A Gentle Pushback Against Obama's Recent Comments Towards "Defund the Police"

RC turtle said:

If only we could get "Support the Police" to mean "give support to the police by re-allocating the jobs they're not suited for."

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This would be a great approach.

Good messaging doesn't mean it won't be misrepresented. It's a given there will be purposeful misrepresentations.

If it's campaign messaging it can't need a long explanation.

I don't have a good message at the moment but it would be something along the lines of Reorganize Policing.

I would use "policing" and not "police" because 'police' is too direct of an attack on the individuals and that is how they will hear it.

The right had "defund" years ago with "Defund Planned Parenthood," which in that case meant exactly what it sounded like: PP needs to go away entirely. So when they hear "Defund the Police" what else are they going to think?

As to whether we will lose people with certain slogans, I think it depends on what we are using the slogan for. If we're using it to set our boundaries as in "you can come this far and no farther," or "this is where we stand like it or not," then a strong statement misunderstood or not is fine. If on the other hand we're trying to win someone over to join us, then we need to consider the language and perspective they use and have and speak to it. They way this is playing out is starting as the former to get attention, which hopefully leads to discussions that accomplish the latter.

I agree with the view that if you have to explain your slogan it's not a good slogan. This issue is not the same as the "black lives matter"/"all lives matter" thing because it is clear what "black lives matter" means, even though some people seem anxious that equal rights for other people means less rights for them - that's not the same as misunderstanding the slogan. However "defund the police" is as clear as mud. I took it to mean "scrap and redo" the police like rebuild the whole police force from scratch (which I think is a good idea, to be honest). And that was after taking a while to try to figure out what people were actually talking about, because initially it seemed to be saying "remove all funding from the police" i.e. get rid of them, but I was sure it didn't actually mean that. I didn't find out what it actually meant until reading this thread.

So I, a lefty, supporter of black lives matter, didn't understand it. "Reform the police" would be a much better slogan, except that doesn't mean the same as what you're saying "defund the police" means. Sometimes, it's actually better just to explain the concept. The cartoon posted in the thread clearly explains what is meant, far better than any slogan. Some concepts can't be explained in a sentence or a slogan because they're too complex. Why not circulate the cartoon and ones like it and cut out the slogan?

ConnorMuldowney said:

I’ve never in my life heard the opinion that political engagement makes you “privileged.” That’s a new one. I’ve always thought being politically ambivalent is privilege, because it means you have nothing to lose. I admit that I, personally, have privilege. I’m white. I grew up somewhat wealthy. This characterization applies to me, but it seems an odd generalization.

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There are different types of privilege. It requires a lot of financial privilege to have the spare time, spare money and mental energy (spoons) to devote to political campaigning. Not everyone can afford to take the time off work (which may result in an unaffordable reduction in income), never mind pay to travel to demos. There are loads of people who are struggling just to put food on the table and one single extra expense can mean going hungry until payday. Or worse, missing a rental payment and ending up homeless. I'm a single parent in a low income job, but I'm very fortunate that I've been able to work from home throughout the lockdown (key worker in the financial sector) and I have family that would make sure none of us have to visit a food bank unless all of us had no money for food at all. Also my employer's left-leaning and we get 2 days a year to get involved in community/charity work and going to the local gay pride parade counts towards that (with the obligatory company logo in rainbow colours t-shirt, lol). Some people risk getting fired if they turn up to their local gay pride (though that would be illegal in the UK - lots of US states don't have legislation to protect LGBT+ people). There are lots of ways that being able to get involved in campaigning is a privilege.

It is also a privilege to be able to choose a side in certain political issues. For example, I'm bi and someone very close to me is trans. Because of this I don't have a choice which side to be on in LGBT+ "debates" (which aren't debates at all but attempts to remove the human rights of LGBT+ people - especially trans people at the moment) because one "side" in the "debate" means the removal of my human rights and/or the human rights of a person I care deeply about. Of course I care about all other LGBT+ people as well, but because it affects me personally and someone very close, I can't choose to not care. Cis straight people can choose to not support LGBT+ rights and it won't affect their life.

So you're right, but JJ Likte is also right, and the issue isn't so straight forward.

