The thought of going into small scale politics with my ideas has crossed my mind but A) I think I would alienate both sides and B) seriously concerned that someone would come try to shoot me (from either extreme).
And a follow-up question: have you spent time trying to understand what the people who say that are campaigning for, or did you make a snap judgement?
(Personally I think "defund the police" is a poorly chosen slogan because it is so easily misunderstood)
This, many times over -- with the caveat that I haven't been able to think of a more accurate phrase that still fits on a bumper sticker. "Narrow the scope of responsibility for the police and reallocate funding to other resources to handle non-criminal duties" isn't very catchy, but it's closer to what most activists are calling for.
To some people, it means take some of the money from the police, and have actual trained counselors, mental health crisis workers, etc. I have heard of many that hold up CAHOOTS [0] in Eugene, OR as a model, that are MUCH cheaper than police, to help interceed in some cases, where police do not have the training. (the police training for gaining compliance seems to be using taser, force or weapon of some sort, since they are trained for extreme situations)
To others it means completely abolish the police. However, I have heard very few with this view personally, but according to those on the complete opposite side of the political spectrum, this is what they all mean when they say it.
If folks intend it to mean "reduce funds" or "reallocate funds", then we should say that.
Poorly chosen slogans seem like they really hurt the movement. But maybe the ACAB crowd truly does think all cops are bastards.
I once had an interesting discussion with someone about this who had obviously thought about it a fair bit. Their position was that the institution is set up in such a way that your own intentions, regardless of how good, are systemically constrained into a narrow channel and the function of the job is to be "a bastard".
In other words, it wasn't a commentary of the nature of the people in the job, rather the nature of the job.
That said... the cops who made the news for shoving other cops off from kneeling on protesters' necks? They were good cops in that moment. Even if they were doing it to protect their precinct from scandal.
It was equally clear that he expected that from them, and that this was not his first case of abuse. This was merely the time when it became incontrovertible, because somebody had a camera and was willing to take the risk of filming it.
If they aren't going to stand up against abuse even when it's literally a murder caught on video, there's no way to avoid the conclusion that there are indeed countless other abuse cases that have been covered up, with nobody willing to stand up to it. It doesn't show the extent of the abuse but it shows the extent of police willing to cover up and excuse that abuse: universal. That makes All of them Bastards.
That's like thinking someone might believe “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch” applies to police, or that the “broken windows” model of policing has the same cultural effect directed at the police that iats advocates say it has directed by the police at communities.
Or, more generally, that people’s ethics and conduct are responsive to the institutional incentives and cultural environment surrounding them.
Clearly, this is implausible; no one could believe any of that.
then you have others that genuinely want to defund police completely, arguing that the institution itself is a vestige of civil war times to protect wealthy white property/slave owners
I believe this is intentional, as it gives extremist a softer platform.
Same can be said about the BLM organization that has an explicit communistic agenda, while the movement is a broad group fighting against police violence and general civil liberties
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
https://www.blackenterprise.com/black-lives-matter-leader-ou...
Have you even spoken to anyone or gone to an event? I live in a city with a lot of demonstrations and you quickly learn that isn't the phrases intent or ideology for nearly everyone except extreme outliers and agitators.
"actually defund the police"
What did the messenger mean by that?
Look a little deeper and actually go to an event or talk to some real people and you find out what real people believe, I promise you the phrase doesn't mean no police anymore for most people in most places. YES it's a massive movement with outliers.. the two things can and do exist at the same time, lumping them all together or saying it's an even distribution is either intellectually lazy or dishonest
Pick a slogan with an obvious interpretation, tell everyone it isn't what you mean, tell everyone that the only people that really mean it are outliers, continue to push it hoping it really comes true.
A protest march and slogan graffiti aren't invitations to come converse, they are statements. Most of the people I meet might have vague sympathies for these messages but don't participate and obviously don't have those views.
When I see people shouting at each other in the street (in my own experience), chanting on megaphones, businesses boarding up their windows, and people piling trash on the street to keep police and others away... it isn't exactly an invitation to come see what people are about.
It's especially manipulative doublespeak. Say one thing, mean another, and demean anybody who dares to take your message at face value.
I'm judging people with what I see. I see the actual movement with either vague messages that are hard to interpret as not extreme and specific messages that are impossible to interpret any other way. The only people I see trying to have the "reasonable" message are folks online acting as apologists for the protests trying to defend what they "actually" mean with nothing to back up their claims.
