DEFUNDING VIOLENCE ORDINANCE
From CELDF.org: a Guide for Towns, Cities, Counties to Defund Violence
CNN.com NewYorker.com
CELDF.org has been helping communities pass ordinances for over a decade to help protect the residents from Environmental dangers and other Ruling Class abuses. They came up with the following suggestions during the BLM protests. The following came from them.
DEFUNDING VIOLENCE ORDINANCE
X=INFO, A=GREY, G=GREEN, Y=YELLOW, R=RED, B=BLUE
_X. USER GUIDE
This “model ordinance” offers municipal policy changes designed to implement police abolition, informed by #8toAbolition and the Movement for Black Lives Policy Platform1 and numerous abolitionist organizers who contributed to this work. This is a starting point for legal language, offered to support but by no means to replace or detract from organizing, protest, and people power. Laws have power only to the extent that they can cement the progress a movement has made.
_1 Available at https://www.8toabolition.com/ and https://m4bl.org/policy-platforms/.
Further, we offer this model ordinance not as an introduction or overview of police abolition theory but instead as a tool to support abolitionist organizing. We encourage everyone who hasn’t yet done so to explore police and prison abolition theory in depth. Many generations of Black organizers have dedicated their lives to building this movement and sharing their insights; as with any effort towards collective liberation in a white supremacist society we should be centering and supporting the leadership of affected community.2
_2 This means reading or listening and donating to abolitionist organizers, especially those from BIPOC, queer, disabled, immigrant, and poor communities who best understand the experiences and struggles of resisting the police state. For one (of many) excellent resources to learn more about abolition, the Abolition Collective has compiled an array of resources into a study guide, available at https://abolitionjournal.org/studyguide/.
Other organizations to explore, and give money to if you can, are Critical Resistance, Survived and Punished, Black and Pink, and others.
Finally, this is a nuanced policy area and this template “ordinance,” as it is presented, must be customized for the needs and context of your community. Police abolition will not happen through one ordinance; law enforcement has cemented its power into the foundation of our society through federal, state, and local laws, as well as police union contracts and municipal budget and planning documents. Sometimes a city charter requires a police department. You should not submit this document in its entirety to your governing body, but instead borrow from it and adapt it to the strategic needs of your campaign. This document is not intended as legal advice and should not be taken as legal advice.
Note: where you see [things in brackets], you must adjust the bracketed language by making choices that make the most logical sense given your location and campaign strategy. You should delete the footnotes before submitting, although you might want to keep a footnoted copy to reference the sources as part of your narrative and advocacy. You won’t want to use every single provision in here - some are contradictory or redundant. We have color coded the provisions to help you decide which ones you might want to include:
_G. - Green Sections are generally smaller, more gradual changes.
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_Y. - Yellow Sections are generally moderately significant changes.
_R. - Red sections are generally big changes.
_A. You can always advocate for a red (or yellow) provision, and offer a yellow (or green) provision as a compromise when you negotiate with power-holders. Your ordinance might include green, yellow, and red provisions all together. Keep in mind that you should pick what to include based on what you want to accomplish, not on color; for example including all the green sections without thinking critically about each one will create a self-contradicting ordinance and some protections/prohibitions might not in fact be relevant for your municipality.
_B. - Blue sections should appear in your Ordinance no matter what (but you can still make edits if you see ways to improve the template language).
_A. - Gray sections are Authors’ Notes from us to give you more context and justification for what each section/provision does. Delete these, along with any footnotes, from the final copy before you go public with it.
_X. While some of these changes are more incremental, we have carefully and intentionally avoided including any “reformist reforms” (sometimes called “recuperative reforms”) in this Ordinance. We are only providing what we believe to be abolitionist reforms - changes that ultimately bring power back to the people rather than changes that ultimately stabilize the oppressive system. That distinction is important. Abolitionist reforms move us toward a world with less violence, particularly less violence at the hands of the state. In contrast, reformist/recuperative reforms recover the public legitimacy of violent state institutions and/or expand the power and scope of policing and prisons.3 Governments frequently propose reformist reforms in response to public unrest so as to depower the movement. The line between an abolitionist and recuperative reform is not always easy to draw. If you think we drew it wrong, please do let us know!
