The cries of “‘defund the police’ is harsh and may alienate potential allies!” are full-throated, and I am thoroughly sick of them. Police and police unions are manipulating politics shamelessly, and have demonstrated again and again and again that consent decrees and legislation are just something they will work around.
I was chatting with someone the other day and they suggested that “defund the police” is too radical and just alienates them (if you are guessing that they’re white, you are correct) but the reality of the situation is that the police are already out of control and are actively maneuvering to prevent controls from being placed on them. You know the story: a jurisdiction passes an ordinance saying ‘no chokeholds’ and police shootings go up as the cops sanctimoniously explain that they’ve just been given no alternative but to kill civilians – the alternative being a bit of cerebral damage or death from anoxia. Heads, I win – tails, I win!
What’s mind-boggling is that the police also feel completely justified in saying that they’re going to ignore duly constituted authority, because apparently Judge Dredd was right: “I AM THE LAW!” That reveals a subtle flaw in the ‘reasoning’ of authoritarianism; the premise of every authoritarian is that there is no authority above them that they will submit to – except that every other authoritarian thinks that they are the ultimate authority. It’s what makes authoritarians so volatile, especially when they are armed and stupid; “Ultima Ratio Regum” and all that. Consider this guy: [KTLA]
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco this week vowed not to enforce the state’s new coronavirus restrictions, calling Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to contain the pandemic with business closures and stay-at-home orders “flat out ridiculous.”
“The metrics used for closures are unbelievably faulty and are not representative of true numbers and are disastrous for Riverside County,” the sheriff said in a video released Friday.
The Sheriff’s Department posted the video as state officials sounded the alarm on the dwindling number of available ICU beds across the state, announcing that regions with intensive care capacity that drop below 15% Saturday would have to impose another stay-at-home order at 11:59 p.m. Sunday.
So, he speaks for the entire Sheriff’s Department? Ronald Reagan (if they disagreed with him) would have fired the lot, because he was an authoritarian, too – he was just a bigger and more powerful authoritarian.
It took me a while to adjust my understanding of the authoritarian personality, because my immediate instinct was to go, “wait a minute! you swore to uphold the law, not merely the laws that you agree with!” except that’s not really what’s going on: the sheriff never gave a shit about the law at all, except for to nod in its general direction when it happened to agree with him, the ultimate authority in his jurisdiction.
Needless to say, I don’t think that Chad Bianco is qualified to hold the job of sheriff, or anything else that might allow him to exercise authority over anyone, because he has demonstrated conclusively that he does not understand authority well enough to be an authority himself. In authoritarian-land, he should be bowing and doffing his hat to a governor, not mouthing off publicly that, in effect, his opinion trumps the governor’s. In the land of Real Authoritarians he would never do something like that – imagine what would happen if some underling in Stalin’s goon squad publicly refuted Stalin by saying that he was going to blow off his orders. He’d probably get a good beating before they shot him, and the entire department would be ruthlessly purged.
The logic of authoritarianism is compelling, though, isn’t it? Sitting over here on the other side of the continent I am still thinking, “I’d show that son of a bitch; his department would have to hold a bake sale to buy bicycles because I’d re-allocate all their cruisers to a special team responsible for guarding a laundromat in Bakersfield.” That’s the problem with all of this (waving his hands to encompass All The Things) we’re working under authoritarian logic and we’ve got no breathing-room to ask ourselves what makes sense.
What makes sense?
Well, for one thing, I guess this illustrates the danger of having a Sheriff in charge of a department, who is an uneducated goon. Let me have goons about me that are educated! Instead of sending Beria and Blohkin to go sort him out, why didn’t the journalists who carried that story follow up requesting Bianco’s data that shows (as he says) “The metrics used for closures are unbelievably faulty and are not representative of true numbers and are disastrous for Riverside County,” Oh, really? What the fuck are you talking about, why is this within the scope of your authority, and why didn’t you just resign so that you don’t have to enforce this onerous policy? Wait, you’re not resigning? Lavrenti, run down and get his signed letter of resignation, and take Vasily with you. Tell him to bring his tool bag.
By all means, take Newsom to task for wining and dining at 3-star restaurants during the outbreak, and for all the sleazy, hypocritical things that are why we hate politicians. But this guy and anyone in his department that have decided they are a bigger authority than the governor out to be reality-checked, hard. If the governor is wrong, explain it to the media (who will dutifully mis-report it) but the pandemic death-rate and outbreak rate in Riverside County looks exactly like the rate in the rest of California – as opposed to, say, Christchurch, New Zealand – where Covid-19 has been contained and mostly snuffed out using completely effective low-tech techniques.
