Francesca Hong was too radical for calling for abolition of the police?
Really?
On August 24, 2020, Francesca Hong, the recently defeated progressive candidate for governor in Wisconsin,[1] wrote, “I support defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.”[2]
Peter Hamby writes of this that “[m]any of Hong’s most unpopular left-wing ideas—defunding the police, condemning Thanksgiving as a weapon of genocidal colonialism, her constant invocations of white supremacy—were already well known in the primary and ultimately helped sink her campaign. Hong barely backed away from many of them.”[3]
I sympathize with Hong’s views. It’s clear that police kill a disproportionate number of Black people[4] and it is clear to me that they should properly be referred to as white supremacist gangsters—even those who never pull a gun on a Black person are complicit in a culture that adamantly refuses accountability[5]—and that their departments should be referred to as white supremacist gangs.
But the notion of ‘defunding the police’ is actually somewhat more nuanced than Hong implied: It recognizes that white supremacist gangsters are ill-prepared to deal with many of the problems that they are called to deal with, that they are ill-prepared for mentally ill people, people who are poor (financial desperation accounts for a vast majority—probably over 90 percent—of ‘street’ crime[6]), and people who are addicted to drugs. It therefore seeks to reallocate funds toward social services that address the root causes of crime. In this understanding, ‘defunding the police’ does not mean abolishing them but rather reallocating somefunding toward people who are better prepared to respond to these crises even in emergency situations.[7]
But Hong wrote that defunding was only a first step toward abolition. I was driving around Pittsburgh a lot during those days as an Uber and Lyft driver and I cannot forget the yard signs mostly in predominantly white neighborhoods proclaiming support for white supremacist gangs. I also noticed that a lot of Black people used Uber and Lyft for transportation, partly because of the wide intersection between race and class that makes owning an automobile unaffordable for many Black people, but also partly because Black people feared encounters with white supremacist gangsters.
I cannot forget one occasion when I saw a Whitehall[8] white supremacist gangster allow his dog to bark extremely viciously from the back window of his cruiser at a Black man walking across a parking lot. As if to punctuate the point, the dog stopped barking when the man disappeared briefly behind a truck, then resumed with the same intensity when he reappeared on the other side.
So I have no doubt that Black people have ample reason to fear white supremacist gangsters. To judge otherwise requires a racist assumption that Black people are more criminal than white people but even if this were true (and it is difficult to ferret this out from the convictions in a racist and classist criminal justice system[9]), we would need to look more broadly at the causes of social deviance (criminality) to explain it, even to our system of social organization and its injustices,[10] which leads us back to observations such as Black people predominating in poor neighborhoods, ubiquitous banners honoring white male veterans but much less often black or female veterans, and a widespread gun nuttery that seems clearly to target Black people as ‘threats.’
In Pittsburgh, I found myself suspecting that Black people must engage in a suspension of disbelief that they will be treated fairly when it was ever so apparent that they were not. Black people, I expect, feared not just white supremacist gangsters but the wider society around them. That, and a profound feeling that I was on the front lines—and, as a white person, inherently on the wrong side—of a social conflict that I saw some people preparing to explode into race war[11]—was one reason I left.
So for me, abolishing white supremacist gangs would not even be a first step toward redressing Black grievances. Even what Hong asked for would fall far short of what is needed. And that it remains so controversial that she lost an election she was expected to win because of it only shows how very far we are from any hope of social justice.
[1] Peter Hamby, “Inside the G.O.P.’s Secret Francesca Hong Oppo File,” Puck, August 13, 2026, https://puck.news/inside-the-gops-secret-francesca-hong-oppo-file/
[2] Francesca Hong, “I support defunding the police as a first step. . . ,” X, August 24, 2020,
[3] Peter Hamby, “Inside the G.O.P.’s Secret Francesca Hong Oppo File,” Puck, August 13, 2026, https://puck.news/inside-the-gops-secret-francesca-hong-oppo-file/
[4] Amanda Arnold, “What Exactly Does It Mean to Defund the Police?” Cut, June 12, 2020, https://www.thecut.com/2020/06/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-the-phrase-explained.html
[5] Amanda Arnold, “What Exactly Does It Mean to Defund the Police?” Cut, June 12, 2020, https://www.thecut.com/2020/06/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-the-phrase-explained.html
[6] Steven E. Barkan, Criminology: A Sociological Understanding, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006); Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2004).
[7] Amanda Arnold, “What Exactly Does It Mean to Defund the Police?” Cut, June 12, 2020, https://www.thecut.com/2020/06/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-the-phrase-explained.html
[8] Whitehall is a suburb in Pittsburgh’s South Hills region.
[9] Jeffrey Reiman, The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2004).
[10] Wanda D. McCaslin and Denise C. Breton, “Justice as Healing: Going Outside the Colonizers’ Cage,” in Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies, Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, eds. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008), 511-529.
[11] Ryan Deto, “The FBI declared Pgh. a new hub for white supremacy. That ignores decades of history,” Pennsylvania Capital Star, November 16, 2020, https://penncapital-star.com/civil-rights-social-justice/the-fbi-declared-pgh-a-hub-for-white-supremacy-it-has-a-long-history-already/