I'm totally on board with that plan (it would be nice if there were someone I could call to check on a possibly-suicidal friend who wouldn't show up with guns drawn). Americans are four times more likely to be killed by cops than Canadians, and 1 in 1000 young black men is killed by a cop (or some number along those lines). Clearly something should change.

My question is, why call it "defund the police"? The core of the idea is that, in many cases we can change our response from involving police officers to involving some other group who will hopefully be able to do a better job. The fact that this can be accomplished by reallocating funds from the police department, to avoid needing to levy taxes to raise revenue, seems like almost the least important part of the plan. Even then, "defund the police" is only the first half of "defund the police and use the additional funding to create another group that picks up some of the police's responsibilities".

My feeling is that many people view police with antipathy, so they like the slogan and concept of "defund the police" because it feels like a retaliation against the police. I strongly suspect that other ideas, some of which may be much more beneficial than changing the response, will be ignored if they can't be phrased as a tactical strike in the culture war.

Here's one list of proposals [0] for police reform, many of which seem very promising for how little cultural sway they have (delegalize police unions, abolish QI, decriminalize victimless offenses, etc.) I wonder if they have so little sway because they can't be phrased in a sufficiently incendiary manner.

(And by the way, just because there's antipathy towards the police doesn't mean the police are directly at fault. For instance, if police are made to enforce unpopular legislation like the war on drugs, that will obviously make people dislike them but the root problem is somewhat upstream)

[0]: https://medium.com/@yudkowsky/a-comprehensive-reboot-of-law-...

I don't know if the the more reasonable but equivalent slogans got replaced by the more spicy ones in some sort of meme survival of the fittest, or if it's a trend of today's social movements to use divisive or easy to misunderstand slogans on purpose.

Ex: "Black lives matter too" vs "black lives matter". or "replace / reboot the police" vs "defund the police". The police one I'm having a hard time thinking of a slogan that would be better, maybe that's why it stuck.

> "Black lives matter too" vs "black lives matter"

time travels back to a nearby counter-protest, yells:

"All Lives Matter, Always."

time travels back to the future

And now you're back to square one.

you call it defund the police because they are disproportionately overfunded.

8 Can't Wait caught on. It isn't incendiary. It does fit on a protest sign.

> Americans are four times more likely to be killed by cops than Canadians

I didn't know death by Canadian was something we tracked specifically :P

It's an overarching term for people OD'ing on maple syrup and those being trampled by moose.

Because left wing rhetoric comes from grass roots ground up sort of activism. Right wing rhetoric is much smoother because they have full marketing teams and PR backing them. One is organic. One is designed. Organic movements are messy. Carefully designed messages are nice and succinct.

One example of right wing consolidation around their designed messaging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZggCipbiHwE

So, how do you like right wing rhetoric in Capitol ? Messy ? Organic ?)

> 1 in 1000 young black men is killed by a cop

Given that ~300 black men are killed by police each year, I don't think that math checks out.

Agree with police reform, although we probably need more funding in many places, not less.

300/year * an average lifespan of 78 years = 23400.

Multiply that by 1,000 and you get 23M.

There are 38M Black and African Americans in the USA, approximately half of which are male.

The math checks out fine.

Yea that makes sense, surprising to me that it works out

It doesn't work out. A 78 year old is not a "young black man."

I would suspect the ages of people shot by police are weighted fairly heavily in the younger category.

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793

> Risk peaks between the ages of 20 y and 35 y for all groups. For young men of color, police use of force is among the leading causes of death.

300/19740000 = 0.0000152

→ 0.999984802431611 chance of not-being-killed-by-police per year.

pow(0.999984802431611, 69) = 0.998951909443727 chance of never being killed by police.

→ 0.001048090556273 chance of at some point being killed by police

→ just over 1/1000 over a lifetime.

The math checks out... if we ignore the "young" part.

It still works out if we assume young people are just as likely as old men to be killed by police. Restricting us to young people would probably reduce the denominator of "300/19740000" enough to counteract the fact that the exponent of "69" is reduced.

In fact, if you assume that people are young for x% of their lives, and x% of black people are young, this exactly cancels out and you still get `0.001048` odds of being killed by police.