Defund the police may sound threatening. But, we need better police. How about just reinventing law enforcement so that dumb motherfuckers can’t be sheriff in any jurisdiction? The way to do that is to reallocate the money: create community agents and local jurisdiction support structures, and fund them by re-allocating some of the money that would go to the cry-babies in blue. They can apply for the new jobs that’ll be opening up. Or, they can join the (in mjr fantasy-land) flood of ex-cops applying for jobs as mall ninjas. [mall ninjas] Sure, then nobody’d go to the malls anymore, which is “2 birds, one stone.”
I know this is just one example of local law enforcement deciding to announce that they will not enforce laws they don’t like – essentially declaring themselves to be the higher authority. There was some jumped-up nobody sheriff in Virginia who said that if more restrictive gun laws were passed, he wouldn’t enforce them. What blows my mind is that “conservatives” (especially those who worship Saint Reagan) seem to be OK with union-busting and firing employees who don’t toe the party line – as long as they’re not cops.
And meanwhile, here in Columbus, another young black man is shot by cops under suspicious circumstances.
The cops, involved in something completely different, claim Casey Goodman, Jr. drove by them waving a gun. The family says he was carrying a sub sandwich and his keys. The cops say they told him to drop his gun and he didn’t. I say, if I am carrying a sandwich and am told to drop my gun, I doubt I would drop my sandwich. The cops say they found a gun on him. However, the cops are NOT saying WHERE they found the gun on him. Casey Goodman, Jr. had a concealed handgun permit.
Oh, and the Franklin County Sheriff’s office refuses to make their
cops wear body cams.
Columbus Dispatch: What we know about the fatal shooting of Casey Goodson Jr.. (If you have trouble getting past their paywall, put your browser into “Reader” mode.)
I guessed black, because I read something just the other day about some dude who said, quote:
“he too wanted to reform the criminal justice system, ridding it of racial bias, but he feared that using that “snappy slogan” meant “you lost a big audience the minute you say it”.”
Can you guess what colour he is? (Clue: his name is Barack Obama)
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/04/barack-obama-lesson-british-left-words-matter-defund-the-police-us
That word “defund” has a political context most progressives seem unaware of.
The right wing has for years demanded that government “Defund Planned Parenthood!” – by which they mean cut off every penny, get rid of it, burn it to the ground and salt the soil.
The general public may not agree with that call, but that’s what they hear when they hear that word – and they correlate it with all the other right wing propaganda about commie-anarchist-rioter-anti-American-all-around-bad-guys coming to take their guns and apple pies, and they see it how fits together.
Alas, “reallocate” (though an improvement) is too big a word for too much of the public. “Real locate – huh?” The search for optimal messaging continues.
Let’s see… How does “Defund Education” or “Defund the Homeless” or “Defund your department’s allocation” sound?
It’s almost as if some progressives would rather be seen as woke than actually accomplish something.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/defund-police-slogan-election-polls-democrats.html
It’s hard to find optimal messaging when the people you’re trying to send messages to have been trained for (at least) the last three generations to be as knee-jerk and closed-minded as possible.
I’ve kind of settled on Re-Form. Not Reform, but Re-Form. And pronounced with both syllables equally stressed.
But I suspect that the pearl-clutchers would find something wrong with that, too, because as Marcus discusses above, resisting any change at all is what they do.
I think Pierce R. Butler @4 is correct. For many, perhaps most, people, “defund the police” means “abolish any kind of law enforcement force entirely”. Since that is generally regarded as a really bad idea, the slogan tends to repel anyone who interprets it that way.
Of course, it’s an open question whether most of the people who misinterpret the “defund” slogan would respond better to a different slogan, or whether they are mostly dead set against any significant changes to the system.
The title of this post is a perfectly fine slogan; “reinvent” sounds much more positive and hopeful than “defund.”
I kind of had the assumption that American police tended to make white people feel safer and Black people feel less safe. However, recent polling disproves that idea:
https://www.newsweek.com/81-black-americans-dont-want-less-police-presence-despite-protestssome-want-more-cops-poll-1523093
“A Gallup poll conducted from June 23 to July 6 surveying more than 36,000 U.S. adults found that 61 percent of Black Americans said they’d like police to spend the same amount of time in their community, while 20 percent answered they’d like to see more police, totaling 81 percent. Just 19 percent of those polled said they wanted police to spend less time in their area.
Black Americans’ responses to the question were nearly on par with the national average, in which 67 percent of all U.S. adults said they wanted police presence to remain the same and 19 percent said they wanted it to increase.”
So most Black people don’t want fewer police, they want less racist police.
