The US is at a tipping point. A wide and disparate coalition across all 50 states has emerged on to the streets to make its voice heard on a panoply of racial and economic injustices. The protesters range from longtime civil rights proponents to workers who have lost their jobs in the pandemic. They have been joined even by former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and the voices of businesses such as Nike, Citigroup and Twitter. The protests over the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis have spread beyond the US, too.
Disproportionate police violence against African Americans has been a concern for years. But the unusual political strength of these rallies is their diversity and their breadth. That will be put at risk if increasingly vocal calls from some in the movement to “defund the police” are allowed to become its defining agenda.
Activists disagree about how to deal with police brutality. Calls for defunding police mean anything from minimising the use of firearms, to shifting funding from police services to other community and social services, to lowering the number of police or even — as Minneapolis lawmakers have done — pledging to disband the city police.