Reply to Can someone explain “defund” the police vs police reform?

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Can someone explain “defund” the police vs police reform?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]It is an unfortunate phrase that is wrongly leading people to believe it means get rid of the police force everywhere, and so is now being amplified by the far right to scare people into thinking the far left wants a lawless country. It isn't about that at all. It is about specific police funding changes in specific communities.

What those changes may be are different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction because, of course, the police force is a locally funded and governed entity, so this is a local, not a federal issue (e.g. in some places, unlike DC, the police write parking tickets; a huge waste of police time and resources for some locations, but probably fine in tiny towns).

So, in some places it means to alleviate the police from aspects of the job they aren't trained for or shouldn't be wasting resources on by shifting funding for those functions to people who are trained to do those things (like social workers, in some cases, or high school grads in others).

It also includes ending funding for practices and initiatives that have proven to be a failure or actually harmful. In some locations, as one example, a ton of money is spent on systems to create gang profiling, but they have been misused and abused, in addition to being ineffective, so there is a call to defund the broken program and work on a better solution.

And in some places where the police force has gotten outsized and is grossly overfunded, it does mean to cut it back and shift funding to underfunded programs like education and community programs. As in a giant corporation, a police department can also sometimes become bloated with middle management and people who make things up to do to keep their own jobs. Meanwhile, critical community services are severely underfunded or nonexistent and would, if funded, go a long way to reducing crime.

In yet other areas where the people and the police are particularly at odds, some are making compelling arguments to completely reimagine what "policing" that community should look like, which may including abolishing what we now think of as police for that community.

So if you want to know what changes fall under the unfortunately labeled Defund Police movement, you need to research the initiatives proposed in your local jurisdiction. The LA lists have been fairly well publicized and debated (but obviously would not mean much to a small town in Md.)

Why the focus on funding? Because in any entity, when money is earmarked for a project or promotions have caused middle management bloat, and people have jobs because of it, they will do anything and everything to keep funds running to that project/task/position even in the face of abject failure, especially when backed by a strong union (notoriously difficult to eliminate police jobs). It takes courage and political will to admit something expensive didn't work and pull the plug on funding (aka, defund it), and it takes even more political courage to take a dime away from the police force/union, when the slogan for it is complicated and the slogan against it is so easy to promote with fear (and where there is a history of using fear and bullying tactics to prevent it).[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics