Defund the Police: Meaning, City Cuts, and 2025 Status

“Defund the police” is a political demand to shrink police department budgets and move that money into services like mental health care, housing, violence prevention, and education. It became a national slogan in the summer of 2020 after Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, but it covers a wide range of proposals, from trimming a city’s police budget by a few percent to abolishing police departments entirely. Most of the actual budget cuts made in 2020 and 2021 have since been reversed, though the movement’s push for non-police crisis response has produced programs that are still growing.

What People Actually Mean by It

The phrase is not one policy. A 2021 Stanford Law Review essay by Jessica M. Eaglin sorted the proposals into four camps.¹

The most far-reaching is police abolition: the long-term dismantling of police departments and prisons, replaced by community-led safety models. Abolitionists argue policing is designed to control marginalized populations and cannot be reformed. Next is police recalibration, which narrows what police do by handing off mental health calls, traffic enforcement, and similar tasks to other agencies. Third is police oversight, which uses funding as leverage for accountability rules like chokehold bans or body cameras; the proposed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and Executive Order 13929 fit here. Fourth is a straight fiscal approach, cutting police spending as part of general budget-trimming rather than a social policy agenda.

A separate framework in Perspectives on Politics distinguishes “abolitionist” strategies aimed at ending policing from “disaggregative” strategies aimed at reassigning specific police functions to social workers, traffic specialists, and other professionals.² Someone saying “defund” might mean anything from ending policing altogether to shifting a few million dollars into a mental health response team.

Where the Idea Came From

The intellectual roots run back decades, through Black abolition feminists such as Mariame Kaba, Angela Davis, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who have argued for dismantling what they call the “prison industrial complex.” Critical Resistance, founded in 1998, spent years building that case.³ The 2014 Ferguson protests after Michael Brown’s death broadened the audience and helped seed the Movement for Black Lives, which organized around divestment from police and reinvestment in communities.⁴

The 2020 protests turned the demand into a mainstream slogan. The Minneapolis group Reclaim the Block petitioned the city council to defund the Minneapolis Police Department, and the call spread quickly.³ Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib backed redirecting police funds to social services.⁴

What Cities Actually Did

More than 20 major U.S. cities cut police budgets in the months after Floyd’s death, with advocates counting over $840 million in direct reductions nationally.⁵ What that meant in practice varied enormously.

Minneapolis was the symbolic center. In June 2020 a majority of the city council pledged to dismantle the police department and replace it with a Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention. The pledge quickly hit resistance. Mayor Jacob Frey opposed deep staffing cuts, calling proposals to lower the officer cap from 888 to 750 “irresponsible.”⁶ That December, the city moved nearly $8 million of the department’s $179 million budget into violence prevention and mental health crisis teams but kept staffing levels intact.⁷ It also banned chokeholds, revised use-of-force policies, restricted crowd-control weapons, and put $2.4 million into a non-police 911 mental health response team.

A November 2021 ballot measure to replace the police department with a Department of Public Safety and eliminate a charter-mandated minimum staffing level lost roughly 56% to 43%.⁸ The force still shrank sharply, from about 900 officers in 2020 to 560 by August 2022, driven mostly by departures. In June 2022 the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the city’s charter required it to fund and staff at least 731 officers.⁹

Austin made one of the most aggressive moves, dropping its 2021 police budget from $434.5 million to about $293 million by shifting forensic science, emergency medical response, and other services out of the department and toward supportive housing and mental health responders. Portland cut $15 million and disbanded a gun violence reduction unit. San Francisco pledged $120 million in divestment over two years. Seattle passed roughly an 18% reduction by leaving vacancies unfilled and moving parking enforcement and similar functions out of the police budget. At least 25 cities removed police from schools, saving a collective $34 million.⁵

Why Most of Those Cuts Were Undone

Within a year or two, most cities that had cut police budgets restored the money, often at higher levels than before.¹⁰ Los Angeles, after Mayor Eric Garcetti pledged to cut $150 million, gave the department a 3% increase. New York City’s “$1 billion” reduction turned largely on accounting shifts like moving school police costs to the Department of Education; actual spending rose by $200 million. Austin reinstated police cadet classes after facing recruitment and attrition problems. Burlington, Vermont, went from cutting the police budget to offering $10,000 retention bonuses.¹¹

Several forces pulled in the same direction. Homicides jumped in many cities during 2020 and 2021: Chicago from 495 in 2019 to 797 in 2021, Austin from 33 to 88, Philadelphia from 356 to 562, Portland from 29 to 90.¹⁰ Whether the increases were caused by budget cuts remains contested, but the political effect was decisive. Officers left in large numbers. State legislatures pushed back too: Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a law in May 2021 penalizing cities that cut police funding, and a 2023 Wisconsin law requires Milwaukee to maintain police staffing or lose state aid.¹²

