DEFUND THE POLICE?

The recent protests over the police murdering of George Floyd seems to be having better results than any other recent protests around the same issue.  This time the protests have endured, and the American public are now on their side .  In a stunning reversal, recent polls have shown sixty percent of Americans now agree with the Black Lives Matter movement, an increase of twenty points since the last poll was taken.  Like the issue of gay marriage, the country is clearly starting to be more on the side of equality than not.
There are several reasons for this: The first is quite simply it is impossible for any decent human being to watch that horrible Floyd video without being outraged and disgusted.  It's not just the needless brutality of the killing, it's also the casualness of Derek Chauvin, the officer with his foot on Floyd's neck and the equally blase manner of the other cops around them, even as Floyd was calling out for mercy.  The unthinking, cold manner of those officers can one lead to one conclusion: they've done things like this before without punishment, and they clearly thought that they could get away with it again.  (And Chauvin has already had seventeen complaints made against him in his twenty years of service).  It also really shows how much the importance of nearly everyone in America having a cell phone in their pocket has changed things: Floyd's killing and other recent cell phone videos of police brutality would have gone unseen by the public, allowing the police to file false reports and sweep the violence under the rug, as it certainly appears that they have been doing for decades.
Another reason that these protests seem to be sinking through is because some police departments have responded to protests over their being too violent with acts of excessive violence, from clubbings to tear gas firing, shooting themselves in the foot politically.  Also, the marches have been more ethnically diverse than past ones, and, let's face it, legislators are more likely to listen to white people complaining than people of color.  The fact that even Mitt Romney (who has proven himself as the only honorable Republican elected official in the country) marched in a Black Lives Matter rally shows how this issue is getting through.
The good news is that the sudden popularity of the movement may lead to real changes not only in the police departments around the country but also in other ways: Nascar recently banned Confederate flags from their races, statutes of Confederate soldiers have been removed, and there is a movement to rename military  bases named after Confederate leaders.  (Unfortunately, our president is on the wrong side of this).
While there have been many solid suggestions made by police reformers, from the list on the 8 Can't Wait website (click here to see it) to some ideas about how our country should change the way that the police are used (why have them waste time pulling over drivers for minor traffic violations?).   One  new slogan has emerged on signs at the rallies: Defund the Police.  In spirit, I agree with the sentiment of it; even the police themselves have complained about how they are used to deal with issues like homelessness, drug addiction and mental health issues because the country  has failed to deal with them.  Defunding the police means that cities should stop giving so many tax dollars to the police while taking money away from drug rehab programs, homeless shelters and other kinds of social spending that do a better job of preventing crime in the first place.  It's the kind of change that America should have started making years ago.
But there's a problem with the nature of the slogan: it sounds extreme.  The right wing media has already latched on it and openly claimed that the protesters want to abolish the police entirely, leading to anarchy on the streets.  Even though this absurd notion does not seem to have seeped out of the right wing media bubble and into the mainstream of the country,  it does give right wingers the opportunity to try and discredit an entire popular movement simply by purposely overstating the intention of a slogan.
It might seem silly for me to focus on the wording of a slogan, but sloganeering is an important part of our modern political discourse, and conservatives have been better at it than progressives for years.  Consider that conservatives have discovered that instead of saying that you're anti abortion, you can call yourself "pro-life", or that you don't hate the LGBT community, you just want to "defend traditional marriage".  The sad fact of the matter is that coming up with a catchy bumper sticker sized slogan is important in our country; as much as I despise Donald Trump's presidential campaign of twenty sixteen, "Make America Great Again" was an undeniably great campaign slogan and the fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign couldn't come up with a good one to counter it is part of why she lost. 
So, "MAGA", is a good slogan,  but "Defund the Police"?  Not so great in my opinion. It is truly sad to think that from having a catch phrase that is viewed as going too far, an entire positive movement may be killed or crippled before reaching any of its laudable goals.  But I do think it's possible.