LGBTQ+ perspectives on police reform: An examination of support for defunding, reallocating, and disbanding, a research note

Abstract

The murder of George Floyd in 2020 catalyzed a national discussion about policing, including calls to #DefundthePolice that recently manifested in the 2024 national election as presidential candidates debated competing approaches to achieving public safety and police reform. The well-documented “race gap” in views of the police was apparent in this discussion, whereas the views of another minoritized community with a long history of being subjected to police violence, the LGBTQ+ community, were imperceptible. This research examines LGBTQ+ people’s support for police reform. Using data from a national probability survey, we find LGBTQ+ people express more support than non-LGBTQ+ people do for three types of reform: defunding the police, reallocating police funds, and disbanding the police. For both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ people, the predicted probabilities for supporting reallocating police funds are higher than for defunding the police and disbanding the police. Within the LGBTQ+ population, the predicted probability for each type of reform is highest for nonbinary people, generally followed by those who are young, of color, and liberal. The findings related to the LGBTQ+ population are foundational to understanding how different segments of the LGBTQ+ community orient to police and prospects for reform.