Unbundle the Police

As anti-police protests sweep across the country and the world, many people seeing signs, Instagram posts, and articles proclaiming Defund the Police have the same reaction: Yes! Followed swiftly by: So, how exactly does that work?

Fair question. The U.S. is an unusually violent country with more guns than citizens. Entirely defunding, or abolishing, police departments tomorrow would not abolish that violence or vaporize the guns that accompany so much of it.

But here’s one way to frame the challenge before the #Defund movement: Unbundle the police.

The #Unbundle concept, first coined by the music entrepreneur Trevor McFedries, is best thought of not as an alternative to defunding but as a kind of framework to see how bloated modern police work has become—and how