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The current study examines the media's depiction of demands to defund the police. Although this call to action has been a part of the public discourse for decades, the call has reached mainstream attention following the police-involved death of George Floyd in May 2020. Black Lives Matter, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, and other prominent organizations have endorsed this call. However, there is a lack of agreement on the “correct” meaning of this socio-political movement.

The authors performed an inductive content analysis of the news articles using MaxQDA, a qualitative data analysis program. The authors focus on the text and its themes and patterns in the descriptions of #DefundThePolice, both implicit (e.g. tone) and explicit (e.g. defining the movement as problematic). The codes were further refined following open coding to fully develop the existing patterns. The results are organized by the themes within the articles. The findings also include direct quotes to reinforce the themes.

In the authors' content analysis of news reports, the authors find that the US and UK news outlets report definitions that parallel the M4BL's description of the movement. In this respect, media coverage reflected the basic tenets of the movement accurately as opposed to using definitions that misrepresent the group's primary objective. Although these sampled news articles generally adhered to the basic description of the defund movement, the authors found that the overall substance and tone of coverage varied across outlets. This divergence yielded five overarching themes that included: the involvement of corporate America in the defunding debate, the frequent use of opinion pieces, mentions of history for informing the debate, the inclusion of the police perspective, and reporting that seemed to tie the defund movement to increases in violent crime.

This article explores how the mass media reports and defines the #DefundThePolice movement. Although much debate surrounds this issue, there is limited understanding of the mainstream news media's depiction of the movement. The current study addresses this research gap and informs the defunding debate by examining whether media descriptions of the movement coincide with the Movement for Black Lives benchmark delineation.

The police killing of George Floyd and other high-profile incidents of force sparked massive protests around the world. Amidst eroding public perceptions of police legitimacy, politicians and activists have sought to achieve systemic change. Over the past year, several cities in the United States have implemented various police reform initiatives, including reallocating resources, cutting budgets, and downsizing specialized units. As a result of these changes, the “defund the police” movement may have far-reaching consequences on police culture, especially within specialized units most affected by budget and resource changes. Furthermore, as fentanyl overdoses are surging and the American opioid crisis continues, specialized drug investigation units face a host of challenges in responding to increases in drug-related crime in the aftermath of “defund the police”. Therefore, this study aims to examine the experiences of a Drug Investigation Section in a large metropolitan city.

This study uses data from semi-structured interviews conducted between October 2021 to May 2022. The results of this study provide a thematic analysis that explores the narcotics detectives' perceptions of key features of police culture, as well as how current challenges affect those perceptions.

Key features of the police culture were noticeably absent from detectives' responses, including an overemphasis on danger, machismo, conservatism, and social isolation. Elements of cynicism, group solidarity, and a mission/action-orientation, did emerge. The context of “defund the police” did little to alter their perceptions, except for heightening cynicism and negative perceptions of politicians and prosecutors (a form of “us vs them”, but not involving citizens). The interviews also revealed various other changes that have occurred in recent years that have adversely affected the section's traditional investigative capabilities, especially with regard to illicit fentanyl distribution, though the addition of an intelligence analyst minimized those negative effects.

This study adds to the scarce research on contemporary police culture in specialized units, especially in the aftermath of the “defund the police” movement, providing a glimpse into its context within a drug investigation section and its potential effects on police culture and narcotics investigations.

Given the historical legacy of policing Black bodies, this research focuses on the structures of anti-Blackness within school policing and the strategies students of Color activists use as they work to defund or abolish police departments in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

Specifically, this article looks to Twitter as a counter-storytelling space for students of Color activists to organize and build movements to end anti-Black school policing. Through the frameworks of critical race theory (CRT) and Black critical theory (BlackCrit), this research applies inductive coding to analyze 42 Twitter posts from three students of Color-led organizations based in Los Angeles.

This document analysis presents four themes, which describe four dominant strategies students of Color activists use in their campaigns to defund or abolish school police in the LAUSD: (1) centering Blackness and Black student experiences, (2) making demands for the elimination of funding and support for school police, (3) calling for a shift in funding to support Black students and (4) employing multiple tactics concurrently.

These findings demonstrate the importance of developing and centering a critical understanding of anti-Blackness to achieve racial and educational justice within social movements.

Moreover, the demands of students of Color activists reflect visions of public schools free from anti-Black school policing.

The chapter situates the role of narrative power in shifting media policy amidst calls for police abolition, defunding, and media reparations following the documentation of media harm. Community-based narrative intervention is not only focused on those aspects of reporting and media that deal with harms perpetuated by discourses on public safety, but also about developing what I refer to as “collective narrative self-determination” to reflect the needs and desires of communities. The chapter documents how grassroots media efforts attempt to reconfigure the space of media policy and shift narratives toward the community power needed to reckon with the consequences of vital public resources being systematically defunded for budgets and policies that entail greater police powers. The chapter concludes this is an important moment for community-based initiatives and interventions that can shift media narratives around policing and urban violence and also shift who is served by those narratives, contributing to the long-term process of building narrative power and racial justice across a wide range of community and media organizations.

The murders of Black people at the hands of police in 2020 have led to global protests that have called on public officials to defund or abolish the police. What has been drowned out in these conversations, however, is the traumatizing aftereffects of anti-Black police violence as a public health crisis. In this paper, I argue that the racial terrorism of anti-Black police violence is a deeply felt wound in Black communities that extends beyond the individuals who directly experience it and that this type of collective trauma must be understood as an urgent public health crisis.

Using published studies and online commentaries on anti-Black police violence and its mental health impacts in Canada and the United States, this paper examines the mental health impacts of anti-Black police violence at both the individual and community levels.

A public health response to the traumatizing aftereffects of anti-Black police violence and other forms of state violence must highlight important policy imperatives, such as policies of action focused on improving the public health system. It must also encompass a recognition that the public health crisis of anti-Black police violence is not solvable solely by public health agencies alone. Rather, strategic opportunities to address this crisis arise at every level of governmental interaction, including law enforcement, health care, employment, business, education and the media.

While the impact of anti-Black police violence on the mental health of Black individuals has been emerging in the literature over the last several years, what has been less focused on and what I address in this paper is how the threat of that violence lingers in Black communities long after the protestors have packed up their megaphones, resulting in collective trauma in Black communities.