Actual members of impoverished and minority communities never supported it, they wanted more policing to keep their neighborhoods safe. The base of support was privileged members outside of those communities.
When polled, poor black people want more policing, despite also agreeing with much of the defunder critique.
Knowing both options, they prefer flawed policing to being ruled by criminal gangs.
Wanting more policing and wanting to defund the current system are not oppositional. I want more cops doing shit that matters and less of the current police department.
Pulling over more people for expired tags and other pretext stops is hardly what we needed more of. I once had an officer decline to take a copy of video of my vehicle being stolen since he said it wasn’t going to be investigated anyway. How does a department like that still have time to hand out turn signal tickets, and pop people for going 10 over at the bottom of a hill?
In places where it has been dialed down are crime rates that different when looked at over a long time period?
There is quite a lot of fuss about a crime wave right now, but we are at historical lows in a lot of places. In SF shoplifting actually peaked in 2014. In SF the murder rate has risen since the pandemic… to 2017 levels. There were some high profile smash and grabs on the national news, but having your car broken into in San Francisco is something that has been a thing for a LONG time. There’s nothing new about the tenderloin being a shithole.
I think that to call the current conditions a “crime wave” is a bit too non specific considering the massive societal upheaval we experienced since 2020. What specific numbers, or measurable trends concern you?
> There is quite a lot of fuss about a crime wave right now, but we are at historical lows in a lot of places. In SF shoplifting actually peaked in 2014. In SF the murder rate has risen since the pandemic… to 2017 levels. There were some high profile smash and grabs on the national news, but having your car broken into in San Francisco is something that has been a thing for a LONG time. There’s nothing new about the tenderloin being a shithole. I think that to call the current conditions a “crime wave” is a bit too non specific considering the massive societal upheaval we experienced since 2020. What specific numbers, or measurable trends concern you?
The crime wave has affected the entire country, not just SF. It’s also a violent crime wave—the number of homicides in absolute terms and as a percentage of the population had been declining for many decades and we reversed much of that in a few years time. So we aren’t just talking about a bit of shoplifting (though what’s going on in San Fran is absolutely novel). It also begins around 2014-2015, not merely since 2020. This violence also disproportionately harms communities of color, which should concern people who were vehemently impassioned in 2020 that “black lives matter” considering how many more black lives have been claimed in a single year by this crime surge than have been taken by police in the last 30+ years.
But this is not a practical real world option. In the present, you fight crime with the police system you have.
The Americans I do know who really hate defund are the very definition of latte swilling liberals complaining about crime going up in their nice suburbs in SF, Portland and Seattle while... complaining bitterly about rich white liberals.
The one supporter I do know lives a few blocks from George Floyd although the slogan seems to mean something different to her (transfer funds and responsibilities for mental health to social service departments).
If you have to keep explaining "when I say X, I really mean Y", you should maybe stop saying X.
Defund the police is popular with nobody except rich liberals living in privilege bubbles. People in crime ridden areas especially don’t want it.
Like many short and pithy slogans, it may not be communicating that message effectively at all.
It's not like police forces are an eternal attribute of all civilizations. Modern policing is actually pretty young.
Contrast that to “Black Lives Matter” or “We are the 99%” which are also short slogans that encapsulate the broad and varied beliefs of the respective movements without being off putting to even the people who agree.
Err, the former had people shitting themselves over it online for years.
Contrast that with “Defund the police” where even where there is broad support for alternative policing initiatives, you don’t see support for the slogan.
There are two separate things here, to be analyzed separately: slogan/demand vs . an actual proposed policy. I think it's a huge mistake to confuse the two.
So I dunno, I don't walk around saying "that's the wrong demand", or "say something else, you don't want that." I'd rather understand where it's coming from and who is saying it, see?
Slogans are tactical, part of a movement, and the activists involved do not have state power, they pretty much never will given the structure of the US state, and as I see it the purpose of the demand is to primarily to point out the injustices, contradictions, and limits of the existing system.
In that respect "defund the police" is probably somewhat successful from the POV of the people who propagated it, who are mostly, from what I can deduce, anarchist movement types. (And yes, they probably actually do believe it. But I'm not an anarchist, so) They've made a broad swathe of the public see something that is frankly true from my POV and others: policing as we have it now has an awful history, and frankly its primary purpose in our western society is the routine maintenance of existing power structures and inequities, and in the US especially this takes a fundamentally racist form. It's getting increasingly hard to deny that, even for mainstream liberals and some conservatives.
