Of course, the demand to defund police is not just about cuts to police budgets. It is also about limiting police contact, functions, weapons, legitimacy, and power—and uprooting surveillance, policing, punishment, and criminalization from every aspect of our lives.71 As abolitionist scholars Dan Berger and David Stein put it, “The call to defund is best understood as an effort to revoke the political and economic power of the police—and of the larger criminal legal system it upholds.”72 Defund campaigns “approach local and national budgets with necessary urgency as a venue in which the status
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