I liked Demilitarize the Police. That seems a lot harder to argue against, and the fundamental point is instantly clear.

ConnorMuldowney said:

Same argument could be (and WAS) used against the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in 2014. People said “how will people KNOW that it doesn’t mean Only Black Lives Matter? This is why we need to say All Lives Matter instead.”

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No. Literally no one objected to Black Lives Matter on the grounds that it was confusing. Anyone who objected to the phrase was objecting to the fundamental concept that Black people’s lives matter.

In this discussion, we are in agreement about the concept, we are differing over semantics. At first I thought I was not explaining well enough to get that across; now I feel that you are conflating the two as if they were the same thing and refusing to move past that. You do recognize that we are in agreement about the concept, don’t you?

JJ Litke said:

I liked Demilitarize the Police. That seems a lot harder to argue against, and the fundamental point is instantly clear.

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I prefer that phrasing for the same reasons. To the extent that there's nuance to that phrasing, it's that demilitarizing means both to stop giving a civilian police force military-grade weapons, and to stop training them like they were military in a war-zone.

No. Literally no one objected to Black Lives Matter on the grounds that it was confusing.

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I disagree that there were no objections, but I agree the people doing it are being disingenuous. They understand what it means, they just don't like it.

I think picking a slogan like "demilitarizing the police" is better because it's a more targeted approach. Yeah, there's much more that should be done to reform the police, but that entire package of reform is huge, and politically a non-starter in this country if taken all at once. Better to take smaller, targeted reform steps that are achievable. I think "demilitarizing" is achievable now, even though I know that police unions are likely to push back hard, as will Republicans in Congress -- and we can all predict what form that pushback will take. But at least the average voter doesn't need to be told what "demilitarize" really means.

So, for those who don't know, Introversion and I are married IRL. We've been talking a lot about this, so let me explain myself a little more.

Absolutely "defund" is bad marketing. I get that. But as ConnorMuldowney points out, slogans have different purposes. My own reading has led me to understand "defund" resonates with a lot of people - and a lot of people really do mean it literally. For many communities, police departments are an unambiguous negative, and abolishing them is the goal. Does that mean the community doesn't want any law enforcement services at all? No. It means they're emphatic in pointing out this system is utterly broken for their citizens, and needs to be razed. Watering down a term like "defund" won't fly.

That said, it's a practical truth in this country that if you want political change, you have to engage enough middle-class white folks to get it off the ground. So it comes down to whether or not "defund" is going to offend enough liberal white people to offset the way it's galvanizing other communities. I honestly don't know the answer to that - but I do know that after this election it's clear the middle-class white liberals (in aggregate) aren't going to be saving our democracy.

I do think arguing over a slogan should never distract from actual action. Maybe part of the problem is that concrete action is hard to determine here. One first step, IMHO, would be taking back all of the army surplus that gets sold to police departments. I live in a sleepy little town, and AFAIK our police officers are decent folks who deal more with moose sightings than armed robbery - but I do not want them to have tanks, ever. If things get so bad here tanks are in order, I want visibility and discussion before military weapons are deployed. I don't want Officer A to have a bad day and decide they need a Howitzer to deal with my neighbor's kids playing basketball past 11 at night.

So "demilitarize the police" works for me - but that's just one step. It's not the whole. It doesn't capture everything. It might work to open discussions with local and state governments, but it addresses a very small subset of the problem.

I guess since we've spent a couple of pages now arguing over a slogan, that suggests the slogan is more of a distraction than a help - to us. I have yet to be convinced "defund" is so problematic that its resonance with activists should be ignored.

As far as Black Lives Matter is concerned - IMHO no, that one's not at all ambiguous, and anyone who claims puzzlement is being at best disingenuous. I will say, though, that I have one very liberal acquaintance who was outraged by it, but she's never been a person of nuanced thinking - and her outrage didn't turn her into a conservative.

I think the original slogan was "Abolish the Police" which was deemed too extreme, and so "Defund the Police" was used, but I do think, if it were up to me, I would go with "Demilitarize the Police." That one seems hard to argue against. I like it.

I like "Demilitarize the Police." A lot. First, it's emphasizing the parts I most object to — arming police to act like soldiers, without the years of training and military discipline soldiers receive.

