Tuesday, June 09, 2020

"The Logic of Defunding and Dismantling Police Departments"

The thing about slogans is: they are meant to capture attention, not to encapsulate a detailed plan. MAGA, anyone? Do we still know what that means? Slogans rally people to a cause, or get attention for an issue. They don't explain everything in 10 words or less.  "Defund the police" is a slogan that can mean "Abolish the police," or it can mean "Why do the police act like an occupying force?"  And "Defund the police" is a much better way of focussing on the problem than "Police reform," which is about as meaningful as MAGA; maybe even less so, if that's possible.


Yeah; in this context, "defund the police" is a terrible idea! Or is it an expression of frustration and anger and a call for radical change that ends this brutality once and forever?  I'm old enough to remember the cries of "police brutality!" in the '60's, too.  Didn't resonate all that well, even after the police riot of '68 in Chicago.  Remember people still blamed the "demonstrators" and "agitators" for the deaths of 4 bystander students on the campus of Kent State 2 years after that convention.  Took a long time for "police brutality" to actually effect change, and then Reagan came along and shut down the mental hospitals, putting thousands on the streets (where the "homeless" problem really began; the bad economy did the rest), and then the change was short-lived.  It wasn't long until we decided the police should be "Dirty Harry" (considering that movie's from the '70's, maybe it started before Reagan, and he was effect as much as cause) and then came "The Thin Blue Line" BS (novel first, reality later; cops loved being the Praetorian Guard defending civilization from the barbarians:  i.e., blacks, Latinos, what have you.  Non-middle class and above whites, basically.).  Pretty soon we were demanding Joe Biden & Co. pass harsh punishments and build more prisons and incarcerate as many people as possible as we got "tough on crime!"  And the more we heard horror stories about prison (read the first third of "Presumed Innocent", the novel that launched Scott Turow.  It contains a story unrelated to the plot about a man in prison who suffers unspeakable torments and abuse.  Is it true, based on Turow's experience?  Or a horror story fed to the pulp-fiction audience to emphasize how bad prison is?  Either way, we absorbed such stories and increased our fear of "them"?  It's worth noting Turow's book came out in 1990, the crime bill Biden is now associated with was passed into law a few years later.).  We accepted this as the reality of people who "deserved" to be imprisoned, to protect "us" from "them," never for a moment thinking we are the creators of our culture and in some sense our own prison guards.

This is the context, too, in which this discussion is taking place.  When you have a President pushing this kind of "conspiracy" (it barely rates that term), concern about the adequacy of a slogan demanding radical change is not really sanguine.



I don't even mind the "generational differences." That's what Kent State was all about: blame the students, or blame the National Guard? Who you blamed pretty much depended on how old or young you were.   Today, despite our "get tough on crime" decades, we'd be appalled by the National Guard shooting students on a college campus, no matter what the situation was.  (Believe me, parents today on any school campus, from kindergarten to university, won't tolerate things my parents didn't even raise an eyebrow at.) And as the NYT proves, we can have this discussion.  I think we need to have this discussion.  Again, this is the context of the discussion, already, this morning.
Should the response be "Tut, tut, now, now, let's not get excited"?  Sometimes using volatile expressions is using words "like a grown-up."  "De-funding the police" can mean shifting that money away from SWAT teams and weapons and toward more social workers and mental health care facilities (the largest mental health care facility in the state of Texas is the Harris County jail; not coincidentally, the largest county by population in Texas).

We can do better than this, and do better by our police, too.
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