If the DSA Gets Its Way, American Policing Ends - By Chief Tom Weitzel (Ret.)

I usually stay out of party politics. Thirty-seven years in this profession, thirteen of them as chief of police in Riverside, Illinois, taught me that a chief who picks partisan sides loses half the room before he has said a word. I am making an exception, because this is not a debate about tax rates or zoning. It is a platform that, if implemented, would end American policing as an institution. I do not think enough voters have read it closely enough to understand that.

The Democratic Socialists of America has a platform. It is public. You can read it yourself. On policing, it does not hedge.

What the platform actually says

Strip away the campaign-trail softening some candidates apply to it, and the DSA’s own language is not shy. The organization’s current national program, Workers Deserve More!, includes a section titled “End Mass Incarceration and Police Immunity.”

Demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor. Treat drug addiction and mental illness as health issues, not crimes. End qualified immunity and empower civilian oversight bodies with real authority over the police.

That is not a media paraphrase. That is the program.

DSA’s 2021 political platform and its abolition working group went further still: cut police budgets annually toward zero, decertify or disempower police unions, end qualified immunity, demilitarize departments, and treat abolition of police and prisons as the horizon, not a slogan. National leaders have described defunding and abolition as a long-term goal, with police and prison abolition treated as one project rather than two separate debates.

Layer on the specifics that have circulated from DSA working groups and platform language over the past several years: eliminating qualified immunity, stripping departments of surplus military equipment, disarming officers, and shifting remaining authority to civilian oversight bodies with real power over the police. Redirect dollars now spent on patrol officers, detectives, and 911 response into mental health services, drug treatment, housing, and other public services instead.

I want to be fair. Some of those ideas, in isolation, are not crazy. Every chief I know supports more funding for mental-health response. I certainly did in Riverside. Co-responder models, crisis intervention teams, better addiction treatment: none of that is controversial among serious law-enforcement leaders. The problem is not that the DSA wants those things. The problem is that it wants them instead of a police department, not alongside one.

What this does to the profession — step by step

Three and a half decades on this job taught me that a police department cannot function without three things: adequate funding, legal protections for officers doing dangerous work in good faith, and a command structure with actual authority. Taken as written, the DSA program and its related abolition agenda remove all three at once, in a compounding sequence. Walk through it with me.

Step one: bleed the budget. Redirect police funding to other services as a standing policy, and treat that redirection as a step toward abolition. That is not a one-time trim. It is permanent contraction. Every year means fewer detectives on cold cases, fewer officers on patrol, fewer training hours, and older equipment. A department does not collapse in year one under that model. It erodes, budget cycle by budget cycle, until a city wakes up and realizes it can no longer staff a night shift.

Step two: strip the legal protections. Eliminate qualified immunity, and every officer on the street is one split-second decision away from personal financial ruin, even when that decision was reasonable, trained, and lawful at the moment it was made. You will not get more careful policing out of that. You will get officers who hesitate at the exact moment hesitation gets someone killed, and you will get a mass exodus of anyone who can leave for a department or a profession that does not carry that exposure. The ones who stay are disproportionately the ones with fewer options. That is not “better policing.”

Step three: gut the unions. “Disempower police unions,” in the current program; decertify them, in earlier DSA demands. Either way, you weaken or remove the last institutional mechanism officers have to negotiate pay, safety-equipment standards, and due-process protections. Departments do not become more accountable when this happens. They become more chaotic, because the union is often the only body with the standing and resources to push back on genuinely bad policy before it is enacted. Remove that check, and city hall faces little organized resistance to whatever comes next.

Step four: demilitarize, then hollow out. Strip departments of surplus military equipment and the protective and tactical gear officers use in active-shooter and hostage scenarios, and you are not just ending photo-ops with armored vehicles. You are taking away tools that keep officers and civilians alive in rare but catastrophic calls. Combined with defunding and legal exposure, you no longer have a police department in any functional sense. You have a weakened civilian force with less cover, less equipment, and less capacity. That is the destination the platform names: abolition, not reform.

Step five: hand authority to the board. Empower civilian oversight bodies with “real authority over the police,” and the chain of command changes. Oversight is not the same thing as running a scene. Every chief I know answers to a mayor, a board, or a city manager. That is democracy. What the platform describes is different: civilian bodies with authority over the police as a step toward abolishing the institution itself. Decisions that used to take seconds start taking a meeting. Command becomes a figurehead function.