I don't see why the town I grew up in, with a single elected constable, needs to have an armored tank. There are more cows than people! Half the population leaves after October 5. Fortunately, town also voted against it, much to the mystification of the state police.

And I think on a local level, if we start with "Demilitarize the Police," we can move funds to local programs to help people, and we can work on better hiring and training.

Are a rallying cry and a slogan the same thing? I guess I can see "Defund the Police” galvanizing the people who experience policing as a negative thing, but it doesn't give enough direction as to where to go with that energy. "Demilitarize" does have a more concrete goal.

JJ Litke said:

I still must not be getting my point across. I’m not saying defund-the-police is offensive, it’s that the term “defund” has already been coopted. You think you’re saying “reallocate police funding for other resources” but people hear “we hate the police and want to get rid of them entirely”.

So maybe it doesn’t take that long to read something about how it really works. How are people supposed to know they need to look it up? They think they know what you meant, you hate the police and want to get rid of them, no need to look it up. Who’s going to tell them that’s not what it means? Do you think mainstream media will do that? The guys who breathlessly covered Republicans’ histrionics about Clinton’s emails without any clarification are going to step up and tell everyone what Defund means here, instead of just breathlessly cover Republican histrionics about it?

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This. Especially when there is no shortage of people out there telling them that the BLM movement, and the Left in general, are a bunch of anarchists who want to tear burn everything. Breathless histrionics get clicks and eyeballs, while thoughtful, in-depth analysis doesn't. Or at least it doesn't attract the same eyeballs.

Most of the folks who swallow the extreme crap about the Left are lost causes, I suspect. Heck, half of Republicans still think the election was "stolen" from Trump, and many still think Obama is a Muslim who wasn't born in the US. But I think the motto is misconstrued by folks who are more moderate too. A majority of Americans reacted with horror and outrage at George Floyd's murder and do want police reform. Most Americans do think policing is biased against African American people. Alienating many potential allies with an easy-to-distort slogan that means different things to different people isn't a good political move, imo.

I'm not even sure what "defunding" the police means, exactly (I've seen different explanations from different advocates), and I'm 100% in favor of comprehensively reforming policing in this country, which could well include disbanding some departments completely and starting from scratch, not to mention changing the way police are recruited, trained, evaluated, supervised, and administered. Ultimately, though, I don't think reforming policing can be done without funding. It may take more funding than it does now, and it may mean paying police better and training them more rigorously.

AW Admin said:

I like "Demilitarize the Police." A lot. First, it's emphasizing the parts I most object to — arming police to act like soldiers, without the years of training and military discipline soldiers receive.

I don't see why the town I grew up in, with a single elected constable, needs to have an armored tank. There are more cows than people! Half the population leaves after October 5. Fortunately, town also voted against it, much to the mystification of the state police.

And I think on a local level, if we start with "Demilitarize the Police," we can move funds to local programs to help people, and we can work on better hiring and training.

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I agree. Even this doesn't necessarily touch on every needed change, but it does encapsulate a central problem with policing in this country. And there is evidence that this approach doesn't even save those "blue lives" that matter so much more to the Right.

It would also be really nice if we could stop framing attempts to solve social ills as a "war on" whatever too, because that drives some of the collective mentality. Even constitutional democracies allow violations of civil liberties during wartime, so if we're at war with drugs, or crime, or terrorism or whatever, extreme measures feel more and more warranted. Even if they are counterproductive. I think the so-called "war on drugs" is one of the root causes of the mess we are now in.

I spent ever so many years in Advertising (I know, and I'm very sorry. I married into it) and I'd agree that the merits of Defund the Police as a slogan are irrelevant now, because it's collected too much baggage. Not saying that Demilitarise the Police won't go the same way, but I like it very much because the discussion includes what went wrong - you guys literally militarised your police force which means you ended up getting a very different mentality both from and towards them.

The smartest thing to do would be to bank as many slogans as you can, and have them ready. When the slogan (and thus the conversation) gets hijacked, pull out another slogan. Have it ready to run.