The protest nearest to me and most recent for a couple of days had "DEATH TO US MARSHALLS" tagged on the boarded up window of a nearby business. You'll excuse me for not wanting to approach people still demonstrating in the presence of messaging like that.
Yes it's a muddled mix but two things jump out quickly. One you're not going to get attention marching with notepads and whispering. And two they don't need to cater their message to anyone's ideas but their own you are asking a totally different generation to appeal to another. Yes it might be a better political idea, but this is a young emotional movement. I don't know how people can expect a sophisticated perfect message and a completely unified front... It's just not realistic
I'm not saying you have to go to demonstrations if you dont want to, but if you want to find out the truth though you probably should it is worlds away from what you are describing you just said your only experience is through news and online forums. Yes there will be some messaging like that. Obviously I don't agree with that, or lots of other ideas and sentiments, but I still listen to everything they have to say. There will be a few extremes and colorful language but do all those folks really want to kill marshalls? Highly doubt it. Again it's getting attention and people are pissed off... These are young activists not campaign managers
There is a large protest movement that is doing a terrible job achieving its goals, if its goals are to actually effect change.
It's not on me or anyone to go decypher what a movement is trying to be. Yes, messaging is hard, but if you're a movement without a message, all you are is a bunch of angry people in the street occasionally causing riots.
If you're hanging around in a protest where folks are advocating killing federal marshals (protestors can't always spell very well) you aren't exactly... not endorsing that message.
You're getting down to my point.
I've generally been opposed to recent protest movements. I think they have done a lot of harm (property damage, human lives, destruction of community resources) and very little good (confused message, no clear goals, encouraging extreme hostile views and actions).
The protests have served as a venue for people do demonstrate their virtue and a mechanism for increasing divisiveness and ultimately have done considerable harm to achieving any of the goals they might conceivably want if someone thoughtful was taking charge.
"We don't have anything to say but we're going to talk loudly anyway and expect other people with more sense to solve our problems for us" isn't a great message for a protest movement. You can't elect the right people if you don't know what you want. You can't change hearts and minds if you haven't figured it out for yourself first. And most importantly, if you have a bad message or no message and you're perfectly happy to associate yourself with the people who do have violent, destructive messaging, intent, and actions... the people who might be on the fence to support your cause are going to become your opponents... not just opponents of the extremes you tolerate, but opponents of everything you're choosing to associate with those extremes.
"It's not on me or anyone to go decypher what a movement is trying to be. Yes, messaging is hard, but if you're a movement without a message, all you are is a bunch of angry people in the street occasionally causing riots.
If you're hanging around in a protest where folks are advocating killing federal marshals (protestors can't always spell very well) you aren't exactly... not endorsing that message"
This is a truly bizarre perspective to have... you're saying that someone is basically endorsing everything at a demonstration when all they are doing is listening to what is going on... THE DEFINITION OF HAVING AN OPEN MIND you think is a bad position to take... You sound very close minded and you mix rioters and demonstrators with another wave of your hand, yikes! Try going out into your community with an open mind. I'm not saying I would run up beside a banner that says that and be all buddy buddy, because thats a crazy statement, but it would behoove you to not just lump in an entire legitimate movement with one crazy person, because also like I said there's no way those people actually advocate killing people... thats so obvious!!! You found one crazy person or someone looking to stir shit up that's all.
You seem to have a really skewed perspective of this and on top of that are resorting to childish arguments like spelling errors... get real you don't know anything about me or most of these protestors (I won a spelling bee bitch but go ahead flex some more). I said I went to one demonstration and you have a slew of ideas and prejudgments.
As some examples of things I agree with: I think prison should be used much more rarely. It is a terrible thing to imprison someone, and should only be done if someone is an immediate danger to others. Otherwise other punishments should be used. We should also dramatically improve conditions in prisons. But there will still be prisons.
I think crime would greatly go down if there was less inequality and more investment in marginalized groups of people, and if systems that oppress people like policing were fixed. But I think there will ~always be crime, and always be police.
I think the latter involves things that would be largely popular with people. The former is a tougher sell, but I think things are slowly moving in that direction. I'm not convinced calling these proposals "abolishing the police" is actually helping that cause.
No, as someone actually in the “abolish/disband” camp, I can confidently say it is a different (and smaller) segment of the movement than the “defund” camp (and even for the vast of the “abolish” camp, it doesn’t mean to eliminate the law enforcement, including armed response, functions served by the police from local government but to disband the existent monolithic centralized local paramilitary law enforcement agencies and reorganize local community services with law enforcement as an organizationally decentralized function distributed throughout local government.)