What Did Survive: Non-Police Crisis Response

The clearest lasting effect is a wave of new programs that send unarmed responders, not police, to mental health and welfare calls. Over 100 such units now operate in U.S. cities.¹³

The oldest is CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) in Eugene, Oregon, running since 1989. Operated by the White Bird Clinic, it sends two-person teams of a mental health crisis worker and an EMT to handle mental health calls, substance use, and welfare checks 24/7. In 2019 it took over 18,500 calls and asked police for backup only 311 times, about 1%. The Eugene Police Department estimates the program diverts 5% to 8% of 911 calls and saves about $1.23 million a year, though staffing has been strained by wages of around $18 an hour.¹⁴

Denver’s STAR (Support Team Assisted Response) program launched as a single-van pilot in June 2020, modeled on CAHOOTS, and has grown to eight vans covering the city. In 2023 STAR teams responded to over 7,000 calls, about 46% of eligible incidents. During the pilot, neighborhoods served by STAR saw roughly 1,400 fewer criminal offenses, a 34% decrease against comparison areas. The average cost per incident is $151, compared with $646 for a police response.¹⁵ Mayor Mike Johnston proposed $6.9 million for STAR in the 2025 budget, up from $6.4 million.¹⁶ An estimated 65% to 70% of referrals involve unhoused people, and the housing resources to help them remain limited.¹⁷

Seattle created its Community Assisted Response and Engagement (CARE) department in October 2023, combining the city’s 911 call center with unarmed Community Crisis Responder teams for non-violent mental health and welfare calls. Crisis teams handled about 1,000 calls in the first year, with an average response time of roughly eight minutes.¹⁸ The department’s budget has grown from $20.5 million in 2023 to a proposed $45.4 million in 2026, with plans to double crisis responder positions from 24 to 48.¹⁹ Washington State passed legislation in May 2025 to support community responder programs statewide.²⁰

A federal lawsuit in Washington, D.C., is testing whether the practice of sending armed police, rather than mental health professionals, to behavioral health emergencies violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. In Bread for the City v. District of Columbia, the ACLU argues that sending police to mental health crises while sending medical professionals to physical health emergencies denies people with disabilities equal access to emergency services. In September 2024 a federal judge denied the District’s motion to dismiss, ruling that the plaintiffs had “plausibly alleged” discrimination. The DOJ filed a statement of interest supporting the plaintiffs in February 2024.²¹ According to the complaint, less than 1% of D.C. 911 calls involving mental health emergencies get a response from a mental health professional, compared with roughly 90% of physical health emergencies that get a response from D.C. Fire and Medical.²²

Federal Legislation That Went Nowhere

Both parties tried to legislate around policing. Neither signature bill became law.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, from Democrats, would have banned chokeholds at the federal level, restricted no-knock warrants in drug cases, lowered the standard for criminally charging officers, and eliminated qualified immunity.²³ The House passed it twice. Senate negotiations between Representative Karen Bass and Senators Cory Booker and Tim Scott collapsed in September 2021, mostly over qualified immunity. Bass said the compromises had weakened the bill so much it would not have had a “meaningful impact,” and she described it as ending up in the “Senate graveyard.”²⁴

The Movement for Black Lives introduced a broader alternative, the BREATHE Act, in July 2020. It called for cutting federal funding for programs that support policing, prosecution, and incarceration, including the DOD 1033 program that transfers surplus military equipment to local police, the DEA, ICE, and FBI surveillance programs. It would have barred federal law enforcement from using tear gas, rubber bullets, facial recognition, predictive policing software, and no-knock warrants, decriminalized simple drug possession, and replaced youth detention centers with community-based rehabilitation.²⁵ No member of Congress introduced it and it never advanced.

Republicans built their own agenda around “Back the Blue.” In December 2025, Senator John Cornyn introduced the Back the Blue Act with 35 Republican cosponsors. It creates new federal crimes for killing or assaulting law enforcement officers, imposes a 30-year mandatory minimum when an officer is killed, and makes the murder of a first responder a statutory aggravating factor for the federal death penalty.²⁶ In May 2025, Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick and Jared Golden introduced the bipartisan Defund Cities That Defund The Police Act, which would strip Economic Development Administration grants and Community Development Block Grants from jurisdictions that abolish or drastically reduce police budgets without a proportional drop in revenue.²⁷

Public Opinion and Political Fallout

The slogan divided Democrats. Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “dead” and said it was not the party’s position. President Biden used his 2022 State of the Union address to say, “The answer is not to defund the police. The answer is to fund the police.”²⁸ Progressive members like Representative Cori Bush pushed back, arguing that decades of increased police funding had not produced safety.