I never believed in the Mandela effect before, but the people saying "black lives matter" was never controversial must be living in the Berenstein universe. In 2014, in my home state of Pennsylvania, "Black lives matter" was responded to with "Blue Lives Matter," "white lives matter," and "all lives matter." I'd honestly say it was more controversial than "defund the police." At least defund the police didn't have three separate movements spawned against it.

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Of course it was controversial. Just not among liberals. It served the noble purpose of outing all my racist neighbors.

I certainly never said, or meant to imply, that the BLM movement wasn't controversial. It is definitely a movement that has drawn battle lines between left and right, and it's spawned all manner of counter movements by the Right, and by certain pearl-clutching white "moderates" who seem to believe that the playing field is level and therefore think "racism cuts both ways" in defiance of all the evidence to the contrary.

What I was saying is that most Americans surveyed believe that police don't treat black people and white people equally.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-ta...s-we-know-about-race-and-policing-in-the-u-s/

https://fivethirtyeight.com/feature...-and-police-brutality-changed-since-ferguson/

One thing that keeps the whole issue "controversial" is that acceptance of systemic racism as a reality is central to being a Democrat nowadays, while opposition to this belief is at the core of GOP rhetoric. In these very polarized times, once something becomes associated with "liberalism," no matter how well supported by data, conservatives feel they must oppose it. I imagine there is some of this happening in reverse too. I certainly feel more of a need to scrutinize claims supported by or made by conservatives, at least, though I like to believe I am still capable of analyzing data that supports them.

In any case, a majority acceptance of systemic bias in policing doesn't mean that many white Americans in particular aren't being hostile, or at least obtuse, about the issue. More white Republicans than Democrats feel policing is unbiased. And even though most Americans supported the BLM protests initially, there is also a tendency for some (many of whom are White) at least, to focus most heavily on occurrences where some protests became more disorderly or looting occurred. Confirmation bias at work, of course.

People are also capable of holding views that appear to be in opposition with themselves. For instance, some polls suggest most Americans still think police are doing a good job overall (though this number has dropped in recent years). So at least some who feel the police are racially biased still think they are doing a good job overall., which is very troubling. More people feel their own local police are doing a good job. But these numbers vary greatly by race. My takeaway from this is that some white people acknowledge racist policing is an issue, but it's not a big enough issue for them to give low marks to the police overall. This shows a profound lack of empathy, imo.

Another thing is, even though most Americans (even most Republicans) support certain elements of police reform (such as banning choke holds), fewer than half of Americans support cutting funding to local police and shifting it to social services.

https://poll.qu.edu/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=3663

This is one reason why I think the "defund the police" slogan isn't going to work well at winning the hearts and minds of people who, however unfortunately, still hold a lot of political power in this country.

Roxxsmom, of course you didn’t say or imply BLM wasn’t controversial, no one here has.

I, too, feel like "defund the police" can be too easily misinterpreted by someone who reads no further than the slogan itself. Seems like slogans are akin to jokes, if you have to explain it, it's not very good. "Black lives matter" got a lot of pushback, but it was clear in what it meant. "Defund," as others has mentioned, has historically been used in cases where the goal was to remove all funding with the final goal of abolishing the entire thing. As a result "defund" and "abolish" are synonymous in many people's eyes.

I rather like "lift the burden," myself. Lift the burden of police oppression from the oppressed, and lift the burden of wearing too many hats from the police. It can be seen as a positive on both sides, and what's the counter? "Keep them down?" Who wants to wear that on a t-shirt?

That said, "Defund the police" already has traction, and the very fact it can be misconstrued MIGHT be a good thing. It starts conversations. Yes, the first question (from both opponents and people who are legitimately curious) will be "Seriously? Don't we NEED the police?" However, that question is SO easily answered and the idea so clearly explained that it's not remotely a stumbling block. And for an opponent to keep whining, but we NEED the police," after you've already explained "defund doesn't mean abolish," makes the opponent look stupid.

So it naturally leads opponents to a question rather than just an opposing slogan that can be treated as a definitive argument/smackdown of the original slogan.

"Black lives matter."
"ALL lives matter, and if you disagree with that, you're a bad person! Check and mate! Imma ignore you now."

They HAVE to ask the question.

Never mind. The more I think about it, the more I'm starting to think it's absolutely brilliant.