Frankly, I’m sick of having to pander to dimwits who can only be bothered with the first three words of a massively complex concept.
The way I see it, that is par for the cursed. 
Trumpists will be misled as always, but OTOH most people are more able to notice the difference, particularly because the reason for why something is barely considered is caused by reasons that are very painful to not see, police officers that disregard life, police departments that brutalize peaceful protesters, and leaders that support that while offering band aid solutions and demonizing the opposition with huge straw men.
And I can speak with more evidence, polls have gone tits up for Trump in the last 2 weeks, showing that most do notice the nuances and are not impressed with the gross attempt at rising political fears.
Frankly, for some it won’t matter what words are used by the protesters-anything the protesters say will be offensive to them. Unless you use words so innocuous, so ineffectual, so ghoddamn tame that they amount to saying nothing at all, offense will be taken.
They decided to be offended by someone kneeling, an act which, for all of human history, has been associated with humility, respect, deference, subservience. We kneel to respect kings, to beg, to ask for a woman’s hand in marriage, to pray for a fallen teammate.
Yet, the instant someone used it to protest violence against black Americans, it was deemed an insult, filling people with rage at the audacity of someone getting down on their knee.
So, yes, I agree that this crowd will be offended by whatever is said or done by protesters, and the only way to make them happy is to stop protesting altogether.
In PR and advertising, the onus is on the advertiser to get the message right. It is not on the audience to interpret the slogan right.
If a marketing rep came up with a misleading slogan that gave customers the entirely wrong idea and thus drove them away from the company’s product…the company managers wouldn’t blame the customers, they’d blame the marketing rep. And rightfully so.
When Trump chanted, “Lock her up!”, people rightfully interpreted it as calling for Hillary’s incarceration, not some subtle ploy about how some things needed investigation or transparency.
If you are talking about MAGATS, BLM protesters may as well be shouting “Fuck the Police!”.
The appeal to choose a better slogan to “Abolish the Police” is not made in order to appease people who will never be persuaded to abandon an ignorant bigot. Sure, it would behoove progressives not to give them more ammunition with which to continue to gin up their anti-liberal sentiment, but at the end of the day, they are hardly worth the consideration.
The appeal for a better slogan is because “Abolish the Police” has a history and ideology that alienates those who agree that systemic problems of racism exist and that significant reforms are desperately needed, but do not agree that society can function without police. These are people who can and do see beyond slogans for anti-racism, and what they see in this Abolition Movement is some troubling anti-capitalist agendas, supported by arguments containing very vague strategies and hopelessly unrealistic views of human nature.
In saying the above, I’m not entirely rejecting the nearly utopian dreams of these idealists. I’m objecting to the sale of vaporware those who desperately want, need and deserve a solution now. I see no more certain way for all this momentum and desire for change to fail than to over-promise and under-deliver, again. I believe that the pragmatism and well defined, realistic steps to “Reform the Police”, is the better goal and more honest slogan.
Live by the slogan, die by the slogan.
Dont use slogans which are- on the face- not what you want.
Agreed. The slogan led a lot of perfectly decent people to draw an erroneous conclusion. It sounded like a call to anarchy. It really is a call to reform and restructuring.
Should’a said so in the first place.
(I want a national single-payer medical care system. I’m gonna call it “Kill the Doctors.”)
Right, because Joe Biden is going to call for abolishing all police. He’s probably changing his campaign logo to a fist and consulting all of the Occupy Wall Street protest veterans as we speak.
Y’all are writing as though we’re running against a full-employment incumbent who masterfully responded to a global pandemic before it even had a chance to infect a single person.
I was pretty outspokenly cautious in pointing out all of last year that Mueller’s investigation and impeachment wasn’t going to dent Trump’s support at all, and that the only thing that could was a change in mood.
Well, that happened. We’re right here, right now. We’re living with outrage, and I’m saying we should feel confident in expressing that outrage. In fact we have to. We have to be strident in attacking the opponent when he’s weak. We have to finish this, and we don’t finish it by being cowards.
More like it led to triggered, scared white people feeling triggered and scared.
This is the problem with being black and brown in a white man’s society. It takes being murdered on videotape before white people actually believe what you’re saying, but be careful not to express outrage in ways that make white people scared. They’ll think you’re calling for “anarchy.”
Um, no. We’re calling for fairness and for this society to live up to the promise of equal protection under the law.
There will never be a slogan that those who are against the idea behind the slogan will agree upon.
You are asking vegans what they think about the new steakhouse’s slogan, they aren’t going to like it.
This focus on the slogan, rather than the ideals behind it, is intentional. It is meant to keep people fighting over a slogan, rather than getting any progress on the actual problem.
Anyone who agrees with the ideals, but thinks that the slogan is problematic, would better use their energies in explaining the slogan to those that they think wouldn’t understand it, rather than repeating over and over again that they don’t think that everyone will understand it. At a certain point, it really does become obvious that it’s not really about the slogan.
But yeah, Abolish the police is the only words that fit what needs to happen. Reform has been “tried”. Rebuilding or reformatting are making the assumption that it is just an administrative issue.
Trying to claim that the US’s history of police is not rooted in racism because some other countries had police too is like trying to defend an arsonist by insisting that he didn’t invent fire.
The police in the United States can trace their roots back to slave catching and segregation enforcement. Sure, the slave catchers would go catch a white criminal, if they stole from or harmed someone important, but that was not their only, and not even their main job.
In the north, police were constitutionally required to work as slave catchers.
After abolition of slavery, police were then used to enforce segregation laws, and then were used to fight against civil rights protesters.
