It means things like “maybe we don’t need armed people to give tickets to drivers with a busted headlight” and “if we put more funds into mental health crisis teams we won’t have to send as many cops to violent incidents”.
There are full-on police abolitionists, but they’re far fewer in number.
My question is, why call it "defund the police"? The core of the idea is that, in many cases we can change our response from involving police officers to involving some other group who will hopefully be able to do a better job. The fact that this can be accomplished by reallocating funds from the police department, to avoid needing to levy taxes to raise revenue, seems like almost the least important part of the plan. Even then, "defund the police" is only the first half of "defund the police and use the additional funding to create another group that picks up some of the police's responsibilities".
My feeling is that many people view police with antipathy, so they like the slogan and concept of "defund the police" because it feels like a retaliation against the police. I strongly suspect that other ideas, some of which may be much more beneficial than changing the response, will be ignored if they can't be phrased as a tactical strike in the culture war.
Here's one list of proposals [0] for police reform, many of which seem very promising for how little cultural sway they have (delegalize police unions, abolish QI, decriminalize victimless offenses, etc.) I wonder if they have so little sway because they can't be phrased in a sufficiently incendiary manner.
(And by the way, just because there's antipathy towards the police doesn't mean the police are directly at fault. For instance, if police are made to enforce unpopular legislation like the war on drugs, that will obviously make people dislike them but the root problem is somewhat upstream)
[0]: https://medium.com/@yudkowsky/a-comprehensive-reboot-of-law-...
I didn't know death by Canadian was something we tracked specifically :P
Ex: "Black lives matter too" vs "black lives matter". or "replace / reboot the police" vs "defund the police". The police one I'm having a hard time thinking of a slogan that would be better, maybe that's why it stuck.
time travels back to a nearby counter-protest, yells:
"All Lives Matter, Always."
time travels back to the future
And now you're back to square one.
Given that ~300 black men are killed by police each year, I don't think that math checks out.
Agree with police reform, although we probably need more funding in many places, not less.
Multiply that by 1,000 and you get 23M.
There are 38M Black and African Americans in the USA, approximately half of which are male.
The math checks out fine.
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793
> Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.
→ 0.999984802431611 chance of not-being-killed-by-police per year.
pow(0.999984802431611, 69) = 0.998951909443727 chance of never being killed by police.
→ 0.001048090556273 chance of at some point being killed by police
→ just over 1/1000 over a lifetime.
The math checks out... if we ignore the "young" part.
In fact, if you assume that people are young for x% of their lives, and x% of black people are young, this exactly cancels out and you still get `0.001048` odds of being killed by police.
One example of right wing consolidation around their designed messaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE
There is no reasoning that will allow down that anger. No looking at actual facts and statistics.
You have to that with slogans. They're low resolution, so there's an inevitable loss of fidelity. No one marches with a legislative proposal on a placard, and it would be unreasonable to do so.
(I suspect it would actually be quite a bit more incendiary.)
Communication (even at length) is hard. We all bring different baggage to every attempt to speak and listen. It's probably ~impossible once you mix in uncharitable readers/listeners.
I can't speak for the campaigners, but I suspect "reform the police" won't cut the mustard for them because it's the sort of thing the establishment says before it fails to deliver meaningful change. "Today I'm calling for the establishment of a bipartisan commission on police reform", and its short imperative slogan--"reform the police"--could be an inspiring message if people had the impression that is how the gears sound when they're spinning up to change something.
But it's not very fair to insist people should be chanting a demand that seems to translate to "promise to look busy for a few months so that we'll go home and hope we don't notice when you don't solve the problem."
"Disarm the police" would receive the exact same pearl clutching responses.
[1] https://www.alternet.org/2012/10/how-higher-education-us-was...
[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/03/10/defund...
Your first article is someone criticizing prior efforts by others to reduce public education funding. The only person using the word "defund" is the author. Though interestingly, there is a mention of conservative attacks on programs like sociology, anthropology, minority studies, and gender studies. I assure you that many conservatives really do want to abolish funding for those programs.
The second article is a single person using the word "defund" to describe Obama's reduction of military spending. Again, somebody using the word to describe somebody else's actions.
Interestingly, both of those articles are by people who oppose defunding. Perhaps they used that word precisely because it implies "remove funding entirely", which has an exaggerated emotional impact?
