Republicans openly calling to de-fund the police now

[Vēritās]

The first time I heard this term was during the George Floyd riots.



Kinda hard to miss it.

- Doc

Well how could I possibly miss a sign at a rally I never attended? You caught me. I must be lying.

[Vēritās]

That sounds nice, but I can assure you that Defund the Police and Woke are both terms that started on the Left, regardless of how they were subsequently and effectively weaponized by nut bars on the Right.

I think you misunderstand my point. I fully acknowledge that both started elsewhere, but I'm saying neither gained any sense of prominence until the Right weaponized them. The fact is you don't have a single Democrat politician anywhere pushing to defund the police in any sense relating to how the Right depicts it happening. In fact Democrats pushed for more funding only to get blocked by Republicans. What the Democrats wants to do is better described as reallocating funding, not doing away with all funding. Reallocating and increasing funding so they can better address people with mental health disorders. Cops just showing up and gunning down people who are mentally retarded and people whose own family called them to help them calm them down. They do this because they have zero training on these issues and they're taught to address every issue the same way: if the person appears to be violent or pose any kind of possible threat, just treat them as you would a terrorist holding a knife to a woman's throat. That doesn't even make any sense to say get rid of all funding. Over the years the police forces have become militarized by purchasing weapons no longer used or needed by the military. So when they stockpile such weapons, they tend to find reasons to use them. Hence, you get all sorts of illegal raids using SWATS, many times resulting in innocent deaths. Of course, they're not doing this in white suburbia, they're doing it in inner city areas where mostly minorities live.

As it is, the people who started the "defund the police" rhetoric were activists. We just assume they are Leftists, but in reality they were pissed off black people who were sick and tired of watching their friends and family arbitrarily murdered by publicly funded civil servants. Same thing with the BLM protests. Is it really reasonable to assume that every single person among those crowds of tens of millions of protesters over the course of nine months, were all "Leftists"? I know several interracial families who are die hard Republicans and they also attended the BLM marches here in my town.

[Kishkumen]

Excellent point, Veritas. No doubt many of the rightly exasperated and outraged protestors were not Leftists.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

The first time I heard this term was during the George Floyd riots.



Kinda hard to miss it.

- Doc

Well how could I possibly miss a sign at a rally I never attended? You caught me. I must be lying.

[Res Ipsa]

Well how could I possibly miss a sign at a rally I never attended? You caught me. I must be lying.

Not sure how you missed this one Veritas, as you're pretty good at staying atop current events. The Biden Campaign specifically addressed "defund the police" as being proposed by folks on the left about two weeks after the start of the George Floyd protests. https://www.ajc.com/news/what-does-defu ... A3c15umyI/

But I also missed use of the term "woke" by members of the left to describe themselves. I may have been aware that it was used in some part of black culture, but the first time I recall it being applied to the left was by the right. So, I'm with you on that one. It may be that Kish heard it being used by left college students or faculty before the right picked it up.

ETA: From this article in Vox on the history of the term, it looks to me like the wider use of the term outside of black culture and it's use by the right as a term of disparagement were close to simultaneous. https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/st ... ontroversy

[Vēritās]

Just checked the date, and Floyd happened when my wife was in her third month (out of four in a row) at the hospital leaving me to tend to business and caring for three kids while putting focus of current events on the backburner. I do remember posting about this at the time, though it was more driven by outrage of the video footage we all saw at the time.

[Res Ipsa]

Just checked the date, and Floyd happened when my wife was in her third month (out of four in a row) at the hospital leaving me to tend to business and caring for three kids while putting focus of current events on the backburner. I do remember posting about this at the time, though it was more driven by outrage of the video footage we all saw at the time.

I figured it was either something like that or you were out of the country at the time. It also may have been a bigger issue here than in your neck of the woods.

[Vēritās]

Just funnin witchya bro

[Chap]

It would be clearly foolish to suggest that a tax-funded police service is unnecessary.

On the other hand, there is a reasonable case for suggesting that some of the money currently spent on the police force might be (for instance) more effectively spent on better mental health services and paramedical professionals that would cut down on the number of sick persons wandering around frightening people because they are not getting the care they need. As it is, the public who encounter such persons just have to call the police (who may end up resorting to unnecessary, possibly lethal force), whose training is simply not adapted to such interventions. Police time is much more expensive than paying for more appropriate interventions that would be likely to have better outcomes.

And so on. To that extent, spending some police funding on other kinds of social intervention would certainly be justified. Police should be kept for fighting crime, not for handling problems that can be handled better and more cheaply by other means.