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Comment by collyw | Hacker News Reader

Was anyone surprised by this? Defund / Abolish the police sound like the stupidest ideas ever.

As an outsider looking in, it seems to me like reducing the scope of responsibility , and increasing accountability, of your police forces would be a boon to public safety.

We've tried to hold police accountable for murder. Charging them results in incidents like the entire police force rallying behind the one and just not doing their job anymore. And nearby police refusing to do their duty as well.

This happened in Atlanta. You can't even bring charges against a cop, let alone make it to a trial, without horrendous outcry and mass refusal to do their job.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/17/us/rayshard-brooks-atlanta-po...

Where I am we have many levels of public safety enforcement; I've heard that in the USA there's a lot less variety in policing?

Ie, bylaws are enforced by armed and armoured officers who have full power to arrest.

Is that true? It seems to me that dividing the forces would help to break their unified defensive behaviour.

> Charging them results in incidents like the entire police force rallying behind the one and just not doing their job anymore

... which could be considered a win for the section of America that the police oppress.

It really should. But in a highly polarized, incredibly litigious society like the US, that would likely lead to more trench-digging, and sadly the opposite of an increase to public safety.

Obviously the details would be contentions but I think reducing the scope of policing in abstract is widely supported across America. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who can't think of an entire category of behavior the government is currently in, and should not be, in the business of micromanaging with violence.

But when people say "abolish the police" they do not come across as meaning "reduce the scope of policing in a careful manner" to a sizeable fraction of the other people in the country.

>But when people say "abolish the police" they do not come across as meaning "reduce the scope of policing".

Some people, sure, but that's understandable given their extremely dire situation. Regardless, in my experience, most people do in fact flesh out reasonable ideas while using the phrase. Further, by far most "phrases" I've heard in person are of the "defund/reform" variety. But of course "abolishment" gets disproportionate attention, and there's always the trap of just listening to news sources and online forums where the phrase "abolish the police" is quoted with no chance given to the people for more context.

I agree that the ideas put forth are generally reasonable but a national political slogan shouldn't require "but wait I don't mean that in the literal sense" explanation. You can't have a catch phrase and then complain when it's taken literally. A phrase like that was a marketing disaster waiting to happen.

I agree - it's perfectly reasonable to take it literally. It's not equivalent to the mostly-willing-misinterpretation of the phrase "black lives matter". However, I don't think it's as simple as "complaining when taken literally". My point is that people should be more charitable - this phrase didn't originate from a committee's meditations. The situation it arose from is terrifying, disastrous, intolerable, an emergency, etc. On scales smaller than the national one, e.g. at community level, it's quite literally a fight for life and civilization. The extremity of the phrase is commensurate with the extremity of the circumstances - this is a spontaneous cry, not a diplomatic thought. We should talk about this situation with that reality in mind. Of course despite all this qualification, the phrase is used, if far from ubiquitously, and if you add onto that the way news and human drama naturally works, then the phrase never had a chance to not be a widespread part of the image of the national movement. We should not allow people to attempt to literally abolish the police, but we should try to understand why that has become one of their slogans, and not use it as a catch-all for dismissing the movement in a single repeated sentence (e.g. how the root post of this thread has done - not something you've done).

It's mostly terrible messaging. Defund and Abolish are both absolute terms (i.e., people try to defund planned parenthood, and we abolished slavery) but, for the most part, what's being asked for is just to scale back the police and their funding.

I agree it's unfortunate. "Defund", though, I can defend as colloquially non-absolute. Literally it means "remove all funds", but people often use it to mean "reduce funds", I've found.

Edit: Of course, that's not to say there are no people using it absolutely in this case.

You're falling for a strawman.

Spend some time looking at the nuanced proposals for policing reform that go by the name "defund the police" and I am guessing that you agree with them a lot more than you think you do.

Having seen the bodycam footage from the police that has emerged recently, I think everyone supporting BLM have been falling for a strawman. George Floyd appears to be high as a kite, does practically nothing the police ask him to. The police appear to be pretty reasonable.

Eight minutes and fourty six seconds.

There is no excuse for holding your knee on a person's neck for eight minutes and fourty six seconds. There is no excuse for doing it after he says that he can't breathe. There is no excuse for doing it after those around you tell you to cut it out. There is especially no excuse for continuing to do it for minutes after he became motionless.

