“ ‘Defund the Police’ UK: Mobilising against institutional racism in a hostile environment”

The slogan “defund the police” was regularly heard during Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in both the UK and the US. Whilst it is often regarded as an importation from the US, much like the BLM movement itself, it is in reality grounded in decades of struggle against the expansion of the carceral state in the UK. Simply put, it calls for the divestment of funding from police forces in favour of increased investment in social and welfare services that are considered to be best-placed to prevent crime and social harm. Defunding alone is insufficient since reducing both police funding and social funding simultaneously, as occurred in the UK following the financial crisis of 2008, can actually lead to an expansion of police power. The ‘policification of social policy’ (Millie, 2013) can occur as officers are called upon to respond to problems such as mental health issues that are necessarily neglected by underfunded social services. Defunding the police is also regarded as a means of tackling structural racism that is reinforced by police practice. Indeed, calls to defund the police must be understood in the context of repeated findings of institutional racism in the police, as revealed most recently by the Casey Review into the standards of behaviour and internal culture of the Metropolitan Police (2023). The failure of attempts to tackle the issue by encouraging ethnic diversity within the police, improving police training and introducing accountability mechanisms has led many to conclude that institutional racism within the police can only be tackled by defunding and eventually abolishing the police (Vitale, 2017). 

Calls to defund the police come from diverse publics, from police officers (Logan, 2015) to activists (Abolitionist Futures, 2020), and take on a variety of forms, from diverting police funds into welfare and limiting police powers (Fleetwood & Lea, 2022), to outright abolition of the police (McElhone et al., 2022). After outlining the contours of the defund the police movement, this paper will seek to determine to what extent it can effectively tackle racism and thus fulfil the overarching aims of the broader BLM movement. Given the contradictory role of the police to prevent racial discrimination whilst being called upon to control ‘suspect communities’, notably in the context of the ‘hostile environment’, it will argue that the issue of power is ultimately more important than that of funding (Fleetwood and Lea, 2023). Indeed, defunding is pointless without community empowerment that will enable ordinary people to take control of conflict resolution (Vitale, 2017, Joseph-Salisbury et al., 2020).