Ragan Clark/AP Photo
Protesters in New York last weekend
Polls increasingly show that majorities of white people are sympathetic to black grievances and intolerant of police brutality. And the movement slogan du jour is … “Defund the Police.”
This sentiment, however, does not command anything like majority support. When a CNN anchor asked Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender, “What if in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?” Bender replied, “Yes, I hear that … and I know that that comes from a place of privilege.”
Uh-oh. For a drowning Donald Trump, “Defund the Police” was a life raft. He was out with a Twitterstorm: “LAW & ORDER, NOT DEFUND AND ABOLISH THE POLICE. The Radical Left Democrats have gone Crazy!” And Fox News had a field day.
Is the left once again snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory? Well, no, actually. There is a more complex, nuanced version of “Defund the Police,” but it requires a few paragraphs.
Some police departments are indeed beyond redemption. The Minneapolis department seems to be one. The city council’s plan is to shut it down and re-create a new reformed police force at the county level. This follows a model successfully adopted in Camden, New Jersey.
Other police forces need drastic reform. There was also a model for that, using Justice Department investigations and reform programs enforced under court supervision. Under Obama, there were 25 such investigations that resulted in 14 such court-enforced plans. Trump shut it down. Our friend Richard Rothstein reminds us that the 1994 law creating the program was authored by one Joe Biden.
As for defunding, many police departments do get far too much public money, which they spend on ridiculous and invasive cop equipment, at the expense of other priorities such as schools and public health. Even Bender’s line about privilege is not wrong, though it’s dumb politics. People who call the police expecting protection tend to be white. People who justifiably fear the police are black.
But try reducing those complexities to a slogan as pithy as “Defund the Police.” I couldn’t do it, and I’m pretty good at one-liners.
For better or worse, slogans that arise spontaneously out of radical moments are not poll-tested. Some spontaneous movement slogans actually work out pretty well, like “Black Lives Matter.” Others are cringe-worthy.
I recall my discomfort, as a Vietnam protester in the late 1960s, when some of my fellow marchers were chanting, “Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!” Surely, rooting for Ho wasn’t the point; the idea was to get America out of Vietnam so the Vietnamese could settle their own future.
But, wait—Ho did win. And Vietnam today is a better place than it would have been had it been occupied indefinitely by U.S. troops and U.S. puppet regimes. Sometimes, the radicals are right.