Honestly, I'm not sure how else to explain to you that you should care about other human lives even when those people are high or not in the best place in life. George Floyd was murdered by a police officer pinning him in a choke hold for eight minutes and fourty six seconds and "he did drugs" or "he didn't listen to the police" is not a sane explanation.

I'm really not sure what else to tell you when you believe that it's "reasonable" for the police to choke a man to death for eight minutes and fourty six seconds because he was "high as a kite".

I know you may be unwilling to entertain the opposite point of view, but it doesn't necessarily sound like a "stupid idea" to friends/families/cultures who have lost members to murder by police (at varying points on the scale from negligence to depraved heart to purposeful to premeditated), especially in the case for mere "defunding", which is thoughtless to call a "stupid idea" out of hand, since the argument that some police have too much firepower is one that can be formed reasonably, and not just a "stupid idea" to be dismissed without engaging. Also, most victims don't even go as far as literal and unqualified abolishment, and say they want complete reform. But even the ones desperate enough to call for abolishment, which I find hard to blame them for, are usually talking about specific extremely corrupt and violent jurisdictions, and further, they admit that something must come after - abolish "the current" police in "some" places, before they kill again, and replace them. And of course, I'm sure there are some who have been driven to want only to "abolish police" without further qualification, and you are encouraged to engage them respectfully and explain that it's unrealistic despite their emotional suffering and outrage, and engage them in the context of the more fleshed-out options I've listed above.

Don't just call it a "stupid idea". That doesn't belong on HN.

Reforming policing and law enforcement is not a stupid idea, but the “Defund the police” messaging shuts down thoughtful conversation and alienates allies.

It needs to be replaced with a credible alternative.

> Abolish the police

What does this mean to you?

What does "abolish" mean, you mean? The 13th amendment to the U.S. constitution "abolished" slavery. It means get rid of completely, and make sure it never comes back.

what about the exception for prison labor which many consider to be 'modern slavery'?

Tough question actually, because I know what it is intended to mean, and I also know what a lot of its most passionate devotees want it to mean.

I didn't disagree with any of the thinking behind it: shifting more funding and responsibility to social support/health professionals, and focusing more on the conditions that spawn crime rather than just stamping it out as it shows up. Seems like the difference between actually fixing the holes in your house vs. putting all your money into duct tape and basins. The first step towards fixing a broken system is identifying the root causes.

But there's that, and there's the vast majority of people I know who say every cop is an evil fascist and society would be better with no law enforcement at all. Given how many people think—and want—"abolish the police" to mean abolition in the most literal sense, it is hard to look past that definition, even if it's not the intended one.

It's simple: Radicalism breeds radicalism. I don't like those redneck survivalist guys with all the guns either, but it's getting a lot harder to tell them their doomsday fantasies are stupid when so many on the left sound like they consider CHOP to be a blueprint for a better society.

It doesn't matter what it means "to me". It matters what it means.

Abolish: verb - formally put an end to (a system, practice, or institution).

Defund is not actually a bad idea. The police are tasked with handling the fallout of failing or non-existent social systems and have been scaled respectively - in fact police funding is growing every year, and not insubstantially.

If you work in tech you should know what happens if you transfer too many responsibilities to one bloated team.

These funds would be better invested in actual support systems. Homeless shelters. Drug rehabilitation. Fixing subpar education funding in poor school districts.

Yeah, but calling it "defund" sounds a lot like "no more police, anywhere".

I think a lot of the insanity here could have been avoided if this was presented as what it was intended to be—a reallocation of resources based on a desire to more effectively address deep-seated problems that make society worse for everyone—and not as, you know, anarchy.

If you were making that argument about "abolish", I'd agree, but defund? I guess you'd need to know the massive funding increases the police has gotten over the past 20 years. Even abolish acknowledges there needs to be some form of community policing, it's just that the current model is militaristic, has little accountability, incentivizes the wrong things (arrest quotas) and (re-)hires the wrong people.

I don't think anarchy is what you think it is. It wrongfully has picked up the entire Mad Max vibe. Any Chomsky talk on anarchism or the book of the same name ("On Anarchism") are a bit more nuanced introductions. Anarchism and police are "natural enemies" because anarchists believe the power police hold right now is unproportionate and unjustifiable. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24025920

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