Defund What Is Failing

“Defund the police” was never really the problem.

The problem was that a serious moral argument got flattened into a slogan simple enough for enemies to weaponize and allies to misunderstand. Most people heard “abolish safety.” What many activists were actually arguing was far more complicated: stop pouring endless public money into systems that repeatedly fail at the work they claim to do, and start investing in the conditions that make people safer in the first place.

That argument reaches far beyond policing.

We keep funding institutions that preserve themselves while communities collapse around them. We protect bureaucracy, ceremony, branding, administration, and optics — then act shocked when ordinary people are still hungry, alienated, exhausted, over-policed, spiritually hollowed out, and unable to imagine a future worth building.

Take policing itself.

There are moments that require force. There are dangerous situations. But modern policing has become a dumping ground for every unresolved social failure: untreated mental illness, addictions, homelessness, trauma, poverty, loneliness, and community breakdown. We send armed strangers to manage problems created by decades of political neglect, then call that public safety.

Fund crisis teams. Fund housing. Fund addictions treatment. Fund violence interruption programs. Fund schools that form people instead of processing them. Fund young builders before hopelessness hardens into rage.

Less management. More mentors.

Less surveillance. More opportunity.

The same pattern exists everywhere else.

Too many schools produce compliance instead of imagination.

Too many churches protect institutions more fiercely than they feed people.

Too many governments preserve rituals of power while ignoring the human beings crushed underneath them.

Even the monarchy survives this way: wrapping conquest and class hierarchy in velvet, music, nostalgia, and sacred language until people forget what empire actually cost. Canada itself sits on treaties that were repeatedly broken, manipulated, or ignored. To speak honestly about that is not radicalism. It is historical adulthood.

This is the deeper issue.

We have confused institutional survival with moral legitimacy.

But an institution does not deserve to survive simply because it is old, expensive, emotionally familiar, or wrapped in respectable language.

If a system cannot feed people, shelter people, heal people, educate people, protect people, or tell the truth about itself, then eventually the public has the right to ask a brutal question:

Why are we still funding this at all?