Of course, those of us who are in the abolish/disband camp tend to see the “defund” camp (who want to divert resources and some functions to other local service organizations and not make the police responsible for as much) as a better-than-nothing compromise position that can break the vicious “reform” cycle where every police problem that rises to the level where it is accepted than something needs to be done leads to more funding being dumped into police coffers at the expense of other agencies, necessitating an expanded police role, and leading to even more police problems.
This is frustrating because one gets into a debate where the other side doesn't really hold a set of beliefs and it ends up being an inaccurate discussion of what the movement wants instead of about what should actually be done.
Which leads to my conclusion that the vast majority of people don't really have any specific thoughts on what they want to happen but a vague attachment to a slogan and a dubious explanation of what the people with actual ideas want. This is why I appreciate your viewpoint in that you actually have one and haven't steered into pointless quibbling about who wants what or if ideas even exist in a movement.
A followup question for you which might help me understand what you really want to happen:
I was the target of a road rage attack this week. A broken window and minor damage and inconvenience to myself in the process. From the law enforcement environment (or whatever you choose to call it) you would find ideal, what does the response look like?
It is vague "on purpose" because the things which actually need to change are subtle, require understanding of specific circumstances and deatails, involve compromise and human understanding of the failings of people, and generally nothing else fits on poster boards.
If I were a little more paranoid I might be suggesting that the bad slogans of protest worlds are actively being encouraged by sophisticated opponents of these movements in order to ensure that they achieve nothing.
If someone really wants change, they should say it instead of accusing people who question them of not understanding their poorly chosen message.
Isn’t the parsimonious explanation that people kinda mean what they say?
In minneapolis, defund and abolish were used interchangeably, and 9nof 13 city councillors did sign on to abolishment.
Since the community backlash, they have largely given up on abolishment and stuck with defunding as if it means something different now than it did a year ago.
And in Minneapolis just this week I had to wait on the phone 45 minutes to file a police report I've heard nothing back from after being attacked in a road rage incident. The person I did finally reach was definitely a decent human, but not trained to receive the kind of report I was giving and thought she shouldn't be taking it at all. (besides a sense of insecurity, lots of tiny glass pricks, a brief blood pressure spike, and a broken window I am well enough)
I have doubts that the state is doing enough to protect me or to address crimes that have happened, not because of some panicked sense of irrational fear, but because I had to spend an hour with shards of glass in my pants on hold on Wednesday along with the delightful experience of vacuuming glass out of my hair at a car wash. The last time I had the displeasure of talking with the city attorney, they declined to do anything about death threats I had received from a known source.
I'm thinking of buying a gun.
Having a friend of a friend casually explain how he just leaned his seat back when he heard gunshots sitting in a drive through was really telling. That, and a family coworker us ending his lease early and moving out of NE minneapolis after a bullet came through the wall and narrowly missed his cat's head. Another coworker had a car window smashed in overnight in uptown because he forgot to not lock thr car doors when he parked on the street.
I understand that country living isn't for everyone, but I don't think you could pay me enough to move back to a dense urban setting.
I could have my own home in the country essentially for free, but I don't think I could keep my sanity. Maybe with a wife/dog/child some day but being among a sea of somewhat radical conservatives alone hundreds of miles of anywhere I'd like to go outside of my own home... let's just say I'm done being isolated for now.
What I think is that if the local government and police were actually doing a good job, the problems would be considerably reduced. I don't think the "abolish the police" party or the "law and order" party can either achieve this. But what it would take is leadership that is capable of understanding problems and enacting solutions and a population that is more interested in understanding their world than chanting slogans about it.
It would be hard to apply Japanese policing styles to fundamentally different societies. That doesn't mean we can't learn good lessons from them, but we need to remember it's never an apples to apples comparison.
Somewhere between Japanese idiosyncrasies and American exceptionalism, we could learn a lot from other developed societies. We just don't, because we're arrogant, ignorant, and proudly so. We mask our social ills with flags and nationalism, even though there's hardly a cohesive America left to be proud about.
