have an impact on the rest
of their life, and maybe even its duration.”
In her classes at Johns Hopkins University, politi-
cal scientist Vesla Weaver presents two charts com-
paring the world’s most developed countries. The
first shows spending on social welfare. “The U.S.
is way out there in the stingiest part of that graph,”
she says. “Then on the other side, I show public-
safety expenditure. We are way out on the extreme
other end.” Her point is a stark one: reorienting po-
lice funding “almost involves a recharacterization of
the American state.”
That may well be the idea embedded in the asser-
tion that Black lives matter. And like the movement
that carries the name, the new safety paradigm per-
colated from the grassroots. Weaver says the closest
things to a pilot program were efforts, undertaken
over the past five years in poor neighborhoods in
Chicago and Baltimore, that relied on a community’s
own self- knowledge. “This is what safety really feels
like,” she says. “It doesn’t mean the police. Us har-
vesting our own things. Us being mentors to young
men in our neighborhoods.”
This, then, was the positive alternative taking
shape when Floyd’s death abruptly pushed open
the door to new ideas. But dipping a toe in the wa-
ters of change has proved ill suited to the outraged
anger that has swept across the country since late
May. Calls to “defund the police” rose to the top—
for some, shorthand for the argument that public
funding spent on law enforcement would be bet-
ter spent on social services, but for others an idea
that raises the specter of complete lawlessness. In
a few places, the battle cry has been taken literally:
the Los Angeles police department’s budget waspolice can’t be solved with incremental change.
“The community brings its problems to the police
to work out solutions within the community, but the
police don’t have any of the tools that we really need
to solve these problems,” says Alex Vitale, a profes-
sor at Brooklyn College and the author of The End
of Policing, which argues that reform, training and
department diversity don’t go far enough. (A study
released in July found that diversity on a force did
not in fact lead to less police violence.)
But changes on a nationwide scale will be chal-
lenging. There are around 18,000 police depart-
ments in the U.S. There is no real federal oversight
when it comes to policing agencies. Police depart-
ments across the country look mostly the same be-
cause, by and large, it has been assumed that there
is pretty much one way of doing things.
“If we go down this path to re-examine what
policing looks like, we need to make sure we know
what really works. We need to look at what our po-
tential outcomes will be,” says Joseph Schafer, a pro-
fessor of criminology and criminal justice at St. Louis
University. “If you were going to sit down and create
a policing system from scratch, it wouldn’t look like
what we have right now.”
The ciTizen paTrols left the streets of North Min-
neapolis when the police returned. But for several
days after, McAfee was still hearing from gang mem-
bers, looking not for trouble but its opposite. “Most
of the guys that we work with, they love this com-
munity,” he says. “They was still calling, showing up,
’cause they needed purpose.”
On the city council, Cunningham and Ellison
were not the only members who saw opportunity
in the unrest. The Minneapolis police department
(MPD) was deeply troubled, and activists had
been beating the drum for change. In 2017, on the
150th birthday of the force, a group called MPD150
published a history of the department’s brutal
treatment, including the 1990 killing of 17-year-
old Tycel Nelson, shot in the back as he fled,
and the 2015 death of an unarmed Jamar Clark,
which prompted weeks of protests. One chapter
called for abolishing the department in favor of
“community-led safety programs.”
That once radical notion had already been
gaining traction among academics. Two years
after serving on President Obama’s Task Force on
21st Century Policing, Yale Law School professor
Tracey L. Meares wrote that “policing as we know
it must be abolished before it can be transformed.”
Researchers at other major universities gathered at
the same conclusion.
“It’s all broken in policing,” says NYU’s Fried-
man. “We have decided to treat the police as a one-
size-fits-all remedy for everything that’s wrong.”
Friedman argues that most of the duties that have
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