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Long pointed to as one of the most dangerous and violent cities in the United States, Chicago has made major strides in addressing this negative stereotype in the past several years. With the election of Mayor Brandon Johnson in 2023, the new administration has implemented several progressive public safety programs. His policies, including mental health first responders and increased support for education and housing, have led to a sharp 22.1% drop in overall crime in Chicago in 2025. This was the largest decline of all major cities in the U.S recorded that year.
Johnson was elected in part on a platform that gained traction throughout the United States following the 2020 George Floyd protests. Faced with widely publicized instances of police brutality against black men amidst a pandemic, crime surge, and cost-of-living crisis, Americans began to question the rationale behind their country’s exorbitant spending on police. The United States spends approximately $200 billion on police, more than all other countries combined.
Despite calls to ‘defund the police,’ in recent years, police spending has only continued to increase. Yet, reforms in Chicago, as well as Seattle and Austin, show that the movement has had an impact on public policy. At the same time, repression by U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) has increased under Donald Trump’s second term, with four times as many arrests and five times as many deportations as Biden’s administration. With crime rates having already declined before this large-scale increase in immigration & policing, this flashpoint demonstrates that now is an important time to revisit the ‘defund the police’ movement.
Why ‘Defund the Police’?
In the wake of the widely publicized murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, massive protests took place across the United States. Protests against the police have been common in recent decades. Similar movements occurred following the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Michael Brown and Eric Garner in 2014, and Freddie Gray in 2015. With the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, George Floyd’s death reignited racial tensions between police and marginalized individuals who are statistically more likely to be killed by them.
As tens of millions of people protested throughout the United States, activist messaging began to evolve. While previous Black Lives Matter protests of the mid-2010s focused more on individual accountability and police reforms like bodycams, the George Floyd protests saw a growth of calls to ‘defund the police.’
Activists argued that, based on the long history of white supremacy in the United States alongside the persistence of racially-motivated cases of police brutality and murder of black Americans, policing as an institution cannot be dedicated to keeping marginalized citizens safe. As a result, many note that billions in public funds would provide greater public benefit if they were invested in mental health services and other community safety measures.
In spite of these aims, media coverage and political pundits created hysteria regarding the movement to the point that the idea remains radical. However, scholarly evidence has largely demonstrated that there is little correlation between an increase in police spending and a decrease in crime. Rather, increasing the number of officers results in higher misdemeanour arrests. For this, advocates of defunding the police argue that money should be diverted away from police resources and toward housing, education, mental health, and other social determinants of crime.
Police Defunding in the Time of ICE
Despite the 2020 protests, police budgets generally continue to increase across the United States. As of 2026, policing costs American taxpayers over 200 billion annually, up from $135 billion in 2020. At the same time, crime rates in the majority of cities across the United States have decreased. These two co-existing realities make it easy for lawmakers to continue to point to and say that more officers and more funding lead to fewer crimes.
This line of reasoning, while not supported by statistical analysis, is clearly compelling. Donald Trump’s platform has largely consisted of evoking violent crime in ‘hellhole cities’ for expanding control. Alongside his appeal to anti-immigrant sensibilities, this manipulative hysteria has allowed for the high-profile expansion of ICE operations into cities across the United States.
In many ways, ICE injustice has replaced police brutality in the public eye. The ICE operation in Minnesota from December 2025 to January 2026 saw agents murder Renée Good and Alex Pretti. This is not to mention the more than 40 people, including Victor Manuel Diaz and Luis Beltrán Yáñez–Cruz, who have been killed while in ICE custody. These murders, as well as the lethal conditions in ICE centres, have led to significant worldwide attention.
(Photo by Chad Davis via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 4.0 DEED)
While ICE’s actions no doubt deserve close attention, the shift in the national narrative away from policing obscures how the institution is still functioning in the way activists have been criticizing it for. Police killed 1,318 people in 2025, up from 1,162 in 2020. What’s more, police departments actively collaborate with ICE in many ways that remain underacknowledged.
