INDIANAPOLIS (WTHR) - Protesters in central Indiana and across the country are calling for "defunding" police departments, which conjures up images of a city with no officers at all.
But TieJen Demirel-Pegg, an associate professor of political science at IUPUI said, "defunding police is a very unfortunate choice of words...It implies a police force does not exist. That you're going to take all their funding so they can't do their jobs."
She said the "defunding movement" is more about reorganizing police departments and getting back to basics.
"It takes away some of the responsibilities police themselves feel they do too much of," Demirel-Pegg said.
For example, instead of police responding to calls involving people who are homeless or who have overdosed, she said those responsibilities and budget dollars might be shifted to social workers and health care providers.
"The argument is they will still do what they're trained to do...you have an intruder, you call police and they respond so there will be law and order," she said.
Democratic City-County Councilor William Oliver is a member of the council's Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee.
He said while there "a lot of things are on the table for discussion" when it comes to policing, he doesn't see Indianapolis doing what the Minneapolis council did when it voted to "defund" its police department.
Oliver said, as far as he's concerned, "that is not on the table whatsoever...It's a specific situation we're trying to address...It's not the reforms, it's not the other things that led us where we have to do more of this and more of that and we'll be OK. No, when the law is broken, when someone robs a liquor store or shoots their next door neighbor or puts their knee on someone's neck, they're breaking the law, they're brought to justice and prosecuted."
But Oliver also said Indianapolis must do more to address racism and racial disparities.
"How can we address that a piece at a time, start tweaking and different things to change going forward," he said.
With the recent calls to "defund the police," the Indianapolis Fraternal Order of Police hopes the city won't fall into what they call a "regressive model."
"While the raw emotion and anger over systemic injustices is real and valid, such a concept is counterproductive to what is our overall collective objective: Fair and Impartial Policing," the FOP said in a statement.
"Mayor Hogsett must commit to reimagining the role police play in our city and that role has to be smaller, more circumscribed, and less funded with tax-payer dollars," Jane Henegar, executive director of the ACLU of Indiana said in a statement.