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> In many contexts, we accept that organizations have to end, and be replaced, to enact meaningful change. Companies go out business; political administrations lose elections.

There’s obviously a significant difference between the regular election cycle (which applies to police chiefs and mayors that run these departments) and abolition. I don’t think the people calling to defund or abolish to police just want to see the administration change, or the officers get fired and re-hired.

I think aside from the Marxists and Anarchists there are very few people who are supportive of abolishing or defunding police. Fomenting resentment and fear of policing, advocating violence against police, and diminishing police’s right to self defense seems to be a deliberate strategy to destabilize communities and increase crime while framing attempts to restore law and order as oppression and racism.

Police forces have gone through some major and rapid shifts due to technology, first in terms of statistical tracking of crime and enforcement and more recently with regard to widespread surveillance and body cams.

Police can ultimately expect to have every response recorded, maybe even automatically analyzed and flagged by AI. Perhaps surprisingly most police are supportive of body cams because more often than not they are used to support an officer’s actions.




> I think aside from the Marxists and Anarchists there are very few people who are supportive of abolishing or defunding police.

The simple slogans and close approximations poll poorly, the actual concrete policy objectives wrapped up in the “defund” section of the movement, as distinct from the more radical “dismantle/abolish” section, poll quite well: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/23/21299118/defunding-the-police-...

But even with the more simplified versions, the support is more than Anarchists and Marxists, unless those are vastly more common than any previous research has suggested (so that they are a majority of Democrats and an even larger majority of Blacks): https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/64-americans-oppose-defund-p...

> and diminishing police’s right to self defense

Is not something the defund/demolish/abolish movement is interested in. That movement is interested in moving the police out of problematic situations in the first place (and in the extreme dismantle/abolish case, getting rid of the police and redistributing law enforcement responsibilities more diffusely and out of centralized paramilitary organizations), not in reducing the right of anyone to self-defense. If anything, it's the more “moderate” reformers who refuse to consider changes to the fundamental structure of law enforcement that are forced, because of that refusal, to try to address the problem by doing things that might fairly be described as restricting the rights of police to self-defense, or at least the available means.


diminishing police’s right to self defense seems to be a deliberate strategy to destabilize communities and increase crime

Indeed, you just need to look at marxist countries to see the hypocrisy: they all have a well-funded, scary, unnacountable police.


And somehow those body cams malfunction at the most opportune time. Also, there are plenty of economical and libertarian reasons to defund the police, but I am guessing you somehow missed them during widespread discussion over the past 4 weeks.

Happy reading.




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