"The demand to 'Defund the Police' has been under criticism, either for being out of step with public opinion or miring the rebellious potential of last summer in obscure skirmishes over municipal budgets. Here, Kay Gabriel lays out the strategic wager of campaigning to defund the police, recording the political utility of the demand and accounting for the further organizing that it requires."

"Defund,” together with abolition, is widely misunderstood on both the right and the left. Its political opponents make their attacks occasionally in good faith and overwhelmingly not. But Defund is an indispensable strategy in the present—capable of shifting resources at a mass scale from the state’s repressive and death-dealing mechanisms into institutions that sustain everyone’s ability to live, consolidating anti-police sentiment into an actual shift in social relations, and forming an anti-carceral bloc that can link the demands of racial justice together with equality of access to resources, space and safety for everyone.