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This is a timely article. If I only viewed the world through my Facebook feed right now, I'd believe that everyone in the US wants to defund every police depar

This is a timely article. If I only viewed the world through my Facebook feed right now, I'd believe that everyone in the US wants to defund every police department. In reality it's an incredibly unpopular view among everyone, left, right, and center. https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/06/01/police-reform-america-poll https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20... I think making this worse is that even a mild concern about this policy would be received very poorly on social media -- so nobody objects and you see a silent majority phenomenon. It's frightening that social media is a primary news source for so many people.

saas_sam 6y ago
Case in point: The reality that it's unpopular doesn't save you from the downvotes you're currently getting from those who wish it were otherwise.
aabhay 6y ago
This is a silly straw man argument you’re making. Asking every American whether they want to defund the police is like asking everybody in the US if they enjoy taking the subway to work. Only a fraction of Americans live in cities that are calling for this action. A more reasonable poll would only ask Minneapolis residents.
gbear605 6y ago
The requests that the protesters are focusing on now are mainly around shifting funding from police departments to other departments to do the same job but without being armed and dangerous. For instance, house calls can be done by social workers and a separate system of traffic patrollers could give out speeding tickets. “Defunding” is a misnomer that’s easy to say but not really what many protesters want. Also an end on the war on drugs would be a good step too; cost saving plus decreasing the need for police.
crazygringo 6y ago
Survey questions can be incredibly misleading. There's a huge difference between do you support "cut funding for police departments" (with no broader context, so sounds scary -- all risk and no benefit) vs. "move excess police funding to social services which reduce crime" or even just "remove funding for militarized vehicles and equipment in police departments". Intelligent policy decisions very, very, very rarely can be reduced to just five words. In fact, it's a well-known phenomenon that as survey questions become more nuanced and in-depth, the percentages of "extreme" views decrease dramatically, and most Americans turn out to hold largely centrist, reasonable views, totally different from what the media portrays. It's the simplistic survey questions that force binary extreme answers without context or compromise that get all the press.
pensivemood 6y ago
> In reality it's an incredibly unpopular view among everyone, left, right, and center. If you are a layman, you don't know shit about the "reality". That is the only reality that you can be sure of.
snowwrestler 6y ago
A poll from a week ago might be pretty out of date now. Americans' perceptions of the police fell about 10% during that time: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/06/americans-views-police-drop-significantly-amid-protests-survey/3159072001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/06/amer... An important factor to watch is how that phrase "defund the police" gets defined--see peer replies here for examples of how people can interpret it positively. I predict some of the ideas behind it will indeed become mainstream and we will see police budgets fall in the next few years. LA's mayor has already committed to cuts, for example. I would not underestimate the impact of social media to rapidly move ideas from the radical fringe to close enough to the mainstream to have political impact. See for example InfoWars, avoiding vaccines, "Q"-type conspiracies, heck even Donald Trump himself.
- mellow2020 6y ago
  > An important factor to watch is how that phrase "defund the police" gets defined--see peer replies here for examples of how people can interpret it positively. Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23447259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23447259 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23420016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23420016

saas_sam 6y ago

Case in point: The reality that it's unpopular doesn't save you from the downvotes you're currently getting from those who wish it were otherwise.

aabhay 6y ago

This is a silly straw man argument you’re making. Asking every American whether they want to defund the police is like asking everybody in the US if they enjoy taking the subway to work. Only a fraction of Americans live in cities that are calling for this action. A more reasonable poll would only ask Minneapolis residents.

gbear605 6y ago

The requests that the protesters are focusing on now are mainly around shifting funding from police departments to other departments to do the same job but without being armed and dangerous. For instance, house calls can be done by social workers and a separate system of traffic patrollers could give out speeding tickets. “Defunding” is a misnomer that’s easy to say but not really what many protesters want. Also an end on the war on drugs would be a good step too; cost saving plus decreasing the need for police.

crazygringo 6y ago

Survey questions can be incredibly misleading. There's a huge difference between do you support "cut funding for police departments" (with no broader context, so sounds scary -- all risk and no benefit) vs. "move excess police funding to social services which reduce crime" or even just "remove funding for militarized vehicles and equipment in police departments". Intelligent policy decisions very, very, very rarely can be reduced to just five words. In fact, it's a well-known phenomenon that as survey questions become more nuanced and in-depth, the percentages of "extreme" views decrease dramatically, and most Americans turn out to hold largely centrist, reasonable views, totally different from what the media portrays. It's the simplistic survey questions that force binary extreme answers without context or compromise that get all the press.

pensivemood 6y ago

> In reality it's an incredibly unpopular view among everyone, left, right, and center. If you are a layman, you don't know shit about the "reality". That is the only reality that you can be sure of.

snowwrestler 6y ago

A poll from a week ago might be pretty out of date now. Americans' perceptions of the police fell about 10% during that time: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/06/americans-views-police-drop-significantly-amid-protests-survey/3159072001/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/06/06/amer... An important factor to watch is how that phrase "defund the police" gets defined--see peer replies here for examples of how people can interpret it positively. I predict some of the ideas behind it will indeed become mainstream and we will see police budgets fall in the next few years. LA's mayor has already committed to cuts, for example. I would not underestimate the impact of social media to rapidly move ideas from the radical fringe to close enough to the mainstream to have political impact. See for example InfoWars, avoiding vaccines, "Q"-type conspiracies, heck even Donald Trump himself.

mellow2020 6y ago
> An important factor to watch is how that phrase "defund the police" gets defined--see peer replies here for examples of how people can interpret it positively. Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23447259 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23447259 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23420016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23420016