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Comment by eckmLJE | Hacker News Reader

Actual instances of police funding being reduced are so rare that the author reaches for incidents of low police-citizen interaction following controversial police-on-citizen violence as evidence of what a straw-man version of "defund the police" advocates for.

"Defund the police" has to be the most poorly conceived political slogan of all time. It sounds more like a pejorative its opponents came up with.

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It must have been a calculated decision to name it 'Defund the police' - if it had been called what it really is, which is 're-allocate percentages of funds from the enforcement arm of the police to more pre-emptive interventions and other services while still increasing budgets all around' or even just 'reform the police' it would not have had legs. 'Defund the police' has legs but it's easily used by political opponents. Perhaps a student of political science can chime in on the merits of blunt messaging and if it has a longer term impact.

I can understand some criticisms of the slogan, but why are you criticizing the slogan in this case when the police were literally not defunded?

Not op. When the call for reform is "defund" and that seems like the wrong thing to do, then people don't support sensible reform. One would imagine that many if not most police officers support some kinds of sensible reform but probably hesitate to support "defunding" their wages and have their and their colleagues jobs cut, which is what "defund" really sounds like. It's a total us and them mentality which is not the way policing is supposed to be. In fact it's one of the things many people want reformed. Policing should be for us and us in our community with our consent as a population.

My point is that it doesn’t make sense to say “you called for defunding the police, we didn’t defund the police, things got worse, therefore your slogan is bad.”

Because no meaningful reform happened and whatever did happen doesn't, at face value, appear to be positive?

I would want to evaluate the merits of a particular slogan by means other than whether the intended reform happened. It’s easy to say “no thanks” to reform regardless of how good of a slogan it is.

But a misleadingly bad slogan makes it much more likely that people will say "no thanks". If what you said isn't what you meant, and what you said makes people reject what you meant, why did you say it?

I suspect that proponents thought anger at the police was much more widely spread than it was, so they grabbed what they thought would sell.

The slogan is bad because it channels the energy initiated by real problems into the worst idea possible. True, in many - though not all - cases this terrible idea was recognised as such even by the woke city managers and kept at the level of bloviating without doing much. That's still bad and the slogan still bad, and the opportunity wasted still bad. Not as bad as when this idea is actually implemented (not in Oakland but happened in other places afaik).

> their wages and have their and their colleagues jobs cut

Is this not literally the idea? The issue with "defund the police" slogan is that defunding isn't the end goal. The idea is to reduce the size, scope, militarization, and budget of the police force _and_ use that money to instead fund programs to help citizens and the local economy.

Part of the platform is absolutely to reduce the current scope of the widely militarized police force in the US.

>One would imagine that many if not most police officers support some kinds of sensible reform but probably hesitate to support "defunding" their wages and have their and their colleagues jobs cut, which is what "defund" really sounds like.

I'd argue that the reason that folks rallied 'defund' is that police aren't willing to accept reasonable reform and they have enough power to keep it from happening.

Reform isn't realistic in a system that required the group being reformed to consent to the type of reform.

I'm personally a fan of 'reallocate' police funds.

I think the frustration that led to "defund" is that a lot of sensible reforms have been resisted or watered down, and protections like qualified immunity have sheltered abusive cops from accountability.

For example: There was an article on Hacker News today about how an FBI program to track use-of-force incidents may shut down due to a lack of police involvement (https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2021/12/09/fbi-poli...).

I think there is likely a de-escalation path that involves sensible reform, but it will also require that reform to be embraced and implemented by the police

If education reformers cry "Feed shit to children" but don't actually feed shit to children, would you argue that it wasn't a terrible slogan because they didn't actually did it?

No, I would argue that it’s a terrible slogan for other reasons completely unrelated to whether or not they actually fed shit to children.

It wasn't just "defund the police", it was "abolish the police".

If your argument is that the police haven't been defunded or abolished, maybe your issue is with the mainstream media that were publishing arguments in favor of abolishing the police?

Have you considered holding them to account for that?

They should have gone with "right-size the police".

People are conflating "Defund the Police" with a reduction of Policing enforcement and staffing. Whereas, I believe the original intent of DTP was the stop the militarization of the Police by not allowing them to acquire APC and other war-surplus items. The movement feared, rightly so IMO, that having such things would allow Police Departments to train and begin to act in a manner more consistent with field battle and a less like Community-based Policing enforcement.

The article he cites is from a June 24 bill that redirected $17 million from that police budget to violence prevention programs [1]

[1] https://abc7news.com/oakland-police-funding-city-council-cut...

Reposting my reply to this comment that you reposted (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29504134)

If I read this article correctly then the author's point is that simply the passage of a bill to be enacted in the future is the cause of increased crime in the present, which seems like a shaky argument to me.

Also I'm noticing that the ABC7News article says

>More than $17 million will be diverted from the police to violence prevention and other services not involving police. Another $3.6 million will be put into the new MACRO program which will basically be a civilian crisis response program within the Oakland Fire Department addressing those in mental health crises.

This means that even assuming this is a net decrease of $20.6 million to budget, this is still giving back only ~half the net increase from this year's budget. So we should still be up $16 million or so vs. 2020

Again, this does not account for inflation (6.2%)

Also again, I don't see how inflation should apply to police budgets but not other budgets.

Sorry I don't seem to understand your argument. You're comparing the budgets in nominal terms without accounting for inflation. For example the $630 million this year won't be able to fund as many officers and services like the year prior due to inflation. Budgets are typically increased across the board to account for inflation.

Ah, thank you for clarifying, I understand now.

I still think this amounts to the argument "next year's budget cuts are increasing crime in my neighborhood now" which doesn't make sense to me.

Slight correction. The bill didn't redirect funds, it proposed redirection of funds. In reality, Oakland's police department is getting a larger budget [0].

[0] https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t...

> Actual instances of police funding being reduced are so rare

I'm not sure what you mean by rare, but many major cities did proceed with reducing police funds:

"New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Baltimore and a dozen other cities have all also reduced police spending. "

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-de...

Aside from the author saying so, I don't see any data in the linked article supporting that LAPD funding has been reduced. Moreover, a quick search seems to indicate that LAPD received a funding increase in 2021.

"The City Council cut the LAPD by $150 million in July, after massive protests following Floyd’s death, pledging to put the proceeds into disenfranchised communities. Council members quickly set aside $60 million, using much of those funds to balance the budget, leaving about $89 million for various programs."

L.A. cut millions from the LAPD after George Floyd. Here’s where that money is going

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-26/lapd-fun....

From the same article: "Although activists expressed satisfaction in seeing law enforcement funding go into social programs, some remained frustrated that Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council recently increased the LAPD’s budget for the fiscal year that starts on July 1."

And just one month ago, LAPD's budget was increased by 12% for the upcoming fiscal year, up $213 million.

wouldn't that mean the cause of the increased crime is either criminals who are angry at the police so they commit more crimes or the police not working as hard (or a combination)

Could be, but those aren’t exhaustive possibilities. There might also just be more crime e.g. because of the pandemic rather than anger at the police, or there might be the same actual level of crime but more is getting reported.

Wait what? Why would criminals be angry at the police for not interacting with them as much? I think a more likely explanation for increased crime is increased opportunity due to reduced police presence.

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