_3 A fantastic visual explanation with examples from Critical Resistance about reformist and non-reformist
reforms that we highly recommend everyone reads:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f17f/t/5b65cd58758d46d34254f22c/15333
https://criticalresistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/CR_NoCops_reform_vs_abolition_REV2020.pdf
_A. *********Delete the above user guide before submitting this too!*********
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_B. A DEFUNDING VIOLENCE [, REFUNDING COMMUNITY] ORDINANCE
A Rights-Based Ordinance Revoking our Consent to Be Subjected to Racially and Socio-Economically Motivated Punishment as a False Solution to the Root Causes of Societal Harms[ and a Knowing Misuse of Resources].
_A. Authors’ Note: Ordinance title options for consideration, or create your own:
● Defunding Violence Ordinance
● Democracy without Violence Ordinance
● A Defunding Violence and Reclaiming Community Ordinance
● Freedom and Safety by Defunding Violence Ordinance
● Harm Reduction Ordinance
When deciding what to call your ordinance and when discussing it with others, remember that getting rid of police is, all by itself, a solution to systemic racism and violence. Refunding can be a persuasive talking point and a supplemental solution, but the first and foremost point of defunding is that less police equals safer communities, beyond just the remarkable benefits of freeing up resources to devote to public resources and services.
_B. PREAMBLE
_A. Authors’ Note: The preamble describes why you are passing this ordinance and what is wrong with the institution of police that should motivate your community to change how it tries to create public safety. This template preamble denounces “false solutions” and reformist reforms to police brutality (e.g. #8cantwait) to avoid the ordinance getting co-opted into something that stabilizes, rather than guards against, an oppressive status quo. We offer suggested language here to pre-emptively answer questions about and challenges to the Ordinance, and perhaps give organizers some talking points. However, you are the experts of your own community and experience! Adding statistics or anecdotes specific to your location will strengthen the preamble. Don’t hesitate to edit our suggestions more substantively for messaging that will work better in your community. None of the preamble is legally binding language when the law is enacted, but it is important framing to orient people to the need for and goals of the Ordinance.
_B. Creation & Evolution of Police4: Policing and incarceration have not always existed. City and town governments created the first police forces to prevent Black people from fleeing enslavement.
_4 consortiumnews.com/2020/06/23/uprising-police-violence-racism-have-always-enforced-injustice/
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After slavery was purportedly abolished with the Thirteen Amendment, but actually legalized “as a punishment for crime,5” policing evolved to protect and maintain racial capitalism, controlling people’s movement and protecting societal divisions of property, labor, and resources. Local governments directed police forces to uphold racism and expand social control in steadily more insidious ways, such as forcing Black people to work for white employers, selectively criminalizing Black behavior to recreate slave labor through imprisonment, enforcing Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws, attacking union organizers, suppressing protests in the Civil Rights era and beyond, employing television and film media to propagandize the purported necessity of police, and selectively targeting and upholding laws that punish people for poverty and other vestiges of overt racism.
_5 U.S. Const. Amen. XIII.
_A. [Optional state-specific facts, i.e. that Pennsylvania developed the first state police in 1905 to suppress workers seeking to unionize].
_B. Police were created and have further evolved to serve their fundamental purpose: helping the affluent few accrue and protect hoards of resources and wealth. State-sanctioned police violence disproportionately targets Black, indigenous, and other people of color and disabled, poor, and queer people in order to maintain the wealthy elite’s ability to exploit humans and the environment for profit. Police violence also prevents this hoarded wealth from being redistributed more equitably. Police prevent people from defending themselves against physical infrastructure that leeches resources from and/or injects toxins into their community, further cementing the genocidal origins and colonial legacy of property ownership.
