6 ms·

per 'defund the police' being extreme, here's a story. living near Pitt in 1981. iiuc, Reagan defunding forced the local psych hospital to empty out. So now we

per 'defund the police' being extreme, here's a story. living near Pitt in 1981. iiuc, Reagan defunding forced the local psych hospital to empty out. So now we had a bunch of patients with psychiatric disabilities living homeless in the neighborhood, and my understanding is that they needed to stay close by the hospital in order to get daily meds. Of course this resulted in more police involvement, and though I don't have the proof, the common sense reaction would be to allocate more officers to the zone. I'll bet the officers in the street weren't thrilled. end result : mental health funding decreased and police funding increased. So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations

fumanchux 5y ago
The “Reagan defunded psychiatric hospitals” trope needs to die. The wards started emptying in the 60s with the granting or rights to the patients. We don’t want to go back to “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest”. Then more with the invention of meds that controlled the worst symptoms. Psychiatric hospitalization rates dropped 65% from 1970-1979. Those hospitals were funded by states not the feds, so there was a much larger trend going on. [1] https://www.nasmhpd.org/sites/default/files/TACPaper.2.Psychiatric-Inpatient-Capacity_508C.pdf https://www.nasmhpd.org/sites/default/files/TACPaper.2.Psych...
- dlbucci 5y ago
  Both things can be true. Reagan did repeal this, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of...
  - marcusverus 5y ago
    The bill had been only law for 10 months when Reagan repealed it. It seems dubious that either the bill or its repeal had any significant impact on the national trend which, as the gp pointed out, was well on its way by 1980.
deleted 5y ago
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roenxi 5y ago
> So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations... Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, because I've seen one or two around and this one is new to me. It is best to take political slogans literally. When a large group of people gets together and starts chanting something, then votes someone in who promises to execute the chant there is always a pretty good chance that the slogan will get implemented literally. Eg, I'm pretty sure that there were some half-hearted arguments that "build a wall" was metaphorical. It turned out to involve a literal wall.
- nerdponx 5y ago
  It seems pretty literal to me. Fund police less, fund other things more instead.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    It is a possible interpretation. But there are a wide variety of interpretations of that slogan in a crowd of people chanting "defund the police". It isn't really possible to say that this specific interpretation is what the crowd means because in all likelihood even the crowd won't agree on any specific interpretation. The other slogan doing the rounds at the same time - "all cops are bad" - suggests that there was a serious element who wanted to abolish the police on the basis that the entire police force was bad. That needs to be acknowledged if people are arguing about what the phrase means.
    - nerdponx 5y ago
      I'd say that "defund" is softer than and different from "ACAB" or "abolish the police". "Abolish the police" is pretty much right out of Kropotkin, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with that (perhaps rightly). "Abolish" as opposed to "disband" is a deliberate nod to "abolition", as in slavery abolition. See also: the meme about how modern policing is descended from slave patrols in the Antebellum South (based on my non-professional reading, this seems to be half-true, and it looks more like modern policing developed in 18th-century England). ACAB... meh. Because of the power dynamics involved, I see nothing wrong with assuming that any police officer is hostile and a threat to your life and liberty. Police departments generally seem incapable of regulating themselves effectively and seem mostly immune to civilian oversight. Maybe there are exceptions in certain parts of the world. I do agree that some people take "defund" further than others. I also think that a lot of people are "defund revisionists" to some extent, who are squeamish about really aggressively defunding in starve-the-beast fashion, much like how people are squeamish about "abolishing" the police. But I don't think it's a bad thing that any given crowd doesn't agree on what exactly it means. Politicians seem to be more or less uniformly interpreting it in the way I described it.

fumanchux 5y ago

The “Reagan defunded psychiatric hospitals” trope needs to die. The wards started emptying in the 60s with the granting or rights to the patients. We don’t want to go back to “one flew over the cuckoo’s nest”. Then more with the invention of meds that controlled the worst symptoms. Psychiatric hospitalization rates dropped 65% from 1970-1979. Those hospitals were funded by states not the feds, so there was a much larger trend going on. [1] https://www.nasmhpd.org/sites/default/files/TACPaper.2.Psychiatric-Inpatient-Capacity_508C.pdf https://www.nasmhpd.org/sites/default/files/TACPaper.2.Psych...

dlbucci 5y ago
Both things can be true. Reagan did repeal this, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of_1980 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_Health_Systems_Act_of...
- marcusverus 5y ago
  The bill had been only law for 10 months when Reagan repealed it. It seems dubious that either the bill or its repeal had any significant impact on the national trend which, as the gp pointed out, was well on its way by 1980.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

roenxi 5y ago

> So my understanding of 'defund the police' is to reverse what happened in that and many similar situations... Most comments explaining "defund the police" seem to settle on a different meaning, because I've seen one or two around and this one is new to me. It is best to take political slogans literally. When a large group of people gets together and starts chanting something, then votes someone in who promises to execute the chant there is always a pretty good chance that the slogan will get implemented literally. Eg, I'm pretty sure that there were some half-hearted arguments that "build a wall" was metaphorical. It turned out to involve a literal wall.

nerdponx 5y ago
It seems pretty literal to me. Fund police less, fund other things more instead.
- roenxi 5y ago
  It is a possible interpretation. But there are a wide variety of interpretations of that slogan in a crowd of people chanting "defund the police". It isn't really possible to say that this specific interpretation is what the crowd means because in all likelihood even the crowd won't agree on any specific interpretation. The other slogan doing the rounds at the same time - "all cops are bad" - suggests that there was a serious element who wanted to abolish the police on the basis that the entire police force was bad. That needs to be acknowledged if people are arguing about what the phrase means.
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    I'd say that "defund" is softer than and different from "ACAB" or "abolish the police". "Abolish the police" is pretty much right out of Kropotkin, and a lot of people aren't comfortable with that (perhaps rightly). "Abolish" as opposed to "disband" is a deliberate nod to "abolition", as in slavery abolition. See also: the meme about how modern policing is descended from slave patrols in the Antebellum South (based on my non-professional reading, this seems to be half-true, and it looks more like modern policing developed in 18th-century England). ACAB... meh. Because of the power dynamics involved, I see nothing wrong with assuming that any police officer is hostile and a threat to your life and liberty. Police departments generally seem incapable of regulating themselves effectively and seem mostly immune to civilian oversight. Maybe there are exceptions in certain parts of the world. I do agree that some people take "defund" further than others. I also think that a lot of people are "defund revisionists" to some extent, who are squeamish about really aggressively defunding in starve-the-beast fashion, much like how people are squeamish about "abolishing" the police. But I don't think it's a bad thing that any given crowd doesn't agree on what exactly it means. Politicians seem to be more or less uniformly interpreting it in the way I described it.