Defund the Police is setting the twittersphere all noisy. I prefer the term “demilitarize” but that attracted a lot of insistently earnest tweeters who say it has to be DEFUND or nothing.
Ok, let it be nothing then. It will be the 2020 version of Medicare for All. Medicare for All sounds like a fix for all that ails us, pun intended. But there are other types of national health care programs that might work as well or better for the U.S. Maybe we could allow more people into Medicare or Medicaid. Maybe we can create a real public option. Oo! Oo! I know! Maybe we could try real cost control and regulation of hospital prices. That’s something that Obama never even considered when he duct taped the ACA together. It’s just when you say it has to be Medicare for All or nothing, you might just end up with… nothing. The reason is, you probably can’t win the election if you don’t present workable alternatives. And if you can’t win elections, you got no power to do squat.
Same with “Defund the Police”. If I were a right wing operative and that phrase didn’t already exist, I would have to invent it. Then I would create sock puppet accounts on all social media outlets posing as young, earnest, Bernie lefty voters and whip that sucker to death. I’d jump on anyone who wants to slow this down and think it over carefully and consider the pros and cons for each city.
Demilitarize is a much easier case to make. And why is that? It’s because the police and their paramilitary budgets swelled in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Did the local police departments have to become their own armies? We thought so. We thought we would be fighting off terrorists, or at least that’s how it was sold to us. That didn’t really materialize because it turns out that we got better with national security and intelligence.
So, we ended up with police departments armed and trained to take down terrorists and no terrorists. Plus, racial tensions were deliberately inflamed by the right wing media (oh, let me count the ways) and the person who claims to be our current president.
We have seen what they do. They are prepped to see anyone as a threat to the American way of life. The problem was there before George Floyd. Yes, black citizens have been massively and disproportionally targeted. But in the last week, we have seen that anyone can be made to submit with varying degrees of pain and bodily harm. This is a predictable outcome. It’s like giving someone like Trump access yo the nuclear football and fielding his question about “why do we even have nukes if we’re not going to use them??”.
If you were an overarmed cop given a target, and a narrative that all black people are potential threats and no good wasteful takers of taxpayer dollars, what would YOU do?
If you have unaccountable power, it takes a very principled, disciplined person to not use it. We shouldn’t have militarized the police. For that matter, I have a problem with remote control drones killing people in war zones too. It’s way too easy to start seeing wedding parties as terrorist training grounds. And who knows? Maybe they are. But to kill people like this without facing them when they are too far away to be physical threats to us feels more like an execution. I think you should face your adversaries for a fight to be fair.
Think about that for a minute. Aren’t we all weirded out by that rag tag justice department “federal” forces battalion who watched over Trump’s babygate? They should have been clearly marked and identifiable. Otherwise, there is no way to hold bad actors accountable.
I think the vast majority of voters can agree with this. Police should be demilitarized and forced to take it down a notch. They need an attitude adjustment. And with all the money we would NOT give them for hummers and other equipment of war, we could reallocate to making neighborhoods safer by addressing the root causes of crime.
If you keep pushing Defund the Police, you are going to make a lot of voters very uneasy. It sounds like firing police and whole departments and leaving citizens vulnerable to criminals. It takes more time to explain that’s not what you mean and by then their Fox News thought stopping programs will start running and they’ll be accusing you of being Antifa. (PSA: Antifa is not an organization in any traditional sense of the word. In broad terms, Antifa stands for anti-fascist. Find me a person who is anti anti-fascist and you should avoid that person like coronavirus.)
Anyway, you can’t save anyone or make structural changes unless you 1.) have a successful revolution or 2.) win elections. If you start a revolution without first demilitarizing the police, you will have a very difficult time winning elections. With the current people in charge crackdowns and canceled elections will happen. You can bet on it. Who’s going to stop them? So, the practical reality is that we need to win elections. And we’re not going to win elections by making voters fear for their personal safety.
So, demilitarize the police.
Filed under: General |
The Confluence 
I’m so glad you wrote this piece. “Defund the Police” has me terrified that the far, far Left will fuck up another election. If someone is breaking into my house and I call 911, I want a cop to show up, not a social worker. The people promoting this demand are doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin, knowingly or unknowingly. We need to shut or shout this loser down, and all of your suggestions are on the money. Of course, our police departments need major reforms but that slogan will re-elect Trump.
The Bernie left are experts at screwing things up so your concerns are certainly valid on that account.
Excellent Post.
I agree and let´s change the tone of defund for “de-militarized”.
At this point in time would Kamala Harris be the better choice for VP?
Idk, belle. I’d vote for her but I think THE most important issue that’s going to come up after the election is austerity, specifically, how much austerity and who’s going to get gored this time. I know it’s hard to think about that right now with coronavirus and BLM protests going on. Believe me, if I weren’t a high risk individual, I’d be protesting too. In fact, if I were Trump, I’d raise the specter of Antifa terrorism every chance I got In order to prevent any discussion of what will happen after the election to social security, Medicare, Medicaid, school systems, libraries, bridges, etc. Why not continue making outrageous tweets and poke your base as often as possible? Then when you’re re-elected, you can do whatever the fuck you want to the social safety net and the trillions of dollars in the social security trust fund.
For those reasons, I’d prefer to have someone like Warren who understands the root causes of the two income problem and bankruptcy. She understands this issue inside and out and Biden could use someone with her fluency in finance matters.
