This is a great question! “Abolish the police” and “Defund the police” are slogans which actually capture a couple of different policy models, and there’s an emerging conversation right now about what they would look like and which is best. I don’t mean to say that they’re necessarily slogans without a policy, but they are slogans serving as a rallying point for a variety of people trying to imagine and formulate what a modern post-police society would look like.

I’m a fan of “defund the police” more, for reasons I’ll go into in a second. But there’s a lot of other ideas as well. “Abolish the police” is most frequently used by anarchists who would like to go even further. But outside the context of Ideal Anarchist Communism, the majority of anarchists I’ve talked to about this will eventually concede the need for some group to guarantee the enforcement of community rules, they just refuse to call that group “police” or those rules “laws.” Ultimately, I would agree that “abolish the police” is something of an endgame slogan, a phrase capturing what an ideal scenario might entail. But that sort of thing serves to confuse the vast majority of people, who are entirely unacquainted with any of this discourse.

Like I said, I like “defund the police.” By this, I mean dramatically cutting police departments and reducing the roles of police officers, transferring resources to social services to actually address root causes and reduce crime before cops are ever even involved- something which can absolutely be done in most cases! What remains of the police should also be heavily restructured towards non-violence, but in my mind’s model a small police force would remain to investigate and handle public violence and certain other crimes.

To get a handle on what this looks like, it’s valuable to imagine what roles the police and the justice system currently handle that could be better handled by someone else. This a good corrective to most people’s acceptance of the fact that we give cops tons of different jobs related to managing the failures of society, and that most can be eliminated by the very existence of a better society!

• Cops deal with especially high rates of crime from young people (29% of 2016 arrests were of people age 16-24). What if we funded a national program to remove lead from paint and other housing materials, since we know for a fact that environmental lead poisoning during childhood has strong negative impacts on mental development, in a way that has been tied to significantly higher crime rates. Not to mention the reductions in youth crime that could be achieved by better public schools, free mental healthcare and counseling, free afterschool programs, public community centers, and on and on. In addition, we have known for over 20 years that targeted early childhood interventions have been dramatically more effective at stopping crime than tough sentencing laws.
• Cops do welfare checks, checking on people that others are concerned about to make sure they’re OK. Couldn’t these and many other similar roles better be handled by community-based mental health initiatives?
• Cops do traffic stops. What about an entirely separate, unarmed civil organization for traffic patrol? Or if you feel leaving them too unarmed would be dangerous, what about locking a firearm in cruiser trunks that the patrol is only authorized to use when a driver is confirmed to be armed and aggressive? There are degrees of disarmament worth considering for different functions! (Also worth noting that better public transit systems would reduce traffic violations by definition, as less people would be driving).
• Cops clear out homeless camps and arrest or disperse homeless people in public spaces. What if we fully funded housing first programs that give every homeless person a home and a transitional social worker, something that was successfully employed from 2005-2015 in Utah. When you account for the reduced crime rates and hospitalizations of the homeless, these policies partially pay for themselves!
• Cops deal with most drug busts. What if we legalized and regulated certain light drugs, taking a whole section of the black market into the public. Then, we could decriminalize heavier drugs so that efforts are focused on public health treatment for addicts. There’s tons of research illustrating that demand-side approaches like that are more effective at limiting drug abuse than supply-side approaches like giving drug dealers long prison sentences. The most sophisticated and dangerous drug trafficking operations can be dealt with through tactics used on organized crime, which is often more legal-work than police-work!
• A number of crimes exist for the specific purpose of giving the police the discretionary ability to disperse or arrest people they determine to be a public nuisance: loitering, juvenile curfews, open container laws, etc. To be frank, we could literally eliminate some of these “crimes” simply by making them legal, with few negative consequences if done as part of a larger transformative program.
• Police patrol cities looking for crime, even though this is generally inefficient at stopping crime compared to focusing on hotspots. What about creating city programs for neighborhood-oriented and community-controlled groups of unarmed people trained in intervention, mediation, and deescalation? When done right, this sort of model has proven successful even in high-crime areas.
• Also, about those hotspots I mentioned: what if we actually made an effort to empower those communities? How many high-crime areas do you think would remain high-crime for long if we made a real effort to eliminate poverty, and if we provided everyone with free comprehensive public transit, education, and the other public services mentioned above?

Add it all up, and what roles are the police actually left with? If we lower youth crime rates by treating young people better and improving education, create community options for mental illness and interpersonal conflict, take care of traffic laws with an entirely separate organization, eliminate homelessness and poverty, reform our drug laws and humanely combat addiction, decriminalize the most harmless minor offenses, and provide opportunities and resources to reduce violence in the most violent neighborhoods, how much of their current jobs are police left with?

That’s why I like “defund the police” best as a rallying point. While “abolish the police” is an end-goal that leaves most people outside the left wondering what exactly it means, “defund the police” draws attention to the fact that our status-quo policing system is a policy choice we make every single year when it’s time to draw up public budgets, and that we can dramatically reduce the need for police by reprioritizing funding towards things that actually serve to improve human welfare.