In my home state, there is a fascinating gubernatorial primary race featuring the former Chief of Police in Detroit, James Craig. When he was in that role, he struck me as an acceptable policeman, and in conversations with black folks in Detroit, most felt safe from police officers in our city. Now, he is running for governor, on a highly Republican platform, and in Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, he revived discussion over the phrase Defund the Police, to bipartisan applause.

What I find missing from conversations regarding defunding the police is what it actually entails and looks like in areas where crime is visible. I live in a city known as having high rates of crime, though I have found it quite safe, and we live in an era of relatively low crime. But, here, as elsewhere, people routinely break laws, and sometimes it leads to community consternation. And after George Floyd was murdered, many healthy conversations about whether to “defund the police” were had. I felt blessed to engage in these conversations having had meditated, and practiced suspending my judgement and thought.

I will never forget the morning my wife and I discussed the “Defund the Police” argument over breakfast, and I stupidly asked, “What, are you going to just let people speed down the road and not pull them over?”, to the gentle din of cars speeding down one of our cities main throughfares, past a police station. After this rhetorical blunder, I realized that we have cast so many of our collective social problems as issues which can be fixed by police, traffic being one.

My neighborhood had suffered from speeders careening down streets at shocking rates, leading to many residents losing vehicles to hit and runs, and one neighbor being struck by a car. For years, we requested the city install speed humps, but city officials routinely misled residents claiming they could damage snow plows and impede emergency vehicles. Often, in the summer months, they would “increase patrols” to address racing. In our neighborhood, this led to absolutely no change in observed behavior. Finally, after many resident complaints and requests, the city began installing speed humps, and this program has become one of the most popular programs in the city. We have them on our street, and they have definitely and thankfully reduced speeding in our neighborhood. And they require exactly zero police officers to maintain. The problem of speeding, which had been cast in the light of a criminal problem to be solved by police, has actually been fixed by the public works department.

We deal with another problem which would benefit from a re-examination outside of the context of policing. Near my neighborhood, prostitution is common, and very unfortunate. Several times I have seen women in extremely dire circumstances, dressed to various levels, clearly influenced by drugs and trauma. I view this situation as one of public safety, and would love to have my municipal government help keep those involved safe and offer a pathway out of this situation. But the only publicly funded phone number I have to call is the police, and I do not view the women involved as engaged in criminal behavior. So a reform of the notion of public safety would be helpful.

Many others much brighter than I have helped me understand the concepts and history of “defunding the police”, and what it really means. As a phrase it does not have a lot of support, and it is not right to cast all police officers as a problem. But what does this have to do with meditation? From meditating for over a decade, the greatest benefit I have discovered is a major reduction in the impulse to respond instinctively and aggressively to the suggestions of others. This manifests as an open-minded approach to life, and problem solving. It’s amazing how focusing on the need to refrain from thought in meditation translates to an ability to refrain from judgement of the words of others, to an ability to refrain from reacting to the political arguments of others. If we lived in a world where more people did this, we might get more effective solutions.