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.
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.