By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
A television anchor in Los Angeles asked a national leader of the Democratic Socialists of America a direct question this summer, and got no direct answer.
Frances Gill, a member of DSA’s National Political Committee, sat for an interview with NBC 4 Los Angeles anchor Conan Nolan.
Asked whether the group’s goal was to defund police and to get rid of prisons and jails, Gill said yes, according to Fox News, which reported on the exchange. What DSA wants, she said, is “a horizon where folks are not reliant on armed enforcement to meet our public safety needs.”
Nolan then asked whether, if his daughter were assaulted and raped, any agency would find the man who did it. “Of course,” Gill began. Nolan asked what it would be if not police, and where the man would be if not in jail. Gill said she wanted to “avoid getting caught into these hypotheticals,” and pointed instead to what the city spends on police rather than on street lighting, addiction treatment and mental health care.
That exchange is the argument in miniature. DSA has been clear about the destination. It has said far less about the road.
What the platform says
The group’s program, adopted this year, puts the goal in writing.
Under a plank titled “End Mass Incarceration and Police Immunity,” DSA calls to “demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.”
The same plank would end qualified immunity, empower civilian oversight boards, and treat addiction and mental illness as health problems rather than crimes.
The organization’s National Abolition Working Group is more specific.
Its banner reads “Defund. Abolish. Create.”
Its first stated demand is to defund police “by rejecting any expansion to police budgets or scope of enforcement while cutting budgets annually towards zero.”
The group has built toolkits and talking points for local chapters running defund campaigns, along with a national summit held in 2021.
Chapters have taken it up.
Milwaukee DSA’s abolition group, formed after George Floyd’s death, states that the chapter “voted to work towards defunding MPD, with the ultimate goal of abolishing MPD,” and that police “are beyond reform.”
One line in the national plank sits oddly beside the rest of DSA’s work.
The group’s organizing strategy is built on union power, including a program that places members in workplaces to organize them, as RMV reported in August.
The platform singles out police unions for disempowerment, listing them under its heading on police immunity.
The case DSA makes
Some in DSA frame abolition less as criminal justice reform than as a precondition for everything else the group wants.
“Abolition is fundamental to the success of any socialist project in the United States because the police are a powerful political institution that is routinely mobilized to stop progressive advances,” Viral Mistry, a co-chair of a political education working group in DSA’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus, wrote in a 2021 review of Derecka Purnell’s book “Becoming Abolitionists,” published in DSA’s Democratic Left.
The review asks who breaks strikes, who evicts working people, and who the ruling class calls when the masses protest.
Megan Romer, a DSA co-chair, gave a softer version on The New Yorker Radio Hour, where she defended the position in a conversation with editor David Remnick.
According to published accounts of the interview, she said she is not in favor of getting rid of police entirely tomorrow, and described defunding as moving money to schools, jobs, parks and recreation rather than stationing officers on every corner.
What happened where it was tried
Cities tested the first step in 2020, and most of them stopped.
Austin voted that year to cut or reallocate about $150 million of a $434 million police budget. About $21.5 million was an immediate cut. Most of the rest moved functions such as forensics and 911 dispatch to other departments.
The next year Texas passed a law penalizing cities that reduce police spending, and Austin adopted a record $442 million police budget.
Portland cut $15 million and disbanded its gun violence reduction team.
Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, shifted nearly $8 million from its police budget to other city services in December 2020. The following year the city put a measure on the ballot to replace the police department. About 56 percent of voters rejected it.
Researchers who tracked cities that pledged to defund found they temporarily reduced police budgets, “only to later increase them beyond what they were previously.”
Two cautions belong with those numbers. Many widely cited figures describe proposed cuts rather than adopted ones.
PolitiFact examined a list of 21 cities said to have cut $1.71 billion and found it was built from proposals, “some of which were scaled back before the budgets were adopted and some of which were reversed the following budget year.”
The second caution concerns cause.
Homicides rose about 30 percent nationally in 2020, the largest one-year increase in more than a century. The same researchers declined to tie the two together, writing that they “take no position on any causal connection between reducing police budgets and subsequent increases in crime.”
Where the left declines to follow
Two prominent DSA-aligned politicians have not embraced this plank.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, asked on The Clay Cane Show in August which parts of the DSA platform he did not share, pointed to public safety. “We have our police force, we have prisons, we have jails,” he said, adding that their purpose is “to ensure that we are delivering safety and justice hand in hand.”
Francesca Hong, a DSA member who narrowly lost Wisconsin’s Democratic primary for governor in August, had worked during the campaign to distance herself from a 2020 post in which she supported defunding police as a first step toward abolishing them.
The alternative, and who it leaves out
The same review offers an answer to the question Nolan asked, relaying Purnell’s response to skeptics. It begins with a counter-question.
“What about murderers and rapists? What about the fact that most murders and rapes go unsolved by police, and that cops themselves are responsible for many murders and sexual assaults? The current system doesn’t stop murders and sexual assaults,” the review reads.
The claim is accurate for rape and not for murder.
Police cleared 61.4 percent of homicides in 2024, up from a low of 49.4 percent in 2021, according to FBI figures compiled by the Murder Accountability Project. Rape clearance ran about 27 percent that year, down from 49 percent in 1980. Most homicides were cleared. Most rapes were not.
Low rape clearance also does not establish that victims want a different outcome.
A 2024 systematic review of 28 studies identified 70 barriers that keep women from reporting rape and sexual assault, and the reasons that recurred were fear of mistreatment by law enforcement, fear of being blamed or disbelieved, shame, and a perceived lack of evidence.
Those findings identify barriers to reporting. They do not establish that victims reject investigation or prosecution once an offender is identified.
The review’s answer is prevention: understanding why people commit such crimes and building “a society of care,” with grassroots violence interruption and conflict resolution programs as examples.
It does not describe what happens to the offender who is caught, and DSA’s current program does not say what would take the place of police and prisons.
A resolution submitted to DSA’s 2019 national convention argued that “in place of incarceration, restorative justice… must be adopted.”
The record on that approach is specific.
The Justice Department’s clearinghouse rates the practice for juveniles, where it is judged promising for reducing repeat offenses and completing restitution, and rates it as having no effect on whether participants recognize wrongdoing or feel remorse.
Victim-offender mediation is often used in property crimes and minor assaults.
An FBI bulletin describing California’s juvenile process says only those who admit fault at the earliest stage are accepted, and that gang and firearm cases are excluded.
Two limits follow from the design.
The process requires the person who caused harm to admit it and take part, which leaves out anyone who denies the offense or refuses.
And proponents concede the evidence is drawn from a favorable pool. The Sentencing Project notes that evaluating the approach is difficult because of selection bias, focusing on those most likely to succeed.
The evidence on repeat offending points the same way.
A 2025 meta-analysis drawing on 27 studies of adult programs found restorative justice produced small but significant reductions in general reoffending and no reduction in violent reoffending.
Some restorative programs do reach murder and felony assault. They operate after conviction, inside the correctional system.
A Florida legislative review found victim-offender dialogue programs running with inmates in New York, South Carolina and Texas, one of them open only to felons convicted of violent crimes.
In those programs the offender has already been caught, tried and locked up, and restorative justice supplements incarceration rather than replacing it.
RMV asked DSA who would respond to a rape or assault in progress once police budgets reached zero. They were asked what happens to an offender who refuses a community process, and to one who cannot be rehabilitated by a program. They were asked what consequence a murderer or a child abuser would face in a country without prisons, how a victim would obtain justice, and what would keep law-abiding residents safe from a person who has already harmed someone and intends to again.
DSA did not respond.