The police violence issue is a ratcheting problem — meaning it goes up, but is prevented from going down.
Police are increasingly militarizing and escalating because it gives them increasing resources and status, and thus power and further income.
Corruption goes up because all methods of reducing corruption are safely behind police union walls, where there is no touching them with law or established politics.
Thus, ‘Good’ cops that speak up are consistently punished, removed from important positions, and forced to leave the force for any action against corruption, or refusing to use the new powers for the sake of defending abuse.
Reform of all this would definitely be wise — especially when we can see how other nations handle police work, and how it shapes their societies. Police states are NOT a wise choice, if you’ve ever seen how they turn out in full bloom.
But… the mechanisms we’d use to reform the police are political ones. Ones that are basically electrified wire behind lifetimes of police-related politics.
There simply isn’t enough muscle — enough ‘priority’ behind the safe political system to break down the walls in place with the back-and-forth waves of modern liberal politics. Those walls are in fact DESIGNED to stop exactly these waves of reforms — the police forces simply have to refuse to comply in subtle ways, and find a way to get back to business as usual, and continue militarizing and pushing horrible politics.
Where do you get the muscle to make real change? This is where the Luntz-style political machine is actually resourceful in a way you can use. You use your unreasonable people.
You have a literal army of folks, an active literal army of folks willing to push for unreasonable things — to be the bad cop to your good cop.
Those people are the exact muscle you need.
Those people holding protest slogan signs — DEFUND THE POLICE.
You need exactly those people.
The “reasonable” concern that some of the folks here feel is exactly the mild but affecting persistent fear you need in others to break down those walls of fear the police exploit every day.
See — If they don’t want to be defunded — then they really, really should accept maximalist reforms and demilitarizing permanently.
That’s the choice you need to be offering. That’s the muscle you need to be able to even do anything, rather than just playing at and ending up doing nothing.
Shaming the defunding effort is exactly what throws away your chance at doing anything.
It is ironically the most unreasonable choice — to give up exactly the power to solve everyone’s problems with the minimal harm.
Because otherwise, we continue repeating the past, in increasingly horrible ways.
The conflict you avoid by pushing reform-or-have-worse is well worth the conflict of choice you offer — and embracing your own ‘radical’ base to do it is actually healthy for the party.
The party would gain a LOT of muscle by having a radical movement it doesn’t just abandon at every opportunity.