That’s an interesting clarification as I’ve never heard this take before, especially from the press who’s supposed to speak for the left. They seem pretty happy with just plain: let’s defund the police, full stop.
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?
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...
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."
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
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.
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.