Racial Differences in Support for Defunding the Police

• In Event: Attitudes about Race, Racism, & Police

Abstract

For decades, government spending has prioritized funding police departments over competing budget interests such as affordable housing, universal healthcare, public education, upgrading outdated infrastructure, and universal basic income. The United States’ practice of spending big on police welfare while digging under the couch cushions for pennies to spend on social welfare programs, long taken for granted, faces increasing scrutiny in the twenty-first century. Two primary factors explain this change: (1) public displays of the violence inherent to the institution of policing are breaking through the national consciousness; & (2) under late-stage capitalism, the rich are growing exponentially richer on profits generated by labor exploitation, thereby pushing the middle class down into the lower class. Thus, more Americans than ever are questioning what value policing adds to communities given its large price tag and violent impulses. Moreover, the need to drastically expand social welfare programs is readily apparent to both the historically and newly minted poor. This study uses nationally representative data to investigate whether people racialized as Black are more likely to support defunding the police than people racialized as white. Split sample analyses were also conducted to see whether the significance of predictors varied among Black and white subsamples.

Authors

• Alexander Updegrove, University of North Texas

• Ahram Cho, New Mexico State University

• Maisha Cooper, University of North Carolina at Charlotte