The article also stated that there may have been problems with the poll, like not differentiating between total elimination and partially dismantling police departments.

If presented as total elimination of police departments, the survey might have missed support for more nuanced calls to dismantle police, said Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “One notion of abolition is the need for discontinuity from the violent and racist past of law enforcement,” he said.

The way I read it that quote is saying the 15% would be higher if you included both the people who want to abolish and those who want more moderate reform.

It’s not saying that it already includes both groups.

My speculation is that the actual phasing means very different things to very different people, and thus the actual nuance of what people believe in aggregate to be useless to discern by their agreement or disagreement with singular phrases. For example, "abolishing the police, with context that they would be replaced with equally strong mutual support systems, social workers, mental and physical health workers" could be a vast majority of that 15%, or it could be the vast minority of that 15%. We just don't know.

Social workers aren't going to stop people from breaching the Capitol.

No, but it's pretty normal to think that the people attending domestic incidents to identify whether a crime has committed and the people guarding the legislature should have different rules of engagement, training and quite possibly uniforms.

I'm the first person to argue that 'defund the police' was a terrible slogan to adopt, but that's precisely because everyone jumps to saying "but we don't actually mean have no publicly subsidised law enforcement". Even if the rafts of related reform proposals are still far too idealistic for the real world, it's not a position comparable to the Q faithful having the numbers to win primaries.

Well neither did the cops, so I don't see your point.

That’s not what your article says lol. Do you have another source for your outlandish claim?

Please stop using HN for political battle and flamewar. We've already had to ask you this once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173294, and we ban accounts that abuse the site like this, regardless of their politics.

Other people being wrong or behaving badly doesn't make it ok to break the rules.