Something shifted in the weeks following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, or at least it felt that way. Calls to defund the police rang out in protests across the country and through the halls of city government. The Minneapolis City Council, in a widely covered June rally, announced a veto-proof majority in support of dismantling its deadly police force. In New York City, local officials were confronted by a protest encampment at City Hall that grew by the hour, coalescing around a single demand: to cut the city’s $6 billion police budget. National media outlets, including this one, dedicated unprecedented page space and airtime to ideas of abolition and life after the police.
But less than six months later, as a summer of upheaval and potential came to a close, many of the early pledges made by sympathetic—or at least politically shrewd—elected officials in Democratic cities have collapsed. The Minneapolis City Council, facing pushback from its bureaucratic charter commission, decided it would not be disbanding its police force after all; and onetime cuts made in cities from Portland to New York have been exposed as performative budgetary sleights of hand. That was particularly true in Los Angeles, where the city council voted in July to cut just $150 million from the police department’s $1.8 billion budget, around the same time as officers received a 4.8 percent raise and new bonuses that will amount to $41 million by the end of the fiscal year.
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