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?
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)