I don't have a source, it's just an educated guess. "Defund Planned Parenthood" was a huge conservative slogan in America. It's possible that the people who coined "Defund the Police" had never heard the other slogan in their entire lives, but they'd have to be living under a rock to do that, because they're left-wing and liberal political activists.
> Can you explain this more thoroughly? (in regards to "paying their own way")
Increasing town revenues through more aggressive enforcement. i.e. you increase the ticket quotas so that cops nail more speeders. In America it's so normalized to break the speed limit that, for example, Tesla self-driving systems let you configure how much your self-driving car will break the speed limit by. So you can reliably increase town revenues by issuing more speeding citations, because everybody does it.
This isn't the only lever you can pull to squeeze money out of your citizens, but it's the most common one.
> I think you are amalgamating the separate actions of several different groups and attempting to attach a single coherent narrative to their collective actions in an effort to excuse everyone involved.
Amalgamating yes, excusing no. Consider it a post-mortem report - "How did we fuck this up".
> We used to just call this "Police Reform." So this all seems like a huge unforced error, then.
Yup!
Can you define "they" more clearly?
> blindly copypasted a conservative slogan
Do you have a source for this?
> and called it "Defund the Police". When what they were actually calling for was more training, especially in regards to mental health situations and deescalation.
I think you are amalgamating the separate actions of several different groups and attempting to attach a single coherent narrative to their collective actions in an effort to excuse everyone involved.
> But slash the politicians did, because they could do the most literal interpretation of the protesters' demands and then blame them when they obviously don't work.
"Defund the police" has a single obvious interpretation, and there many individual groups that were calling for this precise interpretation.
> The reason why the current policing structure is so corrupt is that the police are expected to "pay their own way" in a sense.
Can you explain this more thoroughly?
> There's a whole phenomenon of known-bad cops jumping from department to department
And to what extent is this the source of the problems of modern policing?
> Perhaps they should have called it "Refund The Police". It even has a double meaning: we need more money for less harmful policing and we need to refund (i.e. send back) the idiots who were running the current corrupt system.
We used to just call this "Police Reform." So this all seems like a huge unforced error, then.