The violent crime rate for black men is roughly equal to the portion of police shooting victims which are black. Violent crime rate (excluding murder) is roughly 2x the average, and so is the death rate to police.

That's why I think we need to be focusing on why black people have a higher crime rate, and how we can fix the societal problems that lead to that. Reducing the number of police shootings is a great goal, but so long as there is a racial (and gender) divide in the crime rate there is going to be a divide in the police shooting rate.

> Criminality among young black men is also disproportionaly higher.

Is it? Or are young black men just disproportionately more likely to be held accountable for their “Three felonies a day”?

The problem is that "defund" means remove all funding. So these people are playing word games.

They originally meant “remove all funding” which is why you would see this intermixed with “abolish the police”. It was an initial emotional overreaction that they’re trying to walk back. It would even be understandable (indeed, commendable) if they simply said, “we reacted emotionally to some troubling videos; we regret advocating for the abolition of police altogether, but we do want to see these other, more moderate reforms”. Instead you have some people doubling down i.e., “no, we actually meant ‘abolish the police’” and others who are cringingly pretending that “abolish the police” was some sort of metaphor. Both camps are more preoccupied with appearing to be correct than with actually being correct. Of course, someone will inevitably try to deflect to the errors of some other group, as though no one can be criticized except the worst group, which is the kind of race-to-the-bottom thinking that landed us here in the first place.

> “we reacted emotionally to some troubling videos; we regret advocating for the abolition of police altogether, but we do want to see these other, more moderate reforms”

Have you ever participated in politics? Because even in a small town government meeting, a board member stating they are changing their view because they "reacted emotionally" initially is going to immediately be followed by a call for them to resign.

I'm not opining on the issue at hand. It's just that when I read the suggestions here on HN about political messaging, many of them don't line up with any political reality I'm familiar with.

Even still, the appropriate response isn’t to double down or lie. If you don’t like those options, consider your response before expressing it in the first place. I agree that we should normalize honesty though.

> It was an initial emotional overreaction

This one line summarizes the broken nature of our political conversation.

We are in a cycle of emotional overreactions, amplified by social media, and escalating in severity.

The problem is people who would rather whine about word choice in protest slogans instead the underlying issues.

No, the real problem is people getting angry because they think they understand the underlying issues.

There is no reasoning that will allow down that anger. No looking at actual facts and statistics.

> The problem is that "defund" means remove all funding. So these people are playing word games.

You have to that with slogans. They're low resolution, so there's an inevitable loss of fidelity. No one marches with a legislative proposal on a placard, and it would be unreasonable to do so.

"Reform the police" is a slogan and accurate.

> "Reform the police" is a slogan and accurate.

IIRC, "defund the police" grew out of frustration with various police reform efforts that failed to address these problems [1]. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to take up the slogan of one of the things you're opposing.

[1] For instance I watch a video of some police deescalation training (in Seattle, IIRC), where the rank-and-file were talking back and not taking it seriously, and the instructors were not very enthusiastic or in control. I can't imagine that reform effort did a lot of good.

It's not accurate, unfortunately. Reform is as ambiguous as defund. Do you mean totally eradicate and then reform a department? Or do you mean just telling them "do better"? Are you talking about re-forming the police or reforms for police?

“Reduce police funding” ?

> “Reduce police funding”?

Better in some ways, worse in others. It avoids the confusion with abolishment, but it looses the connotations of seriously changing the status quo. Because of that, it's less attention-grabbing.

The truth is often less attention grabbing than falsehoods.

It’s “one crazy trick” or “you’re not going to believe #7” but for matters that are actually important to discuss and debate in specifics.

> The truth is often less attention grabbing than falsehoods.

Pretty much every slogan is a falsehood, if you want to quibble.

That's a poor excuse. They're low resolution, but not so low resolution that you can chant a slogan and then claim you meant something else entirely. Why not "reform the police", or hell, even "disarm the police"?

Do you think "disarm the police" would be going better than "defund the police"?

(I suspect it would actually be quite a bit more incendiary.)

Communication (even at length) is hard. We all bring different baggage to every attempt to speak and listen. It's probably ~impossible once you mix in uncharitable readers/listeners.

