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Comment by eric_b | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of people saying "Defund the police doesn't mean no police". Ok, fine.

But it's a shitty slogan that, regardless of actual meaning, is doing more harm than good. Normal people don't get the nuance. To them it just sounds like the "defunders" want to get rid of all police. And normal people think that is a very fucking bad idea.

Do you know what regular people do when they are worried about their safety, children or their property? They vote in candidates who are tough on crime.

I think for meaningful police reform the slogan needs to change. You need to get normal people on board. "Defunding" is not the way to do that.

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I read another comment elsewhere with which I totally agree. I think we're at a tipping point in the US where if the slogan was "End the War on Drugs" you're likely to get majority support, and ending the war on drugs would do more than any single thing to bring about social justice in the US.

Contrast that with "defund the police", the goals of which are amorphous even from its supporters, and if you don't think calls to defund the police are met with stares and questions like "are you insane" in any place besides mid-to-large urban areas in the US, you really need to pop your social bubble.

For better or for worse in a democracy you need to convince the majority (or near majority) of the population over to your side. The slogan "defund the police" is not the way to do it.

Yes! "End the War on Drugs" is exactly the kind of thing that could get meaningful traction and has a relatively concrete set of goals.

Probably still confusing in any place besides mid-to-large urban areas in the US.

Thanks to the opioid epidemic, this is no longer true. There are huge swaths of rural and Rust Belt America that now realize that the criminal justice approach to a drug problem is counter productive.

How about end incarceration for non-violent offenses?

Drugs, Shop-lifting, DUI, Robbery (unarmed), Prostitution, Protesting, etc...

We have tech to monitor ppl wherever they go, we could easily monitor these people w/ ankle bracelets etc and make sure they're behaving. We could require them to go to therapy and figure out the root of why they do what they do, you know what you'd do w/ a child who's acting out and misbehaving....

Maybe we curtail a lot of issues.... Save prison for pedophiles, rapists, murderers, assaults, etc....

That’s actually not true about convincing the majority.

A minority has had outsize political influence in the US for a decade or two now. Because of the electoral college and because of gerrymandering.

Most people are sympathetic to the protests but that doesn't mean there won't be a "law and order" backlash if they feel changes to policing are making them less safe. It's definitely happened before.

OK I admit pique and curiosity at the downvote. There are mathematical models which can be used to measure gerrymandering.

And the way in which the Electoral college disempowers lots of people (a vote in an 8 million person city counts less than one in Ohio, or a small town in Wisconsin) is easily verifiable.

One might disagree with ethical implications which can be drawn from these facts, but, these facts are facts, and there's even math to back it up.

http://math.cmu.edu/~wes/gerrymandering.html

https://math.duke.edu/news/electoral-plot-detecting-gerryman...

How about “Deunionize Police”?

Doesn’t have the same ring, but would solve many of the issues people are protesting about (accountability, etc).

Democrats are unlikely to do that. If de-unionizing police is solution to incompetent cops what is the solution to incompetent schools ?

I think most people do not see most teachers as the basic problem in public schools. E.g. polls show overwhelming support for paying teachers more. The same has been true of police, but less so - Maybe that's changed?

If people perceive most of the workers as the basic problem in addition to the management and the government, which they rarely do, but police may now be an exception, I don't see why the union should be spared.

The problem is that would lead to cognitive dissonance, as the people who want to defund the police also tend to be very pro-union.

I lean libertarian socialist. Big unionist, and I say fuck police unions. End them all.

Personally I'd go with "Reform the Police" or "Police the Police". Or maybe "De-Militarize the Police" which is not the only goal but one with broader support.

How would de-militarizing the police affect the overwhelming racism problem that exists in police departments nationwide?

Just as a slogan, "Reform" is too boring and vague. "Police the police" is catchy but sounds more about oversight, which is not really the idea here. I thought of "Reduce the police", which might get broader support than "defund", but isn't as catchy and maybe still wouldn't get majority support. Polls show the police are still popular, though obviously and justifiably less popular lately. I suspect these calls for defunding (and abolition) are going to scare public opinion back in the other direction, which is a pity, since there really is a reform position to stake out here. For example, I bet even most police offers don't want to be the ones to have to deal with mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. A moderate and non-scary reform movement would surely get massive public support at this time, while a radical one is likely to provoke a counterreaction. It probably always works that way though, and eventually something comes out of it anyhow.

How about “Calm the Police” or “Calm 9-1-1”

Not energetic enough. How about "Replace the police"?

