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The murder of George Floyd focused the nation’s attention on policing as a social justice issue. Advocates for police reform have advanced three options: 1) defunding police departments and reallocating to social services to make communities safer, 2) increasing police budgets to fund trainings and programs, and 3) police abolition. While these positions are distinct, they reflect an understanding that police killings are not isolated events, but rather, are indicative of a systematic failure to provide equal protection under the law. In other words, one’s attitudes toward police reform may be associated with one’s awareness of inequality. Understanding how MSW students’ awareness of inequality is associated with these reform options may help educators prepare students for ethical social work practice.
Methods
Data come from a self-administered survey of a sample of geographically and racially diverse MSW students. There was a total of 435 responses from 24 different states, with 55% of respondents enrolled in Californian social work programs. Respondents were asked about their awareness of inequality and police reform as follows: What is the best way to deal with the problem of police brutality and shootings? Respondents were asked to place themselves on a 7-point Likert scale, with 1 labeled reduce police budgets and reallocate to social services and 7 Increase budgets to pay for trainings and programs. Respondents indicated endorsement of abolition by selecting I think abolishing the police is the best way. Data were analyzed in Mplus version 8.9 and multinominal logistic regression was used to assess the relationship between the latent construct of awareness of inequality and police reform approaches: defunding, increased funding, being in between defunding and increased funding, and abolition.
Results
Awareness of inequality indicated good fit (CFI/TLI = .997/.990; RMSEA = .043; 90% CI .000, .114) and acceptable reliability. As for police reform positions, 52.3% felt that defunding was an appropriate solution, 24.8% believed that increasing police budgets was viable, 14.5% described themselves as in between those two options, and 8.4% rejected both options as a solution and stated that abolition was the best approach. Awareness of inequality was a significant predictor of these positions. MSW students with higher levels of awareness of inequality had lower odds of believing that defunding the police (AOR = .105, p = .047), funding the police (AOR = .025, p = .002), and being between those two options (AOR = .048, p = .010) relative to endorsing police abolition. Thus, MSW students with higher levels of awareness of inequality are more likely to endorse abolition as a solution to police brutality and shootings relative to the other options.
Conclusion and Implications
Awareness of inequality is associated with each police reform option. However, greater awareness of inequality results in increased support for police abolition relative to the other options. For social work educators, this suggests that support for policy positions may involve connecting student’s understanding of inequality to specific policy positions/interventions. Moreover, social work educators should recognize the importance of including abolitionist perspectives in discussions concerning police reform.