In any case, neither example is the same thing as a large social movement using it as a slogan, especially when that movement publishes things like "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
When things like that appear in the New York Times, is it so unreasonable for people to take their word for it? Or should we keep insisting that they don't really mean it?
And before you tell me that that's just one person's opinion, I'll just point out that so were both of your references, and those are the opinions of people who aren't even supporters of those movements. The "defund the police" movement has its own people using the term and saying "yes, we mean literally abolish the police".
I picked 2 old articles from different political tribes to show it isn't new or just 1 tribe. Defund the Pentagon is a slogan now. Bernie Sanders[1] and Barbara Lee[2] proposed cutting the military budget by 10% and called it defunding.
I don't see anyone saying defund can't mean abolish. But most people who mean abolish say abolish because defund can mean reduce funding.
It's unreasonable to listen to people on the fringe of a movement and ignore the majority. It's unreasonable to read NYT opinion pieces and ignore NYT news pieces.[3] It's unreasonable to ignore actual legislation. It's unreasonable to ignore all the top search results.
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/16/defund-the...
[2] https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/defund-pentagon-b...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/what-does-defund-polic...
“Defund the police” is misleading in a way that “Trump Train” and “Ridin’ with Biden” are not. It’s not a real train and Biden isn’t with you, but people are not misled.
Better in some ways, worse in others. It avoids the confusion with abolishment, but it looses the connotations of seriously changing the status quo. Because of that, it's less attention-grabbing.
It’s “one crazy trick” or “you’re not going to believe #7” but for matters that are actually important to discuss and debate in specifics.
Pretty much every slogan is a falsehood, if you want to quibble.
IIRC, "defund the police" grew out of frustration with various police reform efforts that failed to address these problems [1]. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to take up the slogan of one of the things you're opposing.
[1] For instance I watch a video of some police deescalation training (in Seattle, IIRC), where the rank-and-file were talking back and not taking it seriously, and the instructors were not very enthusiastic or in control. I can't imagine that reform effort did a lot of good.
Have you ever participated in politics? Because even in a small town government meeting, a board member stating they are changing their view because they "reacted emotionally" initially is going to immediately be followed by a call for them to resign.
I'm not opining on the issue at hand. It's just that when I read the suggestions here on HN about political messaging, many of them don't line up with any political reality I'm familiar with.
This one line summarizes the broken nature of our political conversation.
We are in a cycle of emotional overreactions, amplified by social media, and escalating in severity.
> Defund
> to deplete the financial resources of
> to withdraw financial support from, especially as an instrument of legislative control
Now, many of the same champions of this cause are taking on the role of the police themselves. Across Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere, people are creating open source documents with the names of anyone they believe was at the riot.
Most troubling of all, I am seeing many people openly advocating the police should have shot more protesters or brutalized them in some manner.
This seems highly contrary to the goals of the movement.
I have seen many saying black people would have been shot, and this is unequal, that doesn't mean they want more shot.
I've also seen many decrying the lack of defence of congress. Again, doesn't mean more deaths, just better preparation.
Hatred and malice spreads like a viral wildfire on social media, no matter what your political ideology.
On the other, these people literally attempted to overthrow the country, some were armed, some had bombs, some had the intent of abducting and/or harming people like Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. So I would be very sympathetic to there having been a much more robust response, whilst still preferring nobody be hurt.
> This seems highly contrary to the goals of the movement.
It is, and most people "in the movement" I've seen are saying "hey, this gentleness is how BLM protests should've treated, too".
I've seen lots of people ask questions like “where were the tear gas and rubber bullets?”, but I think you are missing the point of those and other references to the behavior of the police during BLM and other protests if you interpret them as a call that the violent behavior should have been repeated.
They are, in at least most cases, using the restraint shown in the attempted coup where top government leaders were targeted to highlight what they see as the inappropriateness of the violent response in earlier protests and the hollowness of law enforcement claims that the force used in those earlier events was reasonable, necessary, and justified rather than motivated by racial and political bias.
> We're not saying shoot them like you shot us. We're saying don't shoot us like you didn't shoot them.
The issue is with the double standard, and that's what's at the root of the BLM movement. Honestly I'm surprised that some people still haven't managed to understand what's at the root of BLM after like all the demonstrations that happened around it.
