OK OK... I know that a lot people are freaking out about this defunding talk, but I think the wrong term is being used with that talk. The intent is in fact to construct an entirely new policing force from the bottom up. Defunding is a misguided term and thus assumed to mean no more police and no more funding for police. No.... that is not what is intended. What is intended AND needed is a police force not of some gestapo tactical force as we have now. Truth is and the facts are, the police have become their own little terrorist group. They act as if they were some separate and unaccountable branch of people control. Remember what is stamped on the side of those cop cars? TO PROTECT AND TO SERVE. That said it all, that the police force was created only to help society and do nothing but that. Not to take matters into their own hands and not to be the judge and jury during interaction with the public.
To defund the police is to rebuild the police from scratch. And that has now become necessary. To start with the original intent for that policing force to police and only to police. What the police have become goes far beyond that originally intended, and this derailment of original intent goes back many many decades. Take the gay community for example. Throughout history the police have taken it upon themselves to harass and hound the gay community. And for no other reason but to display their force of power fueled by hate and bigotry. There was no reason for police to harass, hound, and brutally terrorize gay men and women. And as with the black community, eventually the gays had just about enough of that unjust harassment and bigotry, so one day the gay community rose up and fought back in what became known as THE STONEWALL RIOTS.
For a long long time now the issue is and the problem has been, where does "TO PROTECT AND TO SERVE" end and out right terrorism by police begin? Where and when did the police force gain such power where they could beat, kill, harass, and terrorize the citizenry at their own discretion? And to believe they themselves could have no accountability?
This "DEFUNDING" idea is simply and long needed re-boot on what the police have become vs what the police need to be. We have seen this police terrorism played out over and over. I could name so many examples. The beating of Rodney King with police laughing and referring to it as "Gorillas in the Mist". Or, the young man who escaped Jeffrey Dahmer only to be returned back to Jeffrey Dahmer by the police with those same police officers later laughed and joking over the couple having been gay. And that young man that police returned back to Jeffrey Dahmer was later murdered by Jeffrey Dahmer. So many examples of police not doing their job and instead allowing personal bigotry to rule their actions. THIS perversion of law enforcement is what must stop. And this is what defunding the current policing system is all about. To rid society of the terrorism that so many police have engaged in, and replace those bad cops with an entirely different policing system from the ground up. Actually, with the policing system as originally intended before it all got so out of control.
YES.... we do need to defund the current failed system and then begin to re-build from scratch.
AND..... it will happen.