Maybe let BLM pick and setup their own police inspectors and have some oversight over an agency that polices the police. Instead of D.A. handling cop cases it would be members of this agency (they'd have lawyers who handle prosecutions - their own D.A.). Could be on a national or state by state level.

This is worrying to many on the left, since it implies that unions could be bad. The ideologically consistent viewpoint is that the very concept of policing itself is so evil that it taints even associated unions.

Maybe we could reorganize the police as a private enforcement group that wouldn't answer to the courts or constitution?

Sort of like the brownshirts before WWII. [1]

Edit: Youtube took down a video of them back in 2019. [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung

2. https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/youtube-bans-anti-nazi-docum...

That sounds like it goes in the opposite direction, we need police to have MORE not LESS oversight and be under more scrutiny and actually get punished (probably 2-3x the sentence of a non-officer).

And yet, the no-police zone in Seattle is just what I described.

I agree that to a lot of people, defund seems to imply abolish, which is not a great position. On the one hand, I think the word choice is somewhat purposeful, as it's designed to sound extreme and appeal to people who see the police as an extreme problem. On the other hand, it definitely lends itself to purposeful misrepresentation by opponents.

That said, I think given the popularity of the movement, the phrasing doesn't necessarily doom it. It's a popular enough phrase now that it's getting explanatory media coverage (I just saw the last John Oliver, where he explained that defunding the police doesn't mean abolishing them, and there's lots of other articles out there if you Google "defund the police"), and since the idea behind it is good, once people understand it I think there's a reasonable likelihood they get on board.

With all that in mind, I actually still struggle to come up with better phrasing that's both strong enough and also clearer in meaning. The obvious phrase would be "reform the police," but police reform has been talked about too much already and hasn't been effective as previously described, so that's got too much baggage to be good. "Fix the police" could be okay, but it's too general. "Redistribute the police budget to a wider range of services" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. It's a tough one.

Abolish has it's merits, assuming they replace it after abolishing. Abolish is more.... tear down and rebuild back up something similar but re-imagined... maybe following the Swedish model.

But, really the police system is so draconian, might we not be better w/out it than we are now? I mean have you seen the videos of mayhem at the hands of the police, it's hard to think of them at all in a positive light. I mean, did Germany keep the S.S.

Cops are literally murdering, abusing, and going rogue - and may actually be fully infiltrated by purpose by white power extremists.

Some of the cops responsible for Eric Garner dying, actually wore t-shirts saying "I Can Breath" for fuck sake. Mayhem would be better than police inciting of mayhem. All the rioting, looting, etc didn't happen in a vacuum the COPS CAUSED IT by their corrupt actions.

Or phrased another way, meaningful improvements don't fit inside snappy slogans. Which in turn means they don't really fit inside protest movements.

Obama wrote an essay about this. He said the only way to get meaningful change is to get involved in local politics. "Vote in municipal elections" is not a slogan that will appeal to the kinds of people who are fanatical BLM activists though.

But I think it's healthy that actual defunding is on the table now. The police need to be accountable. It may be a solution to the police union problem. Defund, start over without the union.

Exactly, don't start your negotiations with a plan that is already a compromise.

Reforming an institution always costs more money, not less.

The point isn't to save money. It's to force reform by taking away the current police department's money.

(This is an excellent example of why the "defund" slogan is confusing; however, of the other suggestions I've seen in this thread, I haven't seen any that make clear the level of change that's needed.)

What do you expect to happen when you take away their ability to pay for reform?

I can think of a few things that will require more money: better/longer training for officers, and doing more investigations into citizen complaints. That stuff isn't free.

When you defund an organization and at the same time demand it does better, you create a siege mentality among the members of the organization. They will get worse, not better.

At least in the cases where I've heard specifics, the intention is to essentially disband the existing police department and start a new one, that doesn't have the old bad police officers or the old union, protecting them from the consequences of their lawbreaking.

Brilliant.

And whilst you're building a new police force from scratch, who will be doing the policing in the meantime? Who will be appointed to create this new police force and how will they be chosen? What will they do the first time one of their new police officers gets shot? What will the city do if the brand new police force is incompetent because none of them have any experience? And then if they decide to unionise too?

Rebuild it from scratch rarely works out well in software. It's hard to imagine it working better for an entire police force.

Actually, it has been done before and seems to have worked: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/08/872470135/new-police-force-fr...

