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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

Quite frankly we lost. We were beaten and tear gassed and arrested and called rioters & looters on the news. Public figures called for more violence against us in major mainstream liberal publications. Many of us are still in jail with six figure bails, some of us are facing terrorism charges.

The entire system came down hard on those protests, from nearly every angle. The democrats refused to endorse or support the goal, and the risks & costs of continuing or escalating were too high. So it stopped, failed.

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What are you talking about? The media and Democrats were heavily in favor of the protesters to the extent of denying its part in enabling rioters and looters.

One of the greatest disservices in American education is how they teach about activism. The narrative goes that if you can get a million people to complain on the streets, this will magically drive political reform. What doesn't get talked about are the intense lobbying and legal challenges that actually kept the government accountable.

"Fiery but peaceful protests"

The image of a CNN anchor in a respirator standing in front of a burning building calling things peaceful was when the movement lost it.

It's hard to sympathize with an angry mob that's burning down cities and looting stores.

I'm not claiming protests were or should be necessarily peaceful. Those protests started because of murder and disempowerment, and a context of decades of it.

Making it hard to sympathize with protestors is an important role of the news, and a significant part of why those protests failed.

I've seen astounding violence from police, before during and after those protests. Look at the thread we're in! Look at the one yesterday about them smuggling fentanyl! Look at the one from last week about the LA county sheriff gangs! Protesters don't carry a responsibility to uphold the law, they are a reaction to the police refusing to do so.

I would say it's equally hard to sympathize with the cops that pushed down an elderly man, then left him bleeding from the head on the street, marching over his unmoving body towards protestors, in broad daylight.

It's important to remember that it's the cops with the deadly weapons, its the cops with the chemical weapons, and its the cops depriving access to medicine when they hurt protestors.

Most cities that started to follow through on either scrapping their police force or cutting their funding saw a massive spike in crime, and even those mayors and city councillors who were adamantly defund-the-police types are now begging for more money for the police and for police officers to come back out of retirement or from the other cities they moved to.

The public turned on the movement when the movement turned on the public. Minneapolis neighborhoods were faced with turning into food deserts after looting caused enough damage to force the grocery stores to close for nearly a year (smoke and water damage).

Some stores partner with non-governmental community peace organizations (i.e. civilized gangs) to reduce the need for police presence, and it is slowly working.

Others haven't been so lucky. A Walmart recent closed in a suburb because it needed to call police nearly 6,500 times over the course of 5 years. That was after other local retail outlets had also closed.

Social fabric in some areas is just fundamentally torn, and there's nobody with a good solution.

Which cities were those, that started to follow through on defunding?

Cities that increased funding are also experiencing the crime spike. It's a national phenomenon. Also one that apparently police can't prevent because, again, more police haven't prevented it.

Over 20 major cities cut or moved funding in some way by 2021: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-de...

> Over 20 major cities cut or moved funding in some way by 2021

That's a misleading way of talking about those numbers, and in fact the source linked within the article shows the exact opposite.

For example, it cites New York as an example of a city which "reduced" police funding. Except New York famously didn't - they simply moved SROs to the Department of Education instead. Total funding for police actually increased. It just was reported on a different line in the budget.

> Most cities that started to follow through on either scrapping their police force or cutting their funding saw a massive spike in crime

This is factually incorrect. Every major city in the country increased funding for police between 2019-2021. None defunded the police. Some made temporary adjustments in 2020 due to pandemic changes, but every single one was reversed by a subsequent increase over baseline levels for the 202-2021 or 2021-2022 cycle, depending on when the city's fiscal year falls.

Minneapolis is the only one which even voted to permanently defunded the police, but that was reversed before it went into effect.

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