I can't speak for the campaigners, but I suspect "reform the police" won't cut the mustard for them because it's the sort of thing the establishment says before it fails to deliver meaningful change. "Today I'm calling for the establishment of a bipartisan commission on police reform", and its short imperative slogan--"reform the police"--could be an inspiring message if people had the impression that is how the gears sound when they're spinning up to change something.

But it's not very fair to insist people should be chanting a demand that seems to translate to "promise to look busy for a few months so that we'll go home and hope we don't notice when you don't solve the problem."

"Reform the police" has long been the tagline for ineffective measures. We've been trying to do it for decades; "defund the police" is in part a response to the reform argument.

"Disarm the police" would receive the exact same pearl clutching responses.

People talked about defunding education and the military for years. Both for and against. Everyone understood what it meant.

They talked about reducing funding.

They talked about defunding.[1][2]

[1] https://www.alternet.org/2012/10/how-higher-education-us-was...

[2] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/03/10/defund...

I'm not sure how either of these articles support your point.

Your first article is someone criticizing prior efforts by others to reduce public education funding. The only person using the word "defund" is the author. Though interestingly, there is a mention of conservative attacks on programs like sociology, anthropology, minority studies, and gender studies. I assure you that many conservatives really do want to abolish funding for those programs.

The second article is a single person using the word "defund" to describe Obama's reduction of military spending. Again, somebody using the word to describe somebody else's actions.

Interestingly, both of those articles are by people who oppose defunding. Perhaps they used that word precisely because it implies "remove funding entirely", which has an exaggerated emotional impact?

In any case, neither example is the same thing as a large social movement using it as a slogan, especially when that movement publishes things like "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police": https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

When things like that appear in the New York Times, is it so unreasonable for people to take their word for it? Or should we keep insisting that they don't really mean it?

And before you tell me that that's just one person's opinion, I'll just point out that so were both of your references, and those are the opinions of people who aren't even supporters of those movements. The "defund the police" movement has its own people using the term and saying "yes, we mean literally abolish the police".

The first article also quotes someone else saying defund. Eliminating sociology, history, anthropology, and language aren't mainstream conservative positions. Minority studies and gender studies maybe.

I picked 2 old articles from different political tribes to show it isn't new or just 1 tribe. Defund the Pentagon is a slogan now. Bernie Sanders[1] and Barbara Lee[2] proposed cutting the military budget by 10% and called it defunding.

I don't see anyone saying defund can't mean abolish. But most people who mean abolish say abolish because defund can mean reduce funding.

It's unreasonable to listen to people on the fringe of a movement and ignore the majority. It's unreasonable to read NYT opinion pieces and ignore NYT news pieces.[3] It's unreasonable to ignore actual legislation. It's unreasonable to ignore all the top search results.

[1] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/07/16/defund-the...

[2] https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/defund-pentagon-b...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/what-does-defund-polic...

When you march with something that’s objectively false and materially misleading, you lose my good faith engagement.

“Defund the police” is misleading in a way that “Trump Train” and “Ridin’ with Biden” are not. It’s not a real train and Biden isn’t with you, but people are not misled.

English is not my first language, but it seems an ambiguous slogan as the prefix de- not only means to remove but also to reduce / degrade. For instance, there were some recent calls for "defunding the Pentagon", in the sense of reducing military spending.

> Defund

> to deplete the financial resources of

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/defund

You left out the first definition:

> to withdraw financial support from, especially as an instrument of legislative control

Correct, that's why I used the word "ambiguous" (i.e. having or expressing more than one possible meaning).

People talked about defunding education and the military for years. Both for and against. Everyone understood what it meant.

I mean, you're basically the problem here. You're very clearly being disingenuous and playing word games at the exact moment you're accusing others of doing the same.

Yes, I agree with you. I would also add the ‘spirit’ of the Defund the Police movement was that a lack of oversight created a safe environment for bad officers to victimize their community.

Now, many of the same champions of this cause are taking on the role of the police themselves. Across Reddit, Twitter, and elsewhere, people are creating open source documents with the names of anyone they believe was at the riot.

Most troubling of all, I am seeing many people openly advocating the police should have shot more protesters or brutalized them in some manner.

This seems highly contrary to the goals of the movement.

> Most troubling of all, I am seeing many people openly advocating the police should have shot more protesters or brutalized them in some manner.