Police Brutality is Intentional and Systemic: Police are brutal. Not because the profession draws an occasional violent recruit, but because the profession allows, encourages and in fact demands its officers to be violent and then immunizes them from legal and social repercussions. Police academies program trainees to see violence as a legitimate defense to imagined threats and discuss de-escalation only performatively: recruits spend, on average, 110 hours on defense tactics and firearms training and only eight hours each on crisis intervention and de-escalation.6 Academies condition recruits to perceive Blackness, neuro-divergent behavior, disability, and poverty as safety threats to which brutality is a necessary response. Less than half of police
murders stem from police responding to a “violent” crime.7 Murders aside, police perpetrate an unknowable magnitude of widely accepted nonlethal violence by detaining people without cause, arresting people who are innocent, and assaulting people who pose no threat - all in the name of protecting and serving. Laws give police broad discretion, inviting officers to heed the interpersonal racism that their training drills into them. Beyond causing direct harm through the use and threat of violence, policing’s purpose to maintain law and order in a system built on exploitation allows the everyday violence inherent to our existence in an oppression-dependent society to continue. All policing is police brutality.
_6 https://www.vox.com/2016/7/7/12118906/police-training-mediation
_7 2017 Police Violence Report, https://policeviolencereport.org/
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_B. Police Disproportionately Arrest, Brutalize, and/or Murder Black and Indigenous People: Nationwide, Black people are 3 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.8 Black US Americans are imprisoned at five times the rate of white US Americans.9 Studies across the country show that Black drivers are significantly more likely to be stopped by police and up to 200% more likely, once stopped, to have their vehicles and persons searched by police despite Black drivers being statistically less likely to have contraband items.10
_A. [perhaps include a state specific statistic, e.g.: In Vermont, where 1% of the population is Black, 9% of people incarcerated are Black. This staggeringly disproportionate representation begins with police racially profiling and harassing Black people and continues with racism in courts and jury pools].
_B. Indigenous people are the most likely of any racial or ethnic group to be murdered by a police officer.11
_8 You can look up your state here if you’d like more specific data: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/states
_9 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52877678
_11 https://www.nationofchange.org/2016/10/30/remember-talk-standing-rock/
Police Disproportionately Endanger Women, LGBTQ+ People, and People with Disabilities: Any available statistics for sexual abuse by police officers are “practically nonexistent” due to a multitude of factors including wide-spread lack of accountability, oversight, or consequences for police misconduct as well as the inherent power dynamics between police and civilians that discourage reporting and encourage cover-ups.12 As a drastic underestimate, the Associated Press identified over 1,000 police officers who lost their badge in a six year period due to sexual misconduct, which number fails to account for unreported or uninvestigated incidents and includes zero incidents from New York or California, where no state decertification process for sexual misconduct exists.13 About half of these victims are children and almost all are either LGBTQ+ or straight, cisgender females.14 Physical force, trained aggression, years of unprocessed trauma, and immunization from consequences cause police to commit gender-based and domestic violence off duty as well; over 40% of police officers nationwide anonymously admitted to abusing family members, a statistic replicated by other studies.15 Transgender and gender non-conforming people, particularly those who are Black and/or otherwise multiply marginalized, experience egregiously inflated rates of police harassment, violence, assault and subsequently increased frequencies and lengths of incarceration.16 Approximately half of all US police murder victims are people who are mentally, physically, psychiatrically, cognitively, developmentally or otherwise disabled, D/deaf, neurodiverse, or chronically ill.17
_12 https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/19/us/police-sexual-assaults-maryland-scope/index.html
_13 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/01/police-sexual-assault-investigation.
