Our city is a police state. It doesn’t have to be.
Our city leaders have an obligation to the health and well-being of our communities.
We cannot make meaningful progress without defunding the police.
Every candidate for mayor in this year’s election has a vision of the city that they want you to believe in. But it’s impossible to enact any meaningful progress without taking on the largest resource drain in the city–the Wichita Police Department. No significant movement can be made on the issues of homelessness, the mental health crisis, the continued loss of public space to private interests, or even the tree canopy, so long as the city continues to be bled dry by an insatiable militarized occupying force.
The Ask
Regardless of who is elected mayor, it is certain that they will push to raise the police budget even beyond the enormous sums they already receive. Because police funding cuts into every other opportunity we might have to positively impact our city, it doesn’t really matter what a candidate’s other priorities are–so long as they support increasing police budgets, they will not be able to make meaningful impacts in any other areas of policy.
Rather than go along with the way things are, hoping your preferred candidate somehow finds a way to give the police more money and fund (stone-soup style) anything else, let’s acknowledge our impossible situation and call it out at the ballot box.
This election, instead of voting for a mayoral candidate, write in “Defund for Mayor”. Send a message to the city that regardless of who sits in the mayor’s seat, we demand a significant reduction in the Wichita Police Department’s budget. Along with that reduction, we expect an increase in those social services that benefit our city from poorest to richest: public transit, parks, libraries, public health, civic engagement, ongoing education and recreation.
We can have everything if we abolish the police.