The #DefundthePolice Movement in Reimagining Policing in America

• In Event: Digital Advocacy Strategies

Abstract

The stark reality of US racial duplicity was exposed on Jan 6 when a group of armed, seditious, white domestic terrorists staged an insurrection at the US Capitol to prevent the certification of the Electoral College for Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris on the behest of Trump. Trump spent weeks before and after the November 3, 2020 US presidential election claiming the electoral result would be rigged and fraudulent if he lost. The Jan 6, 2021 insurrection included members of the Proud Boys, QAnon conspiracy theorists, white supremacists carrying confederate flags, and religious extremists of the group Jericho March. This mob stormed past the Capitol police, and looted, destroyed and defaced the Capitol building, while threatening to hang Vice President Mike Pence and hurt House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.. Investigative reports would reveal these right wing populist Trump supporters organized in plain sight on social media apps like Parler, MeWe, Facebook and Twitter. The world and the US public watched as the National Guard failed to be deployed until hours after the coup attack. The deferential treatment of this seditious white domestic terrorist mob by Capitol Police stood in such sharp contrast to how Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters were treated by police during the summer 2020, leading President Biden to exclaim: “No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesters yesterday that they wouldn't have been treated very differently than the mob that stormed the Capitol.”
The COVID-19 summer of 2020 saw masked Americans of all races join in collective solidarity on the streets to march for racial justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Floyd, a black man, was openly murdered on the streets in May 2020 by US police who placed a knee on his neck until he suffocated. Floyd’s death is part of a systematic, well-documented pattern of police murdering unarmed black citizens. Very few BLM publics resorted to looting or violence within these protests; yet, police were shown spraying peaceful, masked protestors with tear gas and utilizing rubber bullet mallets in order to disperse the BLM crowds. Trump’s repeated disparaging treatment of BLM supporters came to helm on June 1, 2020 when he employed National Guard US Park Police troops in full riot gear to tear gas peaceful protesters outside the White House so he could walk to the nearby Episcopal church to hold a Bible for a photo.
Arising from these BLM social justice protests was a controversial rallying slogan—Defund the Police—spawning the viral twitter hashtag #defundthepolice. Defund the police connotes a spectrum of possibilities that can include reimagining life without police and prisons to the diverting of resources away from police departments and toward community services that provide more support for black publics. Democratic elites disagree on the political way forward to deal with systematic racism in US policing practices. President Biden disagrees with defunding but embraces reform, while leaders of the BLM movement call for an overhaul and reimagining of the police department to address systematic racism. Polls reveal black US publics were crucial to Biden both securing the democratic nomination and winning the 2020 US presidential election, a fact Biden openly acknowledged when he noted, “When this campaign was at its lowest, the African American community stood up again for me,” Biden said. “They always have my back, and I’ll have yours.”
Social movements and protest ecologies are shaped by the technological imaginary and sociotechnical affordances of social media as these tools create a space for premediated deliberation of policy ahead of its enactment. Utilizing the framework of sociotechnical political imaginaries and networked framing of social and protest movements within digital architectures, this study examines #defundthepolice from June-December 2020. Examining over 3 million tweets randomly sampled daily over this time period (which covers both the summer 2020 BLM protests and the 2020 US election), this study questions, 1. How the movement was framed by publics, supporting and dissenting, 2. How gatekeepers were elevated to shape the movement’s goals digitally, 3. How viral images and videos on #defundthepolice visually framed the movement, and 4. How Twitter fueled sociopolitical imaginaries of reshaped US policing to ensure racial and social justice. Utilizing a range of computational social science methodologies that include natural language processing, semantic network analysis, and visual content analysis, alongside manual content analytic methods, this study will parse tweets across relevant samples to answer each question. In turning attention to the affordances of Twitter as a sociotechnical imaginary for rearticulating a plural, diverse society rooted in racial and social justice, this study heeds the academic call to make transparent the injustices faced by US BIPOC publics.

Author

• Sharon Meraz, University of Illinois at Chicago