The City Planners' Case for Defunding the Police
More than 650 urban planning professionals signed a letter connecting design decisions to criminal justice outcomes.
The construction of highways — a frequent site of police protests — bisected or isolated many African American communities.
Photographer: David Ryder/Getty Images
A group of several hundred urban planners is calling for the largest U.S. planning organization to support defunding the police.
While this kind of reform may seem in the purview of criminal justice policymakers, the planners lay out in a letter to the American Planning Association how neighborhoods that were racially segregated by a range of planning policies have become further denigrated by police violence and harassment of Black people — and that planners have done little historically to help change this dynamic.