Even the name of the movement: "Black Lives Matters" aka "Blacks are not a lower class to be treated more arshly and with less humanity"
Which is why when someone says BLM nah ALM, it's absolutely missing the point of the movement. Cause how do you reframe that: "All people are of equal class"... Ok but black people aren't treated equally so like that's not true? That's why there are million of black people protesting. It's okay to maybe wonder... Wait is it true that black people are treated differently? Is it because they are black? Or is it more that poor people (happen to often be black) and are treated differently? Yes sure that's a question one can wonder, but you don't have to go very far at least to suspect that whatever it is, in effect, black people do get treated differently (be it because they are black or because they are poor, or because they're less educated, etc.) The why doesn't matter, the different treatment does, no matter what, nobody should be treated differently.
Sorry for the rant, but it's tiring having to explain these basics. Of course left and right can't even have a proper conversation around the issue when half the table doesn't understand what is the issue to discuss.
And I like to remind people, this isn't just the root of the BLM movement, this is literally the root of the United States itself. The declaration of independence:
> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;
There are endless videos of normal cops being executed by unhinged drivers who were pulled over for things like "a busted headlight." You don't know who you're dealing with, how close to the edge some people are, or if they are dangerous felons, when you pull them over. If those situations were a very real possibility in your daily job, would you perform that job unarmed? I wouldn't. Maybe some very brave mental health professionals would, for a time, until some of them are killed as well, as indiscriminately as the police, which is inevitable.
What then? Stop pulling people over altogether, because it's not worth risking anybody's life further? Just let people speed and drive drunk, or drive with an unsafe vehicle?
When I get this far in discussions with people, it eventually comes down to "well dangerous people shouldn't have guns." It's a nice thought, naive in my opinion, but regardless, how do we deal with the reality of right now until those ideals manifest in reality? The reality is that dangerous people make regular traffic stops too dangerous for normal people to behave in any other way that to exercise extreme caution.
Frequently, this is because they suspect the cop will find they have a warrant or contraband and the stop will proceed past a ticket to arrest and felony charges.
Separating the civil and criminal enforcement here makes these encounters safer; we can see this in countries where traffic cops aren't routinely armed.
Don't check at all. Check, but report without pursuit. Some have issues with traffic stops entirely, given the racial biases involved in who to pull over. (Demonstrated most effectively in this study, where the disparity disappears when the sun goes down: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/inside-100-million-poli... / https://news.stanford.edu/2020/05/05/veil-darkness-reduces-r...)
There's also the fact that the scary "normal cops being executed by unhinged drivers" scenario is a vanishingly rare scenario. The rate of murders of police officers matches roughly the rate in the general population. https://www.newsweek.com/it-has-never-been-safer-be-cop-3720...
Dude the reason the cat with the warrant hasn't been caught is because they dont show up to their known residence. They are EVADING. Their home isnt a safe space from warrants.
You just effectively nullified the entire reason to have a warrant out for someone's arrest, let alone reason for bail so someone shows up to court.
And no, it's not safer in the sense they aren't shot. Body armor has gotten better and the likelihood of surviving a few rounds to the chest has gone up. The shootings haven't changed, just the body armor. Get out of your sick fantasy world. Better yet, go be a cop to help reform. See for yourself before you think you have an opinion.
Cops who attempt to turn in bad cops get fucked up by other cops, so this is a no-go.
Otherwise I generally agree with your point that not checking for warrants has a really bad consequence of potentially letting go of people who have warrants out for committing heinous, heinous crimes. (Admittedly, often times cops have let go of people during traffic stops without checking for warrants. Several serial killers for example.)
And they wear body armor, can call for backup, and can engage threats with deadly force. I would imagine a job with those tactical advantages would have a much much lower murder rate than the general population.
Philando Castile serves as a good example.
And it does not matter: in the US and most civilized countries a police officer is supposed to have a reasonable suspicion before they start invading someone's privacy.
The idea of someone running warrant checks on the basis of a broken tail light is antithetical to notions like the presumption of innocence and right to privacy.
Hm, there's definitely a line somewhere. I'm with you in that I don't think cops should be able to demand ID and run checks on random people simply out and about in public. Broken tail light? Not sure. Speeding? OK now you're breaking the law and arguably creating a public safety threat, but probably not going to be arrested. DUI? Now you're in misdemeanor territory at least. When is it reasonable to check if you're also wanted for something else? Maybe when you're booked at the jail?
Census workers aren't expected to check for warrants, because it's not their job; I'm advocating the same for things like speeding enforcement.
https://www.denverpost.com/2020/09/06/denver-star-program-me...