Polling was consistently rough on the slogan. A March 2021 USA Today/Ipsos poll found fewer than one in five respondents supported the movement, with 58% opposed.²⁹ A February 2022 survey showed only 21% support, with 64% opposition overall and 70% among independents. Republicans led Democrats by 12 points on “crime and safety,” and voters believed the Democratic Party supported defunding the police by 48% to 34%.²⁸ Analysis of the 2020 cycle suggested Democratic candidates who explicitly rebutted the charge outperformed those who did not.

The underlying policies polled better than the label. A summer 2020 Gallup survey found 47% supported “reducing police department budgets and shifting the money to social programs,” with 78% of Democrats, 46% of independents, and 5% of Republicans in favor. Support was highest among Asian Americans (80%), Black Americans (70%), and adults 18 to 34 (70%).³⁰ An October 2020 Yale-led study found 66% supported “reform,” 34% supported “defund,” and 23% supported “abolish,” with differences driven by the specific policies attached to each word rather than the words themselves.³¹

Where Things Stand in 2025

By 2025 the phrase itself had become what Governing magazine called “politically toxic.” Cities that had cut funding pivoted to raising it and offering hiring incentives; Seattle raised its police budget 16% for 2025.³²

At the federal level, the Trump administration has moved in the opposite direction from the reform agenda. The DOJ dismissed proposed consent decrees for Louisville and Minneapolis, closed civil rights investigations into police departments in Phoenix, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Trenton, Mount Vernon, and Louisiana, and began reviewing existing oversight agreements in Baltimore, Cleveland, Newark, and Ferguson.³³ In Minneapolis, a state civil rights settlement approved by a Hennepin County judge in July 2023 remains in force, and the city has budgeted $113 million for reform work between 2024 and 2030, even as the separate federal consent decree stalled.³⁴ Federal policies aimed at curbing police abuses, including chokehold bans and qualified immunity reform, are described as “mostly dead letters.”³²

Departments across the country remain roughly 10% short of their budgeted workforce, and some have disbanded specialized units to keep patrols staffed. Santa Fe and Beverly Hills have begun hiring private security to supplement their forces. About 41% of departments surveyed now run co-responder programs, pairing officers with social workers or mental health specialists on nonviolent calls.³²

Movement groups describe the current period as reflection rather than retreat. The African American Roundtable in Milwaukee plans to end its “LiberateMKE” campaign. National groups like the Movement for Black Lives and the Advancement Project still frame defunding as a long-term project, arguing that even where budgets were restored, the crisis-response programs seeded in cities like Denver, Seattle, and Eugene continue to expand.¹²

1
Stanford Law Review. To Defund the Police
2
Cambridge University Press. The Ethics of Defunding the Police
3
Equal Justice Society. Defund the Police Memo
4
Close Up Foundation. What Do Defund the Police and Police Abolition Mean
5
The Guardian. US Cities Defund Police Transferring Money Community
6
Route Fifty. Minneapolis Police Budget Cuts
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MPR News. Frey Signs Minneapolis City Budget With Cuts in Police Funding
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ABC News. Minneapolis Vote Police Reform Means Movement
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MinnPost. Minneapolis Needs a Fully Funded Police Department
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National Center for Biotechnology Information. Police Budgets After Defund
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The New York Times. Dallas Police Defund
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The Guardian. Defund Police Movement Austin Seattle
13
The Marshall Project. Police Mental Health Alternative 911
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Health Affairs. CAHOOTS Crisis Response
15
National League of Cities. Denver Community Response Model
16
Denverite. Denver STAR Team Expansion
17
Urban Institute. Evaluating Alternative Crisis Response in Denver STAR Program
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National League of Cities. Seattle Community Response Model
19
City of Seattle. CARE 2026 Proposed Budget
20
Council of State Governments Justice Center. Developing and Strengthening Partnerships With Police, Fire, and EMS
21
ACLU. Bread for the City v. District of Columbia
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The Appeal. DC ADA Crisis Response ACLU Bread for the City Mental Health
23
PBS NewsHour. What Is the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act
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NPR. Bipartisan Negotiations on Capitol Hill Failed to Produce a Police Overhaul Bill
25
JURIST. Movement for Black Lives Introduces BREATHE Act
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Office of Senator John Cornyn. Cornyn Senate GOP Introduce Back the Blue Act
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Office of Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick Golden Bill Blocks Funds for Cities That Defund Police
28
Roll Call. Defund the Police Still Haunts Democrats
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Politico. Defund the Police Democrats
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Gallup. Americans Say Policing Needs Major Changes
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Yale News. Resistance to Defund or Abolish Police Rooted in Policy Proposals
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Governing. The State of Policing Five Years After George Floyd
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The New York Times. Trump Police Consent Decrees
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CBS News Minnesota. Minneapolis Police Consent Decree Minnesota Human Rights Response