[ExI] Cory Massimino on advocating police abolition

[John Clark]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2020 at 8:34 PM Dan TheBookMan via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>> The police are not going to be abolished, it just ain't gonna happen.
>> Pretending otherwise is a fantasy.
>
>
> > That’s what you believe, but it still doesn’t explain why you thought
> Cory (or yours truly) confused abolition with defunding.
>

Because the phrase "defund the police" is suddenly all in the news and is
basically a good idea, however it's a very poor name to give it because
it's practically begging to be misinterpreted; right wingers have tried
with some success to tar those who advocate it with the very silly idea of
abolishing the police. What "defund the police" really means is to stop
using cops to give tickets for minor violations of the traffic laws (robot
cameras or the equivalent of meter maids could just write down license
plate numbers) and decriminalized the drug laws so police would not be
needed to enforce that either, thus the budgets of police departments could
be reduced significantly and the money saved used for more important things
like drug rehabilitation; unfortunately all that won't fit on a bumper
sticker. But they've got to find a better phrase than "defund the police".

John K Clark
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