Skip to content

Monday, Jun 8, 2020

Did the idea of defunding the police originate with Antifa activists?

Eric Smith, Gigafact Foundry
no

Antifa refers to a loose affiliation of left-wing activists that rose to prominence in the United States in 2017. The idea of "defunding" the police–which is being used to refer variously to reforming, restructuring or reallocating police funding to other needs, or even abolishing the police outright–dates to well before then.

Books and publications advocating for a radical shift in the law enforcement and penal systems began to circulate years before the Antifa movement, spurred by leading activists like Angela Davis. Critical Resistance, for instance, an organization that advocates for police and prison abolition, was founded in 1997.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.