I wish they would delete it and stick with their second demand - take all weapons away from police. No guns, no batons, no tasers. It's also crazy, but at least it's crazy in a "this might just be crazy enough to work" kind of way.
Abolition of existing centralized paramilitary police departments in favor of rethinking public safety and social services and reconstituting and redistributing law enforcement within a new framework is an idea which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.
It may seem, by a pre-June-2020 perspective, to be an out-of-the-range-of-serious-debate demand, but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.
>...which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.
>but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.
Well you're right about that. Because it's insane, and generates clicks, likes, and retweets and so media keeps covering like it's actually popular despite the fact the inverse is true to keep generating their clicks, likes, and retweets. I've been waiting for the Star Tribune to actually run some local polling on this, because everyone I know still back there also thinks it's insane. My guess is they do run the polls, and don't publish the results for the same reason.
[1]https://twitter.com/databyler/status/1268555840098906115?ref...
More recent polling shows much higher support for both “defund” and “dismantle” than what that poll found for it's lopsided framing of “defund”.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-poll-e...
From your article:
>For example, 39% of respondents supported proposals “to completely dismantle police departments and give more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence.”
So, only 39% of respondents support "dismantling" (notice the specific word choice here) and essentially creating, out of thin air I guess, another organization that would obviously have a license to engage in violence if their charter includes dealing with domestic violence. This is an echo chamber proposal if there ever was one.
“Dismantle” and “abolish” are about equally popular in the movement for those that support the position that goes beyond “defund” in organizational change.
And 39% is widespread, though obviously not majority, support (and “defund” has 76%—a large majority—support in the pool, which I notice you ignore completely.) And nothing in the quote (or the movement) suggests that whatever armed law enforcement functions were retained would be concentrated in a single new organization created ex nihilo. While, again, advocates are mostly calling for a community process to rethink a design new service delivery and public safety systems rather than selling an already completed redesign that just needs legislative blessing, one framework concept I've seen mentioned more than once is redistributing domain-specific law-enforcement functions within service agencies consistent with the agencies’ domain, broadly the same much state and federal law enforcement functionality is rather than being concentrated in a single paramilitary force of general remit.