The police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 on top of the murder of many others birthed the largest protest movement in American history. Up to 26 million people participated in the rebellion that year against police violence and systemic racism from May 26 to mid-June, with an average of 140 organized protests per day.
The U.S. ruling class, through their corporate media, police departments and politicians, has been trying to squash the movement ever since.
Rally! interviewed Brian Kaneda, Deputy Director and Los Angeles coordinator for Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), to get an update on the movement to defund and abolish police and prisons since the 2020 rebellion. CURB’s mission is to get people free, close down prisons and shift resources away from incarceration and towards community-based services. Brian has been active in abolitionist prison and police reform work for more than 10 years.
We discussed that despite a backlash against the movement, it has not succeeded in halting the people’s works to stop police from terrorizing and killing us, to end racist policies and to redirect public money from policing to the resources our communities need.
Defund the police is a demand, not a slogan
The rebellion spread awareness of police violence throughout society. The multiracial unity of the movement was a significant blow to the brutality, white supremacy and racial division that the U.S. capitalist class has used for centuries to prevent us from uniting around our common interests to get the political power to transform society.
Revolution is a process and each time people rise against the rulers, it strengthens the struggle to transform society. As Kaneda notes, “[I]t’s clear that the movement for Black lives and people who were inspired by their leadership and outrage helped transform the world and push people not just in this country, but across the planet to really consider the experiences of Black people in America and the relationship police, jails and prisons have to Black suffering and Black death.”
The rebellion’s call to defund the police has drawn attention to the huge city and county budgets being used to militarize police forces while youth programs, housing and healthcare go dry.
The rulers’ backlash includes media coverage of conservative and liberal politicians attacking “defund the police” as a misguided slogan, but as Kaneda and other leaders like him point out: “Defund the police is not a slogan, it is a demand.”
It directly challenges the U.S. State to fund human services not violent and racist social control.
African American history and the liberation of society
The first to die in the American revolution against the British crown was a Black worker, Crispus Attucks, who escaped slavery and became a sailor. In the early 19th century, anti-slavery abolitionists like Frederick Douglass invoked the memory of Attucks in the cause of freedom and equal rights.
From the 17th through the 19th centuries Black and white abolitionists risked their lives to make America fulfill its promise. The Civil War was fought to decide the question of slavery and the emancipation of African Americans in the South helped win the war for the North.
After the war, three Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution expanded democracy for all working people. The 13th outlawed slavery except as punishment for crime. The 14th made all people born or naturalized in the United States full citizens. The 15th gave Black men the right to vote. This latter right had to be re-won after the federal government prematurely pulled federal troops out of the South in 1877 and left Black and white Republicans (then the party for civil rights) to be violently disenfranchised. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s, known as the second Reconstruction, because it fulfilled some of the promises of the first, secured the right for all people to vote, live, work, learn and travel in integrated spaces.
Today, Black voters are resisting Republican-led voter suppression and are demanding guaranteed voting rights for all.
Also today, Reverend Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the National Poor People’s Campaign, is calling for a “third Reconstruction” in which the U.S. government finally fulfills its promises of freedom, justice and equality. Two of the campaign’s principles are that “We believe that people should not live in or die from poverty in the richest nation ever to exist,” and that “We recognize the centrality of systemic racism in maintaining economic oppression must be named, detailed and exposed empirically, morally and spiritually”
A transformational moment in our collective history
When asked about the 2020 rebellion, Kaneda replied, “I don’t think that the impact of the uprisings could possibly be overstated.” He noted that it was a “completely transformational moment in our collective history” that will continue to bear fruit for a long time to come.
What fruit has it borne?
Kaneda said the only way to get the things we really need is through a new system that divests from punishment and invests in communities with the goal of eliminating policing and prisons; preventing and responding to harm and creating a thriving world for all.
Election results nationally suggest that the political and moral values of the rebellion and the defund and abolition movements are withstanding the rulers’ narrative. Kaneda observes: “[W]hat we saw is the fear mongering isn’t landing the way we’re being told it is and that tells me that our ideas are resonating with people, no matter what the polls say.”
In the last two elections, abolitionists and police reformers entered city councils, state houses, and Congress. In California, reform prosecutors and county sheriffs were elected in Los Angeles and Alameda counties. Tennessee, Oregon and Vermont outlawed involuntary penal servitude, the 13th amendment exemption. Although progressive San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin was ousted by a recall orchestrated by the city’s ruling class, progressive Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón, Boudin’s ally and predecessor, triumphed twice over recall efforts that failed to gather sufficient signatures to get on the ballot.
In November 2020, Los Angeles County voters passed Measure J to redirect 10 percent of the county’s unrestricted funding (estimated at between $300 million and $900 million) to address racial injustice through community investments and services such as youth programs, good-paying jobs, mental health care, affordable housing and alternatives to incarceration.
As part of the fascist backlash, law enforcement unions successfully sued the county in June 2021, with a judge ruling that Measure J was constitutionally invalid because it took budget decision-making power away from the board of supervisors and gave it to the voters. Too much democracy? Organizers managed to get the current Board to redirect $200 million this year. It must be re-deliberated annually (whereas Measure J would have made it permanent).
Kaneda notes that it is clear “how big of an impact our movement has had because it’s directly related to the intensity of the backlash.” Misinformation about crime ignore the facts that property crime has been declining since the 1990s, that although violent crime did increase in 2020, it is still at a 50-year low, and that the primary causes of violent crime are poverty and social neglect, not a lack of police.
The movement continues
Kaneda notes it is a victory to have defunding and abolishing the police in the public conversation. Many leaders understand the significance of the demands and are not going back. New consciousness has led to new advocacy groups and coalitions. Organizations such as Mothers Against Police Brutality, whose founder testified at the United Nations in October 2022, are educating and uniting people. Budget 2 Save Lives, is a promising new coalition that Kaneda says is teaching how to fight for divesting from incarceration and investing in services through budget advocacy.
Such movements are revolutionary because their demands can only be met through a political revolution. The role of revolutionaries is to unite around these working-class demands. The solution is a cooperative society where social wealth is owned in common and distributed according to need; a society organized for humanity and our planet to thrive. Our eyes have been opened, but it will take strategy, tactics and ongoing effort to keep our movement on track.
