The “unhelpful” part is that people take the 3-word slogan and assume they know what it means. to pretend like “Defund the Police” ever meant “stop paying all police and don’t do anything different” is purposeful ignorance at this point (2.5 years after it was popularized).
In practice, it is a call for lots of changes in the US legal/policing system and government responses to requests from residents.
The best enumeration I have seen of these policies is CampaignZero[1]. You may not like their policies (they align with lefty prosecutors/DAs like Chesa Boudin), but they exist and there are specific policy proposals.
And cities don’t learn from what police officers do. Most large cities have city attorneys who are required to clean up the lawsuit messes that the police department makes and larger cities have a city manager that insulates the police department from the political side of city government. Neither the city attorney nor the city manager are responsive to voter demands nor do they have the legal authority to tell the police to do anything differently (except during the labor negotiations phase, when they are almost always outmaneuvered by police union negotiators).
> to pretend like “Defund the Police” ever meant “stop paying all police and don’t do anything different” is purposeful ignorance at this point (2.5 years after it was popularized).
You may not like it, but you don't control what "defund the police" means to everyone. There absolutely are people who mean it different ways, and it's not "willful ignorance", it's just the standard linguistic challenge of using an ambiguous pithy expression which then becomes overloaded as different people try to declare "what it really means."
But it's not ambiguous. It has a literal meaning, which is zero funding for police. That the activists using it are trying to act smart with Humpty Dumpty wordplay [1] doesn't change its well-established meaning. Especially when related activists get NY Times opinion columns doubling down on that meaning [2].
See how many other movements you can think of, that can make such outrageous claims, only for the journalist class to massage their words and bend the rules of language past their breaking point, to make the movement palatable to the masses.
[1] ’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
Reform the police, demilitarize the police, deescalation for police, stop police violence, accountability for police, teach cops to be kind, etc... Of course they're not "critic proof" - someone motivated to twist words will find a way. But they'll have to twist words, whereas now they just use their plain, literal, unambiguous meaning.
But there's a good reason why defund/abolish the police is sticking around - because a significant part of the activists do mean it [1] (ACAB didn't come from nowhere), and the moderate faction that doesn't mean it literally is unwilling to part from the radical faction that does.
Anyone supporting the moderate faction is in a thorny position - do they think the moderates will grow a spine and stand up to the radicals once they've achieved their goals, or will they continue to meekly let the radicals set the agenda?
[1] Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police [..] There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
In practice, it is a call for lots of changes in the US legal/policing system and government responses to requests from residents.
The best enumeration I have seen of these policies is CampaignZero[1]. You may not like their policies (they align with lefty prosecutors/DAs like Chesa Boudin), but they exist and there are specific policy proposals.
And cities don’t learn from what police officers do. Most large cities have city attorneys who are required to clean up the lawsuit messes that the police department makes and larger cities have a city manager that insulates the police department from the political side of city government. Neither the city attorney nor the city manager are responsive to voter demands nor do they have the legal authority to tell the police to do anything differently (except during the labor negotiations phase, when they are almost always outmaneuvered by police union negotiators).
[1] https://campaignzero.org/