“Woke 1.0 was crazy,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York said in a recent interview.
The congresswoman, speaking on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, seemed to distance herself from the positions of an era of Democratic politics around 2020, shortly after she rose to prominence. Some on the left now see the rhetoric of that time as ineffective and divisive. There has been a widespread retreat on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts among corporations. And some public officials, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, have walked back their calls to defund the police.
Using terms like ‘defund the police’ leads to bad faith assumptions that it means getting rid of the police entirely, rather than reappropriating funding used for military-grade weaponry for better purposes. Instead, emphasizing how those resources could be better used—such as the expanded use of mental health support in place of police intervention in many cases—might be more effective.
Isn’t that just capitulation though? Defund the police is already the watered down version of abolish the police. It wasn’t that long ago that people hearing universal healthcare meant higher taxes and removing your “good” private healthcare. In fact, many people do still think that way, especially if they feel they “worked hard” to get their “good private care.”
While I understand politicking, should we trust politicians who are willing to abandon pieces of the movement rather than standing on principle and finding better ways to explain them? Explain what defund means, what the policies are, what the goals are, don’t just abandon it and call it crazy.
“Do you support defunding the police?”
"I support giving the police an easier time, they’re already overworked and have many cases on their plates. I support having the police involved in more dangerous cases which they are trained for while instead having social workers respond to many less violent and more mundane cases which they are trained for. I think we can all agree that a police officer isn’t a social worker nor a psychiatrist.
Further, I know I’ve personally dealt with this, but how many of you have felt that something is happening, being it stalking or threats against your life, and the police are of no help until actual harm is done? That’s exactly because the police have more pressing cases that do involve actual harm first. I believe we should take a look at the funding for police departments, which sometimes is more funding than entire towns and cities, and instead of spending funds on invasive flock cameras that some officers and even flock employees are using to stalk individuals, gymnasiums, and fitness centers themselves, I’d appropriate that funding to separate divisions to better protect and handle more specific cases."