This article goes into more depth:
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/17/21292046/black-people-abolish-defund-dismantle-police-george-floyd-breonna-taylor-black-lives-matter-protest
I don’t see how that solves the issue you’re talking about. Substituting the authority of some “dumb” locals with the authority of some other less-dumb locals means the new crop of people still need to kneel before Zod (or whoever the bigger authority is). And what if Zod is kind of a shithead himself?
I’ve been asking myself all this time why county health departments, school districts, etc., are the ones making these decisions in so many places. If you say “but there are very few cases Bumfuck, Nowhere, which makes it a very different situation from someplace like Plague City,” then that doesn’t actually change anything. The federal government could perfectly well recognize such facts and use them for the decisions that it (and not some other entity) will make about how to respond in various places at various times. Or state governments could do so, for certain responsibilities which fall to them.
In any case, they don’t need to hand all of that control over to the locals (whatever flavor of local you think it should be). But they do need to do their own fucking jobs, assuming they don’t resign, or so I’m told. The reason it happens though (i.e., not doing their jobs) is apparently just so the public will have somebody else to blame whenever it’s a decision that some of them don’t like.
About words hmmm. “It’s not global warming it’s climate change”. It’s not global warming it’s a global burning and it’s not climate change it’s a climate catastrophe. The rational-scientist community wants to seem all publishable and everything, I’m sure. The authoritarian-fearful community has attacked the first phrase in my quote enough that rational people (thought?) it better to come up with the second phrase in my quote, which was attacked in the same way. Meanwhile, life dies.
Reform and reinvent the police, these words have been tried and coopted. If you use these words you are supporting the status quo. Mr. Obama may have disliked the words, but what was quoted from him as an offer in place of them in the article of The Guardian wasn’t any better.
All natural languages have inserted words that are not actually spoken. The authoritarian-fearful media first inserted the silent word “only” into Black Lives Matter, as in BLMonly or BLonlyM. Instead, as you understand the issue or it gets presented to you over and over again by the likes of the brilliant BLM leadership the silent word is also. Black Lives Matter too! Black Lives also Matter.
This is why the motherfuckers had to insert “legal” into count all the votes, in order to supplant the silent phrase “it is just” or “for justice”, that most people hear.
The important issue for communication then is to say Defund the Police, but insert the correct silent words when pressed.
They’re not gonna listen anyway, so shitcan “defund”. Abolish the murdering pieces of shit.
Fuck this annoys me. I’ve said this before and I’ll doubtless have to say it again: to paraphrase Flavia Dzodan – my progressive politics will actively and rationally seek to gain and hold onto power, or it will be bullshit.
@jenorafeuer, 5: Oh, it’s hard, you say? Fuck it then, we’d best give up and retreat to preaching to the choir from the opposition benches where we can’t get anything done. Good plan. /s
@achuah, 6:
You’re right, it’s a waste of time, best stick to the old message that has been proven to cost votes. Good plan.
@springa73:
NO IT ISN’T!! Did you even read the article I linked to? I’m going to quote a whole paragraph here:
And there are links from there in the original to other sources. This is NOT an “open question”. You can’t just shrug your shoulders and say “ach, they probably wouldn’t listen anyway” and take the normal lefty course of not bothering to try to talk to the deplorables – that bullshit is what gave us Trump in the first place, thanks. The question has been asked, and the targets are telling you that they’d change their mind if you changed your rhetoric.
@seachange, 10:
You are sticking your fingers in your ears and going lalalalalalalalaIcan’thearyou. You obviously read the article, at least a bit, but you either stopped before you reached the paragraph above or deliberately disregarded it. The evidence doesn’t fit your model, and you like your model better. Have fun on the opposition benches, you’ll achieve FUCK ALL.
@keithnielsen, 11:
If by “they” you mean voters – the first group we need to address – then you’re just ignoring the evidence like everyone else. If by “they” you mean the police… well, yeah, the evidence suggests that in some cases you’re right. And how does one address that? By getting people into power who will wield the bigger stick and fire and jail such assholes on the spot when they express ANY reluctance to follow the chain of command. You want militarised police, Mr Policeman? Sure – you just disobeyed a lawful order of a superior, take a month in a cell and an instant demotion.
No, this is very, very wrong. As Bob Altemeyer explains in The Authoritarians (and you should read it if you haven’t), the vast majority of authoritarians are authoritarian followers, and this is what gives them their power. (An authoritarian leader without followers is just a lonely guy ranting in the corner.)
When a sheriff disobeys the state governor, it may seem at first blush that he is thus not an authoritarian follower. But authoritarian followers don’t follow just anybody; they follow the leaders that give them the emotional satisfication they are seeking, and these lines of authoritarian power don’t always run through the local elected government (and sometimes not through any elected government at all). In this case, there will be various conservatives (some elected, such as to the state legislature, and some not) through whom the sheriff believes the lines of authority run, and the governor is not considered part of this network.
