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Comment by jyounker | Hacker News Reader

The poster's entire article is based on a strawman.

The "Defund The Police" movement has very specific and very well documented goals: Use police only for law-enforcement, and use specialized responders for non-law enforcement interactions. For example, you send mental health specialists when someone is threatening suicide. This reallocates funding from the police to more capable responders, but allows the remaining police to actually focus on law enforcement.

The author ignores this completely to make his argument.

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> The "Defund The Police" movement has very specific and very well documented goals: Use police only for law-enforcement, and use specialized responders for non-law enforcement interactions.

It's not well-defined at all. There are many people who do literally want to "defund" and abolish the police entirely:

"Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

You posted this elsewhere but to be clear, you are wrong.

The defund the police movement, at least the one in the US that gained popularity between 2017 and 2021, was explicitly aimed at eliminating the concept of policing. The belief is that because policing began with South Carolina slave patrols (it did not, but that doesn't matter) that the whole concept is corrupt and changes in execution won't fix the heart of the problem.

In order to fix it, policing needs to be entirely destroyed and rethought, from first principles. The funding would be allocated towards community building and outreach a la the Cure Violence programs in NYC. Since crime is of course solely an economic and mental health issue, with proper education, stipends and mental health resources crime can be eliminated without needing a police force at all.

Some of the elements aren't bad, but taken together it was not a good idea.

It's like the orange man and whether you take him seriously or literally argument that many of his defenders used.

When the defund movement had people marching with ACAB & abolish posters regularly, it's hard to argue it meant anything else.

A thought exercise for the word re-definers defending the term:

If your CEO walked on stage and said "we are defunding __" where __ is the division you work in.. would you be like "oh good it means I'm going to work on better stuff now" or "oh shit let me get my resume up to date".

We can make lots of arguments like "they chose the wrong word" but I don't think we should argue that the word means something else just because it helps the slogan make more sense.

>> The belief is that because policing began with South Carolina slave patrols

Yes! This one always cracked me up and is so American centric. As if history began in 1776 or 1492 or 1619 or whatever date people want to use. No other civilization in the history of humanity ever had law enforcement? We had to invent it, and of course the bad people invented it.

“Defund the Police” reminds me of “High Speed Rail 2”, the biggest benefit of which would have been extra capacity for passenger and freight, new stations etc, not reduced journey times.

Defund The Police is obviously such a terrible name if their true goals are as they say

The whole point is that the defund the police movement is a signal taken up by people not directly effected by the issue; not a comment on the details or potential effectiveness of the concept...

So "the whole point" is that people are only allowed to support policies they would be directly aided by, or disagree with policies they are directly injured by?

Huh, super mysterious why this line of reasoning is popular amongst people who want the world to remain the same.

Big question is does police currently have enough funding for those main tasks? If not defunding them by taking money from them only makes situation even worse.

Or do you actually need more funding to spend on the other stuff? Which could in best case over some years decrease overall costs for society.

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