From the ACLU, this is at Liberty, a podcast about the civil rights and civil liberties questions of our time.

I'm Molly Kaplan, your host for this episode.

Since the protest decrying, the murder of George Floyd began in May, the institution of American policing has taken center stage.

Activists are calling for change, and their demands are being heard in cities across the country.

You've likely heard the phrase defund the police, a slogan that describes both slashing police

budgets and reinvesting that money into black and brown communities through affordable

housing, health care, job training programs, and more. But as the weeks

have passed, chance to defund the police have been joined by a more radical call, abolish the police.

What would it look like not just to lessen the footprint of police in our communities, but to

eliminate that presence altogether? Joining me to break down abolition and how we are thinking about it at the

ACLU, our attorney, author, researcher, and organizer, Andrea Ritchie, and senior staff attorney

for the ACLU's Trone Center for Justice, Carl, to Kay. Andrea, Carl, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having us. Thanks. Good to be here. Good to have you. The first sort of groundwork

we want to lay is definitions. Can you, Andrea, to start, explain to us, what is the difference

between defund the police and abolition? Well, one is a step or potentially a step on the way to the

other. So defunding the police

certainly means reducing police budgets, but it also means reducing the scope of police work,

reducing police contact, reducing police equipment, reducing police power. And the goal is to

invest in the things that will actually keep us safe rather than continuing to invest in policing,

which not only has proven to be a source of tremendous violence, not only deadly violence,

but physical, sexual violence, but also a source of vast criminalization and foreclosed opportunity as a result.

And instead, to invest in the things that communities need to be safe and to be

...