I've seen lots of people ask questions like “where were the tear gas and rubber bullets?”, but I think you are missing the point of those and other references to the behavior of the police during BLM and other protests if you interpret them as a call that the violent behavior should have been repeated.

They are, in at least most cases, using the restraint shown in the attempted coup where top government leaders were targeted to highlight what they see as the inappropriateness of the violent response in earlier protests and the hollowness of law enforcement claims that the force used in those earlier events was reasonable, necessary, and justified rather than motivated by racial and political bias.

No, there were people also saying that the protestors should have been shot. On this very website, IIRC (rightly downvoted), but certainly on other platforms.

> Most troubling of all, I am seeing many people openly advocating the police should have shot more protesters or brutalized them in some manner.

> This seems highly contrary to the goals of the movement.

It is, and most people "in the movement" I've seen are saying "hey, this gentleness is how BLM protests should've treated, too".

I haven't seen that.

I have seen many saying black people would have been shot, and this is unequal, that doesn't mean they want more shot.

I've also seen many decrying the lack of defence of congress. Again, doesn't mean more deaths, just better preparation.

I've seen many of my peers, friends even (which hurts to see) openly calling for mass bloodshed and rejoicing in the deaths of those who were shot or died on 1/6.

Hatred and malice spreads like a viral wildfire on social media, no matter what your political ideology.

Well on the one hand, hoping people get killed is pretty dark.

On the other, these people literally attempted to overthrow the country, some were armed, some had bombs, some had the intent of abducting and/or harming people like Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi. So I would be very sympathetic to there having been a much more robust response, whilst still preferring nobody be hurt.

Yes, the lack of preparation for a mob which had been announcing its intentions publicly for weeks in advance leads me to believe someone higher up must have issued orders to stand down, essentially letting them in.

Haven't you seen the repeated message:

> We're not saying shoot them like you shot us. We're saying don't shoot us like you didn't shoot them.

The issue is with the double standard, and that's what's at the root of the BLM movement. Honestly I'm surprised that some people still haven't managed to understand what's at the root of BLM after like all the demonstrations that happened around it.

Even the name of the movement: "Black Lives Matters" aka "Blacks are not a lower class to be treated more arshly and with less humanity"

Which is why when someone says BLM nah ALM, it's absolutely missing the point of the movement. Cause how do you reframe that: "All people are of equal class"... Ok but black people aren't treated equally so like that's not true? That's why there are million of black people protesting. It's okay to maybe wonder... Wait is it true that black people are treated differently? Is it because they are black? Or is it more that poor people (happen to often be black) and are treated differently? Yes sure that's a question one can wonder, but you don't have to go very far at least to suspect that whatever it is, in effect, black people do get treated differently (be it because they are black or because they are poor, or because they're less educated, etc.) The why doesn't matter, the different treatment does, no matter what, nobody should be treated differently.

Sorry for the rant, but it's tiring having to explain these basics. Of course left and right can't even have a proper conversation around the issue when half the table doesn't understand what is the issue to discuss.

And I like to remind people, this isn't just the root of the BLM movement, this is literally the root of the United States itself. The declaration of independence:

> We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;

>maybe we don’t need armed people to give tickets to drivers with a busted headlight

There are endless videos of normal cops being executed by unhinged drivers who were pulled over for things like "a busted headlight." You don't know who you're dealing with, how close to the edge some people are, or if they are dangerous felons, when you pull them over. If those situations were a very real possibility in your daily job, would you perform that job unarmed? I wouldn't. Maybe some very brave mental health professionals would, for a time, until some of them are killed as well, as indiscriminately as the police, which is inevitable.

What then? Stop pulling people over altogether, because it's not worth risking anybody's life further? Just let people speed and drive drunk, or drive with an unsafe vehicle?

When I get this far in discussions with people, it eventually comes down to "well dangerous people shouldn't have guns." It's a nice thought, naive in my opinion, but regardless, how do we deal with the reality of right now until those ideals manifest in reality? The reality is that dangerous people make regular traffic stops too dangerous for normal people to behave in any other way that to exercise extreme caution.

> There are endless videos of cops being executed by unhinged drivers who were pulled over for things like "a busted headlight."

