In the spring of 2020, the nation was roiled by protests as people reacted to disturbing video footage showing Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kill George Floyd, a Black man he arrested and subdued who posed no plausible danger to him or anyone else.

In the months following, activists, politicians and ordinary citizens began debating the role of police, race and the best use of public dollars to keep communities safe. Some of the politicians who embraced reducing police funding now express regret over those positions. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, recently echoed that reassessment, invoking a local city council member’s description of the era: “Woke 1 was crazy.”

Some of the calls for changes in 2020 went beyond what most Americans were ready to accept. It’s understandable how a call to “defund the police” was easily turned into a political weapon, especially as crime increased during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But in the years since, we’ve seen a growing backlash to any change to policing, even as we saw the highest number of police killings on record in 2024. The effort to make police reform itself radioactive conflates a huge spectrum of policy ideas into an oversimplified binary of "pro-police" versus "anti-police." 

We must reject that false choice and return to the core question that remains: How do we reduce unnecessary police violence while preserving public safety? 

Department of Justice has 'defunded' Civil Rights Division

Police brutality is a scourge that undermines public safety........

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