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

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 at 11:15, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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.)
>

They did "defund the police" in Camden, New Jersey, in 2012 and it
apparently turned out OK:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-jersey-trnd/index.html



-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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