There's a thing I constantly tell people. Communication often has three components: 1) What you mean to say, 2) What you say, 3) What was heard. As a communicator you should try to ensure that what you say and what you mean are the same. All the while you have to keep in mind your audience to ensure what was heard was what was intended. At the same time, as a listener your job is to try to understand the meaning and not what was said. Getting the intent is much harder and requires one to be aware of the limitations of language and communication as well as your own internal biases and often the biases of the one communicating (what assumptions are they operating under).

Additionally, analogies, slogans, sayings, and such are all simplified and reduced methods intended to prime a person to remember or think of a more complicated topic. Here "defund/abolish the police" is an easy to remember/say slogan (and can be easily written down and read from afar). It is much harder to communicate "we need to rethink policing in general, their funding, and what they should be doing. Currently we do not know the answer but are trying to drive a national discussion so that we can come to an agreement and fix what a large portion of us believe is a problem." The latter is much more vague and is trying to bring together people with wildly different opinions but do agree with that main point.

Reading __ANY__ slogan as an absolute and/or literal meaning is simply naive. It's hard enough to communicate accurately with the roughly 300 words in this comment, let alone slogans, which need to be smaller than a tweet.