“Defund the Police” — and The Arts
By Eric Booth, June 2020
Defund the police. When translated from slogan to policy, this means reallocating those public funds given to law enforcement industries so that we can more effectively achieve public safety for all people in America—especially for Black people who have been brutalized for centuries. Defund the police means this must end, now.
Overturning these entrenched cultural norms and the institutional policies and laws that hold them in place is long overdue. The public outcry demanding this revision springs from the monstrous racially targeted abuses of the public trust that have been visited upon Black people and other minority groups. The remedy demands redress of historic racism embedded in individuals, institutions, government budgets, and systems.
In rethinking how we can move against racism and toward new systems of all-public safety, we begin to see ways that law enforcement funds can be more effectively deployed. Spending on police dominates most city budgets, dwarfing investments in health, housing, parks and recreation, arts and culture, and civil rights. For example, New York City spends more on policing than it does on the Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development combined.
Many alternatives to policing have been quietly in place, some for a long time, providing remedies that make deep sense. For example, social service organizations are the right ones to call for many situations of mental health crisis, domestic disputes, homelessness, and vagrancy. Community groups are the right ones to address many community issues that get inflamed by a badge and gun. For example, Rayshard Brooks (and how many others?) would be alive today if the “sleeping-in-the-wrong-place” patrol had been called instead of armed police—“Mr. Brooks, you need to go home now; let’s get you there,” instead of handcuffs from an armed white officer, is clearly the better idea. This is the right kind of thinking to bring about a fairer, kinder, safer America. I worked with police for seven years in New York City, and I know that this solution is better for them too.
What role can the arts can play in this reallocation of law enforcement responsibilities? In a radically reconceived restructuring of public safety provision, the arts are not the people to call during a crime in progress. However, they can add significantly to the wider ecosystem that creates safer communities—they already do. The arts are among the many sectors that already contribute more than most people realize, and those contributions could be dialed up with funding that now goes to the law enforcement and punishment industries.
Here are some ways the arts currently contribute, even with the modest support they currently muster. These suggest direct alternative-to-police support programs, not even considering the indirect contributions that arts institutions, art works, and artists make by the very nature of their vibrancy in American life.
With more support, these current programs and others that would spring to life could make a significant contribution to the fairer, kinder, safer America being demanded out of grief and anger about racist murders and institutionally embedded racism.
Supporting the reduction in crime
High-engagement creative youth programs already deflect many young people of all races from joining gangs, developing drug addictions, and other criminal and destructive activity. Also, arts programs within the justice system, in juvenile and adult corrections, are known to have a powerfully positive impact on participants—research studies have not yet been able to affirm the widely-believed reports that good programs reduce recidivism (mostly because it is so difficult to get data on factors that influence recidivism). Also, community creative projects foster stronger intergenerational and neighborly ties; cohesive communities are safer communities.
Engaging young people in schools
Arts education, when given significant time, is proven to engage students in school, boost academic achievement, build executive function skills, increase attendance, connect families with schools, and reduce disciplinary referrals. Intensive arts education develops a range of personal and social skills that transfer directly to successful engagement in employment and engagement outside the arts. Arts programs (in school and during out-of-school time) activate student voice into constructive expression and collective successes.
Community empowerment in problem solving
Teaching artists/community artists with training are adept at designing and facilitating processes that enable community groups to creatively address the complex challenges they face. This capacity goes beyond community arts projects (which are valuable themselves) to devising experiments with community members who lead them, finding the best ways to change an unacceptable status quo.
Arts and arts education leaders can advocate confidently for the contribution the arts can make to the smarter, kinder, more effective allocation of city funding for police funding to make communities safer. Can we get a seat at the table where such discussions will take place? Without getting that seat, we can advocate in general as much as we like, but the contribution the arts can make will be lost.