I like Kamala. She’s steely. I’m sure she’s very well qualified. In fact, she would be overqualified compared to almost all of the Vice Presidents we’ve had to this point. But I wasn’t impressed with her campaign. She should have made more progress. Was it a fundraising issue? A lack of confidence issue? A little bit of “I was a little black girl in Oakland when you voted for xyz”? It came off as a little too staged regardless if it were true.
We really have too many good options. Even Amy is good. She’s one of those workhouse senators that gets shit done when most senators don’t. I’d vote for Stacey abrams. I thing she’s fantastic and dynamic. I’d vote for Gillibrand. She’s got a ton of experience in military matters. And that’s the problem. It’s hard to whittle it down to one of them. So I have to look forward to February 2021. Who do I want in there when the bottom falls out? Who could make the biggest difference for the most number of people? I’d have to give Warren the edge here, especially if there are structural changes to be made. She reminds me of a Hamilton type. We’re going to need that.
RD, I do not think that Harris brings very many voters at all if she is the VP choice. She ran for President with much fanfare. She shot up in the polls after the first debate, because she attacked Biden. But then people decided that they didn’t like that much, and then she was very ambiguous in her views about M4A. So she steadily dropped until she was at about 5%, at which point she withdrew from the race before the Iowa caucuses. It was a smart thing to do, bu t it doesn’t suddenly make her more popular than before.
Who is going to vote for Biden who would not have before, if he adds Harris.? Some additional Back people, the ones who did not turn out for Hillary in 2016? Maybe. But I think that any Black woman on the ticket would accomplish no less; and a couple of them have some geographical superiority. Demings from Florida and Lance Bottoms from Georgia might possibly help in those states. They are not as well known; maybe Biden would think that they are not ready to step in at a moment’s notice, as he says. I would rather see one of them on the ticket than Harris. Harris seems almost inevitable, though, for better or worse. I’d rather have Tammy Duckworth , if it came to it. Right now, Harris is copying Sanders, pushing bills like everyone gets $2,000 a month until “the pandemic is over,” a bill which she is actually sponsoring with Sanders. In 2008, Hillary talked about “show horses and work horses,” and of course she got blasted for it, as for every single thing she said. But in my opinion, Kamala is a show horse, in that metaphor. I still remember her questioning Kavanaugh, as if she had evidence which would destroy him, and then just letting the whole thing go, never following up. “Think carefully before you answer,” she said. He lied, she did not call him on it; in her next round of questions she asked about other things. She was given immense credit for it by some people,, even though she accomplished nothing valuable.
With Warren, there is the crucial issue of her being replaced by a Republican governor with a Republican, thus making it much harder to take the Senate. Winning the Senate is imperative, or Democrats will get nothing through. To me that is completely disqualifying, fair or not. There are other issues I have with her, such as not wanting the election to be about Republicans calling Democrats socialists or pointing to Warren’s proposals to drastically raise taxes. And I have no idea what voters she would bring; the Sanders people don’t like her, and the moderates do not, nor the Never Trumper Republicans. White upper middle class liberals in strongly Blue states seem to be her base. However, I will say that Stanley Greenberg, the well respected pollster who worked for Bill Clinton, thinks that she would be the best vote-getting choice as VP, which is hard for me to agree with, but worth noting.
The phrase “demilitarize the police” is better for more than one reason.
It also serves to remind us that we can’t demilitarize the police without demilitarizing the general public as well. I’m not fond of the police right now, and I trust them probably less than I ever have before–but it’s still not fair to ask them to go up against loons with automatic weapons, without similar firepower of their own.
Good point.
Woody:
In other words; De-militarized the Police and Gun Control need to go hand-on hand in order to work.
Reminder: Beaker Street streams Fridays 9 PM – 12 AM on arkansasrocks.com.
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I forgot to add Central Time.
Wow, William! I wish you and the public, in general, would scrutinize the men running for office as critically as they do the women. We wouldn’t be living in the holy hell we are living in right now if they did. In the meantime, we see Biden getting pass after pass by the dem party and the media despite his many gaffs since becoming the presumptive nominee and then the dem nominee for president. He’s also got a boat load of issues he’s carrying around but you don’t seem bothered by those issues which will plague biden in the general election, William. There’s more to being president than being great at being empathetic and Warren has detailed ideas on how to fix the complicated problems brought on by trump’s oligarchy AND she is every bit as empathetic as Joe is.
In “normal” times, it would be acceptable to consider Duckworth or Whitmore or even Demmings (all of whom I like very much) but who have less name recognition and plans to deal with the many problems facing the country right now. However, we don’t live in normal times. Our country is about to go down in flames with fascism waiting in the wings. We have 40 million Americans on unemployment, a pandemic which, according to the experts, is about to surge again in the fall and a dictator in the white house who will continue to do great harm to our institutions and the American people for the next 5 months. Clearly, we are going to need someone who has a plan (actually many plans) ready to go from day one in order to bring our economy back and deal with the pandemic. Someone who is smart enough and motivated enough to get these plans off the ground and not just talk about them. Ellizabeth Warren is that person. She is the right person at the right time. Clearly, Americans are fed up with the status quo as shown in the last 15-16 days of protests against police brutality and racism, which is just the beginning of the people’s angst with the system. Biden is a part of that system and will need someone who can balance that out. Following is an article which explains in a rationale way why Warren is the best choice: https://morningconsult.com/2020/05/27/biden-warren-vice-president-poll/