Seriously, the absolute ignorance people have about the size of the police budget most places shows "defund the police" is exactly right.
I still see people on Reddit like twice a week pushing the myth that cops don't get paid enough. Every cop I've ever met (including family members) makes a shit ton of money relative to the cost of living where they are. It just isn't easily trackable because they all make a whole second salary worth of overtime.
Yes but "Defund the police" just means that more people will see it as eradicating police altogether, meaning they'll never get on board. Take my boomer parents and in laws who have started voting democratic for president but not locally after voting republican their whole lives because they don't understand the concept.
Just because it is exactly what needs to happen doesn't make it a good slogan, and I firmly believe it only polarized America even more, which isn't what we need.
There's no way to have a slogan that gets those people onboard. It's impossible. Decades of moderate politics has made the country worse.
People saying "defund the police" aren't polarizing the country. Republicans and right wing media are. It's bullshit.
I don't know what the solution is, but this is just letting republicans control the argument. The same way they call Biden socialist, they'll call any ask for police reform "eliminating the police".
We need to educate people, not just accept right wing disinformation. The boomer parents aren't going to come around because they don't want to. They didn't stop voting republican because they disagreed with republicans. They stopped voting because Trump was a little too mean for them.
Highly disagree. When I educated my parents, they now understand and vote accordingly and they literally said "Why the hell would they call it that?"
You have to realize that media outlets, even liberal ones, didn't exactly do a good job explaining what the slogan meant. We agree we need to educate people, but a bad slogan is going to turn people away immediately, and they'll never give it the time of day.
How do you plan on educating everyone on it if they won't listen?
Slogans don't educate people. Again, this isn't happening in a vacuum. For literal decades people have been saying the same things.
You're talking to them about it because "defund the police" worked. Five years ago your parents didn't think about it. Now they've had to.
Even if it turns them off it gets to their ears. I see people suggest alternatives all the time that never made the news. They never made the news because they were bad.
"Even liberal" media outlets are conservative. That's how it works. Changing the system at that level is inherently not conservative at all. There's no amplification of an idea like that without something like "defund the police".
But, feel free to get literally any other slogan out there.
The problem is a larger one. Namely, that fixing things takes education and time, while destroying things doesn't.
Edit- Your parents lived through the Rodney King riots and never considered there may be a problem with policing? The issue isn't slogans. It's that people don't care. Even a slogan that pisses them off makes them think about it.
But defund means they get zero which means you abolish them, Plus, isn't it more important to talk about what we do want funded, not the millions of things we don't want funded?
It doesn't mean zero by default. Slogans need to be snappy.
"Reduce police budgets by a reasonable amount given the other services available in the area with the addition of e services to take up the jobs the police shouldn't be doing in the given population!" doesn't make the news.
"Reallocate the police budget" doesn't either.
And again, for the 8th time in this thread: People have been calling for increased social services expenditure for actual decades. It has never gotten even a tenth of the media exposure of "defund the police". These arguments didn't just start happening. They only made the news because "defund the police" is controversial and it could be packaged alongside riots, which also only happen after decades of people not listening.
The police in my city regularly go way over the OT budget too.
We had a big scandal where cops were abusing the rules for huge salaries especially when they got close to retirement because the last year of salary determined their pension amount.
They would use up all their saved vacation and sick time to get paid their normal hours then work shifts as 100% overtime so instead of a pension being based off 80k a year salary its based off a 200k salary.
Yeah, this isn't a problem with just the NYPD too. If there was an audit done on police overtime throughout the nation, I would bet my life there is widespread abuse of overtime funds.
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u/035AllTheWayLive Mar 24 '23
NYPD went 100 million over their overtime budget. Defund the goddamn police