Professor Michael Fortner

Articles by: Professor Michael Fortner

From protest to problems: Minneapolis and the political limitations of the #defund ‘causal story’

14th May 2021

Prof Michael Fortner, City University of New York

OPINION: Levels of violent crime across America saw an unprecedented increase in 2020, and remain worryingly high in 2021; in this latest essay from the Violence Reduction Project, Professor Michael Fortner of City University of New York explores the political limitations of the ‘causal story’ attached to #defund and why a blended reform approach rather than the moral clarity of police abolition will save more lives.

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Professor Michael Fortner
Assistant Professor of Political Science, CUNY

Profile
Dr Michael Javen Fortner is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). He is also a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. He received a BA in political science and African American studies from Emory University and a PhD in government and social policy from Harvard University. His work studies the intersection of American public policy and political philosophy – particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and class. He is the author of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment (Harvard University Press, 2015), a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and winner of the New York Academy of History’s Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History. Along with Amy Bridges, he edited a volume on city politics, Urban Citizenship and American Democracy (SUNY Press, 2016). His scholarly articles have appeared in Studies in American Political Development, the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Policy History, and Urban Affairs Review. He has also been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, and Dissent magazine.