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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

> This reminds me of "Defund the Police", wherein supporters would try to convince others that the slogan did not literally mean what it says.

I have a hard time figuring out whether:

1) all the people who are saying "no we don't really mean defund the police" are just the moderate elements battling it out with the extreme elements (eg. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...)

2) most of them actually want the police to be abolished, but they're doing a motte and bailey[1] whenever they're confronted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

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"Defund" can be a relative term that doesn't necessarily mean to fully remove funding. E.g. we've had decades of hyperbole where relatively small cuts to defense funding are referred to by opponents as "defunding" US troops.

We spend a whole lot on policing compared to most other developed nations, and we're not getting terrific outcomes either on civil liberties or crime rates. It might be time to take a different approach where we spend a lot less on direct policing, and redeploy a lot of those resources to fight crime in other ways.

The developed countries that spend more or similar amounts tend to do it by spending on more highly trained officers than we do.

On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.

> we've had decades of hyperbole where relatively small cuts to defense funding are referred to by opponents as "defunding" US troops

making defense and police funding continue to increase but at a slightly slower rate is referred to by opponents as "defunding"

> On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.

This statement disturbs me. Please clarify.

If you spend a huge amount of money on police, and get bad outcomes for both crime rate and negative impacts of policing, there's really two options:

- The money is poorly spent, and better (perhaps less) spending would obtain better outcomes

- Because of other factors, we're doing approximately as well as we can: if we deployed resources away from the authoritarian, heavy-handed mechanisms, we'd have even more crimes and bad outcomes.

I think the former is more likely, but I can't entirely exclude the latter.

There are a number of socioeconomic factors that are believed to be the underlying influence on violent crime. My own personal summary on this is that people tend to become criminals when they lose hope in having a fair shot at a successful life, or see an opportunity that they don't find morally reprehensible ("well, it's really the bank/insurance money so it's not hurting a person"). So I think this hopelessness is mostly what drove the pandemic crime increase.

> On the other hand, maybe we're just so socioculturally fucked that it requires massive authoritarian investment to keep a crummy level of peace. I'm undecided.

I think people both understate how splintered the US society really is, and overstate the importance of this divide.

Imagine a country with a HUGE historical and current influx of immigrants that bring tons of different cultures and ideologies into the mix. The country has traditionally been hard to govern, especially at the federal level, precisely because it encourages freedom of thought and expression through both law and immigration policy. Its economic structure further encourages division by being one of the most meritocratic systems on the planet, where material gains for good decisions are quite the norm, but where the divide between the haves and have nots is always growing, and always on display.

In a country I describe, why is it any surprise to anyone that criminal behavior will be more common than in a more cohesive environment, therefore necessitating a more strict policing approach? And in what world does it make sense to reduce police powers in such a country without suffering the obvious increase in crime that will follow that?

It's not that US is fundamentally broken or fucked up, it's just a very different place compared to the "liberal utopias" of Northern Europe, so often cited by leftist activists in the states.

So it's not broken or fucked up, it just:

- is splintered

- is divided

- is hard to govern

- has an economic structure that encourages division

- has an increasing dive between the haves and have nots

Correct, but that's just how the country is. If people want cultural changes, they've gotta address the causes of the divides in the US and understand that they'll have massive negative consequences too, not just positive ones.

Or they can move to a country that is already more in line with what they want out of society.

US police kill too many people (including many innocents and especially of lower socioeconomic classes)-- easy solution, move somewhere else!

exactly—like one of the other 49 states!

I think it was always pretty clear that the movement as a whole advocated redistribution of resources toward less violent and more efficient alternatives to police, like better social programs and mental health resources.

Relying on the police to prevent crime is like relying on firefighters to prevent fires or paramedics to prevent injuries. Sure they have a role to play, but logically they should only be the last resort in case everything else goes wrong.

From my own experience, and the discussions I had with my peers, the specific term "defund" does not imply advocating redistribution. I sense that in the vernacular "defund" means to stop paying for something and the implication is you are getting rid of whatever is no longer being funded. Defund also tends to be used for line-items and programs rather than organizations and departments, which adds to the confusion.

If I said "the government needs to fund NASA" or "NASA needs funding", you wouldn't assume that they currently have no money.

But the key difference is that you said "fund NASA", rather than "defund NASA". Fund definitely implies there is not currently enough money, or that a new program is being advocated for.

I would likewise think that anyone who wanted to "defund NASA" had the intention of getting rid of the agency, rather than a more nuanced position of "we should stop funding SLS so that we can reallocate the money on high school STEM outreach and climate satellites."

Defund is the opposite of fund. If fund doesn't imply that they had no money at all, defund shouldnt imply removing all their money. If the intention was to get rid of NASA, then the phrase would be "abolish NASA", "dismantle NASA", or some other word that actually has that meaning.

Your argument doesn't make any sense.

You fund something when it has too little money.

You defund something when it has too much money.

If you wanted to abolish or eliminate something you would use those words, not defund.

I'm talking about the word "defund" in the vernacular. Which, for many people, absolutely does also imply abolish or eliminate.

As a thought experiment, I'm going to conjure a slogan: "Defund the Humane Society".

What is the first thing that comes to mind? I expect most people would think "you want to get rid of the animal shelter?" And I would reply, "no what I actually want is to re-allocate money from the euthanasia program so that we can have increased adoption rates and make this a no-kill shelter."

Putting aside the vernacular implications of "defund", my slogan is totally ineffective at actually capturing what I am trying to accomplish. And, it has the added downside of giving people a terrible and inaccurate first impression.

When a criminal is arrested their future crimes are prevented.

I think there’s an assumption that crime is random and that people randomly commit them. In that case it doesn’t matter if you arrest because what’s the point, it’s random.

But people usually commit crimes intentionally. And they commit multiple crimes.

Fire is different than crime in that it’s not conscious.

I don’t think police are alone in preventing crime but they aren’t a last resort. I also think we spend too much on police. And we spend on the wrong things. I want to reform the police to make them more effective.

I’m thinking the latter as it seems so crazy to use a specific word and then argue against its understood meaning. Why would I want to bother with that confusion when I could just call it “reform police” or whatever.

Gaslighting is very mainstream and seems so commonplace in even banal, insubstantial things like debating whether “defund police” means to remove funding from the police or something else.

Exactly correct.

If someone advocates for more funding for social workers and mental health care, they can just say so. That funding doesn't necessarily need to come from police budgets.

If someone advocates to "defund Planned Parenthood", they would be disappointed with a mere reduction in funding.

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