Was "Defund the Police" Crazy? A Defense of the Movement's Underlying Logic
Source: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. "Was “Defund the Police” Crazy? | The New Yorker." September 1, 2026. www.newyorker.com
The Gist
The author argues that 'defund the police' wasn't a crazy or fringe idea—it grew naturally out of years of failed attempts to reform policing, and polls show many of its underlying goals (more social spending, less reliance on police to solve social problems) are still popular. She says politicians are abandoning the slogan for political reasons, not because the public actually rejected the ideas behind it.
Conclusion
The 'defund the police' movement was not an irrational or fringe 'woke' excess, but a reasonable, evidence-based response to decades of failed police reform efforts, and its core policy goals remain broadly popular even as political leaders retreat from the slogan for strategic reasons.
Premises
- The demand to defund police emerged only after decades of grassroots reform efforts (death penalty moratoriums, anti-mass-incarceration activism, DOJ oversight agreements, Obama's Task Force on 21st Century Policing) failed to reduce police violence or meaningfully change policing institutions.
- Despite historic drops in overall crime rates, the number of people killed by police has continued to remain high or grow, indicating that incremental reform approaches did not solve the underlying problem the defund movement sought to address.
- A large majority of Americans (nearly 70% in a 2025 Gallup poll) now believe that directing more resources to social and economic programs, rather than law enforcement, is the better approach to reducing crime—validating one core premise of the defund argument.
- Polling shows continued strong majority support for redistributive social policies closely associated with the defund movement's broader vision (universal health coverage, aid to the poor, higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy).
- A more careful reading of 2020 polling data shows nuance rather than rejection: while the specific phrase 'defund the police' polled unevenly, majorities—especially among Black Americans—supported transferring police funds to social services and enacting major changes to policing (e.g., ending stop-and-frisk).
- The continued electoral success of DSA-aligned and left-wing candidates (e.g., Angie Nixon's primary win) demonstrates ongoing public appetite for the redistributive politics associated with the defund movement, contradicting the narrative that it was a politically toxic aberration.
- Political leaders who now disavow 'defund the police' (e.g., AOC, Mamdani) are doing so for strategic/electoral reasons amid contentious midterms, not because the underlying diagnosis of policing's failures was mistaken.
Assumptions
- Public support for general redistributive and social-welfare policies can be used as evidence that the specific, more radical 'defund the police' framing was also reasonable or justified.
- The persistence of police killings despite reform efforts proves that reform-based approaches are inherently insufficient, rather than merely poorly funded, poorly enforced, or poorly implemented.
- Political leaders' retreat from the 'defund' slogan reflects electoral calculation rather than a genuine reassessment that the policy itself was flawed or unpopular.
- The 2020 polling on 'defund the police' is best interpreted as reflecting curiosity or nuanced support rather than genuine majority opposition to the specific policy of cutting police budgets.
- Historical continuity between earlier criminal-justice reform movements and 2020's defund movement establishes that defund was a natural, non-radical extension of prior reform efforts.