I’ve heard hundreds of supporters speak and the message is fairly uniform: reduce the operational scope and budget of police significantly and use those resources on programs - proven to work elsewhere - which help people and communities in ways that are more appropriate to the specific problem and more efficient in reducing crime. The degree in which the scope/budget varies, but of course some people are arguing for what they think is realistically achievable and others are arguing their ideal; both are valid debate strategies and don’t necessarily mean that they aren’t aligned.
The few people I’ve heard say “remove police entirely,” when asked to elaborate, meant that the entire organization/concept of policing should be rebuilt from the ground up, not that there should be no one in society available to respond to crimes occurring.
>But when people say "abolish the police" they do not come across as meaning "reduce the scope of policing".
Some people, sure, but that's understandable given their extremely dire situation. Regardless, in my experience, most people do in fact flesh out reasonable ideas while using the phrase. Further, by far most "phrases" I've heard in person are of the "defund/reform" variety. But of course "abolishment" gets disproportionate attention, and there's always the trap of just listening to news sources and online forums where the phrase "abolish the police" is quoted with no chance given to the people for more context.
Do you think the majority of the people who say defund the police believe that?
Just because a minority of people have a terrible opinion doesn't mean the entire movement does.
Also even the author doesn't believe they can actually abolish the police.
> I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.
Better in some ways, worse in others. It avoids the confusion with abolishment, but it looses the connotations of seriously changing the status quo. Because of that, it's less attention-grabbing.
People saying “defund the police” are not advocating the complete elimination of police forces; they’re advocating for the elimination of the 75-90% of things that police spend their time on that has zero or negative ROI for society. “Responding to legitimate crimes” is not one of those things.
From my understanding "abolish the police" means to reorganize it and greatly reduced the funding. For example in L.A. the police budget is about $3bn and the next biggest item is public works at $1.5bn. That's kinda a ridiculous amount. I saw a reddit post in /r/dataisbeautiful [0] that broke it down and showed some redistribution.
But of course "abolish the police" means a lot of different things to different people. I'm sure there are people that want literally no police but I'm also sure they are a minority.
That's kinda the problem we have today. We turn complex conversations and topics into their most extreme forms and so we can actually discuss them. And we presume the other person has an extreme view that opposes ours but we ourselves are smarter and now nuanced than the person we're "discussing" with. There's lots of examples. For example here we're discussing "should police exist" instead of "what should police be doing" and often people are even divided on the topic because "police stop bad guys" and "police are to serve the community and uphold the social contract."
> no one is calling for an end of law enforcement.
There are several comments in this discussion calling for abolishing the police. Whenever this topic gets brought up, it usually seems like half the people are defending "Defund the Police" by saying that no one wants to get rid of the police, and the other half are defending "Defund the Police" by telling people why the police should be abolished.
And people with political power are calling for the abolishing them as well. This is Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from last April:
> No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can't be reformed.
I'm not sure why people who want reform are so set on tying themselves to this slogan. If I starting chanting "Defund Public Schools!", I wouldn't expect anyone to interpret that as "remove bloat from school budgets and use the money to fund social services for the kids in order to lessen the burden on teachers and make public schools function better."
I don't think there are very many people out there proposing eliminating police departments. Most calls are for reducing funding from the police to reduce their ability to cause harm, and spending more on other activities that are better at reducing crime. Broadly this is called "defunding the police," though I do understand why you dislike that label.
"Abolish the police" is a different, and I suspect much smaller, movement.
> From my understanding "abolish the police" means to reorganize it and greatly reduced the funding.
No, it means abolish the police (the centralized, monolithic, paramilitary local law enforcement agencies.)
It also means to reorganize the law enforcement function within local government, and probably reduce the distribution of resources devoted to armed law enforcement. But just reorganize/reduce funding is the “defund” not “abolish” position, which are related but distinct viewpoints.
The idea of "funding" is just a rough proxy for what people really want (or don't): more police presence. Garden-variety "defund the police" advocates think that, due to police violence, bias, and so on, the police should be a smaller part of how we address crime. The people in areas affected heavily by crime think that the police should be _more_ involved. That's the disagreement.
Is abolishing the police primarily an actual sub-movement or is it primarily a straw-man?
"De-fund the police," as I've heard explained from people who actually claim to hold the belief, is about taxpayers being very generous when funding police and very stingy when funding education, infrastructure, and social programs. The idea is that the next marginal dollar might not best be spent on the police, even though taxpayers following historical trends would overwhelmingly vote to spend it there.
I'm no social scientist, but I've certainly noticed that in the inner city the police always seem to have freshly painted, frequently-washed, current-year cars, freshly paved and remodeled offices with new signs and landscaping, new uniforms, and so on, while the food bank and the school are decrepit and run-down. The one time I bothered to look up salaries, they were, uhhh, entirely in-line with those outer appearances. On the basis of this purely personal and anecdotal evidence, I would tentatively support such proposals.
Visiting San Francisco and seeing signs in every parking lot warning you to keep your valuables out-of-sight when parked and then learning that apparently they've decided to not punish crimes with damage below $1000, resulting in a predictable crime wave, makes me think that some part of the "de-fund the police" movement actually does want to get rid of the police, though.
I haven't been paying enough attention to figure out how large these relative sub-groups are. Legitimately, I mean -- obviously if you listen to conservative media you'll get the impression that the crazies are the majority, while if you listen to liberal media you'll get the impression that they're a tiny minority -- I just haven't done the homework to make up my mind as to who's right.