IMO this isn't some academic problem like fusion, but a problem of people and politics. Speaking of values, there's a good values overlap between the police, the military, Scouting, religion, gun culture, and conservative politics & politicians. All are hierarchical, patriarchal, heavily focused on in-group loyalty and proud displays of status and power. It's a self-reinforcing good-ol-boys network that's fighting back against cultural extinction. The thin blue line, the whatever %ers, the MAGA folks... all are part of the same general in-group. To them they are the only legitimate America, and everyone else is an outsider, intruder, imposter, hellbent on destroying everything they hold dear. They don't want a multicultural America; multi-ETHNIC might be OK, but only if they fall in line and know their place.
This is not really about the tactics of policing, or training, or body cameras, but about people whose identities rely on power, status, and tradition rather than collective well-being and social innovation.
Japan is on the other side of that spectrum of collectivity. Japan is lucky (in this context) in that they are also overwhelmingly homogenous, so there isn't much of a outgroup to rebel against. They have plenty of social problems but militarized policing isn't one of them.
To the Western world, aside from its bleeding-edge aesthetics, Japanese society is heavily hierarchical, traditional, patriarchal, conservative, orderly... similar to the good-ol-boys we have here, except there, there isn't really much of a challenge to that power structure. There's no Japanese BLM equivalent to put that in sharp contrast with other elements of their society (which exist only on the fringe).
American culture, in contrast, has largely moved on (by % of population) from the good-ol-boys lifestyle, but those elements in our society are still there, and still clinging on, and hold a disproportionate amount of political power and an overwhelming amount of the firepower. Everyday, centrist Americans without significant exposure to violence and crime tend to be more welcoming of outsiders than the conservative elements, but can be easily swayed in both directions by political propaganda.
Long ago the movements veered from discussions about tactical reform and into basically mass marketing with gospel-like, life-or-death overtones and tidy slogans and us-vs-them mentalities. There's no coming back from that... you can go from "police reform" to "culture war", but it's much harder to de-escalate from that and ask about, "Wait, wait, instead of getting rid of police officers, what if we provided community specialists alongside them..."
Trump purposely escalated it into a us-vs-them thing, all the time, everywhere, across any divide he was able to weaponize, because it suited his campaign. We now pay the costs, as a society, with Biden sitting as a lame duck in the middle of it all, begging people to listen to him and be reasonable... but nobody does anymore. There's no one America anymore, just warring factions bound by a shared economy but no shared values.
shrug
Fundamentally a country this heterogenous is difficult if not impossible to govern. Maybe a EU-style model with more local autonomy would be more appropriate than federalism with supremacy. Our real flags now are either black, white, and blue or rainbow-colored, and the ol' stars and stripes are just hanging in tatters in the no man's land between them. Why not just acknowledge the reality and secede into more autonomous, culturally compatible regions and stop fight each other? There's room enough in the world for different societies & values systems, but not if they are forced by external factors to live by the same set of values against their consciences.
The US has never been homogenous. There's a reason we are a collection of states with a federalized government. "E Pluribus Unum."
This magical nostalgia past you're talking about has never existed. Trade whatever you're currently reading in for a few history books.
The problem at it's core is that politicians (including activists) and their platforms are not held accountable and their words are meaningless because they have no definition. Like just look at this thread. "Unfund" vs "Defund". How on earth are we supposed to infer that specific meaning and trust the other side to do so as well? It's like a recipe specifically designed for conflict and misunderstanding. Also a perfect recipe for back and forth definition debates like this one, instead of arguing about the core issues.
It is possible for anyone to see that something is a bad slogan, and easy once you have hindsight. I have no idea how to write a good one.
In any case, to my mind, much of the issue here is that, as an issue, it's been nationalized. What "side" you're on entirely depends on your national political identity now. But police are not a national institution. They aren't regulated federally, except the actual feds, but the feds have their own problems. Many of their investigative techniques probably should be illegal, but they're not. The problems with local police are entirely different, in that they're often doing things that actually are illegal, but because they are insiders to the criminal justice system, nobody will punish them. They've managed over the decades to leverage public sentiment against hippies, communists, drug users, and various crime waves of the 70s and 90s to thwart any and all efforts at civilian oversight, leaving us in a position where the police police themselves.
But it now seems like there is no alternative. As a now matter of national identity politics, as least in the voter consciousness, the only options are, as you said, totally shut down the police or give them even more tanks and bigger guns and less oversight.
These aren't actually the only options. Reform proposals are different from city to city, but you better have a small city and hope the national news doesn't pick up on what you're trying to do. And you can't talk about it on the Internet, unless it's a neighborhood-only private group.