The compounding effect

None of these steps happens in isolation. That is the point. They reinforce one another. A department bleeding funding cannot offer competitive pay to offset the legal risk officers now carry. A department that has lost its union has no leverage to slow the other steps down. By the time you reach demilitarization and committee control, there is no department left in any functional sense — just a hollowed-out agency, understaffed, underfunded, legally exposed, under-equipped, and answerable to a body that did not build the profession and is not trying to preserve it. That is not police reform. That is the sequential dismantling of a profession, described by its architects in their own program, in their own words.

Cities that pursued even partial versions of this experiment saw what you would predict: officers left, recruiting dried up, and it took longer for help to arrive.

Start with Chicago. Sworn staffing fell from about 13,180 officers in September 2019 to 11,602 by July 2025 — more than 1,500 officers gone, and still more than 2,000 below the budgeted force. One in six officers hired since 2016 is already off the payroll. Resignations jumped 206 percent from 2020 to 2021. City Hall did not adopt the full DSA program, but it did leave vacancies unfilled, eliminate hundreds of vacant officer slots, and later slow academy classes to save money. The department has been plugging the hole with overtime.

In Minneapolis, sworn staffing fell from about 920 officers in 2019 to 583 by March 2025, bottoming out near 560 in 2024 — the lowest level in at least four decades, and well below the city charter minimum of 713. Priority-1 response times rose from about six minutes in 2020 to eight minutes and 29 seconds in 2025. Sworn investigators dropped from 161 to 91, a 43 percent cut. In the year after 2020, Reuters found that priority 911 response was already about 40 percent slower.

Portland cut authorized sworn strength from 1,001 in 2019 to 916 in 2020. Actual staffing later dipped to 773, the lowest count since 1989. Before 2020, high-priority response averaged eight to ten minutes. A 2026 city staffing report put the average wait for those calls at about 20 minutes — more than double — even as overall calls fell. The same report found that about 80 percent of child-abuse cases were going unassigned.

Austin’s council cut about one-third of the police budget in 2020, canceled cadet classes, and eliminated vacant officer slots. Within a year, “hotshot” emergency response times were up about 30 percent, and the department stopped sending officers to some non-emergency calls. The council later restored funding after crime rose and Texas law penalized cities that defunded police. That reversal is the point: the experiment did not survive contact with the street.

Seattle did not empty the police budget, but it did shrink the department’s role after 2020 and then spent years trying to climb out. Deployable staffing fell from a peak near 1,300 officers to well under 1,000. Patrol ranks dropped from 694 in September 2020 to about 490. The city is still hiring against that hole.

New York never adopted the full DSA program. It still felt the staffing shock. NYPD headcount fell from about 36,900 in 2019 into the low 34,000s, and critical-call response slowed from 4 minutes 42 seconds in FY 2019 to 7 minutes in FY 2024 — a 49 percent increase. Waits on serious but non-critical jobs rose from seven minutes to more than 11.

Ask any chief who lived through a serious defunding or “reimagining” push in 2020 and 2021 what happened to staffing over the next two years. Now imagine that same trajectory, not walked back after a bad news cycle, but locked in as standing policy: funding redirected, immunity gone, unions weakened or gone, equipment stripped, and the chain of command answering to a civilian board committed to abolition. That is the endpoint if this platform is ever fully implemented. It is not an exaggeration. It is a plain reading of what the document says it wants to do.

Elections matter, and so does the fine print

DSA-aligned candidates are winning primaries. Some of them, to their credit, already distance themselves from the national program’s more extreme planks when a microphone is in front of them — publicly rejecting defund-the-police, calling parts of the platform impractical. That inconsistency should tell you something: even people running under the DSA banner know this program does not survive contact with actual governing. But primaries are won on the base’s terms, and national conventions write platforms, not individual candidates’ talking points. If the wing of the party that wrote this document ever holds real institutional power — city councils, mayoralties, state legislatures with the votes to act — the distance between a candidate’s soundbite and the national program’s actual text will matter enormously.

I have spent my career defending officers who do this job honestly, under enormous pressure, for modest pay. I have also spent it pushing for real reform where departments deserved criticism, because there is plenty of that too. What I am not willing to do is stay quiet while a platform this explicit about ending my profession is treated as a fringe curiosity rather than a governing plan.

Elections matter. Read the platform yourself before you vote.

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About Tom Weitzel, Awake Illinois Fellow of Law Enforcement:

Tom Weitzel retired from the Riverside, Illinois, Police Department in May 2021 after 37 years in law enforcement, including 13 years as Chief of Police. Tom Weitzel is an Awake Illinois Fellow of Law Enforcement. He is an Illinois ambassador for the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund and serves on the advisory board of Citizens Behind the Badge in McLean, Virginia.The opinions expressed are his own. He can be reached at tqweitzel@outlook.com and followed on X at @chiefweitzel.

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