Suggestions of defunding the police have sparked uproar but it’s a sensible and noble goal, argue two crime researchers.

When we both first saw the “attack” ads put up by some combination of the Sensible Sentencing Trust and the Campaign Company, we couldn’t fully grasp the framing of an “attack” in the context of posters that promote transformative social policy. Sure, it isn’t representative of Green Party policy – only Te Pāti Māori has an eye towards prison abolition in its policy books – so it is certainly a misrepresentation. But attack?

Even though the ads were certainly designed as such, our first instinct was: sounds like a nice change from the defunding of social services, disability benefits, schools, universities, food for kids, Jobseeker payments, research, grants for first-home buyers, healthcare, public transportation and climate change initiatives.

The ads were a response to Green MP Tamatha Paul’s rather mild implication that people do not have the same experiences with the police. The hostility in response seems vastly disproportionate, particularly, as Paul pointed out, it is National that is seeking to defund parts of the police – though crucially not in favour of funding community or public services.

We must reconsider and question our unique allegiance to the police as our only form of safety and justice, particularly when such sentiment is coupled with rapid material defunding of our public services and a global rise of authoritarian politics inclined towards the criminalisation of poverty. We are living, without a doubt, in a precarious and insecure world: climate and geopolitical crises, pandemics, man-made humanitarian disasters, rising rents and tax breaks for landlords, right-wing populism and its trade implications, lack of job opportunities and rising food prices (to name a few).

Not feeling safe and secure is a fair response to these conditions. But it is not, nor will it ever be, the police that fight for our collective safety in the face of these fear- and dread-inducing contexts. We must understand the policy choices and narratives that have gotten us to where we are today and work, always, towards a world where we may be safe together. We must ask why the implication that police may not keep everyone safe produces such vitriol and backlash from those in power, when the decimation of public services that do keep us safe does not garner such a response.

We need to ask why cuts to social services come alongside plans to spend hundreds of millions on building a “megaprison” and further inflating and expanding the carceral state. We must also consider who experiences the most active criminalisation, who is most at risk of police interaction, and who is experiencing the most material danger, insecurity, and state violence.

The New Zealand Police use the slogan “safer communities together.” This slogan conjures up an idea of collective and caring communities who look out for each other and places the police at the centre of such a vision. The only problem is the police have not always made our communities safer. In the US context, often front-of-mind with calls to defund police, modern policing originated from slave patrols. In Aotearoa, the whakapapa of our police today is grounded in a long and violent colonial history. As criminologist Emmy Rākete wrote in 2020, “the land wars never ended, we just started calling them the war on crime.” 

In their day-to-day operations (alongside every other part of the justice system), police ensure that Māori make up 52% of people in prisons, despite being 15% of the overall population. The police force is both built on and perpetuates structural racism: Māori are more likely to be stopped and searched without warrant, Māori and Pasifika are more likely to have force used against them in police interactions, and rangatahi Māori are illegally surveilled. Further, police do not prevent crime or harm–at best, they respond to it, and at worst, they contribute to it.

A recent report by Aotearoa Justice Watch speaks to multiple instances of harm and human rights violations at the hands of those operating within the criminal punishment system. Additionally, despite reports outlining how police may improve their response to intimate violence, Aotearoa still has a discouraging track record with the prevention of and response to sexual violence and intimate partner violence.

In this time of constant climate, political and humanitarian crises on local, national and global levels, we must put our money where there are mouths to feed. We have people needing urgent medical care and nurses and doctors needing urgent resourcing; we have people without houses, without a warm or safe place to live; people struggling to buy basic life necessities. Defunding the police is a reasonable, not radical, position, particularly in this moment. Defunding the police in favour of social and community investment is a thoughtful, actionable response to our present conditions.

Calls to defund the police are calls to reorganise society in a way that ensures that people have what they need to survive and flourish. Building society in this way often prevents people from coming into contact with the police or wider criminal punishment system in the first place. To be “tough on crime”, in reality, would be to be tough on the root causes of most criminalised behaviour: poverty, lack of warm and dry housing, intergenerational and psychic trauma, structural racism and sexism, an ever-rising cost of living. Instead of being tough on these roots of crime and looking towards prevention, not punishment, the government has put into practice a slash and burn attitude towards programmes that are vital to community wellbeing.

Such cuts speak to a broad disregard for people that they are supposedly responsible to. Yet in the name of cost efficiency, the defunding spree of key services continues, and we are left with the narrative that only with police will our communities be safe. We can reject this. We can prioritise and fund projects, services and community-based initiatives that minimise harm and make communities safer. Through the funding, creation and strengthening of such programmes within communities, we ensure that those around us are cared for materially, emotionally and spiritually. We can keep each other safe and, if we do so, we can make police obsolete,  no matter how “insane” the Act Party thinks that is.