“Defunding the Police” as Transitional Justice, with Genevieve Bates

A little over two years ago, mass protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis, focused public attention on the dramatically higher rates at which the police use force against Black and Latinx people. More broadly, the Black Lives Matter movement has put a spotlight on deep-seated systemic racism in the criminal justice system in the U.S. and beyond. Against this backdrop, many reform advocates have called for a fundamental reorientation of priorities and resources with calls to “defund the police”: to shift money away from armed law enforcement and toward unarmed first responders and investments in communities. 

The phrase “defund the police” has been a powerful rallying cry for millions of Americans seeking to reimagine the relationship between the state and communities of color. However, some critics, including leaders within the Democratic Party, have argued that calls to cut police budgets might undermine support for change by allowing opponents to equate police reform with leaving neighborhoods unpatrolled and unprotected. It’s possible that the slogan “defund the police,” while mobilizing core supporters, turns away other people who actually support the substance of reform.

Our guest today, Dr. Genevieve Bates, is interested in how the way we talk about racial justice in policing shapes public support for reform. Gen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science here with us at UBC, and has to date mostly worked in the fields of international relations and comparative politics, studying transitional justice mechanisms in the wake of civil war. But recently, Gen has teamed up with coauthor Geneva Cole – who studies racial politics in the US – to examine the effect of alternative framings of police reform on public attitudes. 

What they’ve been especially interested in are the ways in which efforts to root out systemic racism in policing look a lot like post-conflict, or post-authoritarian, transitional justice initiatives. This suggests an intriguing possibility: what if, instead of talking about criminal justice reform as defunding the police, advocates framed reform as part of a larger international movement to redress past state abuses and defend human rights? This is the question that Gen and Geneva tackle through a novel survey experiment that they recently carried out in the US.

In this episode, we talk with Gen about the broad criminal-justice reform landscape, about how she and Geneva drew the connection between transitional justice and police reform, how they designed their experimental treatments, and why it’s important to study not just generic support for reform but support for implementing concrete, real-world reforms in people’s own communities.

This episode puts the study of American politics into dialogue with the study of international relations and comparative politics in an unconventional way: by seeing what happens if we ask Americans, who often view their political system as exceptional, to place their own societal conflicts and challenges in a comparative perspective. We also talk with Gen about why and how the study of international relations itself ought to be grappling with issues of race.