Either way, I'll give a close reading to any proposals they manage to get on to the ballot.
>From my understanding "abolish the police" means to reorganize it and greatly reduced the funding.
sort of just depends on who you ask.
I have people within my social circle that want to literally abolish the police -- erase the concept entirely -- citing historical examples groups of people that had no such similar concept as a central policing group.
Because of fringe opinions like that I tend to take care when I read or say things like "'X' means this", because that's the power of language, some folks really do mean abolish the police, while some simply use such language with a somewhat 'hyperbolic' or satirical meaning.
One idea I've seen is the idea that a dollar of funding spent elsewhere can reduce crime more than a dollar of funding spent on policing. This isn't true for every dollar, as funding often comes with diminishing returns. For example, $400k away from police but instead spent in youth programs will give kids more ways to engage in the activities which reduce their likelihood of being engage in petty crimes due to boredom.
As for those demanding full defunding, I doubt they actually want that. Demanding exactly what they want would be a bit like walking into a salary negotiation and starting with the salary you are willing to accept.
> "Abolish the police" is a scale where there is an extreme end where they may call for completely removing police from across the USA. From what I've seen, that isn't what the majority who are calling for abolishment are aiming for. Maybe "abolish" was a poor choice of a word.
It's not "Abolish the police" by itself. The same people also say "All Cops Are Bastards" and "Policing is a racist institution". It would be unreasonable to take these words as supporting anything other than doing away with police entirely.
> Isn't "defund the police" 99% "that's a nice slogan
No.
> not actually "we'll be good without any form of law enforcement"?
Not that, either.
“Defund the police” is about shifting substantial amounts of funding from police to supportive/responsive social service instead of law enforcement.
> From what I understand it's a play to break unions:
That's probably true of some supporters of the related-but-distinct abolish/dismantle effort, but even there it's not the main focus.
> you defund and dismantle the police department and then you can create a new department, can start fresh with new people, new tactics etc pp.
Dismantle/abolish does allow that, but most of the push for it is not for abolish-and-directly-replace, but for rethinking public safety and community services more generally and redesigning how law enforcement fits into it. While any replacement includes law enforcement personnel employed somewhere, they may not include a single large centralized paramilitary organization like the dominant model for city police / county sheriffs offices, and might (for instance) involve domain-specific law enforcement officers embedded in a variety of different public agencies.
It can, and for many people does, mean abolishing (not merely replacing) police departments as institutions, but, yes, it does not mean abolishing the law enforcement function of government.
I prefer “stop pouring insane amounts of money into police funding and tasking the police force with fixing issues completely unfixable by a police force and instead redirect some of the ridiculously inflated police funds to appropriate solutions.”
> I've seen quite a few at protests with signs saying "abolish the police".
The abolish/disband faction is a different faction from the defund faction, sharing with the other that both believe the reform cycle where police problems are dealt woth by increasing budgets for retraining or other reform measures, reducing resources for other services, which results in police roles expanding, resulting in new police problems from inserting armed law enforcement into nee and inappropriate roles needs to be broken.
The “defund” crowd says, lets wind that the other way and drive non-core roles and the funding to go with them to agencies outside of the police departments, so that the police department is focussed on roles that require armed law enforcement.
The “disband/abolish” crowd says lets go further, and redesign community services without an all-encompassing centralized paramilitary law enforcement service, with enforcement arms where necessary within agencies with focuses other than “law enforcement”.
(There's a fringe within the disband/abolish faction that would eliminate armed law enforcement as a local government function entirely, but they aren't typical of the disband/abolish movement much less the defund movement or an umbrella including both defund and disband/abolish.)
I actually think "defunding" is the perfect way to describe slashing funding. We should start defunding/slashing now because the budgets are huge. It may asymptotically approach zero, but we need to reverse the trend.
"Defund the police" correctly highlights the actual issue, which is why people get so upset about it. The "people who'd otherwise support a more reasonable approach" do not and have never supported a more reasonable approach. They like the police, but can't come out and say it directly so instead they deflect to "hey! I can't support defunding the police because I don't like the slogan".
You posted this elsewhere but to be clear, you are wrong.
The defund the police movement, at least the one in the US that gained popularity between 2017 and 2021, was explicitly aimed at eliminating the concept of policing. The belief is that because policing began with South Carolina slave patrols (it did not, but that doesn't matter) that the whole concept is corrupt and changes in execution won't fix the heart of the problem.
In order to fix it, policing needs to be entirely destroyed and rethought, from first principles. The funding would be allocated towards community building and outreach a la the Cure Violence programs in NYC. Since crime is of course solely an economic and mental health issue, with proper education, stipends and mental health resources crime can be eliminated without needing a police force at all.
Some of the elements aren't bad, but taken together it was not a good idea.
1. That's the only thing they suggested, and they framed it as either/or "If you have infinite funding, you can do both." (Implies we cant do both, because we obviously dont have infinite funding)
2. The overarching context of this conversation is about "defunding the police"
>If the current solution to the problem is only more policing
Is anyone seriously suggesting that? If so, its safe to discount these types of facile absolutist views ("we need more police to solve the problem" & "We need to eliminate the police to solve the problem")
Edit: I'd like to add thay I jusy reviewed my cities budget, and was surprised to see how large the law enforcement budget was compared to everything else. Thank you for bringing that to my attention.
The few people I’ve heard say “remove police entirely,” when asked to elaborate, meant that the entire organization/concept of policing should be rebuilt from the ground up, not that there should be no one in society available to respond to crimes occurring.
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