Are Americans ready to abolish the police?

Is the Defund the Police (or Abolish the Police) movement now dead? If not, it suffered a nearly mortal blow this week, with 57 percent of Minneapolis voters rejecting Question 2’s call to abolish police in favor of a new Department of Public Safety that would be more focused on providing social services. Rising violent crimes rates in America’s big cities, including Minneapolis, have deflated momentum for abolishing the police.

Minneapolis became ground zero for Defund/Abolish Police when George Floyd was lethally kept under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer for 9 minutes. That officer was later convicted of second and third-degree murder. The killing fueled Black Lives Matter protests across America, sometimes accompanied by riots and widespread focus on police abuse.

A 25 percent rise in U.S. homicides in 2020 (for Minneapolis it was 71 percent) has reminded many Americans that while police accountability is imperative, so too, is public safety. Christian teaching has long stressed that the state’s chief divinely ordained vocation is public order and protecting the innocent—that without this foundation at the heart of public order, other social goods become unattainable.

After Floyd’s murder by a police officer, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey refused to support abolishing the police, prompting nine city council members to start “the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department,” which the council unanimously endorsed. (Four members backing Question 2 lost reelection on Tuesday while the mayor was re-elected.)

After the council vote last year, an activist gushed: “We are closer than any time in history, and anywhere else in the country, to a safe, thriving city without police.” Such a statement, naïve as it is, is dangerous. There is no safe, thriving society anywhere without police or government authority. It cannot be done. Safety and order in every society depend on state agents with the power of coercion who can deter, detain, and, if necessary, kill malefactors. These agents are called to behave lawfully, but there ultimately can be no law without their vigorous action.

Traditionally, Christians have cited the Apostle Paul in Romans 13 to justify military force and just wars: “For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer.”

The Christian understanding of government responsibility requires police and other law enforcement agencies as no less critical than militaries in God’s provision for justice and security. Arguably, the police are actually more important, for law enforcement agencies are more directly involved in most people’s lives. Nearly everyone hopes, if under threat, that calling 911 will provoke a quick response by armed and authorized state agents to rescue them. Nobody under assault in the street or under attack in their home is hoping for social workers to appear to remedy the most immediate threat.

Defund/Abolish the Police initiatives are only possible in a wealthy, comfortable, and relatively safe society in which utopian theorists and activists imagine people are intrinsically good but tormented by violence-prone state agents motivated by evil intent. In the days of the Apostle Paul, law enforcement in nearly every society was almost certainly inadequate, with only the rich and powerful protected. But Paul stressed the rightful responsibility of government to protect—and that means protecting all.

America and the West are blessed with mostly honest, professional, and competent law enforcement. We should not take this divine gift for granted. Lawful societies don’t tolerate corrupt police, much less police who abuse or murder. America has nearly 700,000 police officers. Most are honest and competent and will respond to our pleas for help when needed, thank God.

But earlier this year, the Mennonite Church USA published a new resource, “Defund the Police? An Abolition Curriculum,” urging the elimination of law enforcement: “Police abolition is not about reforming the police to be less brutal—it is about the end of police, law enforcement and policing, so that a more just and liberative society and humanity can be built and experienced.”

Abolishing police would precipitate chaos, not liberation. As New York’s newly elected mayor, who’s black and a former police officer himself, said: “When I get out of that subway station, I want to see that cop at the top of the stairs.” So do most Americans—and the vote in Minneapolis shows it.