ICE-Police Collaboration & The Urgency of Continued Reform
Local law enforcement throughout the United States are actively enabling ICE’s widely-criticized measures. This collaborative effort is being fuelled by a refocus on the 287(g) program. First created in 1996, this provision allows ICE to deputize police officers to perform immigration enforcement locally. While it had been used in the past, Trump’s second administration has used this provision to make local police officers instrumental in their deportation agenda.
Just as police budgets continue to rise, the funding allocated to ICE under Trump has also ballooned from less than $6 billion to over $85 billion. This would make it the most well-funded law enforcement agency in the country. This level of funding also does not include the millions in costs to local budgets and lost retail sales in several cities in the wake of ICE ‘takeovers.’
Furthermore, the extent of collaboration between ICE and the prison system is crucial to note, as local jails “provide ICE with both detention space and people to arrest.” To make this connection more overt, Trump’s new appointee for the head of ICE, David Venturella, was the executive of the private prison company GEO Group.
“This is how systemic repression works,” highlights Miguel Alvero Rivera, a Chicago-based organizer. “Corporations exploit migrant workers. Police harass and abuse them. And when workers resist, ICE steps in to finish the job: to take people away from their families, to sow fear in our communities, to attempt to destroy movements.” This extent of police collaboration with federal ICE agents only further stresses that significant changes to policing are necessary.
Chicago & The Nationwide Successes of Harm Reduction Over Policing
Against this national backdrop of increased police and ICE funding, activists and organizers in places like Chicago have worked to bring public safety reforms to the forefront of local politics. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s platform was built on what he termed ‘Treatment not Trauma’, allocating resources to send mental health professionals on 911 calls, alongside investments in trauma centres, support for victims of domestic violence, housing, jobs, and more.
(Photo via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED)
Almost three years after his election, crime rates are down over 20%. Furthermore, Johnson has signalled that collaboration with ICE will not come above public safety. He signed an executive order in January of 2026 ordering local law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute misconduct by ICE operatives within the city, including the killing of Silvero Villego Gonzales and the shooting of Marimar Martinez.
Chicago is not an outlier, either. In cities where progressive reforms like Chicago’s have been tried, such as in Austin and Seattle, crime rates have fallen. Conversely, in cities that have increased police funding while slashing progressive policies, like Atlanta and Oakland, crime has surged.
Reformist Reforms & The Path to Public Safety
Just as New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani has had to backtrack on his campaign promises of diverting police resources due to public pressure, so too has Brandon Johnson, undercutting his own stated goal of eventually defunding the police.
The policies of these mayors have consisted of what activists call “reformist reforms.” These measures are defined by the abolitionist organization, Critical Resistance, as any reforms to policing that do not “reduce overall funding, challenge the notion that police increase public safety, reduce tools/tactics/technology police have at their disposal, or reduce the overall scale of policing.” They identify body cameras, community policing, more training, civilian oversight boards, and prosecution of ‘individual bad actors’ as examples of reformist reforms.
Yet by demonstrating that more officers do not equate to higher safety, these policies have still made strides toward harm reduction and community health. As Chicago-based organizer Benji Hart told Truthout, “We know this has nothing to do with protecting our communities, because policing, militarization, criminalization, and incarceration are never about that.” As he continues, “What we want are the things that have actually been successful in lowering violence and lowering harm in our neighborhoods. And that’s violence prevention programs. That’s housing, that’s well-paying jobs, that’s health care, that’s public spaces.”
Measures like those taken in Chicago are small steps, but they demonstrate that holistic approaches to public safety can work at scale.
The Future of Policing Alternatives
Defunding the police remains a politically dangerous idea; the mere mention of it continues to create major controversy and backlash from people who assume that less police makes people less safe. Even if well-intentioned, this criticism has shut down discussions about the viable alternatives proposed by activists and organizers from across the country.
As ICE continues to ramp up its deportation efforts at the cost of Americans’ civil liberties, now is a crucial time to revisit the aims of the ‘defund the police’ movement. Policing needs non-reformist reforms, such as suspending paid administrative leave for officers under investigation, capping overtime, and withdrawing police from militarization programs. These policies, among others, are what activists have highlighted would free up public funds to instead go toward spending on community health, education, and affordable housing that actually make cities safer in the long-term.
Edited by Chelsea Bean
