1. El Eslógan como Error de Marketing y Malentendido.
Una gran parte de la discusión se centra en que "Defund the Police" fue un eslogan mal elegido, fácil de malinterpretar como "Abolish the Police", lo que perjudicó los objetivos de reforma y fue explotado políticamente.
- Defund the police was a terrible slogan. It should have been, and was meant to be provide more funding for people trained in de-escalation techniques but thats not as catchy.
- Defund the police sounds like anarchy. Reform the police sounds like more effective messaging. Any slogan you have to explain, sucks ass.
- Seems inescapable that defund the police was one of the most self-destructive slogans of modern political marketing. It accomplished little except cornering liberals into the sink hole of explaining how defund didnt really mean defund.
- I dont think defund the police is playing to the cheap seats based on the reaction to it. More importantly, i dont think the slogan would have been an issue if msm didnt platform the worst communicators for it which may have been on purpose.
2. La Intención Original: Reasignación de Fondos y Desmilitarización.
Los defensores insisten en que el significado real nunca fue eliminar a la policía, sino reasignar fondos de responsabilidades inadecuadas (como salud mental) y detener la militarización de las fuerzas del orden.
- Just for the record, defunding the police never meant getting rid of the police. It always meant taking things that shouldnt have been a law enforcement responsibility, e.g., mental health issues.
- Defund the police has never meant eviscerate police departments. Thats the right wing mainstream media narrative. What it does mean is stop over funding police departments and start funding other resources that would actually help police like mental health, housing, poverty, education.
- This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what defund the police means. Defunding the police is an effort to demilitarize our law enforcement, concentrating more on deescalation and community service rather than arrests and killings.
- Defund the police doesnt mean removing law and order, it means preventing the police from becoming a military force. It means not sending these armed law enforcement to check on someone who needs medical care.
3. La Persistencia del Discurso y la Resistencia a la Reforma.
A pesar de la controversia del eslogan, muchos participantes argumentan que la necesidad de reducir el financiamiento y exigir rendición de cuentas persiste debido a la violencia policial y la corrupción institucional.
- Defund became a rallying cry simply because nobody seemed willing to rein in police violence and murder by any other means, including successful prosecution. The only way pds and cities and counties were going to get the message is if you starved the beast.
- I dont think the solution to the problem of the police needing to be fixed fits in a slogan.
- If you want to demilitarize the police just say that. Instead, in the face of turning away thousands of voters over a stupid slogan, you double down. No just dont understand.
- The core of defund activists are policeprison abolitionists. They would not agree with a slogan that suggests reform. They dont believe in it. So you get defund as a compromise.
4. Críticas a la Inacción Política y el Status Quo.
Varios comentarios señalan que, a pesar del debate, las acciones políticas (especialmente de los demócratas) han resultado en aumentos de presupuesto policial, ignorando las demandas de reforma o reasignación.
- I first heard ideas about policeprison abolition about a year prior to 2020. The next year taught me important lessons. The demand was to defund police. They increased funding instead.
- After the 2020 protests against routine police murder of esp black americans and a brief moment of white politicians kneeling in kente cloth, the reaction from the liberal side of the spectrum was to increase cop funding, weaken cop regulations, and blame defund rhetoric for all problems.
- Centrists do the worst of all worlds because they keep going we cant keep calling for defund the police but are too afraid to make the affirmative case for police funding.
- No city council member in any urban environment has shown real commitment to defunding and dismantling their police. Any one who has made noises about it has eventually fallen in line.