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Centrists: Stop saying "defund the police"! Say "reform the police" instead, it polls better.
Me: So does "reform police" entail cutting police funding to increase social services?
Centrists: No, we mean "keep police budgets the same but paint "Black Lives Matter" on streets".
Me: So does "reform police" entail cutting police funding to increase social services?
Centrists: No, we mean "keep police budgets the same but paint "Black Lives Matter" on streets".
The tone I used in this post implies that I'm exaggerating but I'm really not: Painting the words "Black Lives Matter" on busy streets has been the main symbolic gesture Dem. municipal leaders have been willing to give in response to the 2020 protests.
WRT funding, Dem.-led municipalities (i.e. virtually every single major one sans Jax and Ft. Worth) have either a. done bait-and-switch fake defunding measures like in NYC, b. not even pretended to cut police funding, or c. raised them this year. http://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2020/06/10/375627/houston-passes-budget-that-increases-police-funding-amid-calls-to-defund/
Throwback to this classic move from @BilldeBlasio and @CoreyinNYC, where they pushed a "defunding" plan that basically just entailed putting school cops (excuse me, "school safety agents") under the Department of Education's purview. https://www.pix11.com/news/local-news/critics-say-city-budgets-defunding-of-police-is-a-bait-and-switch
But hey, at least we owned Drumpf, right? The worst part of this historically dishonest bait-and-switch was that it somehow a less awful response to the protests than the innumerable cities under Dem. control that *raised* police funding this year.
This is more-or-less the point I was trying to convey. Trust me: the right-wing of the party's opposition to the defund movement has nothing to do with sloganeering and everything to do with proposals to cut police funding to re-invest in social services. https://twitter.com/EricShapiro3/status/1329614172263473153?s=20
