Black and blue: deconstructing Defund the Police

ABSTRACT

The demand to address police racism by ‘defunding the police’ echoed on- and offline in the summer of 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd, but it has not always been clear what defunding the police entails. Through an analysis of 300 stories posted on CBC News and CTV News websites in 2020–2021, this study addresses the construction of the Defund the Police campaign in Canadian news media. Black Lives Matter organized their Defund the Police campaign as a demand for: (1) alternatives to police services; (2) decriminalization; and (3) disarmament, demilitarization and technology. Yet, news media prioritized calls for alternatives to police services, while providing less attention to disarmament, demilitarization and technology demands, and largely excluding decriminalization from defunding conversations altogether. The news media constructed the Defund the Police campaign around three fluid interpretations: defunding as a call to remove and abolish police, as a call for budgetary reallocation and alternatives to police, and as a call for police reform and accountability. Support for a reallocation and alternatives interpretation of defunding was most prominent within the news media, suggesting that police budget cuts in favour of community supports will be the focus of defunding policy in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Defund
• police
• racism
• claimsmaking
• Black Lives Matter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. As of 2019, 33.5 people per 10 million residents are killed by the police in the United States; this is compared to a rate of 9.8 in Canada.

2. Studies on normative police legitimacy analyze institutional efficiency, accountability, or other sizable requirements, to determine if certain standards (e.g., justice and rationality) are being met. Studies on empirical police legitimacy may explore public feelings about the obligation to obey officers, the alignment of moral values amongst the public and the police, or whether or not the public believes police are acting in accordance with the rule of law (Hough, Jackson, and Bradford 2013).

3. The results may be replicated through the following links: 1) site:https://www.cbc.ca/news/* defund* AND police and 2) site:https://www.ctvnews.ca/* defund* AND police.

4. The Defund the Police campaign advocates for substantive policy change around policing, which may cater more to left-wing audiences who are generally more open to societal shifts than more traditionalist right-wing audiences. Thus, the variance in news coverage between outlets may be attributed to CBC News’ left-wing bias and CTV News’ right-wing bias (Ipsos 2010).

5. One researcher was responsible for data coding and thematic analysis, thereby avoiding concerns about inter-rater reliability. To reduce subjectivity and ensure confidence in the data analysis, the researcher created a codebook with descriptions and examples of each thematic code (see Appendix A in Hunter 2022). To remain reflexive while analyzing news stories concerning police violence, the researcher recorded memos in NVivo 12 to document all strong personal emotional responses.

6. For this study, civilians are considered any person who does not fall under one of the other source categories. For example, quotes citing students, although they may be linked to an institution, were considered civilians and not academics.

7. Data does not capture all claimsmaking that supports or criticizes the three Defund the Police interpretation categories. Supportive and critical remove and abolish claimsmaking reflects supportive and critical abolishment claimsmaking within data. Supportive and critical reallocation and alternatives claimsmaking reflects supportive and critical claimsmaking about the alternatives to police services objective. Support for reform and accountability reflects critical claimsmaking about the disarmament, demilitarization and technology objective; criticisms of reform and accountability reflect supportive claimsmaking about the disarmament, demilitarization and technology objective (see Table 1).

  

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kaitlyn Hunter

Kaitlyn Hunter received her M.A. from the University of Guelph in 2022 and is currently completing her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of Waterloo. She is interested in researching issues at the intersections of race and policing.

Sulaimon Giwa

Sulaimon Giwa is an Associate Professor and Interim Dean at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador’s School of Social Work, with a cross-appointment in the Department of Sociology (Police Studies). He was the St. Thomas University Endowed Chair in Criminology and Criminal Justice in 2022. His research interests include critical race and anti-Black racism, critical-realist criminology, and LGBTQ+ people and the criminal justice system. In 2023, his co-authored book Transforming Community Policing: Mobilization, Engagement, and Collaboration was published in its second edition.

Ryan Broll

Ryan Broll is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph. His areas of research interest include bullying and cyberbullying, policing, victimization, and resilience.