Surely all good feminists should support defunding the police. It has been two years since a serving officer abducted, raped, and murdered 33-year-old Sarah Everard in South London, and it seems there aren’t just one or two “bad apples”. Multiple serving officers are either sexual or domestic abuse offenders. No wonder so many women want to give up on the police completely.
If only it were that simple.
“Defund the police” has been the rallying cry of the progressive Left ever since the death of George Floyd in 2020, and has expanded into a policy about much more than race. Obviously the point many feminists make is that since many male officers are sexual and domestic abuse offenders themselves, women shouldn’t trust them. Another is that a large proportion of 999 calls relate to mental health crises — so why are they referred to law enforcement? Meanwhile, making arrests for minor and non-violent crimes — such as burglary, graffiti and low-level acts of criminal damage and public nuisance — locks citizens into a cycle of criminal justice involvement.
Hard leftists in the UK have a tendency to go further: abolish the police service entirely, is their demand, with one activist arguing recently that, “History makes clear that the police do not exist to protect any of us. They exist to have power over us, and like perpetrators, they will use that power indiscriminately to keep us in our place.” The logical conclusion to this argument would be to also abolish all state agencies – including mental health facilities, child protection, and the government itself. It would be an unmitigated disaster. It’s a nonsense, to argue, as they do, that all crime could be dealt with at a “community level” with solutions such as restorative justice.
I emphatically resist these calls. That’s not to say I support the service in its current form. Where I grew up in Darlington, the police were the enemy and rarely protected working-class, downtrodden communities from violence. I saw how the police were complicit in male violence, refusing to admonish perpetrators they related to, man to man. More recently, I’ve been horrified by Baroness Casey’s interim report, which showed that out of nearly 9,000 Metropolitan police officers and staff accused of misconduct since 2013, only 5% were dismissed from the force. Around 1,800 were accused of multiple crimes; less than 1% were sacked as a result. One officer faced 19 allegations, and another was accused of 11 counts of assault, sexual harassment, sending naked images, fraud and leaking information.
Women have every reason to distrust the police. But the defund the police argument that resources should be reallocated to mental health, homelessness and rehabilitation services makes sense only up to a point. Men do not sexually assault, rape, harass or beat up their female partners because they are homeless, drunk or mentally ill. They do it because they can. Sober, wealthy, landowning men also rape and attack women. In 2021, the chief constable of Merseyside told a reporter that, if he were given £5 billion to cut crime, he would invest only £1 billion in policing, and the rest would go to tackle poverty. But what about those middle-class, affluent, socially respectable men who commit acts of violence against women and children? If we defund the police, who arrests these men?
We know that most violence against women is carried out in the home. More than 100 women are killed every year by former or current male partners, almost always following a pattern of escalating violence and harassment. Reducing police budgets would reduce the capacity for police to respond to domestic violence call-outs and to subsequently implement enforcement measures. Nor can we be sure that funds will be redirected appropriately. In the UK, the majority of police funding comes directly from central government; would you trust our government to make sure those resources are directed to, say, mental health services?
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