funny how all the #resistance and #defundthepolice folks are actively working with the feds and law enforcement and cheering them on
I want justice. Protect the weak, help those who are in trouble, prevent violence against the innocent.
That means helping government agencies do their job, when I can. It also means ensuring that the people who we ask to protect us actually DO protect us.
I see no conflict.
thought you guys learned from the patriot act and iraq war and iran contra and million other examples but guess not
> Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police
It’s not some unjustified fearmongering. Anarchists literally took over part of Seattle. At my university, protestors are demanding to completely dismantle the campus police: https://www.wbez.org/stories/northwesterns-president-and-stu...
A fraction want abolition, but they'd also plainly say so. "Defund" by definition doesn't mean abolish.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/colin-kaepernick-abolish-police...
"By abolishing policing and prisons, not only can we eliminate white supremacist establishments, but we can create space for budgets to be reinvested directly into communities to address mental health needs, homelessness and houselessness, access to education, and job creation as well as community-based methods of accountability. This is a future that centers the needs of the people, a future that will make us safer, healthier, and truly free."
Anyone who says it doesn’t mean abolish the police is ignoring the fact that for many activists it does mean abolish the police.
The hashtag does not imply abolishing the police, but that is exactly what defund the police means to many people.
Representing it as such seams misinformed at best, but likely(IMHO) disingenuous.
He defines it as abolishing the police.
I have come across many activists who want to abolish the police.
I would assume that most vaguely left leaning people wouldn’t support that as a policy, but it is certainly not a ‘fringe’ definition from the point of view of the activist community with whom it is most associated.
There is absolutely nothing disingenuous about recognizing that mainstream activists do mean to abolish the police.
We have to accept that both definitions are in use.
What is disingenuous, is to dismiss or deny the idea that anyone other than opponents of it think it means abolish the police.
That is essentially a motte-and-bailey tactic, and all it does is stop honest discussion.
which is about what Colin is literally saying in that quote.
He is saying the police must be completely abolished.
The quote begins “By abolishing policing and prisons...”
You seem to have overlooked this somehow.
The name he has chosen for his project is:
“Abolition for the People, The Movement for a Future Without Policing & Prisons”
It couldn’t be any clearer.
Reappropriating funds does not mean abolishing the police.
You can reappropriate funds without abolishing the police, for example by reducing their duties.
He is saying both abolish the police and reappropriate the funds.
They are plainly not literally the same thing.
There may have been some cops who didn't do their job, maybe even some who helped the mob, but most of them were just put in a horrible place.
I don't know why it's funny that those groups don't conform to the right-wing propaganda about their goals.
The defund/dismantle/abolish movement thinks, broadly, that law enforcement gets too big of a slice of local finding with too broad of a remit, and that there are structural and institutional defects in present local law enforcement, such that funding and functions should be shifted to other organizations, and (and the dismantle/abolish end of the spectrum) existing local monolithic paramilitary law enforcement agencies should be disbanded entirely with all of the lot responsibilities reallocated to other new and existing entities with different structures.
They don't oppose the law enforcement function, nor do they, IME, generally oppose cooperation with existing law enforcement entities, within bounds of care around dangerous institutional biases one may play into with danger to oneself and other innocents while so doing.
Similarly, #resist isn’t anti-government it's specifically anti-Trumpist-extremism. Cooperating with law enforcement rolling up Trump coup participants is pretty much the most on-brand #resist thing ever.