Defunding the police force would be a recipe for anarchy

A demonstrator confronts police officers during a protest against police brutality in Manhattan of New York, U.S., May 31, 2020. /Xinhua

**Editors Note: **Stephen Ndegwa is a Nairobi-based communications consultant and international affairs columnist. The article reflects the author's views, and not necessarily those of CGTN.

In the ongoing protests arising from the death of U.S. citizen George Floyd in Minnesota in the hands of police, it is possible for authorities to over-promise as a way of atonement. Just a few days after legislators in Berlin, Germany passed a controversial anti-discrimination law, authorities in Minnesota promised on Sunday to scrap the state's police department.

Addressing hundreds of demonstrators on Sunday evening, members of the state's city council said the current police force in the state had failed muster following their role in Floyd's death. In its place, the council rooted for a community-based policing system.

But in a rejoinder on Monday, U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's campaign released a statement reiterating that he does not support growing calls to defund the police. "As his criminal justice proposal made clear months ago, Biden does not believe that police should be defunded."

Instead, Biden supports "funding community policing programs that improve relationships between officers and residents, and provides the training that is needed to avert tragic, unjustifiable deaths."

The crusade to defund the police is a culmination, rather than a direct consequence, of Floyd's death. Activists across America have lobbied for a rethinking of the police system for several years, claiming it targets mainly the members of the black community.

Is abolishing the police occupation a desirable or feasible option in the modern world? Security experts view that the action would create more problems than solve the current ones. The level of exposure to crime and general insecurity would be overwhelming, resulting in a security crisis that did not exist.

A profiling of Minneapolis demographics in relation to the black community could help in gauging whether the police have an inevitable role in state affairs. According to World Population Review (WPR), Minnesota is the 12th largest state in the U.S. in surface area and the 21st most populous, with an estimated 5.70 million people.

The three dominant races in Minnesota are White, African American, and Asian comprising 83.3 percent, 6.2 percent, and 4.8 percent of the total population respectively. Although they have an above average high school graduation rate of 81.48 percent, African Americans have quite a low bachelor's degree qualification comprising 20.64 percent of the population.

African Americans are the second most likely to be in poverty (30.42 percent), closely following the native's poverty rate (31.32 percent). In comparison, the race least likely to live in poverty is white (7.23 percent). African Americans' unemployment rate stands at 9.9 percent, the second highest after Indians (12.8 percent).

These WPR statistics could be a fairly good indicator of marginalization, showing why the African Americans are likely to run afoul of the law.

The bigger question, however, centralizes on how cities would look like if they dismantled their police departments. Proponents of police abolition say that some cities with a high police presence or density have high crime rates. Moreover, many of the world's safest cities also have a high number of police officers per capita.

Police have been accused of colluding with criminals to abet crime. In places with organized crime, criminals operate with superior sophisticated logistics the police are unable to match.

Police arrest a protester in the Brooklyn borough of New York, U.S., May 30, 2020. /Xinhua

In some countries, police are usually colluded with politicians to secure their privileged position in society, leaving only a thin security spread to combat crime, or to practice public law and order.

Police brutality is rife. Putting racism aside, the police world is usually accused of using excessive force when dealing with suspects, including many cases of extra-judicial killing of both innocent people and criminal suspects.

As we progress in the 21st century, we need to rethink the police outside its traditional perception as a brute force. But abolishing the police would be foolhardy. A better strategy would be to allocate more resources to areas that can help to reduce high crime rates, and generally maintain law and order.

Defunding the police does not literally mean a total divestiture from the police. It means the police co-sharing budgets with other sectors that support the work of law enforcement, either directly or indirectly.

These areas are found in social welfare initiatives in key sectors such as healthcare, education, personal safety, drug and substance abuse rehabilitation, affordable and decent shelter.

Another major part of police reforms should include the support for community policing, which involves collaboration between communities and the police in not only suppressing crime before it escalates, but also coming up with and implementing initiatives that stop individuals from getting into crime.

Ultimately, the role of the police must be redefined to one that is universal. A police officer should be able to operate in any part of the world regardless of race, creed or color.

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