“Defund the Police” Advocates and Police Officers Must Make Peace

Criminal justice reform remains an urgent need. Both groups need each other in order to accomplish it.

Photo by Koshu Kunii on Unsplash

Criminal justice reform efforts in the U.S.- looking so promising with the passing of the FIRST STEP Act in 2018- have stalled in the wake of rising crime and a strange new progressive obsession with, “Defunding the Police.”

As attractive as a utopian police-free society may seem, when most people imagine it, they picture a peaceful place that doesn’t ever need police and therefore doesn’t have them. A society that needs police and doesn’t have them isn’t called a utopia; on the contrary.

Nevertheless, despite the recent ill-fated jaunt down the dystopian road of defunding the police, there is still much work to be done on criminal justice reform in America.

There isn’t any reason that police officers and their would-be defunders can’t work together; in fact, criminal justice reform would happen a lot sooner, and at all, plus be more successful if the two groups could find common ground.

Plenty of low-hanging fruit on the criminal justice reform tree, no reason to start with ending qualified immunity or defunding police departments. Ending no-knock warrants has bipartisan support in Washington. That would save lives- citizen and…