as the "defund is a bad slogan" takes continue i think more on how the next move shouldn't be 'try saying Reform again' but putting more in showing the connection tween cops, prisons, and slave labor, and why gop and dems alike have a vested interest in not changing things

the focus tends to get narrowed down to just "holy shit the cops have state immunity to murder people" cuz yeah, holy shit, but it's crucial to show people the specific incentives politicians have in not changing anything about cops and prisons and how they're intermingled

you bring up slavery abolition and people might react "that was different, that was a conflict we couldn't avoid" which is useful cuz then you can move right into how we haven't actually abolished slavery, we changed the terms and conditions. this is conflict you can't avoid.

with the 13th amendment loopholes in place, slavery is something that just requires a cop and a prison to get. and you'll find that plenty of dems pour tons of money into not only the cops, but the prisons. it isn't just "can cops brutalize you" that's on the line here.

california probably the most egregious example here because of how it's held up as our big state full of democratically dominated counties, cites... that keep giving more money to cops and prisons. because democrats profit from the prison slavery.

whether that profit be "we have slave labor to fight fires" or "we can just rent out this slave labor to corporations and pocket the profit", it's not just GOP in these areas have deep, deep incentives to change nothing about the system as is.

this is a conflict you can't avoid.

even IF you somehow managed to find a way to - very politely and with no 'snappy slogans'! - get cops to not beat the shit out of and kill people for no reason at all, you still can't get around how a primary function of them is to funnel people into prisons for slave labor.

then there's the vote suppression too. it's just endless incentives to not change anything. in the vast majority of states, becoming imprisoned has some impact on your right to vote. thus, if you want to suppress a voting bloc you don't like? a quick way is to arrest them.

the GOP gets the most obvious benefits out of this, and you can see it in action in florida after the vote to give felons the right to vote and desantis going "nah" and then getting a poll tax in there, but dems who want to avoid any challenges benefit from it too.

and as i've brought up many, many times, my homestate of maine is one of the few states - there's just two, us and vermont! - where prisoners and felons have full right to vote.

it does not escape me that we're, iirc, per capita the whitest state in the nation.

the matters of police and prisons are a conflict you cannot avoid because they remain the unresolved conflict of slavery that we had a war over. people are looking for a way to solve this problem without great conflict, just votes and debate, and there just isn't one.