Sure, no one has suggested police departments as currently constituted should both exist and withdraw from Black neighborhoods, except for police unions applying terrorist negotiating tactics.
More relevant questions
(With regard to “defund the police”): should significant funding and responsibility be redirected from the police to preventive and specialized responsive social services?
(With regard to “dismantle/abolish the police”:) Should centralized all-purpose paramilitary local law enforcement agencies be disbanded, with law enforcement responsibilities distributed within specialized agencies whose agents (both armed law enforcement and other) would be domain specialists as well (for law enforcement officers) trained in law enforcement (which also involves transferring non-law enforcement responsibilities and funding more to non-law-enforcememt units.)
I walk with the dog and sometimes the kids every day, so I see police patrolling around. Had an interesting conversation the other day with the police officer:
- So officer, how have things changed since covid?
- Sir, you won't believe the stuff I get called for. Getting teenagers off their cell phones, wife angry that husband didn't do his share of the chores
- What about what people associate with "crime"?
- Down.
As crime declines overall (it has been for many years now), I believe we really need to rethink the jobs we ask police officers to do. They are hammers and they go into situations that don't require hammering and bad things happen.
Ya, that's what anyone intelligent says any time "defund the police" is mentioned (and I completely agree with it, btw). But they should probably choose another slogan if that's what they actually mean. "Defund" in the context of government policy generally means to eliminate via the funding mechanism.
The reality is defunding does literally mean completely eliminate to many of the groups calling for defunding. The partial reduction in funding is just a stepping stone. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol..., an opinion piece titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”
Note that “defund” and “dismantle/abolish” are separate positions (though many people who hold one as their preferred also view the other as superior to the stays quo, and worse yet while there is a strong tendency in what the language means, the use of each isn't perfectly consistent.)
Which probably shouldn't be surprising since there isn't a single top-down organization behind any of them.
I don't disagree, but then I'm in the “abolish" camp anyway; the misunderstanding there is, I think, not something that can be cured with a different slogan, because “Redesign community services and local government, with a particular focus on deemphasizing force-based law enforcement and decentralizing it within domain specialized agencies, usually with broader responsibility for their focal domain than just law enforcement.” Doesn’t reduce well to bumper sticker size. It's just something you have to explain a lot until people understand it.
"Reform the police" is a perfectly fine slogan that captures what they claim to want. Its only flaw is that it isn't controversial, and so won't get the same level of attention. This slogan, like all too many things of late, is a perfect example of Scott Alexander's "toxoplasma" theory:
> "Reform the police" is a perfectly fine slogan that captures what they claim to want. I
It is not, because the “police reform” movement of the last several decades that drives more funding for retraining and additional resources to police in the name of correcting the exact same problems “defund the police” sellar to address is exactly what they are diametrically opposed to and a reason against, and blame for exacerbating the problem by further draining resources from other local services and leading to police taking even more responsibilities outside of their core competencies.
I mean, sure, in a context-free sense, yes, what they seek is, or includes, reform of policing, but that slogan has existing loading in the current context and it's something the group in question defines themself on opposition to, so no, it's not a perfectly fine slogan, any more than “pro-life” would be for a movement for robust publicly funded universal healthcare including comprehensive reproductive health coverage.
Situation: half the country wants to enclose the country in a giant styrofoam bubble to keep people out. The other half wants to import foreigners at gun point.
Conclusion: We have 100% popular support for immigration reform! Why can't those layabouts in government make it happen?
More relevant questions
(With regard to “defund the police”): should significant funding and responsibility be redirected from the police to preventive and specialized responsive social services?
(With regard to “dismantle/abolish the police”:) Should centralized all-purpose paramilitary local law enforcement agencies be disbanded, with law enforcement responsibilities distributed within specialized agencies whose agents (both armed law enforcement and other) would be domain specialists as well (for law enforcement officers) trained in law enforcement (which also involves transferring non-law enforcement responsibilities and funding more to non-law-enforcememt units.)