Frequently, this is because they suspect the cop will find they have a warrant or contraband and the stop will proceed past a ticket to arrest and felony charges.

Separating the civil and criminal enforcement here makes these encounters safer; we can see this in countries where traffic cops aren't routinely armed.

How do you know to send a social worker or a cop before they're identified and checked for warrants? Or do we just do 100% unarmed social workers and ask the dude with a warrant to kindly wait about 5 to 10 minutes for cops to come over to arrest them?

Seems to work in Denver thus far.

https://www.denverpost.com/2020/09/06/denver-star-program-me...

> Since its launch June 1, the STAR van has responded to more than 350 calls, replacing police in matters that don’t threaten public safety and are often connected to unmet mental or physical needs. The goal is to connect people who pose no danger with services and resources while freeing up police to respond to other calls. The team, which is not armed, has not called police for backup, Sailon said.

> The team has responded to an indecent exposure call that turned out to be a woman changing clothes in an alley because she was unhoused and had no other private place to go. They’ve been called out to a trespassing call for a man who was setting up a tent near someone’s home. They’ve helped people experiencing suicidal thoughts, people slumped against a fence, people simply acting strange.

> “It’s amazing how much stuff comes across 911 as the general, ‘I don’t know what to do, I guess I’ll call 911,’” Richardson said. “Someone sets up a tent? 911. I can’t find someone? 911.”

There's a similar organization in Eugene, OR called CAHOOTS: https://www.usnews.com/news/cities/articles/2020-07-06/eugen...

So a traffic stop shouldn't involve a check for outstanding warrants?

There are a variety of different opinions on the matter.

Don't check at all. Check, but report without pursuit. Some have issues with traffic stops entirely, given the racial biases involved in who to pull over. (Demonstrated most effectively in this study, where the disparity disappears when the sun goes down: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/inside-100-million-poli... / https://news.stanford.edu/2020/05/05/veil-darkness-reduces-r...)

There's also the fact that the scary "normal cops being executed by unhinged drivers" scenario is a vanishingly rare scenario. The rate of murders of police officers matches roughly the rate in the general population. https://www.newsweek.com/it-has-never-been-safer-be-cop-3720...

> The rate of murders of police officers matches roughly the rate in the general population.

And they wear body armor, can call for backup, and can engage threats with deadly force. I would imagine a job with those tactical advantages would have a much much lower murder rate than the general population.

Dont persue?

Dude the reason the cat with the warrant hasn't been caught is because they dont show up to their known residence. They are EVADING. Their home isnt a safe space from warrants.

You just effectively nullified the entire reason to have a warrant out for someone's arrest, let alone reason for bail so someone shows up to court.

And no, it's not safer in the sense they aren't shot. Body armor has gotten better and the likelihood of surviving a few rounds to the chest has gone up. The shootings haven't changed, just the body armor. Get out of your sick fantasy world. Better yet, go be a cop to help reform. See for yourself before you think you have an opinion.

> Better yet, go be a cop to help reform. See for yourself before you think you have an opinion.

Cops who attempt to turn in bad cops get fucked up by other cops, so this is a no-go.

Otherwise I generally agree with your point that not checking for warrants has a really bad consequence of potentially letting go of people who have warrants out for committing heinous, heinous crimes. (Admittedly, often times cops have let go of people during traffic stops without checking for warrants. Several serial killers for example.)

Of course it should not! Traffic stops should not be a dragnet.

OK, so then you're going to have some explaining to do when someone with a warrant commits another violent crime, and it turns out that the week prior he was pulled over for some traffic violation and was let go.

If only we had a similar expectation of "explaining to do" when the opposite happens, and an innocent person winds up dead because of an armed traffic stop?

Philando Castile serves as a good example.

This is a really bad faith response. Truthfully, out of all the traffic stops, which do you think happens at a higher rate: instances like Philando Castile, or instances where someone pulled over has a warrant for a violent crime and goes on to commit more violent crime? If you have to stop and think about it for an extended amount of time, then to me, that suggests you have a strong bias in one direction.

Harassment by police at traffic stops happens at orders of magnitude higher rate than the capture of potentially violent criminals with warrants.

And it does not matter: in the US and most civilized countries a police officer is supposed to have a reasonable suspicion before they start invading someone's privacy.

