As Cities Move to Pull Funds From the Police, Foundations Can Do Much to Ensure Those Dollars Are Put to Good Use

Calls to defund the police, and to secure public safety by providing more money to social services, sounded radical a few months ago. Now that these ideas are gaining wider acceptance, we need to recognize that they are in fact not radical enough and that philanthropy can play an important role in advancing solutions that will make a real difference.

We need to change not just where the money goes, but who determines where it goes and who controls how it’s spent. Real change comes from shifting the power to communities. Groups led by people of color, the ones that serve the people disproportionately killed and incarcerated by poorly run police departments, are the ones who should set the agenda and control the resources as we move forward.

Simply putting more money into current approaches to social services won’t deliver the results we hope to see from the movement to defund police. Foundations can step up to support community-centered nonprofits and help convert the momentum to defund the police into substantive changes that transform how we as a society fund safety and security.

We know that alternatives to policing do a better job of curbing violence than our current approach. Scholars have proven that crime goes down as community nonprofits proliferate — so the more we put into social-service groups, the better. A 2017 New York University study found that for every 10 additional organizations focusing on crime and community life, cities across the entire United States enjoyed a 9 percent reduction in the murder rate, a 6 percent reduction in violent crime, and a 4 percent reduction in property crime.

But no matter how sound the evidence is, or how loud the calls for change are, we’ve seen momentum for real change fizzle.

Take, for instance, what happened when revelations about flagrant abuses by criminal-justice employees at the Rikers Island jail complex in New York City galvanized a movement led by nonprofit advocacy groups to “Close Rikers” that appeared to achieve a stunning political success in 2017, with the mayor and City Council’s endorsement of recommendations to shut down Rikers in 10 years.

Yet in the end, New York announced that shutting down Rikers Island would be possible only by investing $11 billion to build four new borough-based jails.

What if, instead of building new jails, New York City had invested that $11 billion in alternative approaches to engaging youth and reducing incarceration? What if city officials had shifted budgets to fund Black- and Latinx-led nonprofits with proven track records of improving health, safety, and employment?

All the evidence suggests that society would have been better off, in terms of both curbing crime and promoting better lives for people of color and others too often left out.

An example of what we have in mind can be found in New York City’s South Bronx, where Neighborhood Benches founder William Evans helps kids in public housing learn leadership skills by participating in neighborhood-improvement projects. Evans himself grew up in the projects and is a survivor of racial profiling, gun violence, wrongful arrest, and incarceration.

He and his colleagues are making a difference: Young people who have been arrested and referred to programs like Neighborhood Benches are a third less likely to be re-arrested than their peers, and they stay connected to a network of positive community members well beyond the time courts require them to do that.

If the defund the police movement takes hold nationwide, that would offer a once-in-a-generation opportunity for people like Evans to get the resources they need to make a difference in the lives of millions and millions of young people.

In Baltimore, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco, Portland, Ore., and elsewhere, leaders have already cut or announced significant cuts to police budgets. But where will that money go?

Foundations are uniquely poised to use their relationships, influence, and funding to bolster Black- and Latinx-led organizations and community-led approaches to safety and well-being. Here’s how they can create the conditions for radically improving public safety and the political will to sustain that shift.

Help people reimagine what it takes to ensure their safety. Advocates and community organizers need flexible grant funds that enable them to engage entire neighborhoods in developing a vision for community safety that does not depend on policing and prisons. This process must be driven by a deep respect for the rights of citizens to collectively set a path for the future. When Wayne County, Mich., disbanded its Juvenile Probation Department, the first step was holding block-by-block meetings in high-crime neighborhoods to hear from everyone about the impact of the policy move and to develop hyperlocal solutions to addressing youth delinquency. It’s not just money that foundations can offer in this process: They can advance such efforts by helping people of different views and backgrounds build productive relationships.

Set up community leaders to lead. Every overpoliced neighborhood is full of leaders, many of them formerly incarcerated people who are already experts on how best to break the cycle that sends so many people to prison. Like William Evans, they are bringing together rival gang members; facilitating mentoring groups in church basements, basketball courts, and parking lots; and engaging young people — who all too often are seen as the source of the problem — to be agents of change in their communities. These young people are credible messengers because they grew up in and often still live in the same neighborhoods they serve. They have the greatest stake in the success of this work, are accountable to the communities they serve, and are the most trusted change agents. Current investments in social services often miss these leaders and their organizations.

Shift funding strategies. Time and time again, when government and foundations say they went to send money to directly fund grass-roots community groups, their intentions are undercut by bureaucratic concerns about financial management and data reporting. This results in the same large white-led social-services organizations maintaining control over the resources, while grass-roots groups led by people of color subsist on small contracts and grants. Community Connections for Youth spent two years preparing over a dozen grass-roots organizations across New York State to provide alternatives to incarceration for young people involved in the criminal-justice system. Despite those efforts, in 2018, the $10 million the state spent on such efforts was awarded to three large white-led organizations already working within the funding bureaucracy, while grass-roots organizations led by people of color only qualified as subcontractors. Too often, bureaucratic inertia prefers well-documented mediocrity over harder-to-measure success. Foundations can help by directly funding community-based organizations, particularly underrepresented Black- and Latinx-led groups, and investing in their ability to access government funding.

We understand that this plan to plant the seeds for sustained transformation may seem at odds with the urgency of this moment, as the protests continue and unjustified murders by police continue.

But the dynamics that have swollen police budgets and squeezed the finances of community groups have been decades in the making and will take many more years to fully dismantle. The successful calls to defund the police are the beginning of a long-awaited shift to move money from systems of social control to community-led efforts for safe and thriving neighborhoods.

To meet this long-coming moment of reckoning, defunding the police isn’t enough. We must listen to and fund the community-based nonprofits that have the expertise and relationships to build a more equitable future.