> Since its launch June 1, the STAR van has responded to more than 350 calls, replacing police in matters that don’t threaten public safety and are often connected to unmet mental or physical needs. The goal is to connect people who pose no danger with services and resources while freeing up police to respond to other calls. The team, which is not armed, has not called police for backup, Sailon said.
> The team has responded to an indecent exposure call that turned out to be a woman changing clothes in an alley because she was unhoused and had no other private place to go. They’ve been called out to a trespassing call for a man who was setting up a tent near someone’s home. They’ve helped people experiencing suicidal thoughts, people slumped against a fence, people simply acting strange.
> “It’s amazing how much stuff comes across 911 as the general, ‘I don’t know what to do, I guess I’ll call 911,’” Richardson said. “Someone sets up a tent? 911. I can’t find someone? 911.”
In 2019 there were 48 cops killed in the line of duty by 'felonious acts'.
6 were killed during traffic stops
https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...
Also consider the possibility that there's propaganda benefit to making the public think it's common.
From your comments, it seems that because you can show that it's relatively rare, nobody should expect, plan for, or train for it. I look at stats that show police murder rate comparable to the general population and I am honestly impressed that they are able to keep it that low while dealing with some of the most dangerous elements of society. Do you believe it is because violent criminals have a similar level of hatred towards police as they do a member of the general public, or is it because police train for the worst case scenario?
Training is another key aspect of the problem.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/02/dave-grossman-t...
Anyways, domestic disputes are some of the most dangerous calls for cops. A social worker to diffuse the situation seems like a good idea in theory. However reality doesn't give 2 shits about theory. The reason 911 is called out to these is because violence is about to happen, is happening or has been. Hell, Jacksonville sent a female officer to a a domestic dispute of something being stolen between 2 females last year. Body cam shows the officer walks up to the door, knocks, announces herself takes two steps back and waits. A chick just opens the door with a knife and stabs the female officer. "Anecdotal" you say. No. I used to do security integration for a few police departments in Colorado. I got to know a lot of them and would just hear and see this dumb shit nearly daily. Hell, watch Donut Operator on youtube. The amount of videos like this are ridiculously high.
Just out of the blue, a seemingly innocent call, someone gets their stupid on and attacks the cops. And this is Colorado (Denverand Co Springs area). Not the most dangerous area in the country. I now live in Florida.
Do I think cops need a few weeks of better deescalation training or even a better training program needs to be developed? Absolutely and I know for a fact about 80% of other cops want this because they were talking about it back in 2015. Do all cops need to have better hand to hand combat training so they dont need to always result to their firearm or the ineffective less than lethal countermeasures provided (yea tasers and bean bags dont work nearly as often as you think). My opinion doesn't matter because 100% of cops have begged for this, again, since 2015 that I know of. But that all requires funding, unlike Seattle deciding to cut the PD budget by a 3rd, saying they wanted to take more and made their black female chief the poorest paid chief in Seattle history. Who, mind you, even the most racist sexist asshole who looks at her resume will say she earned being the chief, without question.
I swear a majority of people are rational and understand that reality is a dangerous place and bad things happen. They know that defunding the cops and sending an unarmed social worker is just going to result in higher body bag orders or the police are going to get reinvented through them. That's enough internet for now.
I have no idea what this quote means, but left leaning press have explained the concept of defunding the press just fine.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/05/defunding-th...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/07/defund-po...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
Some people seem to mean ‘no police at all’ and some seem to mean ‘don’t task the police with trivial stuff’.
But why then would the right assume it means the former?
but more generally, it's inevitable that the opposing side will interpret a vague slogan in the most negative and scary light possible. I suspect this is often by design, ie motte and bailey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
But to be fair, this article does say:
"But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.
"We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.
"We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison."
The article ends “ Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) is the director of Project NIA, a grass-roots group that works to end youth incarceration, and an anti-criminalization organizer”.
It’s a good read, thanks.
From where I stand (Seattle, know multiple Defund folks), the reaction has been "So, the one true thing we think cops should do - prevent significant violent action and protect people - they failed at. This further proves our point". You can dither on whether blocking traffic is violent (it's not) but the events really only strengthened their case - BLM peaceful protesting is met with an order of magnitude more violence than actual attempted attacks on the government. So why bother having cops if they don't do anything when it actually matters?
According to whom?
The press speaks for the establishment, because to a large extent, that's who owns it. It sucks up to power and reflects its biases.