_14 https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/19/us/police-sexual-assaults-maryland-scope/index.html
_15 https://money.yahoo.com/data-suggests-40-percent-cops-145601125.html
_16 https://www.thetaskforce.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/ntds_full.pdf Police and Incarceration chapter
_17 rudermanfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/MediaStudy-PoliceDisability_final-final.pdf
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_B. With emphasis on the acutely violent danger that police present to Black people, police brutality against people of any race, ability, gender and gender expression is widespread, egregious, and unacceptable.18
Police Fill Prisons, Which Destabilizes Families and Communities: Police are harmful not only for their historic and ongoing role in protecting the ruling class’s rights to exploit and exclude everyone else and not only for the immediate bodily danger they pose to everyone, especially to people from marginalized communities and with criminalized identities. As a gateway into the prison industrial complex, police initiate a process that strips people of their humanity, damaging us physically and mentally. Carceral punishment in all forms is torture. Corporations embedded in this “solution” to violence profit from making us afraid of each other, costing taxpayers over 180 billion dollars a year and pressuring police to find or create “criminals” to justify maintaining this expensive institution.19
_19 https://eji.org/news/mass-incarceration-costs-182-billion-annually/
Police and Prisons do not Decrease Crime, but instead Divert Funding from Programs that Do: Increasing police funding and presence in an area does not decrease crime in that community.20 Cities and towns with lower crime rates do share a common theme: well-funded public services. The way to decrease harmful activity in our community is to provide more resources that address the root problems of inequality such as structural racism, poverty, and environmental degradation - not to invade communities with hired guns whose job is to threaten and enact violence.
Police Perform Social Services to Assert Their Usefulness: After governments cut social services to pay for an ever-expanding, ever-militarizing police force, police are then asked to perform these social services. Police are not trained to address harm, only to punish. Nevertheless police are sent to de-escalate, to outreach to vulnerable communities, to supervise highway repair, to mentor children, to do any number of performative chores where a license to kill is wholly unnecessary. Serving the community as unskilled, over-paid, violently-unstable social workers allows police to legitimize themselves, to claim they are needed to perform these crucial public services, and to build trust with a community they otherwise threaten despite the fact that their existence comes at the expense of the very social services they now attempt to perform.
“Community Oriented Policing” Is a Dangerous False Solution:21 Community policing, which includes tactics like “broken windows policing,” is a relatively new concept developed to promote the misleading idea that police are not harmful if they can build relationships with community members.22 Community Oriented policing focuses on improving officers’ reputation in the community without doing anything to mitigate the actual harm these officers perpetrate on the people in that community.
_21 www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/community-policing-exists-dangerous-200810154949045.html
_22 See, e.g., the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which established community policing federally and created the Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Services office.
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_B. Statistically, community policing improves only the communities’ perception of police and the job satisfaction of the officers but has no impact on crime rates or public safety.23 Federal grants from the Community Oriented Policing Services office come with strings attached requiring further militarization of local police forces and collaboration between local and state police and federal immigration authorities. Broken windows policing involves targeting low-level infractions for aggressive enforcement, prioritizing arrests for visible crimes to create the appearance of “order” and “cleanliness” in a community. This tactic benefits property owners and businesses at the expense of the individual people, usually poor and often Black, who are now arrested, fined, and harassed constantly for minor infractions and symptoms of poverty. “Community Policing” does not create a symbiotic bond between people and police but rather enables law enforcement to solidify their surveillance and control over people’s everyday lives.24
_23 “Community Oriented Policing: What it Is - Why it Works - How to Get Started,” National Criminal Justice
Reference Service, 1997 www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/169113NCJRS.pdf
_24 Alex Vitale, The End of Policing, 2017.
