The Price of Defunding the Police

One of the most contested planks of the Black Lives Matter movement’s platform is the idea of divesting from police departments. This is the demand that government agencies divert funds from law enforcement and put those resources into programs that communities, particularly black and Latino, actually want, like affordable housing.

It’s controversial because anything that tends to pit black lives versus so-called blue lives in the political landscape these days invites outrage from the right like few other issues. But so far, the divestment debate has been short on practical details about what, precisely, such an initiative would look like. A new report produced on behalf of a coalition of national and local racial justice groups, “Freedom to Thrive: Reimagining Safety and Security in Our Communities,” fleshes out the idea.