The idea of someone running warrant checks on the basis of a broken tail light is antithetical to notions like the presumption of innocence and right to privacy.

You have moved the goal post. The parent comments weren't talking about "harassment", it was talking about unjustifiable murder, like the instance of Philando Castile, vs capturing violent criminals with warrants.

> The idea of someone running warrant checks on the basis of a broken tail light is antithetical to notions like the presumption of innocence and right to privacy.

Hm, there's definitely a line somewhere. I'm with you in that I don't think cops should be able to demand ID and run checks on random people simply out and about in public. Broken tail light? Not sure. Speeding? OK now you're breaking the law and arguably creating a public safety threat, but probably not going to be arrested. DUI? Now you're in misdemeanor territory at least. When is it reasonable to check if you're also wanted for something else? Maybe when you're booked at the jail?

Yes, as a society we have to decide together where to place that line. But because of the aforementioned reasons it is my strong belief that any such warrant checks should be impossible to do by the officer on the spot as they have nothing to do with the current stop. Checks being done by a clerk at a court or in jail makes a lot more sense.

The DMV checks for warrants if I go in for a license renewal, despite being unarmed. Seems to work OK; if someone shows up with a warrant they just call the cops.

Census workers aren't expected to check for warrants, because it's not their job; I'm advocating the same for things like speeding enforcement.

Well, since there was an investigation, criminal charges, and a jury trial, it sounds like it was "explained" as much as our system is capable of.

Given that the cop was acquitted of all charges, perhaps the system should be capable of more here?

Maybe so. Neither you nor I were on the jury though. We don't just get to ignore a jury decision and impose our own personal justice because from the outside it doesn't seem fair. There were two blacks on the jury, according to what I read on Wikipedia.

But you can make the same argument in favor or warrantless searches, phone call (metadata) dragnets, stop and frisk, mass surveillance, etc. You are basically making an argument against "the fruit of the poisoned tree" doctrine with respect to crime evidence. More generally, it is an argument against the 4th and 5th ammendements.

Endless?

In 2019 there were 48 cops killed in the line of duty by 'felonious acts'.

6 were killed during traffic stops

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...

I've seen a lot of police dashcam shootings, I guess my inaccuracy was to assume all of the officers actually died.

Consider the possibility that you see them because they're rare and thus notable enough to make the news etc.

Also consider the possibility that there's propaganda benefit to making the public think it's common.

You're misinterpreting my "endless videos" comment to mean "happens with great regularly", instead of "this an established scenario to train for", within the context of traffic stops. People shoot cops at traffic stops, it's a thing that happens, and people should be aware of it.

From your comments, it seems that because you can show that it's relatively rare, nobody should expect, plan for, or train for it. I look at stats that show police murder rate comparable to the general population and I am honestly impressed that they are able to keep it that low while dealing with some of the most dangerous elements of society. Do you believe it is because violent criminals have a similar level of hatred towards police as they do a member of the general public, or is it because police train for the worst case scenario?

> "this an established scenario to train for"

Training is another key aspect of the problem.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/02/dave-grossman-t...

This is also the case for cops shooting unarmed people.

Adding on to what you said: What people dont get about traffic stops, to issue someone a ticket, their ID needs to be ran to be validated. What also happens when you run an ID? Oh this person has a warrant(s). Who tends to shoot cops or anyone who decides to pull them over? People with warrants because they dont want to go to jail! Or they're riding dirty. An unarmed ticket maid won't stop the problems.

Anyways, domestic disputes are some of the most dangerous calls for cops. A social worker to diffuse the situation seems like a good idea in theory. However reality doesn't give 2 shits about theory. The reason 911 is called out to these is because violence is about to happen, is happening or has been. Hell, Jacksonville sent a female officer to a a domestic dispute of something being stolen between 2 females last year. Body cam shows the officer walks up to the door, knocks, announces herself takes two steps back and waits. A chick just opens the door with a knife and stabs the female officer. "Anecdotal" you say. No. I used to do security integration for a few police departments in Colorado. I got to know a lot of them and would just hear and see this dumb shit nearly daily. Hell, watch Donut Operator on youtube. The amount of videos like this are ridiculously high.

