[bambataa]

“Defund the police” is a terrible slogan.

“Oh what we mean by that is actually the opposite where we want to redistribute funding in different ways blah blah blah”.

And all a critic has to do is “left wing radicals say they want to defund the police”.

[defrost]

Do you have any critic proof suggetions?

I suspect they're rather hard to coin.

[SenAnder]

Reform the police, demilitarize the police, deescalation for police, stop police violence, accountability for police, teach cops to be kind, etc... Of course they're not "critic proof" - someone motivated to twist words will find a way. But they'll have to twist words, whereas now they just use their plain, literal, unambiguous meaning.

But there's a good reason why defund/abolish the police is sticking around - because a significant part of the activists do mean it [1] (ACAB didn't come from nowhere), and the moderate faction that doesn't mean it literally is unwilling to part from the radical faction that does.

Anyone supporting the moderate faction is in a thorny position - do they think the moderates will grow a spine and stand up to the radicals once they've achieved their goals, or will they continue to meekly let the radicals set the agenda?

[1] Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police [..] There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...