A couple of nights ago, the city council in my city (Iowa City) voted against budget amendments to freeze the police budget and cancel unfilled positions in the police department. The vote took place in the broader context of the slogan ‘defund the police’ and activist movements since the summer of 2020.
I’ll say a word about all this. But, first, some recent remarks from Cedric Johnson provide us with a useful way to frame the discussion.
The Missing Majority and ‘Defund the Police’
‘Defund the police’ spiked in popularity in the summer of 2020. The police murder of George Floyd, combined with waves of protests led by black lives matter and black liberation movements, acted as the key spark.
And then, by the fall of 2020, ‘defund the police’ declined in popularity almost as quickly as it spiked. Nearly three years later, it’s still deeply unpopular with politicians. And not all that popular among the general public, apart from dedicated activist groups. It shows little signs of regaining its mid-2020 popularity.
Why?
Cedric Johnson provides a compelling narrative in a recent article in Catalyst. He says the left failed to build a majority coalition. Instead, it fell prey to wishful thinking and emergency, shortcut politics. It once again fell for the idea – first articulated by the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s – that a vanguard would come to the rescue. In this case, the supposed vanguard was black liberation activists.
But since vanguard politics don’t work, the activists failed. And ‘defund the police’ didn’t go anywhere. The BLM and black liberation movements mostly fell by the wayside. Many were co-opted by corporations grandstanding and virtue signaling about racial justice in order to sell their products. These companies promote a capitalist vision of ‘racial justice.’ Thus, the left’s failure to build a majority led to the failure and co-opting of black liberation politics. According to Johnson, anyway.
That’s a bummer. In the rest of this post, I’ll show how this played out in a recent city council budget debate in Iowa City, my own city. This case mostly supports the narrative Johnson provides, though we do find some notable exceptions.
Iowa City Police Budget
The city council of Iowa City discussed a proposal to freeze the police budget in its very long meeting on Tuesday evening. Councilor Laura Bergus made the proposal (two proposals, in fact). In the past, she expressed support for police abolition as part of a long-term vision. This time, she presented a nuanced argument for short-term budget restrictions in the interest of social impact and community safety.
Readers can watch the 8ish hour meeting here. Fast forward to the last couple of hours for the relevant material.
Did it work? No. The council voted 6-1 against her proposal to freeze the police budget and cancel unfilled officer positions. And it voted 5-2 (Bergus and Andrew Dunn in support) against the slimmed down proposal to just freeze the police budget.
Activist Engagement
Lots of local activist groups and lone wolves took up the cause and supported the Bergus proposals. Notably, most of them chose not to frame it as a ‘defund the police’ proposal. Most were careful to call it a freeze rather than a defund proposal. They recognized, at least implicitly, that ‘defund’ language lacks broad support. With the council, anyway, and likely also the broader public.
The Iowa City DSA, of which I’m a member and used to serve in a leadership role, made this issue the focus of a letter campaign. I took part, writing my own letter asking the council to transfer money from the police to social services.
About 40 assorted activists made public comments in support of freezing the police budget at the meeting. These activists ranged from lone wolves to members of various activist groups to one county public official. Aside from one opposing speaker, as well as the director of a South District business association (whose remarks were entirely uninteresting and empty of meaningful content), every speaker came out in favor of the proposal.
But it failed anyway. And by a wide margin.
On Failure…
So, why did activists fail? A few factors stand out to me. And I think they line up reasonably well with the Johnson view of the failure of ‘defund the police’ campaigns across the country.
First, the go-to activists theses – that it failed because the meeting was moved to Zoom and they weren’t able to ‘fill the room’ with people, that the city manager’s pitiful ‘copaganda’ presentation swayed a council majority, and so on – don’t stand up to critical scrutiny. I’ll say more about public comments below. But, for now, I’ll claim that jamming the public comments section of meetings rarely works as a tactic. Its success requires special conditions that were absent in this case.
Activists failed primarily because they haven’t built a majority coalition. They did a decent job presenting public comments from a range of people. In fact, they did a better job than usual. But the commenters still didn’t represent a broad enough range of city voters to be effective. They’ve still only barely expanded beyond the ‘usual’ activist base.
The city councilors showed in their discussion that they understand this. This allowed them to dismiss the speakers at the public comments session as unrepresentative of the community. Nor do I see evidence activists are taking the steps needed in order to fix the problem. And so, I’m inclined to say they will continue to fail without major changes in their strategy.
…And the New Left
This takes me back to Cedric Johnson. But with some Iowa City flavor.
Unfortunately, we still build local activism in Iowa City around various New Left era misconceptions and mistakes. We still think open-ended, directionless discussions represent an ideal democracy. We think there’s a ‘progressive’ majority out there waiting to be unlocked by One Neat Trick. And, most pertinent to this case, we think there’s some kind of demographic vanguard (a ‘black vanguard’ in this case) that will come to save us if we just allow them to lead.
No vanguard will be coming to the rescue.
What Would a ‘Defund the Police’ Victory Look Like?
I’ll end with some reflections on what a successful ‘defund the police’ campaign might look like in a place like Iowa City. In short, it would be a majority coalition. Most voters would need to accept the idea that policing doesn’t provide community safety. Rather, social services and strong social institutions provide safety.
And shortcut politics won’t get us there. We can – and should – pack the public comments section at meetings. But that kind of tactic works only after activists build a broad coalition of community members. It rests on a coalition that represents voters in city elections. It doesn’t work as a pressure tactic without a coalition that expands beyond activist circles, except for in rare, emergency situations that last only a brief time (e.g., summer 2020).
The left needs to build those institutions. And we need to build them on the basis of a cross-racial, working-class, community coalition. Not on the basis of a vanguard. Our only effective vehicle is a broad coalition that comes together, gets involved in community safety, and feels safer without the police.
That coalition is worth a million assertions of revolutionary slogans like ‘defund the police’ or ‘abolition.’