Just out of the blue, a seemingly innocent call, someone gets their stupid on and attacks the cops. And this is Colorado (Denverand Co Springs area). Not the most dangerous area in the country. I now live in Florida.

Do I think cops need a few weeks of better deescalation training or even a better training program needs to be developed? Absolutely and I know for a fact about 80% of other cops want this because they were talking about it back in 2015. Do all cops need to have better hand to hand combat training so they dont need to always result to their firearm or the ineffective less than lethal countermeasures provided (yea tasers and bean bags dont work nearly as often as you think). My opinion doesn't matter because 100% of cops have begged for this, again, since 2015 that I know of. But that all requires funding, unlike Seattle deciding to cut the PD budget by a 3rd, saying they wanted to take more and made their black female chief the poorest paid chief in Seattle history. Who, mind you, even the most racist sexist asshole who looks at her resume will say she earned being the chief, without question.

I swear a majority of people are rational and understand that reality is a dangerous place and bad things happen. They know that defunding the cops and sending an unarmed social worker is just going to result in higher body bag orders or the police are going to get reinvented through them. That's enough internet for now.

I take “defund the police” to mean the opposite of “fund the police”.

That’s an interesting clarification as I’ve never heard this take before, especially from the press who’s supposed to speak for the left. They seem pretty happy with just plain: let’s defund the police, full stop.

As others have pointed out, the explanations have existed but perhaps not in your view.

From where I stand (Seattle, know multiple Defund folks), the reaction has been "So, the one true thing we think cops should do - prevent significant violent action and protect people - they failed at. This further proves our point". You can dither on whether blocking traffic is violent (it's not) but the events really only strengthened their case - BLM peaceful protesting is met with an order of magnitude more violence than actual attempted attacks on the government. So why bother having cops if they don't do anything when it actually matters?

It was a dismal communication strategy from the non-fringe leftists to adopt that slogan; there was no way it wouldn't be interpreted as "abolish the police" by a large fraction of the constituents, likely alienating many moderates and giving their opponents an obvious counter. Something like "demilitarize the police" would likely have worked much better.

> especially from the press who’s supposed to speak for the left

I have no idea what this quote means, but left leaning press have explained the concept of defunding the press just fine.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/05/defunding-th...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/07/defund-po...

have they? at the very least, they are not presenting a unified face.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

It's true that there are differences of opinion among the many people participating in this conversation, and the reporting on it.

But to be fair, this article does say:

"But don’t get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.

"We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.

"We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison."

Why would you want or expect the press to present a unified face?

I don't, and it would be very scary if it did. all I'm saying it's quite reasonable to be unsure what "defund the police" means. it's not at all clear that it has some generally accepted meaning.

I agree - it doesn’t have some generally accepted meaning.

Some people seem to mean ‘no police at all’ and some seem to mean ‘don’t task the police with trivial stuff’.

But why then would the right assume it means the former?

well for one thing, the conservative slogan "defund planned parenthood" really does mean (AFAIK) remove all ways planned parenthood could possibly get a dollar from the government. it's not inconsistent to interpret "defund the police" the same way.

but more generally, it's inevitable that the opposing side will interpret a vague slogan in the most negative and scary light possible. I suspect this is often by design, ie motte and bailey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

Conservatives complained about Obama defunding the military too. They knew he didn't disband it.

Because apparently "the press" and "the left" are both homogenous things that are in cahoots with each other to... do... something?

I think the standard end to that sentence is "to destroy our democracy."

It’s a handy assumption when you want to use straw-man arguments.

That’s and opinion piece and I don’t believe she is a staff member, the byline is a clue.

The article ends “ Mariame Kaba (@prisonculture) is the director of Project NIA, a grass-roots group that works to end youth incarceration, and an anti-criminalization organizer”.

It’s a good read, thanks.

That's because the mainstream press doesn't speak for the left, it speaks to make money... and outrage sells clicks.

Both can be true.

> especially from the press who’s supposed to speak for the left

According to whom?

The press speaks for the establishment, because to a large extent, that's who owns it. It sucks up to power and reflects its biases.

The lack of clarity in the slogan has frustrated me as well, but most news coverage I have seen (NPR, NYT) is usually clear about its established meaning among the people using it. Same with in-person conversations.