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.