Defund, Abolish, or Reform: MSW Student Perceptions of Police Reform

This study investigates the role of critical reflection on endorsing police reform options: increasing police budgets, defunding the police, and police abolition. Data come from a self-administered survey of a sample of geographically and racially diverse MSW students. There were 492 responses from 24 different states, with 53.5% of respondents enrolled in Californian social work programs. ​​Using multinomial logistic regression with a latent variable representing critical reflection as a predictor, we find that low levels of critical reflection were associated with endorsing increasing police budgets (AOR = 0.1, p < .001). Yet, while 50.2% of sampled MSW students endorsed defunding and reallocating to social services (defunding the police), at the highest levels of critical reflection, the probability of endorsing either defunding the police or police abolition is below 20%. In all, highly critically reflective social work students reject funding the police; however, there are limitations in connecting their awareness of inequality and racial injustice to structural remedies. The implication is that preparing social work students to engage in anti-racist policy practice may require explicit conversations about racial attitudes.