Is it universally true? No. No phenomenon in society works that way. But on the whole there's a structural aspect of policing that may not be reformable in our current society. I saw a poll the other day that a very large % of black Canadians (my country) trust the government, but do not trust the police. I think that's an interesting and powerful distinction: Especially in light of how police have behaved here at e.g. various anti-vaccine/anti-COVID measure protests vs how they have behaved at other protests (BLM, etc.) in the past.
I think "defund the police" is a "transitional slogan" which might boil out into something better in terms of a more concrete demand if the movement it floats along in grows.
That's my take.
There are people who absolutely Believe that any police force is a slave enforcement force (or derived from one) and a tool of white tool to subjugate others. To them it must be eradicated.
I recall an interview on KQED with an activist who absolutely was proposing to get rid of the entire police and carceral system. When asked how they would deal with, say, a murderer, their response was a) there'd be fewer murderers and b) there would be meditation between the murderer and the victim's family. I really wish the interviewer had asked, what happens if the victim doesn't have a family? Does this mean that rich murderers can pay their way out of any crime? Presumably it would!
It was fascinating, partly because what was being described is a premodern world, in which crime is a purely personal matter and not the business of the state. It's a world of vendettas, in which the powerful operate with true impunity. I don't think the partisans of _really_ defunding the police appreciate this.
(Note, I have a lot of sympathy with the idea that the police are doing too much, especially around mental health crises, and some funding could usefully be diverted, etc etc.)
That’s actually a good take though and probably would have highlighted some of the issues with him better instead of boring “orange man bad” jokes and other things that got boring after two times.
https://thehill.com/homenews/news/542108-poll-finds-only-18-...
It isnt a very popular slogan in general these days (even among blacks) but the rich, privileged and white people loathe it most of all.
I think your representation of blacks and the police is woefully misinformed and is a figment of liberal imagination
If this hypothesis is right, then the problems of these communities are more tractable.
It's so easy to make cheap digs about that handful of people instead of actually tackle the issues that this misnamed movement was/is really about.
If it had actually been called "Redirect substantive parts of the funding currently going to the police to provide alternate mechanisms to address a variety of situations and crises", would you still find it appropriate to make jabs about the situation of some of those who supported it?
There's plenty of better slogans out there. I'd support "end police violence" or "stop killer cops" or something.
Thats certainly much more catchy than the full slogan right now, which seems to be "Defund the police, but we don't really want to do that, even though some people in our movement actually do want that, but they're a minority - we swear. But we want political power anyway and it'll be fine - you can trust us".
You can tell its a bad slogan because of how much oxygen gets spent explaining it. (Eg, right here)
By contrast "Defund the Police" definitely generated a "say what?" response from just about everyone, whether you agreed with it or not.
As for the political power thing ... given the difficulty that existing politicians and political bodies have in exerting control over police authority, the idea that any new group would somehow be able to actually accomplish anything remotely close to abolition is crazy. Look at what happened in Minneapolis as an illustrative example: probably the closest to "actual abolition", and it just fizzled out completely.
“Think different”, “Think outside the bun”, “Just Do It” are good “say what?” examples. I don’t think “Defund the Police” accomplished the goal to make curious and enlist fence-sitters to the cause and instead likely pushed more people towards supporting their police departments.
It might be an ASD trait, but I really like to take people at their word. Please speak what you actually think. I have a hard time trusting people who say one thing while they believe the opposite. Especially in politics.
Where do these slogans come from? Are they designed by conservatives to make liberals look bad?
“Defund the police” is much worse because it’s explicitly naming and promoting a policy idea which activists promise they don’t actually want.
Why lie about what you want?
No, because that's a rational and reasonable statement, where "defund the police" grabs attention, but is ultimately divisive and alienating. Like so many popular talking points, it's a complete failure of marketing and communication, and everybody who says it ends up having to redefine or explain it on a constant basis because on the surface it sounds completely irrational.
Maybe it could have been more successful if the name actually reflected the goal. As-is, the supporters either actually believe in abolishing the police (which was also called for), or they are saying something they don't actually mean in a literal sense because it grabs more attention. The detractors in turn are only arguing with what a minority of the supporters actually even want, because we've grown so unconcerned as a society with actually conveying our points and getting people on our side, and more concerned with simply being noticed.
edit: There's something correct here, because if you want to look for people who supported defund, they were probably working in food service, making you coffee.
It's hardly an attitude that's dripping with privilege.
The backlash, on the other hand...