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Not op. When the call for reform is "defund" and that seems like the wrong thing to do, then people don't support sensible reform. One would imagine that many i
by harry8 5y ago
Not op. When the call for reform is "defund" and that seems like the wrong thing to do, then people don't support sensible reform. One would imagine that many if not most police officers support some kinds of sensible reform but probably hesitate to support "defunding" their wages and have their and their colleagues jobs cut, which is what "defund" really sounds like. It's a total us and them mentality which is not the way policing is supposed to be. In fact it's one of the things many people want reformed. Policing should be for us and us in our community with our consent as a population.
- tshaddox 5y agoMy point is that it doesn’t make sense to say “you called for defunding the police, we didn’t defund the police, things got worse, therefore your slogan is bad.”
- harry8 5y agoBecause no meaningful reform happened and whatever did happen doesn't, at face value, appear to be positive?
- tshaddox 5y agoI would want to evaluate the merits of a particular slogan by means other than whether the intended reform happened. It’s easy to say “no thanks” to reform regardless of how good of a slogan it is.
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoBut a misleadingly bad slogan makes it much more likely that people will say "no thanks". If what you said isn't what you meant, and what you said makes people reject what you meant, why did you say it? I suspect that proponents thought anger at the police was much more widely spread than it was, so they grabbed what they thought would sell.
- smsm42 5y agoThe slogan is bad because it channels the energy initiated by real problems into the worst idea possible. True, in many - though not all - cases this terrible idea was recognised as such even by the woke city managers and kept at the level of bloviating without doing much. That's still bad and the slogan still bad, and the opportunity wasted still bad. Not as bad as when this idea is actually implemented (not in Oakland but happened in other places afaik).
- llbeansandrice 5y ago> their wages and have their and their colleagues jobs cut Is this not literally the idea? The issue with "defund the police" slogan is that defunding isn't the end goal. The idea is to reduce the size, scope, militarization, and budget of the police force _and_ use that money to instead fund programs to help citizens and the local economy. Part of the platform is absolutely to reduce the current scope of the widely militarized police force in the US.
- cmh89 5y ago>One would imagine that many if not most police officers support some kinds of sensible reform but probably hesitate to support "defunding" their wages and have their and their colleagues jobs cut, which is what "defund" really sounds like. I'd argue that the reason that folks rallied 'defund' is that police aren't willing to accept reasonable reform and they have enough power to keep it from happening. Reform isn't realistic in a system that required the group being reformed to consent to the type of reform. I'm personally a fan of 'reallocate' police funds.
- jljljl 5y agoI think the frustration that led to "defund" is that a lot of sensible reforms have been resisted or watered down, and protections like qualified immunity have sheltered abusive cops from accountability. For example: There was an article on Hacker News today about how an FBI program to track use-of-force incidents may shut down due to a lack of police involvement (https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2021/12/09/fbi-police-shooting-data/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2021/12/09/fbi-poli...). I think there is likely a de-escalation path that involves sensible reform, but it will also require that reform to be embraced and implemented by the police