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

[William Flynn Wallace]

The Camden police replacement story is excellent, even if missing a lot of
details.  How did they know who to rehire?  I really like the part about
the cops going up to houses and apartments, knocking on the door and
getting to know the residents.  Sounds like a good thing for every police
department.   Hard to argue with the results.   bill w

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 9:58 PM Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> 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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