Despite countless cries in the streets and public comments during City Council meetings last summer calling to defund the police, Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall’s proposed budget for fiscal 2021-22 proposes a 5% increase to their department. In Mendenhall’s video introducing the proposed budget, she claims that “it’s time to blaze a new trail.” City council members have also echoed the commitment to examining city and police operations with a racial equity lens.
Unfortunately, words and the formation of commissions do not cover up actions. By continuing to increase the police department’s budget, we continue to empower them to commit violence. The system of policing has historical roots in the oppression of marginalized communities and the suppression of uprisings, and especially impacts people of color and people experiencing mental health crises today.
Salt Lake City police are not immune to committing the violence this system perpetuates, as recent events illustrate, nor will they be likely to transform even with the formation of the Racial Equity in Policing Commission, tasked with making recommendations to the city about the police budget and practices.
Since the commission’s formation, they have only recommended increases to the police’s budget, and their recommendations mostly call for more diverse police officers or more police training. These suggestions overlook the historical records that show training is ineffective when the system’s culture, which is entrenched in the violent enforcement of white supremacy, remains unaddressed.
Further, it neglects the demands that by decreasing the police department’s budget, we can instead invest that funding into meeting the community’s needs for mental health resources, housing, and measures to alleviate economic hardship. These investments would go much further to prevent the conditions that lead people to commit crimes, and create a safer city than any increase to the police department will.
Abolition recognizes that acts of police violence are byproducts of their design, rather than tragic anomalies that need reform. It is further a recognition that the presence of life-sustaining resources would eliminate the need to surveil and harass our neighbors.
Abolitionists and proponents of defunding the police are often dismissed or ignored, accused of being either too idealistic or unrealistic — but in actuality, it is unrealistic for us to expect different results by maintaining the status quo of policing, as is often the case with popular police reform bills. Despite many of these reform bills passing, police still kill an average of 1,000 people per year.
If the mayor wants to blaze a new trail and reduce the amount of harm our neighbors face from the oppression of policing and imprisonment, she would take seriously the idea that reducing police power, and thereby reducing police funding, is how we can actually achieve racial equity in Salt Lake City.
Dramatic changes are needed in our city, and across the country, to heal from the damage and trauma many in our community have faced from the impacts of policing — and that change can only come through defunding the police.
Brinley Froelich is a writer in Salt Lake City and one of the co-founders of Decarcerate Utah.