Cries to Defund the police, dismantle them, reduce them — all scare me. They play right into Trump’s “Law and Order” political hands.
The ads and tweets will come out any minute. “Do ya hear’em?” he’ll rant. ‘They want to take police off the streets!!! They want your neighborhoods to be unsafe for you and let criminals run rampant! Is that the America you want???!!!! And now they are dismantling the police dept in Minneapolis altogether and good luck having no one to call when your store gets robbed!” And on and on. With many exclamation points, of course. White middle America and even Independents will eat this up like candy.
I understand that the defunders have cited studies that show that increased funding and expansion of community programs and neighborhood watches, in lieu of traditional armed police may actually reduce crime and certainly prevent George Floyd tragedies. I get that in some cases for people of color and minority communities, too often the police can be more of an unsafe harassment to law biding citizens than a help. And that when Minneapolis “dismantles” their department they will be rebuilding it at the same time.
But all this will be lost in the onslaught to Republican soundbites. To the uninformed, “Defund the Police” has all the dumb logic of Defund the WHO (World Health Org) in this time of COVID.
Let’s switch the language from Defund to REFORM the police. For that is what we really want, in the end.