Well, that's not really building a new police force. She says the new force was largely made up of the same people as the old one. That's re-interviewing/re-assessing everyone, calling it firing+hiring is perhaps meaningful from a legal or contractual perspective, but from an outcomes perspective they could have done a rolling perf review + firings with new management and a big focus on cultural change, whilst preserving continuity of service. There was no discussion that they actually stopped policing for a few months whilst they did this re-assessment, so I suspect they were "fired" in a sense but were being told they'd still have a big chance to get their old jobs back. Otherwise a rolling "fire" and "rehire" wouldn't have worked.

That said whatever they did and whatever it was called, it apparently worked. But I wonder if that was due to this re-culturing vs the more practical aspect of using body cameras.

It doesn't appear to mention it in that article, but one aspect that gets brought up a lot with regard to remaking the police departments is replacing the union. In many cases, it's the local police union that's actively working to prevent investigation or prosecution of police misconduct and crimes.

Firing and re-hiring everyone, legally and contractually, lets you get rid of the existing union and work on building a new one that's actually focused on what a police officers' union should be focusing on: protecting good police officers from abuse and corruption from above, negotiating salaries and job conditions, etc., much like any other workers' union.

In a lot of places cops are paid for training and on the job while training. Why not have it be a 2-4 year training that they actually pay for out of pocket? You know like every other field in America?

Why should we subsidize their training?

Furthermore, maybe we make sure cops have 1 vest, 1 badge, 1 gun in a holster, ammo, and 1 tazer. Ban assault rifles, use USED cars, get rid of tanks, armored vehicles, etc... Get rid of tear gas, and explosive ordinances. Basically take away a LOT of their toys.

So gun, car, badge, uniform, vest, payroll and that's it. No paying any money at all to unions. Maybe even save some money for performance bonuses if they can lower their brutality outcomes as a collective body. Cops w/out any reports get like a 5k bonus at the end of the year. 20k after 10 years, etc...

I worry it's a shitty slogan that will undercut real change.

Many will think it's no police, hence no police brutality, only to learn it's really just a re-organization of the police. Potentially a minor one, as many (most?) haven't shared details.

Cynically, it seems an effort to take away attention from real reform, such as eliminating qualified immunity or banning police unions.

If huge swaths are pushing for defunding, wouldn't this spur the more conservative dems/gop to say oh shit, half measures aren't going to work, if we DONT reform, we're gonna get abolishment or more riots?

I mean seriously, this is a watershed moment in history unlike we've ever seen before and might ever see again. Real reform may come by getting strong on 'defund', and instead we end police unions...

Abolitionism may be just ending all police unions, that could be a big enough abolition to end a lot of this systemic bullshit. (That combined w/ ending choke holds, qualified immunity, and prosecuting cops and not holding them accountable).

How about "descope"?

Reminds me of what my Programming Languages professor used to say, "Scope - it's not a mouthwash!"

Most people don't know what scope, or descope means in this context.

so the slogan is the problem, not the current policing regime, or the perceived benefits to ~200M people incentivized by comfort or complacency to keep that regime in place?

any slogan will be disparaged by vested interests. let's try not to distract from the core issue.

> so the slogan is the problem, not the current policing regime

No, that's not what OP is saying at all. They're saying that the goal is good, but the slogan misleads people who haven't put in time to understand it. And most people haven't put in time to understand it, and won't based on the slogan. The goal is great, but the slogan is hurting the goal.

Also — you say the slogan is doing more harm than good. How do you know?

Based on your own judgement, based on talking with your friends, based reading articles in XYZ publication, based on “common sense”, based on what?

It's akin to "single payer" in the health insurance context. If you're not already well-versed in the subject, you probably won't know what it means, because it's focusing on the process rather than the intended result.

Who are these normal people you're referring to?

Why is it a scary concept to them?

Why should the message be diluted to reduce normal people's fears?

It's explicitly demanding an alternative system to one that has for decades instilled fear of violence towards Black folks.

I support the slogan, and the weight behind it. The intention is to spark discomfort in normal people, change won't happen when normal people feel comfortable.

>The intention is to spark discomfort in normal people, change won't happen when normal people feel comfortable.

This leads to: Everyone's constantly being spammed messages being made to feel uncomfortable because someone, somewhere always has an agenda to push.

That's leadership through fear. 100%.

I feel like the same quote-unquote “normal people” (I think it’s a dangerous term because it’s unquantifiable and can be used to justify anything) you describe here have also been passive contributors to the racial violence of police departments across the US for years now.

So I challenge your logic and your assumptions.

If anything the last two decades of American politics have shown that a highly-mobilized and engaged minority, if they have leverage over officials via money or votes, is able to shift policy _despite_ opposition from a numerical majority of people.

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