The riots that followed Goerge Floyd's death spread from Minneapolis to many American cities around the demand to cut funding to police departments.

In fact, the slogan Defund Police is gaining more and more vigour among those who protest and recall the interweaving that has been consolidated in recent decades between increasingly pervasive and aggressive forms of urban policing - especially towards young people, marginal categories and minorities - and the continuous growth of expenditure for police departments (not so much for personnel but above all for military style equipment and surveillance technologies) to the detriment of social and educational programmes.

The Center for Popular Democracy has calculated the percentage of municipal budget for the police of many American cities and revealed that in the last thirty years, both nationally and locally, governments have dramatically increased spending on urban security and penitentiary field by cutting investments in basic infrastructure, social security and prevention programs. The increasing public spending on police is confirmed in a study held by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy's Fiscally Standardized Cities recently recalled by the New York Times. The Center for Popular Democracy report, which can be consulted online, contains data updated to 2020 and supports the need to rebalance municipal budgets, on which non-federal police agencies depend, allocating resources for young people and minorities.

Although some immediate results have been obtained (i.e. in Minneapolis, New York and Los Angeles), it is in doubt that uprisings are really able to reverse the course of criminal policies firmly supported in many years by citizens. As Loic Wacquant said two decades ago, penal state has replaced  welfare state and the police are charged with tasks and functions that should be widespread among different social and educational agencies. 

Reforming the police involves a political program that puts welfare state model at stake. Defunding police could be only the first step but not necessarily the most important one.