[1] https://www.nasmhpd.org/sites/default/files/TACPaper.2.Psych...

Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, because I've seen one or two around and this one is new to me.

It is best to take political slogans literally. When a large group of people gets together and starts chanting something, then votes someone in who promises to execute the chant there is always a pretty good chance that the slogan will get implemented literally.

Eg, I'm pretty sure that there were some half-hearted arguments that "build a wall" was metaphorical. It turned out to involve a literal wall.

Most comments explaining "defund the police" are from people who disapprove of it. The above is exactly how I've always heard it described. If they wanted to abolish the police, they could have just said "abolish the police."

Interesting. What form would you expect this to take? Maybe an Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"?

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

Right like if you have me saying "defend" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.

I'd also suggest actually reading that op-ed, it's discussing a process that would take decades and specifically arguing against a "reformist" approach to improving police forces.

When you have stories like https://theintercept.com/2021/12/18/little-rock-police-chief... and a former captain of the NYPD signalling that as mayor doesn't trust the police to protect him (after the police union "declared war" on the prior mayor), I'm inclined to maybe believe that policing as an institution in the US needs to be reworked from the ground up.

This should become obvious, and defund starts to make more sense when I say that systemically, US police forces have few or no incentives to actually decrease crime and counterintuitively are often rewarded when crime increases. That the incentives between "the police" and citizens are so completely out of alignment makes you think.

Should be

> I'd argue that this is proof that the defund the police people mean something different. > Right like if you have me saying "defund" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.

If that wasn't obvious.

To Diversify. Obama had the whole "Change" thing. Well what exactly we we changing? And a lot of people chanted about change, but I bet different people had a different idea of what that change looked like.

https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/js84tu/how_did_...

The other slogan doing the rounds at the same time - "all cops are bad" - suggests that there was a serious element who wanted to abolish the police on the basis that the entire police force was bad. That needs to be acknowledged if people are arguing about what the phrase means.

"Abolish the police" is pretty much right out of Kropotkin, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with that (perhaps rightly). "Abolish" as opposed to "disband" is a deliberate nod to "abolition", as in slavery abolition. See also: the meme about how modern policing is descended from slave patrols in the Antebellum South (based on my non-professional reading, this seems to be half-true, and it looks more like modern policing developed in 18th-century England).

ACAB... meh. Because of the power dynamics involved, I see nothing wrong with assuming that any police officer is hostile and a threat to your life and liberty. Police departments generally seem incapable of regulating themselves effectively and seem mostly immune to civilian oversight. Maybe there are exceptions in certain parts of the world.

I do agree that some people take "defund" further than others. I also think that a lot of people are "defund revisionists" to some extent, who are squeamish about really aggressively defunding in starve-the-beast fashion, much like how people are squeamish about "abolishing" the police. But I don't think it's a bad thing that any given crowd doesn't agree on what exactly it means. Politicians seem to be more or less uniformly interpreting it in the way I described it.