by Michael Fortner, professor at CUNY (City University of New York)
The senseless murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis officer ignited a conflagration that consumed cities across the United States. Many communities burned as protesters took to the streets to decry not only this tragic incident but also a history of state violence against African Americans. Many protestors demanded the end of policing. Soon after Floyd’s death, a veto-proof supermajority of the Minneapolis city council heeded this clarion call and pledged to “dismantle” the police department. Council president Lisa Bender declared, “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period.” She explained, “Our commitment is to do what’s necessary to keep every single member of our community safe and to tell the truth: that the Minneapolis police are not doing that. Our commitment is to end policing as we know it and to recreate systems of public safety that actually keep us safe.”[1]
By the end of the year, the council had failed to make good on its promise. This month it trimmed just $8 million from the $179 million policing budget and redirected those funds to mental health teams, violence prevention programs, and other initiatives. Although the council had initially proposed to downsize the police force to 750 officers from 888, it killed the measure after the mayor called it “irresponsible.”[2] Bender blamed the mayor for the stunning demise of the “dismantle” pledge. She tweeted, “He fought us every step of the way.” While the mayor certainly played a role, her remonstrations miss a more fundamental dynamic: the political limitations of the “causal story” attached to their pledge.
There is another causal story, however. This perspective, to be clear, is not a reactionary defense of brutality. It’s not “blue lives matter.” This alternative narrative sees state violence and urban violence as twin evils.
Problem definition is a key component of policy making. It is not a natural process, though. It is a political process involving contending “causal stories,” theories about the origins of pressing social problems. Political scientist Deborah Stone teaches us that “causal stories have both an empirical and a moral dimension.” “On the empirical level,” she says, “they purport to demonstrate the mechanism by which one set of people brings about harms to another set.” “On the normative level,” she adds, “they blame one set of people for causing the suffering of others.” Causal stories also have political implications: “Complex causal explanations are not very useful in politics, precisely because they do not offer a single locus of control, a plausible candidate to take responsibility for a problem, or a point of leverage to fix a problem.”[3]
The causal story at the center of police abolition is simple and compelling: policing is a method of social control, born of a need to maintain white supremacy. Why did the United States invent policing? “The reason is, mainly, slavery,” historian Jill Lepore claims.[4] Activist Mariame Kaba argues that “when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black man’s neck until he dies, that’s the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.”[5] This account never sufficiently considers other social, political, or organizational explanatory factors—not even to dismiss them. Yet what it’s missing in empirical content it makes up for in moral certitude: to reform policing is to refine its racialized disciplinary power; to oppose abolition is to countenance historical evil.
There is another causal story, however. This perspective, to be clear, is not a reactionary defense of brutality. It’s not “blue lives matter.” This alternative narrative sees state violence and urban violence as twin evils: many poor neighborhoods are in desperate need of greater public safety, but all too often indiscriminate, violent policing has been the only instrument deployed to meet this critical need. Realizing the burdens of the past and the deepening urgency of the present, this complex causal story calls for both greater investments in communities and effective law enforcement. In terms of the latter, Robert Muggah and Thomas Abt, for example, suggest that, “[a]mid growing pressure to radically cut funding for law enforcement, what the debate needs is a serious, evidence-based discussion about what works, and what does not, when it comes to restricting the use of force by police, improving public safety, and making police substantially more accountable to the people they are supposed to protect and serve.”[6] Tethered to empiricism, this view lacks the moral parsimony of the simple causal story. Blame is dispersed rather than concentrated on a specific, if nebulous, oppressor. Moreover, the complex narrative can easily be twisted to blame the victims and frustrate systemic change.
Investing in community groups while reforming and refining policing lacks the moral clarity of abolition. Even so, this strategy responds to how many African Americans in the city defined the problem. It will also save lives.
