Defunding My Mistake — LessWrong
www.lesswrong.com
Confessions of an ex-ACAB • • Until about five years ago, I unironically parroted the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB) and earnestly advocated to…

Choice quote:

Putting “ACAB” on my Tinder profile was an effective signaling move that dramatically improved my chances of matching with the tattooed and pierced cuties I was chasing.

  • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    As a non-American unversed in American political rhetoric, “defund the police” always struck me as a weird call for action. Read without nuance it basically means “don’t pay for policing”, not “reduce the relative funding going to LE in favor of other funding”.

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      it’s not a great slogan. In the summer of 2020 there was a mad rush to find a slogan that was radical enough to be credible but not too radical to be popular. It was a bodge.

    • Mike Knell@blat.at
      5·
      1 year ago

      @gerikson It’s also really about changing the things that the police do get funded for over and above the fixed line items for salary, uniforms, thin blue line patches, squad cars, donuts etc. Fund them for better screening to weed out control freaks and all the other people who shouldn’t be cops. Fund them for week-long courses in situation management, unconscious bias, deescalation, and basic psychology with a passing grade a condition of continued employment. Fund them to train and maintain a small, highly professional and highly skilled tactical intervention unit rather than giving every bozo who can’t even write a ticket correctly a two-day course and a shotgun and calling them the SWAT team. Don’t fund them for what they are way overfunded for in the US - military surplus tanks, armoured cars, tactical gear, offensive weapons they should never need but will end up using anyway because they’re there, and poor quality paramilitary training. Properly fund community services, 24 hour mental health crisis teams and addiction / homeless / etc outreach. Build proper inter-agency responses to mental health crises. Do this and you’ll save more money and save more lives than pretending you’re in a real life Call of Duty.

      But hey, Chief says we can get a tank and a margarita machine out of the training budget instead of this classroom bullshit they want us to do! U-S-A! U-S-A!