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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

> Not "abolish", reduce funding.

Yeah, I understand that's what people are saying to rationalize it. And like I said: we'll find out! But see my reply to the sibling comment, where I link directly to his words:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45820126

He's well-documented, saying many times, in many different variations, in many different places, that he wants to eliminate prisons, "dismantle" the police, and so on. One or two comments you might be able to brush aside, but this is a consistent pattern.

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That's what people are saying when they say defund. Reduce funding for. Consistently this is what anyone who says defund the police has always meant. You gotta take off the tin foil hat, my guy.

"We'll find out" haha, you think he's going to shut down the nypd? They have an operating budget of what, $6 billion dollars annually?

He's not going to shut them down, you can't just stop a $6b organization. You can, however, defund it. Maybe they could do just fine with $5 billion. If the city has an extra billion to spend on building housing or improving transit or providing health care or services to the homeless... a billion dollars a year buys a lot of things.

These kinds of folk will panic over "defund the police" as if it's shutting down an entire office. Meanwhile this administration proceeds to effectively shut down the DoED in all but name and we get a shrug back.

It becomes very hard to assume good faith in such situations.

There is no reason to assume good faith anymore. They revel in bad faith arguments

He literally, repeatedly said “defund and dismantle”. He’s not trying to be subtle. I’m not taking anything out of context. It’s obvious that he didn’t mean “reduce funding”, and while that may be what you think is reasonable, it’s not what he meant when he said it. I’ve given you the receipts.

You have to be trying really hard to interpret that in the way you’re trying to do it, “my guy.” I’m just reading his words and taking him seriously.

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