Yeah. That part makes perfect sense to me. It's a little different from what you were saying, but someone on Lemmy was actually telling me about their experience with someplace where something like this had been implemented -- mental health people going on certain calls instead of cops, with cops assisting in cases that might turn violent, and it sounds like it works out great from all people involved's perspective. The callers are happier because people come who are better at handling the problems, the cops are happier because they don't have to deal with calls they are less qualified to deal with, the mental health people are happier because they have cops on standby for violent calls but they also get to deal with things right from the jump, instead of coming in after the cops came and just tackled and cuffed the person or whatever and now they have to come into the middle of the wreckage.
I know you were talking about things at an even much earlier level than when the 911 call happens; that sounds good to me too. The only part I was objecting to was the vindictive framing of it. Like if you want to fund mental health and homeless services that sounds great, we should do that. Coupling that idea up with punishing the police because they were bad (not saying you're doing that, but definitely some people have that in mind saying "defund the police" I think) I don't think is the way to produce progress though.
MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
This is exactly it. But it doesn’t fit on a hat or bumper sticker so the details get ignored.
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mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 weeks ago
The cartoon is excellent but yes the problem is that the phrasing doesn't match the reality. "Fund the nonpolice" isn't catchy though.
Honestly, just properly funding anything that is designed to do benevolent things for the community as a whole is a tough sell with way too many US community politicians
hydroptic@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
This seems to be a problem with at least conservative politicians everywhere. In Finland where I live we do still have the vestiges of a welfare state, but right wing politicians keep dismantling it and cutting taxes on the rich, and later on leftist politicians find it impossible to roll back any changes due to resistance from the right.
jonne@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
But in order to get the money for those programs, especially if their effect is to lower the workload for police, you should get the money from the police budget, otherwise it’s just wasted money. Are you just going to keep giving the NYPD a billion dollars a year to do nothing?
p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Defund means to essentially get rid of a department or thing. The phrase “defend the police” means “get rid of the police”. It doesn’t matter if there’s some cartoon to re-explain away the phrase or a bunch of other people trying to re-define the English language. English is English, and words have meaning.
The “defund the police” movement failed because us liberals don’t fucking understand marketing. Like, at all. I can’t count the number of times some liberal movement crops up with their slogan and Republicans turn that slogan against them because nobody spent the ten minutes time to think about how that phrase or thing could be abused. For example, that brief time when the LGBT movement wanted to rename themselves to LGBTQIA2SUVWTFBBQ? Seriously?!?
It’s like naming your baby “Assman McAssface” and wondering why he gets bullied in school.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 3 weeks ago
I have a private theory, for which I have absolutely 0 evidence, that the forces of the establishment have some way of sneaking stupid unpopular things or phrases into the left’s discourse which the left then seizes and runs with, much to the establishments’s delight. E.g. renaming the Green Party the Green-Rainbow Party, climate activists attacking famous artworks, things like that.
I have 0 evidence for this, as applied to “defund the police” or anything else. Actually I sort of suspect that “defund the police” was an original creation of the ACAB contingent which meant exactly what it sounds like, that got retconned by more sensible but still reform-minded people into meaning “more properly fund everything else” for exactly the reasons we’re discussing. But as a general rule I suspect (again, with 0 evidence) that some of what you’re talking about actually comes from deliberate sabotage.