Therefore, we the people of [Municipality], as the source of governing authority for [Municipality], assert our inherent and inalienable right of local community self-government for the protection and expansion of our Fourteenth Amendment Rights to live free from institutions that prejudice our Black and brown residents, our working-class and poor residents, our disabled residents, and our LGBTQIA+ residents. The police are just such an institution, and are detrimental to real public safety. We hereby limit the violence of policing in [Municipality] through the assertion of the following rights, in the following ways:
SECTION 1: INHERENT RIGHTS THAT POLICE IMPEDE
_A. Authors’ Note: This section lists the legal grounds that justify the binding provisions of the Ordinance. These rights are preliminary support for the argument that the Ordinance is valid and that your municipal officials must all abide by it. You should consider including all of these statements. Part of the reason for basing the Ordinance in rights, not just your local government’s power to protect health, safety, and welfare, is that state and federal governments can use their lawmaking power to make laws that contradict the laws of local governments, and courts generally say that the federal or state law trumps local law. Asserting local rights presents an additional defense against state ceiling preemption. Unlike the enforcement provisions in this template, none of the provisions in this section are contradictory. These rights belong to every person by virtue only of their existence. Police as individuals and an institution violate many or most of these rights especially those belonging to people who are Black, indigenous, brown, poor, immigrant, transgender, gender-nonconforming, disabled, women and intersections of these identities.
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_B. (a) Right to be free from State-funded Violence and Exploitation: All people in the jurisdiction of [Municipality] have an inherent, fundamental and unalienable right to be free from known threats to bodily and mental safety and integrity and mental, physical, emotional, and social well-being; including at a bare minimum a right to prevent their governments from creating, supporting, and legalizing statistically-proven threats to this safety and well-being. This includes a right to not have anyone’s safety and integrity jeopardized to create and protect wealth for another group.
(b) Right to be free from Discrimination: All people in the jurisdiction of [Municipality] have an inherent, fundamental and unalienable right to be free from discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived race, ethnicity, color, sex, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, class, spoken language, education, mental or physical ability, neurodiversity, religion, age, pregnancy, addiction and other illnesses, medical or psychiatric diagnosis, and immigration, family, military, or marital status. People have a right to a government free from systemic oppression with disproportionate impacts on marginalized groups and identities, hidden by identity-neutral laws and policies.
(c) Right to Effective Problem Solving & Community Services: All people in the jurisdiction of [Municipality] have an inherent, fundamental and unalienable right to have their government offer solutions that are designed to reduce and mitigate harms, rather than designed to make profits for business associations while creating the false impression of efficacy, and a right to alter or abolish solutions currently in place that do more harm than good.
(d) Right to Local Community Self-Government: The people of [Municipality] possess an inherent, fundamental and unalienable right to local self government both as individuals and as a collective. This right guarantees every community a system of government that is accountable to the people, that protects and secures their well-being, that puts human and environmental interests above property and profit interests, that can expand but not erode other fundamental rights of natural persons, and that neither state nor federal law can preempt because this right is rooted in the health, safety, and welfare protections that are governments’ fundamental purpose.
(e) Right to Survive: All people in the jurisdiction of [Municipality] have an inherent and inalienable right to survive: to live and perform life-sustaining and nurturing activities and to exist as part of a community without fear of being shot or otherwise have their life threatened or taken by a government official. These protected survival activities include, but are not limited to: sleeping, walking, jogging, playing with toy guns, standing outside apartments and stores, shopping (including leaving a store without making a purchase), asking for help, driving a car, selling art, visiting family, relaxing, gathering in protest or celebration, and all other activities necessary for meaningful life and pursuit of happiness.25
_25 www.cnn.com/2020/06/16/us/black-lives-matter-police-violence-what-people-were-doing-trnd/index.html
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(f) Right to Free Movement: All people in the jurisdiction of [Municipality] have an inherent and inalienable right to move from one place to another, to travel freely between states and municipalities within this country without discrimination or profiling. Every person regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, physical and mental ability, nationality, citizenship status, domicile, or country, state, city, or neighborhood of origin, has a right to experience and enjoy any other part of this country, without fear of being followed, harassed, threatened, or attacked by government officials for looking “out of place.”
(g) Rights are Self-Executing: All rights secured by this law are self-executing, and further implementing legislation shall not be required for [Municipality] or any one or group of its residents to enforce the rights and prohibitions recognized by this law.
