[ExI] Clearly communicating the concept behind "defund the police"

[Adrian Tymes]

Thinking about the nomenclature problem with "defund the police"...

(Politics being politics, there is potential to diverge into a number of
related threads. I am explicitly declaring that I am thinking just of this
subset of the problem, so as to carve off a problem small enough to be
solvable in one step. All related problems are acknowledged and can be
solved separately.)

The issue is that people stop listening after hearing those three words.
"Defund the police and then spend the money on...", people stop listening
before "and then", and insert their own wild takes.

So instead, how about, "relieve the police"? That doesn't seem as prone to
such wild takes - meaning the usual reaction will be to ask, "relieve them
of what"?

That then gives an opening to explain: "relieve the police of non-police
duties, by shifting funding: instead of paying the police for mental health
duties, pay mental health experts, so the police can concentrate on police
duties". This also allows changes beyond just funding shifts to remove
non-police duties from the police - for example, changing laws and
regulations so that 911 calls in response to someone defecating on the
street would be routed to social services, rather than sending a cop as the
first response.

Exactly what "police duties" are can be debated, but there's a wide range
of stuff that even the cops say they shouldn't be doing. Implicit in this
is that, with less funding, there'll be less cops; even the unions and
review boards won't be able to keep everyone on, leaving room to start
actually removing the worst performers (starting with those who actively
and routinely threaten human lives without legal cause; I'd say "moral
cause", but too often they claim "because he was black" as sufficient moral
cause to kill or injure someone).

In the worst cases where an entire department needs to be cleaned out and
restarted, that is "relieving" them in a more thorough sense, for those
cases which engage in too many non-police duties. (Oppression of minorities
being "not a valid police duty" in this context.) But this is not every
case, unlike what "defund the police" implies.

Does "relieve the police" seem a more useful (and ultimately at least as
accurate) term as "defund the police"?

(This won't replace "defund the police". People who are super-angry will
keep chanting that. "Relieve the police" is suggested for those who wish to
focus on convincing those currently opposed to police reform.)
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