Obama - 'Defund the Police' is bad messaging

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Former President Obama said political candidates lose support when using “snappy” slogans like “defund the police,” in an interview scheduled to be released Wednesday.

Obama told Peter Hamby, who hosts a Snapchat political show “Good Luck America,” that those who use the slogan could jeopardize their goals of enacting meaningful reforms for police.

"You lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you're actually going to get the changes you want done," the former president said in the interview scheduled to go live at 6 a.m. on Wednesday, according to Axios.

"The key is deciding, do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?" Obama added.

What does “Defund the Police” mean?

There have been numerous and often contradictory answers to the question since the slogan gained traction this spring, in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the protests it spawned. Liberal media outlets like Vox insisted, “It’s not as radical as it sounds,” insisting that “defunding” was merely an effort to reallocate money to social and mental health services. Others eagerly proclaimed, “Yes, we mean literally abolish the police.” And elected officials in cities like Minneapolis tried to split the difference by pledging to “end policing as we know it.”

In other words, to say that ideological confusion reigns among Defund the Police supporters would be an understatement. When NPR interviewed two proponents of defunding this summer and posed the question of how communities could respond to violent crime without police, both guests replied with vague, feel-good statements, but also revealed their starkly different understandings of human behavior.

“I think this is about a process of looking concretely at what police do and trying to find alternatives that don’t rely on violence as the mechanism for producing safety,” said Alex Vitale, the author of The End of Policing. “When we look at wealthy suburban communities, we don’t see police on every street corner managing the problems of those communities.”

Lawyer Derecka Purnell, by contrast, suggested we rethink the very concept of crime. “What we consider crime and harm, first of all, is a social construct,” she said. She also embraced what might be called the Les Miserables principle of crime (a favorite canard of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, too): “Places where there’s less inequality, places where there’s a more egalitarian society, there’s less harm and less crime,” she said. “So you don’t have to worry about someone breaking into your house because there is no reason for someone to break into your house and take from you because they’re not doing it out of economic desperation.”

For both, Defund the Police meant whatever they wanted it to mean.

Obama’s words had an immediate and clarifying effect on the Defund the Police debate; as progressives’ response to his remarks revealed, the pretense that Americans had simply misunderstood a well-meaning but non-radical slogan became impossible to sustain.

Representative-elect Cori Bush from Missouri tweeted, “With all due respect, Mr. President—let’s talk about losing people. We lost Michael Brown Jr. We lost Breonna Taylor. We’re losing our loved ones to police violence. It’s not a slogan. It’s a mandate for keeping our people alive. Defund the police.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar was equally forceful. “We lose people in the hands of police,” she wrote. “It’s not a slogan but a policy demand.” Fellow Squad member Ayanna Pressley was also upset, writing, “The murders of generations of unarmed Black folks by police have been horrific. Lives are at stake daily so I’m out of patience with critiques of the language of activists. Whatever a grieving family says is their truth.” And petty theft expert AOC weighed in with a tweet-storm scolding Obama for failing to recognize that the whole point of Defund the Police was “to make [people] uncomfortable.”

What their reactions make clear is that if activists had ever really meant “reform,” they would have embraced “Reform the Police” or “Demilitarize the Police” or some other phrase that wasn’t explicitly focused on pulling resources away from (hence, weakening) law enforcement.

Well-intentioned advocates of police reform would also make a concerted effort to distinguish themselves from more radical activists, particularly in the Black Lives Matter movement, which calls for the outright abolition of law enforcement and prisons. And they would engage with the reality of recent crime statistics in cities like Minneapolis, New York, and Chicago, which have seen a disturbing and steady increase in homicides and other violent crimes over the past few months, often after Defund efforts have been enacted by local elected officials.

Years of scholarly research has shown that the presence of police—particularly beat cops who know the neighborhoods they patrol—leads to a reduction in crime.

Cori Bush claims that defunding the police is a “mandate for keeping our people alive.” Setting aside the racial signaling of the phrase “our people” (doesn’t she represent all of the people in her district?) it is in fact minority voters who have been the most outspoken about wanting more of a police presence, not less, in their neighborhoods.

And Democrats would do well to think about the trajectory their party is taking as it prepares to reclaim the White House. When Obama is deemed a sell-out for stating simple facts about Americans’ views of law enforcement, it’s a clear sign of how much more radicalized both the tone and policy proposals of the Democratic Party have become on the issue of law enforcement.

How many months has it taken him to work out (and then speak out regarding) this simple concept?

Here in the U.S.A., it is traditional for ex-Presidents to retire from politics, at least for the most part, and not to "speak out" publicly about anything very often.

I think the real message should be "demilitarize the police."

It's a common misconception that "defunding the police" means completely stripping law enforcement of all of their funding. While while some organizations are indeed calling for the abolishment or dismantling of police altogether, "defunding the police" simply means reducing police department budgets and redistributing those funds towards essential social services that are often underfunded, such as housing, education, employment, mental health care, and youth services.