I'd argue that this is proof that the refund the police people mean something different.

Right like if you have me saying "defend" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.

I'd also suggest actually reading that op-ed, it's discussing a process that would take decades and specifically arguing against a "reformist" approach to improving police forces.

When you have stories like https://theintercept.com/2021/12/18/little-rock-police-chief... and a former captain of the NYPD signalling that as mayor doesn't trust the police to protect him (after the police union "declared war" on the prior mayor), I'm inclined to maybe believe that policing as an institution in the US needs to be reworked from the ground up.

This should become obvious, and defund starts to make more sense when I say that systemically, US police forces have few or no incentives to actually decrease crime and counterintuitively are often rewarded when crime increases. That the incentives between "the police" and citizens are so completely out of alignment makes you think.

Good lord a bunch of typos in the first part of that, and now too late to edit (I think I noticed one and fixed it in the wrong place, making things worse...)

Should be

> I'd argue that this is proof that the defund the police people mean something different. > Right like if you have me saying "defund" and someone else saying "abolish" implying that I mean "abolish" specifically because I'm not using the word abolish seems strange.

If that wasn't obvious.

I think the morale of the story is, people fall for slogans and slogans always turn out shit results. Trump's MAGA, well everyone has a different definition of what it would take to "Make America Great Again." Some might even argue, like myself, that if we say that, we should really take off the "Again" part. I am pretty sure most slogans that get chanted, we could come to the same conclusion, slogans are shit. Trying to have a catch phrase that captures a large and complex idea, is a bad idea.

To Diversify. Obama had the whole "Change" thing. Well what exactly we we changing? And a lot of people chanted about change, but I bet different people had a different idea of what that change looked like.