The requests to water down the rhetoric would simply continue until it was diluted down to, "we should do something nonspecific about this problem which may exist."
FWIW, anecdata, per my other comment [1]: I and large majority of my friends & family (Canadian lower-case-liberals by and large) all fall into that category. It took us a LOOOOONG time (I mean weeks and months) to give the platform and movement enough benefit of doubt to investigate underlying proposals (and then largely agree with them), after having immediate and strong negative reaction to "defund the police".
And most people will not give it benefit of doubt. I literally to this day have conversations with acquaintances of the sort: "No, they're not actually advocating anarchy and everybody fend for themselves! No, I'm serious! Yes, I know that's what the term implies. Hear me out, this is what I think they're saying..."
It's a horrible horrible term that does horrible horrible disservice to the intent.
You giving it the benefit of the doubt, and reaching people who were just shy of doing so, _is_ the rhetoric being effective.
There’s being right, and there’s being effective (to steal a quote from Obama). The current phrasing is worse at turning public opinion than some of the more us/them-rhetoric that comes from I.e. vegans in that regard. Sure eating lots of meat is bad, and animals should probably be treated better, but screaming “meat is murder” won’t actually make any carnivores drop a single steak of their menu, whereas measures that don’t immediately make the respondent feel attacked might.
Yes, “defund the police” will turn heads, but it also immediately leads to being written off as fringe madness. A better slogan should be possible, that actually contains the message of demilitarization.
This is what I'm getting at; in changing the language, you change the idea, and an abolitionist agenda becomes a reformist one.
If you want to advocate for reform, then that's great, that makes sense. But telling people who are advocating abolition, "you're doing it wrong because you aren't doing it my way or appealing to my sensibilities," is patronizing.
And it won't be long until someone says, "Safer Police alienates law enforcement, we should call it 'Better Policing', that way we're sure to be taken seriously," and after a few rounds of this you're left with nothing. It's a losing game.
Society at large will take you seriously when they can't pretend otherwise anymore, because you have repeatedly demonstrated the veracity of your views, often for decades. There is no end to the excuses people can come up with to dismiss you if that is what they want to do. People either won't change their minds, will change their own mind, or will have some experience that shakes up their world view. The rhetoric you use almost doesn't matter; you can't change someone's mind _for them_, no matter what you say. The most you can do is share your ideas, giving them the opportunity to change their mind, if they so choose. What matters is that you're a part of the conversation, and that what you're demanding is just. People will come around. The ones who don't will get old and die.
"Safer Police" would've been radical 20 years ago. Many people's world views were shaken up by repeated videos of police misconduct. "Defund the Police" is radical currently; in 10, 20 years, it might well be mainstream.
If one is not willing to use force for enforcement... does one have enforcement?
"Enforcement" already presupposes violence. I'd suggest "governance" as a better term. Violence is an exceptionally poor mechanism of governance. It creates an outsized amount of unjust outcomes without working especially well.
Police are often called on to force homeless people out of an area, for instance. This often results in violence but never results in solving the problem that people need homes. The war on drugs has resulted in the over policing of impoverished areas and an inestimable amount of misery, but it hasn't helped a single addict to recover and has only enhanced the power of drug cartels.
The question I think people need to ask themselves is, do the police accomplish the goals I believe they accomplish? Am I bringing a lot of preconceived notions to the discussion that I should examine more carefully? Are there better ways to achieve governance?
I'd encourage this thought experiment. Let's say there's a stoop outside your apartment where people smoke, and they litter their cigarette butts. You want them not to litter. What's going to be more effective; threatening them with violence, or putting a trash can out there?
Armed robberies would probably require an armed response, which would certainly imply we'd need an organization with the resources to investigate this & dispatch armed people to interdict this robber.
That doesn't imply this force should be patrolling the streets or have the power to pull people over arbitrarily, and if you believe we need people serving in those roles, it didn't imply they should be armed or that lethal authority should seamlessly blend from responding to armed robbers to responding to a noise complaint.
> I think the problem is actually that you can't imagine a world where we have rules and governance without a militarized force which uses violence to enforce those laws
Then you said:
> Armed robberies would probably require an armed response, which would certainly imply we'd need an organization with the resources to investigate this & dispatch armed people to interdict this robber.
The only purpose for a paramilitary force in society is to respond to violence in an organized and accountable matter. There is no society that can possibly survive long-term without the organized ability to deploy violence on occasion.
You keep bringing up nonviolent situations where armed police aren't the best response; I agree with you that the modern people we call "the police" could be reformed, curtailed in responsibility, and replaced with other community representatives, but the core function of police, which is deploy violence when needed, is not appropriate to fully remove from society.
This would be agreeable to me, at least in principle; the specifics would be important. However, the police force is used in all manner of ways.
> You keep bringing up nonviolent situations where armed police aren't the best response
You continue to downplay or ignore that this is the role police are put to, in the real world, and that it routinely results in violence and unnecessary incarceration
You're the one who challenged us to think about how to enforce laws "without a militarized force". And now you're saying we'll need armed response. Which is it?
This is why people who advocate getting "rid of the police" (your words) sound like they're talking out both sides of their mouth.
"Get rid of police!"
"No, I didn't mean to get rid of police entirely. Why would you think that?"
It's not a good look. People who talk like this are self-sabotaging their side of the argument by using intentionally double-speak language.
This will never go through so long as people continue to use phrases like "get rid of the police".
Again, the vast majority of what police do is unrelated to violent crime.
The police often respond to completely nonviolent incidents, bringing guns into the situation, and then people die. That's entirely needless.
In Uvalde, the police arrived, armed and prepared, to a violent situation, and were unable to organize an effective response. School shootings should be a slam dunk to justify a militarized police, it's the literal "bad guy with a gun." But time and again they fail to respond effectively.
Violence is a one trick pony. Hurting people is the only thing it does well.
> Violence is a one trick pony. Hurting people is the only thing it does well.
Yes, and when your community is faced with organized violence perpetrated by people residing in your community, what is your non-violent solution? The only way to prevent further violence once it has occurred is by tracking people who committed the violence and detaining, reeducating, exiling, or killing them.
What I'm saying is that our conception of what the police is, what they do, and what they are for is wrong. This organization needs to be abolished; it's purpose is to inflict violence, in all manner of places, for any infraction the officer cares to enforce (while ignoring those they don't care to). A police force does not create safety or justice. It creates danger for those at the fringes of society, fails to stop bad actors (and often exacerbates the factors that lead to such bad actors), and creates innumerable injustices.
In replacing it, we'll have to address the thorny question of how to intervene in violent situations. It's true that we will need to organize something to address this. You're saying this will necessarily be a recapitulation of a police force; that's certainly a danger, but not a necessity.
A police force is a standing army which has broad authority over the populace. I am proposing we can change those parameters; they may not need to be standing, their authority and mandate can be very narrow.