OPINION: Defund the Police: Another bad idea from higher ed
In the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in May 2020, 'Defund the Police' went quickly from theory to reality.
At the core of this school of thought is this concept, according to Hochman, that '[c]rime is the result of social conditioning rather than a permanently flawed human nature.'
Dr. Timothy Furnish is a writer, analyst, and author of five books, with over 13 years college teaching experience. He has taught at Georgia Perimeter College, Reinhardt University, Kennesaw State University, and Norwich University. Outside academia, he has lectured at Joint Special Operations University, Defense Institute for Security Assistance Management, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, and several other intelligence and military venues. He also worked for five years as a consultant to US Special Operations Command. Furnish obtained his doctorate in Islamic/Middle Eastern history from The Ohio State University, after serving as an Arabic interrogator in the 101st Airborne Division.
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In the wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in May 2020, “Defund the Police” went quickly from theory to reality. In short order, a number of prominent House Democrats called for cutting police budgets. At least 13 American cities actually did so by the summer, which resulted in crime spikes.
That was the unpleasant reality. But what about the theory behind it? Where did the idea that reducing spending on police departments would benefit anyone come from?
The answer is higher education, the source of many of our society’s current woes.
As Nate Hochman detailed in 2020, a “fringe proposal” of university left-wingers gained support among many in the Democrat party. The moderate version promoted alternatives to armed cops. The radical one advocated getting rid of police departments altogether.
Hochman stated that anti-police theory originated in the 1920s with the German Marxist Walter Benjamin, whose ideas were then taken up by the American Black Nationalist W.E.B. Dubois in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction.
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But it took Black feminist activists like Angela Davis, who decried the “prison-industrial complex,” to shape the theory into a form usable by the likes of the Black Panthers in the 1960 and 70s.
At the core of this school of thought is this concept, according to Hochman, that “[c]rime is the result of social conditioning rather than a permanently flawed human nature.” This perspective is a regular feature of Critical Race Theory (CRT), and “is entirely removed from the historical facts and functions of human societies.”
Marxism is a root ideology of CRT, according to academic James Lindsay and my peer Higher Education Fellow Adam Ellwanger. Marxism views the police as armed enforcers of the ruling class and its capitalist system. For the far left, men and women in blue are “nothing but a tool of an unjust society’s rule” who must be abolished.
Marxism is a staple of American academia. This is why, as Angela Morabito pointed out in Campus Reform last year, so many universities offered classes on defunding the police and abolishing prisons. University libraries, like the University of Washington’s, also offered guides to the topic—which presented no dissenting sources.
Of course, the primary organization pushing to defund police since 2013 has been Black Lives Matter. (BLM). Which, despite media attempts to deny it, is clearly Marxist. So it should come as no surprise that BLM still promotes cutting resources for cops on its website.
At least that group is not openly advocating violence against police, as Antifa has done.
However, despite Marxist professors’ provenance and Leftist politicians pushing it, defunding the police is unpopular with most Americans.
In fact, according to Pew, far more Americans want increased police budgets than decreased ones. And even in 2020, when the defunding fervor was at its height, only 26% of those surveyed actually favored defunding the police.
The bottom line? Marxist theory from higher education actually holds little appeal for most Americans in the real world. For that, we can be thankful.
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Editorials and op-eds reflect the opinion of the authors and not necessarily that of Campus Reform or the Leadership Institute.
