"Defund the police" is merely an agitational short slogan for "we need some other way of governing the safety of our communities, because this is clearly not working."

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.

And it’s a particularly bad short slogan because it says something a) no one really believes and b) something that is particularly unpopular. Defund the police sets back the very things it’s trying to address.

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.

> 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.

People who disagreed with the movement. People that agreed liked (and posted signs in their yards, etc) found it to be a moving slogan.

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.

It’s not a great slogan, sure, but it’s got staying power, and enough people clearly understand (or are willing to listen to) what it actually means, so maybe we can all get on with enacting some change instead of bike shedding what would have maybe been a better pithy slogan.

Sure, I actually agree. But I'm also a) not American b) not black c) not an anarchist, nor a liberal [I'm a radical socialist by conviction, not a liberal]. So take following with that in mind:

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.

This is the flip side of the “take trump seriously, not literally” argument that went around trying to normalize him in the last election.

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.

(Off-topic, but...)

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.)

> “take trump seriously, not literally”

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.

In both cases, that's easily solved by actually considering the content of popular proposals instead of imagining what the proposals _might_ be.

You don't get to call your movement a name and then cry foul when that name is taken at its plain english meaning. "Reform" is just as pithy and just as easy to say, and infinitely more accurate.

They are an attribute of 100% of modern countries.

Does that poll support your argument? Spending and funding isn't directly correlated with "spending time". Chicago spends almost two billion dollars each year on police. Yet it's often cited as one of the most dangerous cities. I'm sure plenty of folks in Chicago's South side would love more patrols. Is the right way to go about that really to keep throwing money at a system which appears to be squandering the funds? Especially when they spend tens (or some years, hundreds) of millions of dollars settling misconduct lawsuits?

The idea of "funding" is just a rough proxy for what people really want (or don't): more police presence. Garden-variety "defund the police" advocates think that, due to police violence, bias, and so on, the police should be a smaller part of how we address crime. The people in areas affected heavily by crime think that the police should be _more_ involved. That's the disagreement.

But do they think the police should be more involved in exactly the same way they are now? I don't know, but I do assume that if asked they would suggest some changes in behavior: "police should be more involved but also they should stop with the X and do more of Y". Either way, that angle is certainly missing from the single question cited above.

When it came to race, 63 percent of Black voters polled supported allocating portions of police funding to social programs, while only 35 percent of white voters agreed.

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.

> “only experience of police is of being harassed, beaten and robbed.”

I think your representation of blacks and the police is woefully misinformed and is a figment of liberal imagination

Just wondering how many AirBnBs in Compton you've checked out.

Yes Compton would be so much better without police! If only we could defund them

Your comments upthread were better; here you're just flinging polarizing labels and showing a massive lack of empathy for people who live a wholly different existence than you (and incidentally generally don't post on hackernews). "Defund the police" was dumb, but if you're gonna sink to trolling to "own the libs", then downvotes are going to rightly turn the volume down on it.

Yes and you mentioning about hypothetical stays in Compton Airbnbs was such a massive addition to the discourse that my reply was such a downgrade! Incredible the mental hoops people like yourself jump through

Like I said, your comments upthread were better. Then you started trolling. I don't know what you were hoping for. I should have just downvoted, I normally would. HN sucks when this kind of thing breaks out. But I guess comments intended to provoke anger and division, hoping for an emotional reaction, some kind of engagement, sometimes get it. Shame to ruin Sundays that way.

I’d be grateful to see this broken down by municipality (or by precinct within NYC). If it is possible for a company to develop a dysfunctional culture which leads it to fail at serving its customers, why would the same not be true of police departments?

If this hypothesis is right, then the problems of these communities are more tractable.

> https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...