Since the Black Lives Matter, or BLM, movement gained ground in 2020, the discussion of reforms to police practices nationally has gained prominent public attention. There have been many proposals canonized into now well-known phrases like “Defund the Police” and “Abolish the Police.”
The approach of defunding the police aims to divert funds from police forces to other crime-preventative services and highlight the militarized nature of police in general.
Even at the local level, police departments consume sizable percentages of a city’s operating budget, with that amount increasing yearly without fail — and largely blindly. Law enforcement operates in a backward manner compared to other city departments by organizing operations around utilizing their increased funds instead of addressing a pre-recognized necessity.
Abolishing the police suggests the founding of new services to more specifically address the collection of situations singular police forces tend to now. It also calls out the origin of the force as slave patrol deputies who have evolved into tools of the state to prioritize the protection of private capital. In this view, those who do not own significant capital are simply just funding a force that sees the general public as subjects to intimidate and be skeptical of.
Iowa City is a part of this movement. The Iowa City Police Department, or ICPD, is one of the most well-funded departments of the city. Since its own localized BLM movement in the same year, these sentiments have remained present and are still a subject of conversation today despite prior failed attempts to restructure the department.
Locally, two figures on the Iowa City City Council continue to represent this desire. Councilmember Laura Bergus, who has served on the council since 2020, has spent her time on the council promoting the diversion of police department funds to services that would aid the community.
“For a lot of members of our community, policing is not necessarily safe. It doesn’t bring them security — it doesn’t enable them to thrive in whatever areas of their lives they’re looking to improve,” Bergus said.
Having won her most recent election in 2023 with 66 percent of the vote, her stance is highly favored. Additionally, the recent popular election of Councilmember Oliver Weilein, whose campaign explicitly criticized policing institutions and practices, supports that this vein of the population refuses to be ignored.
At a recent city council meeting, several members of the community spoke both in support of and against the increase to the city’s proposed 2026 budget that would increase the police department’s funds by $876,010.
Though some concerns were certainly more valid than others, everyone that showed up had a point in that their demands should be seriously considered as taxpayers that fund the Department as a whole.
With both sides of the aisle present, the best way to consider them equally is to pause the increase entirely — a budget stagnation.
The status quo would be the continued increase of the department’s funds, but with much uncertainty on the horizon of policing, there is no better time than now to reconsider blind budget increases.
New policing demands are coming from the state legislature as well as the federal government. State legislative demands will include enforcing laws against our valued transgender community members in spaces that are no longer able to acknowledge their identities, and federal demands would make common police officers also immigration enforcement officials. With changes like these, a blind increase in the department’s funding would only increase their ability to enforce laws which no one can anticipate the consequences of.
Without demanding the city surrender any power allotted to the goons of its agenda and the pending abolition of local Police Review Boards, a budget stagnation is the best way to hear out all of these prominent desires in the community.
Moves in this direction would obviously never happen if the police were being asked this of themselves. This is why budget proposals are approved by a separate council that has no obligation to bend to the desire of the department. If the City Council is meant to serve the community just as well as the institutions beneath them, then stagnation is the most common-sense way to do that.
Constituents have engaged with both the democratic process and their rightful platform to make their demands known. As the measure to stagnate the budget did not pass when proposed at the April 15 meeting, the next opportunity to make changes will come after the 2026 fiscal year begins on July 1. It’s time the City Council listened.
It’s a given that the ICPD will not be happy about such a measure, but frankly, police in general could use the humbling.
“It is unnecessary for those individuals, never mind anyone, to be armed with such lethal force,” Bergus said.
In an economy that is asking more of working-class people with no additional resources in sight, what kind of precedent does it set that this is never expected of police?
And with so much in the future of policing at stake, if not now, when?