Many police departments can trace their roots straight back to their days of slave catching and segregation enforcement. A reform of policies does not change culture. The police, as they are, need to be abolished and then they can reform based on justified needs, not culture and inertia.
Part of it should be that the community should be a very large part in the negotiation of their contracts. The municipality can negotiate pay and benefits, but the community should be able to negotiate code of conduct.
And if an agreement can’t be made, and a community feels that they can police their own neighborhoods better than the police, then let them. Either they will fail and come crawling back to the police, begging for help, or they will find a better way that the police had not yet considered. If you do not have the consent of the governed, then law and order is just another name for oppression.
The police need to be abolished, and the government and justice system need to form a new contract with the communities that they are supposed to serve.
This particular audience interpreted an act that has been used for 10,000 years across every known human culture to indicate humility and respect as an act of outrageous insult.
Their interpreting circuits are broken, and IDGAF what they think about anything anymore.
I’ll also note that this is a grassroots protest, not an advertising campaign. There’s no PR guy testing “Abolish the Police” with a half dozen focus groups, it’s a pissed off person who is sick and tired of watching video after video of harmless people being brutalized by the police, and having those police supported, defended and protected by the system.
Someone doesn’t like the slogan? Boo hoo, maybe start not liking police brutality with equal vigor and I won’t think so little of you as a human being.
For those of you who want to do some outside reading here is an excellent Vox article that talks with several experts on the issue.
The “abolish the police” movement, explained by 7 scholars and activists
And here is the report from MPD150, an initiative started in 2016 (the 150th anniv of the Minneapolis PD) who are working closely with the city of Minneapolis.
Look, I completely supported the taking-of-the-knee thing and I was and am behind Kaepernick 100%. But let’s not pretend that it was JUST taking a knee. It was taking a knee during the National Anthem when you are supposed to stand. So a lot of people interpreted it as saying “fuck the National Anthem” rather than “signifying respect by kneeling.”
Of course, there is much more to it than that. But it could be interpreted many ways because it’s a symbolic physical act. Saying the words “abolish the police” isn’t a symbolic physical act, it is a specific string of words that say “abolish the police.” And I don’t think those words are going to gain much traction with sufficient numbers of people.
But I think most police-reform advocates realize this by now, and I’m not seeing the words “abolish the police” very much in the past week. In fact, I’ve seen numerous people posting graphics with words to the effect of “let’s please NOT use the term ‘abolish the police’ because it’s not a good slogan.”
Good post, Lamoral, but I wanted to touch on this specifically.
I agree that there’s been push-back against the use of inflammatory phrases such as “abolish the police” or “de-fund the police,” but I think the real credit goes to ordinary people, who’ve had some time to cool off.
But on that note, the best way to get people to cool off is to let people express themselves and not tell them how they should feel. That’s the whole reason they’ve been out in the streets for this long anyway: they’re tired of seeing the obvious (i.e. that black people are being systematically targeted for abuse) and that they’re not being listened to. They’re starting to drop phrases like “abolish the police” probably because for once, they feel like their protests are working, that white America may be finally listening.
See the outrageous and inflammatory remarks for what they represent from the perspective of the people expressing those thoughts.
Not true. I heard a bad slogan, and I called it out.
I strongly favor reforming the police.
True.
No. The correct analogy is that you are asking omnivores to come to your new vegan restaurant and enjoy your food with a “Meat is Murder” slogan.
It seems to me that police are trained to enforce laws of the land. As laws changed, police policies changed. It’s absolutely true that there are racist garbage cops that need to be rooted out of the police force. No question. But changing laws and transforming police practices will go a long way to root them out. It will also change what kind of people are going to be attracted to police work in the future. Police culture will change when the laws they enforce and the duties they perform change in line with expectations & results.
Definitely.
I can see an immediate problem with respect to adjacent communities and uneven enforcement policies. Not just for the cops but especially problematic for the citizens.
I submit that laws and policies of enforcement are the place to start. Abolish the police who refuse to obey the changes and regs.
Sure, but the point that I made was that after all the fears repeated Ad nauseam the result has been a counter, counter reaction when to discredit those absolutists Trump and the right wing media are overreaching and discrediting themselves, the results are reflected IMHO in the recent polling, I do think that the ones who are not Trumpists do get the context. And recognize the dishonesty coming from Trump and the right wing media.
So groups are out saying “abolish the police” or “defund the police” and many people become afraid because they are too dimwitted to understand that this doesn’t really mean that those people want to abolish the police or defund the police (which amounts to the same thing), and this is Trump and the right wing media’s fault? If you don’t really want to abolish or defund the police, then choose your words better.
And, again, you cannot claim Camden as an example of the nuanced way you are suggesting to abolish the police. If you just change the name of the organization but put the very same people at the same jobs in the new organization, then what you have done is “reformed” the police, which is something at this particular point in time, you would have an over 95% approval rating for doing.
So why fuck that up with intentionally divisive language and lose any chance of getting what virtually everyone wants?
So groups are out saying “abolish the police” or “defund the police” and many people become afraid because they are too dimwitted to understand that this doesn’t really mean that those people want to abolish the police or defund the police (which amounts to the same thing), and this is Trump and the right wing media’s fault? If you don’t really want to abolish or defund the police, then choose your words better.
And, again, you cannot claim Camden as an example of the nuanced way you are suggesting to abolish the police. If you just change the name of the organization but put the very same people at the same jobs in the new organization, then what you have done is “reformed” the police, which is something at this particular point in time, you would have an over 95% approval rating for doing.
So why fuck that up with intentionally divisive language and lose any chance of getting what virtually everyone wants?