SECTION 2: ENFORCEMENT
_A. Authors’ Note: This section has numerous subsections, each with provisions limiting the role, funding, conduct, authority, and other aspects of police. You will need a thorough understanding of the police who operate in your area in order to choose the provisions that are relevant and that will be effective in meeting your goals. Some questions to ask yourself, while you think through these options, are: does your municipality have its own police force? Do you contract with other municipalities or the state police force and what services does that contract include? (Emergency response, patrols, dispatchers?) Do the schools in your town have Resource Officers, and from what police department? Is your community likely to support radical, broad transformation or do you need to start with incremental defunding, so you can bring more people on board and initiate positive feedback loops that allow for larger, systemic transformation down the line? What kinds of things do police usually do while on duty? How much interpersonal violence do you see in your community? Why do people call 911? Make sure your group centers the perspectives of people most affected by police violence, and when asking BIPOC, queer, disabled, poor, immigrant, or other community members to give advice make sure you listen to how they want a problem solved, not just what they identify as a problem, and find ways to appreciate and compensate their intellectual and emotional labor.
_R. Subsection 2.1 Duties of Police Officers
(a) Police Activity by Invitation Only: The [Municipality] Police Department’s exclusive purpose is to respond to civilian requests for assistance. It shall be unlawful for the police to engage in any activity in their official capacity except for responding to 911 calls [or other explicit verbal or written requests for law enforcement assistance].
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_R. When calling 911, the person requesting assistance may state that the situation is non-violent and ask officers to remove their firearms [or all weapons] before responding, and the responding officers must abide by this request.
_A. Authors’ Note: The first alternative in brackets would allow people to verbally or in writing request police assistance in addition to requesting police by calling 911, for example by coming into a precinct or sending a letter or an email to ask for police assistance. This provision of the Ordinance also allows a caller to specify that police should not come armed. Think about situations where police are asked to find a lost kid or dog, to assist in traffic control when a car breaks down, etc. You don’t want jumpy gunmen entering an already stressful but completely nonviolent situation. Compile research ahead of time before proposing that police no longer perform any social services so that you can share alternative non-police response systems, such as CAHOOTS [[ https://whitebirdclinic.org/cahoots/ ]]. Find data to dispel the myth that police showing up unarmed are putting themselves in danger.
_Y. (a) Police Activity Prohibited in the Following Areas: The following police activity is unlawful except when actively responding to a 911 or other emergency request for assistance: [patrolling neighborhoods, businesses, parks, trails, and other recreation spaces; hosting or attending community events including youth summer camps, outreach or training programs; patrolling or holding office in schools; performing or accompanying health workers on wellness checks including visits to houseless communities; and conducting investigations of alleged crimes]. [Municipality] Police Department must [end or decline to renew] any and all contracts that arrange for police presence in schools, colleges, universities, parks, public transit, and public housing. [Municipality] Police Department must immediately close [all or any] special units[, including those] targeting protestors, sex workers, or “gang members,” or otherwise charged with community surveillance. [Municipality] Police Department must stop all collaboration with federal immigration authorities, Joint Terrorism Taskforces, and other surveillance structures.
_A. Authors’ Note: This is an alternate provision to 2.1(a) above, and is slightly reduced in scope. Rather than a prohibition on all policing activities except 911 response, this provision offers a list of prohibited police activities but allows everything else. You should choose only one of these options. If you begin by proposing the first of these provisions, this second option may be offered as a compromise to the first. You can shorten/adjust this specific list of prohibited police activity if you find yourself unable to gain support for all of the prohibitions, or your group would rather not terminate all of the contracts or departments we list. For example, getting your municipality to force the local SVU unit to cease operations might be a tough sell, and might be a tense or triggering conversation for your community group especially if you all are new to this and new to working with each other. Adjust this to fit your needs. Expand the list if you can!
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