How exactly does a better slogan lead to actually “getting things done”? M4A has probably pretty good slogans and is pretty popular. Yet Biden wouldn’t sign it into law, even if it were to come across his desk. It wasn’t politicians who ran their campaigns on “Defund the police”. It’s a grassroots movement addressing the politicians they elected, not some confused swingvoter, with a clear and consise message about what they want.
Here is an idea for all the people who think their particular slogan is better: make your own movement, chant your own slogans, organize; maybe the defund-the-police-crowd sees your success and joins you. But that would actually be work, posting online how other people are organizing wrong is much easier.
kurt1: you are what is wrong with the left, and you are why it keeps losing.
Can’t believe I’m having to explain this, but a better slogan provably changes the minds AND VOTES of swing voters. Which in turn puts in power people more likely to do what you are campaigning for, rather than people who will do the OPPOSITE of what you’re campaigning for.
No, it’s not. It’s a grassroots movement operating in an election year and therefore, whether it likes it or not, addressing voters in the hope they’ll elect politicians in the future who will defund the police.
Here is an idea for the left: fragment. Split apart into an ever-larger number of ever smaller movements pushing police reform, trans rights, women’s rights, gay rights, racial equality, free education, universal healthcare, environmental protection. Most importantly, see it as a competition.
Or, to put it in other terms: what you’re saying is, “Go away and form the Judean People’s Front”. It was a stupid idea when that joke was written, it was a stupid idea when that joke was set, and it’s a stupid idea now.
This is the best one, though – doozy to finish with:
So… it’s too much to ask that crowd to simply look at the evidence that they’re actively harming the cause they’re pushing, but instead other people have to form another, competing movement with the same end.
Also, you don’t know many people on the left if you think “sees your success and joins you” is how it would pan out. “Sees your success and takes credit for it” is WAY more likely. I’ll never forget the TV coverage of the celebrations among the women camped outside Greenham Common airbase in the UK when the Yanks finally removed their nukes. Some lank-haired hippy was grinning into the camera and saying something like “it took a long time, but it worked”. Sure it did love. You camping out outside the base is the reason nukes are leaving. Not the fall of the Berlin wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union or the end of the Cold War – it was you shitting in a bush for three years that made the US government see sense. The delusion is strong in this one.
The left needs to learn this lesson from the right : the time to argue policy is when you have power. Until then, your arguments and internal divisions only serve your opponents.
Yeah dude, the civil rights movement (who was also much derided for being too extreme and offputting to the center) really took credit for all the good work other people did. Also the fall of the soviet union was definitely brought about by centrists writing letters to the editor (the posting of it’s time).
You don’t have to make your own movement if you don’t want to “fracture”, you can also join BLM and change it from the inside. The point is, you are contributing nothing, your opinion doesn’t matter because it is not connected to anything or anyone in a meaningful way. You can be mad online about it, but it doesn’t change anything.
“The left needs to learn this lesson from the right : the time to argue policy is when you have power. Until then, your arguments and internal divisions only serve your opponents.”
Hey thats a good point, you should definitly join the BLM crowd and chant “Defund the police” with them!
When the evidence says that’s the route to power, sign me up.
“When the evidence says that’s the route to power, sign me up.”
Oh it does. BLM and similar groups had a large influx of people organizing with them. There are regular demonstrations in every major city across the US right now. LA just this week passed massive criminal justice reform. Minnesota started reform months ago. “Defund the police” may not be popular with centrists, it is effective to attract people from the left. So you can join, there is strength in numbers.
By the way, it would be really cool for Obama to tell democratic Mayors and Governors that they lose some folks if they keep sending their militarized police to brutalize peaceful protestors.
sonofrojblake@#15:
Here is an idea for the left: fragment. Split apart into an ever-larger number of ever smaller movements pushing police reform, trans rights, women’s rights, gay rights, racial equality, free education, universal healthcare, environmental protection. Most importantly, see it as a competition.
No heroes, no movement, no leaders.
This is the “ground swell” strategy. If you’ve got numbers and demographics on your side, you don’t have to worry about organizing (other than figuring out who is bringing the sandwiches and gas masks) – the only downside with that strategy is that it doesn’t immediately result in coherent policy objectives. On the other hand, it gives the opposition a hell of a targeting problem. Not that they care; remember, this is the establishment that hasn’t seen a civilian population it hasn’t wanted to drop high explosives on.
The groundswell strategy is great if you have numbers on your side and are patient. That’s hard when your opponent is violent and forces confrontation.
In California, county sheriffs are elected officials, answerable only to the voters of the counties, not the governor. If the sheriff wants to keep their job, they set priorities the way they voters want.