Contrary to Media Narratives, ‘Defund the Police’ Is About Literally Abolishing Police Departments

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As the calls from left-wing activists to “defund the police” have grown in the two weeks since the death of George Floyd, so, too, have the explainers from the MSM on how “defunding the police” is supposedly not about getting rid of police departments altogether but instead is about partially shifting some police funding into local communities.

Axios, for instance, mischaracterized an interview Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza did with Chuck Todd a week ago as saying she told him that defunding the police really wasn’t about eliminating police departments:

Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that growing calls to “defund the police” are not about eliminating police departments, but about reinvesting funds toward “the resources that our communities need.”

Except if you watch the clip, you’ll see that not only was Axios’s characterization of what she said incorrect, but that when Todd brought the issue up to Garza, he never actually asked about defunding the police. What he did was make it sound like it wasn’t even a question, teeing up Garza to affirm his statement that BLM “was not calling for defunding police departments and getting rid of police.”

The transcript of what Todd said is below:

When you — when Americans hear the phrase, “defund the police,” you’re not calling for defunding police departments and getting rid of police. Explain what you mean by that phrase.

Watch the video below of Todd’s softball to Garza and her lengthy response. Note that she never once stated defunding the police was not about getting rid of them:

That was one of those interviews where what a person does not say is more revealing than what they did say.

Unfortunately for Todd, another Black Lives Matter co-founder who did a recent interview was not quite so careful in her comments. Patrisse Cullors, another co-founder of the radical group, told Newsweek that ultimately defunding the police was about abolishing them, but for now the movement was focused on the incremental steps to getting there, which was by way of gradually taking funds away from police departments and moving them elsewhere (emphasis added):

While, ultimately, Cullors said she believes that law enforcement as we know it today should be abolished entirely, she acknowledged that the road to abolition could be a long one—that is why, she said, it needs to be taken step by step.

The first step, she said, would be significantly reducing funding to law enforcement bodies and redirecting that money into initiatives directly serving communities, including education, healthcare and community programming.

“We don’t disband law enforcement in just one day. That’s not logical,” she said.

“I think we should ultimately abolish [law enforcement],” Cullors said. “What we can do right now is drastically reduce law enforcement’s relationship to the community.”

[…]

“Policing and incarceration are part of a continuum. The policing is the first response and then incarceration is the last response. And these two systems rely on each other very, very deeply. We have to be working on getting rid of both systems,” she said.

On Friday, the New York Times published an op-ed written by “anti-criminalization organizer” Mariame Kaba that put a finer point on the supposed debate over what “defund the police” actually means. The headline and sub-headline? Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police – Because reform won’t happen:

The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah hosted a roundtable discussion on defunding the police in which several of the participants made it quite clear what they thought about the police and how police departments needed to be abolished (emphasis added):

“We say ‘abolish the police’ because we mean ‘abolish the police,’” writer Mychal Denzel Smith added. “Tell me something right now that the police are good at, other than whooping ass. Other than doing that, what are they good at? They don’t prevent murders, they come in and try to figure out who did the murder afterward. And they don’t do any of the things they’re sent out to do –—like Patrisse is telling us, we want them to ‘solve’ homelessness, but what that just means [for them] is get the homeless people out of the street.”

Journalist and lawyer Josie Duffy Rice noted: “One of the things people say when you want to defund the police is, ‘But what about murder? What about rape? What if your kid got kidnapped?’…The reality is that the police aren’t doing a very good job of handling those situations and that when we picture accountability in this country, we’re relying on a violent system to reduce violence. We’re relying on a cruel system to reduce cruelty. And we are funding the back end of social ills instead of the front end of addressing them. It’s very hard to imagine a world where we’re defunding the police because it’s all we’ve had to rely on. We’re imagining a new world.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) has also outright called for “dismantling” and “disbanding” the police, which the Democrat-majority Minneapolis city council is working on as we speak:

We need to completely dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. Because here’s the thing, there’s a cancer,” [Omar] said, continuing that amputation is needed so it doesn’t spread.

The evidence is overwhelming that defunding the police is not simply about partial reallocation of police funding. Advocates for “defunding the police” eventually want to see a world where police departments don’t exist and CHAZ-style Lord of the Flies-type communities are put in place.

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Those Defund the Police Nit-Wits had better think of the consiqences of their ideas the crime rate with skyrocket all the way to the moon and beyond

Of course, Todd and NBC, along with the rest of the DNC’s propaganda arm, are trying to make the far left radical demands, which the Democrats kowtow to, seem not so radical, not so dangerous, not so disastrous, lest Democrat voters not vote for Democrats. This is what our media has become.

Perhaps some we see and hear commenting might actually believe that when they say defund, disband, eliminate the police SURELY they can’t mean that literally. Most, however know exactly what they mean (i.e. the actual meaning of the words) but don’t want to scare voters away. Otherwise, they’ll never get the chance to eliminate police and, thus, one of the things in the way of a police state (aside from the 350,000,000 or so guns owned by private citizens).

And eliminating the police to create a police state is not contradictory. The police we have cannot be trusted to serve in a police state; those are specially “trained” (indoctrinated). They need to put the needs of the STATE above everything else, including trampling every right we hold dear and sacred.

Again, I am honestly and anxiously waiting to see some liberal dump do just this. Not anywhere close to where I live, of course, but somewhere exactly like Minneapolis to just watch the fun. We have a localized version of this in CHOP, but it has to be supported by a version of the Berlin Airlift to keep people from killing each other over bottled water or cellphone charging. Let’s enforce a blockade on them and see how much like a “block party” it is.

@Spurwing Plover:

maybe blm and antif**k up should visit the mayors home in these sanctuary and terrorist ridden cities. better yet, have them visit cuomo’s home and comrade be blasio home alone with neanderthal nadler, pencil dick schiff, misogynist and sodomiser schomer, and wife beater sherrod brown of oh