The wisdom of Stone’s seminal typology notwithstanding, the fate of “dismantle” the police in Minneapolis indicates the political vulnerabilities of some simple causal stories. Although the social control thesis has resonated with many progressive academics and politicians, elite cultural institutions and media organizations, and young people, many African Americans have embraced a more nuanced view. In a poll taken of Minneapolis voters in August, 76% of Black voters supported redirecting “some funding from the police department to social services, such as mental health, drug treatment or violence prevention programs.”
When asked, “Do you think Minneapolis should or should not reduce the size of its police force?” Fifty percent of Black voters, including 65% of older Black voters (50 and up), answered “should not.” When asked about the effect of significantly reducing the size of the police force, a plurality (49%), including 60% of older black voters, said it would have a “negative” effect.[7] Echoing the complexity of these attitudes, Steven Belton, president and CEO of the Urban League Twin Cities, said when protesting the council’s pledge, “The tension of living in many of these African American communities is that we are overpoliced, we are subjected to excessive police use of force, but at the same time we are also disproportionately victims of crime and witnesses of crime.”[8]
Facts on the ground also constrained the political possibilities of the simple causal story. By September, violent crimes, including assaults, robberies and homicides, had been up compared to where they were in 2019. MPR news reported, “More people have been killed in the city in the first nine months of 2020 than were slain in all of last year. Property crimes, like burglaries and auto thefts, are also up. Incidents of arson have increased 55 percent over the total at this point in 2019.” Furthermore, the public’s anxiety over these crime rates was palpable. In fact, the city council took the police chief to task: “council members told police Chief Medaria Arradondo that their constituents are seeing and hearing street racing which sometimes results in crashes, brazen daylight carjackings, robberies, assaults and shootings. And they asked Arradondo what the department is doing about it.” African American council member Phillipe Cunningham noticed the backpedaling: “What I am sort of flabbergasted by right now is colleagues, who a very short time ago were calling for abolition, are now suggesting we should be putting more resources and funding into MPD.”[9]
In the end, Minneapolis passed a budget consistent with the complex causal story. The city council did not end policing. Instead, it maintained current staffing levels and diverted some funds to alternative public safety strategies. As the essays in this series suggest, substantial empirical research recommends a blended approach. Of course, investing in community groups while reforming and refining policing lacks the moral clarity of abolition. Even so, this strategy responds to how many African Americans in the city defined the problem. It will also save lives. There’s substantial value in that.
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[1] Sam T. Levin, “Minneapolis lawmakers vow to disband police department in historic move,” The Guardian, June 7, 2020.
[2] Amy Forliti and Steve Karnowski, “Minneapolis votes to cut its police budget, but not staffing, after George Floyd’s death,” USA Today, December 10, 2020.
[3] Deborah A. Stone, “Causal Stories and the Formation of Policy Agendas.” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 104, no. 2 (1989): 281–300.
[4] Jill Lepore, “The Long Blue Line: Inventing the Police,” New Yorker, July 13, 2020.
[5] Mariame Kaba, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” New York Times, June 12, 2020.
[6] Robert Muggah and Thomas Abt, “Calls for Police Reform Are Getting Louder—Here Is How to Do It,” Foreign Policy,June 22, 2020.
[7] “Mayor Frey, the City Council and defunding Minneapolis police,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, August 16, 2020.
[8] Maya Rao, “Some Minneapolis Black leaders speak out against City Council’s moves to defund police,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, July 2, 2020.
[9] Brandt Williams, “With violent crime on the rise in Mpls., City Council asks: Where are the police?” MPR News, September 15, 2020.
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Michael Javen Fortner is an assistant professor of political science at CUNY’s Graduate Center. He is also a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He received a BA in political science and African American studies from Emory University and a PhD in government and social policy from Harvard University. His work studies the intersection of American public policy and political philosophy — particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and class. He is the author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Harvard University Press, 2015), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and winner of the New York Academy of History’s Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History. Along with Amy Bridges, he edited a volume on city politics, Urban Citizenship and American Democracy (SUNY Press, 2016). His scholarly articles have appeared in Studies in American Political Development, the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Policy History, and Urban Affairs Review. He has also been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, and Dissent magazine.
