This morning on NPR, a political organizer named Amiee Allison, who founded a group named She the People, said that Joe Biden was making a mistake by not signing on to defund the police. You can listen to the story here.
What she said was that "defund the police" is shorthand for serious policy proposals to end the cycle of police violence. She then said it wasn't a call to eliminate police departments.
What she is ignoring is that if Biden said those words, what he would do is hand a golden bullet to Donald Trump. Donald Trump would say: "Joe Biden wants to defund the police. Defund the police." Then Biden would be on the defensive (right where Trump wants him), having to explain over and over that "defund the police" doesn't mean what the plain meaning of the words imply: Take all of the money away from the police.
For example: What the hell do you think Republicans mean when they say "defund Planned Parenthood"?
"Defund the police". The GOP attack ads almost write themselves. There would be images of anarchy lifted right out of the Purge movies and the Gotham series. It plays right into the Republicans' decades-old racist Southern Strategy of frightening white voters that they are going to raped in their homes, a trope that racists have been using for centuries.
Words have power. As soon as the slogan "Black Lives Matter" was uttered, the conservatives began twisting it. Don't hand them another chance to do that
"Defund the police" is a bad message. "Reform the police" "Reimagine policing", maybe. Come up with a better slogan.
Unless, those pushing it are actually GOP false-flag organizations. Then it makes sense.
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I have a better slogan:
https://youtu.be/qu6r7Yd_iG8
I agree with the basic idea, start from scratch and build a Police Dept without the bad apples. I totally agree they have the wrong saying to go with the idea. I have already seem some of the backlash that the term "defund" brings out in the haters.
Optics people, optics matter.
w3ski
G'da would've muttered something under his breathe about day late 'n a dollar short, while closing the door to the now empty barn. The damage has been done.
Vigilance, people. We're on our own. It's gonna' get uglier before it gets pretty.
Look up Camden, NJ. Disbanded the police department about 10 years ago because it was too corrupt to successfully reform. Crime is down, community engagement is up, the people now trust the police.
Bad slogan for a necessary event. I've seen police forces be disbanded successfully, and the problems just come right back because the replacement operated under the same problematic culture.
I'm talking about the Oakland Housing Authority Police, who were notoriously corrupt. crooked, and brutal. After some local reporters asked some inconvenient questions about them to the city government, the OPD set them up, busted them, and shut them down, taking their responsibilities on themselves.
So far, so good, except that a few years later, OPD got caught pulling the same bullshit they shut OHA down for in the infamous "Riders" case, only that time OPD wasn't working with the prosecutors and all of the officers involved were acquitted (except for one who fled to Mexico).
Meanwhile, the officers from the disbanded OHA force were free to find jobs in other forces, and they did just that. The San Francisco Park Police in particular hire a lot of them.
That left civil action as a remedy, and the case landed in the courtroom of Thelton Henderson, who mandated a raft of reforms that the OPD dragged its feet in complying with, causing judge Henderson to repeatedly threaten to throw the entire force into receivership over, causing them to issue repeated promises that they would accelerate compliance in a slow motion legal dance that lasted until judge Henderson went into semi-retirement and now the goddamn OPD is on its third chief of police in just over a year.
Read that: something more fundamental than the available remedies has to happen if we ever want to see the police act any differently than the worst among them want to.
Yes it's a bad slogan that the goddamn Republicans will beat the shit out of us politically with if we use, but meanwhile the out of control, militarized cops are beating the literal shit out of pretty much whoever they want while we white folks try to decide whether or not this is something worth our effort to change.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
Camden did not just disband their police department. Did they not also arrange for the sheriff to cover until they replaced the old police department with other police?
It is a stupid slogan. Why not just say- we want better police. Or even we want our police back. Nobody, especially in my age cohort, is gonna get behind "defund police"! Sorry, that is not even English or Spanish.
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