I know OP is presenting this as a historical example of āDefund the Policeā working and being reasonable & doable actually, but when I see this story juxtaposed with the modern leftās attempts to decouple social services from the police, what Iām seeing is some of the reasons the left was successful at doing this kind of thing in the past and why it is failing to do so now.
Even just on the level of messaging, compare āFreedom House Ambulance Serviceā vs āDefund the Policeā. One sounds like itās about freedom, itās about providing, itās a service. The other frames itself as defunding, taking away infrastructure thatāwhether you personally agree or notāpeople broadly view as a service. There is nothing about āDefund the Policeā or āACABā etc. (whose underlying critiques I broadly agree with) that intuitively suggests to anyone hearing it for the first time that what weāre suggesting is reallocating funds to empower and provide a better, safer, demilitarized kind of infrastructure. Itās just āget rid of this thing that most people feel like they needā.
We find THE most dystopian, tear-it-all-down, shockjock asshole-sounding ways to express a point & then spend so much time defending that choice & explaining āno no actually itās really sensibleā (often with an air of superiority, as if to say āyouāre so stupid for thinking the dystopian-sounding thing i said isnāt actually dystopianā) that we never seem to get around to do the damn thing. rather than notice that weāre alienating our allies & learn from this, we just dig our heels in & refuse to adjust.
Why canāt we just say what we mean? Demilitarize the Police. Fund Welfare. Reallocate City Funds. Provide Social Services. If you donāt want to sound like youāre trying to strip apart societal infrastructure you donāt have to! If youāre trying to communicate that youāre trying to provide a serviceā¦ you can just say that up front. We donāt have to marry ourselves to the **ABOLISH** ** DESTROY** **SMASH** **DEFUND** framing.
But itās not just PR or tone or whatever.
FHAS also didnāt wait for permission or demand to get rid of the police-run ambulance first; they saw where the police-run ambulance was lacking and they filled the gap themselves. they they provided a solution. the only reason they got the trust & funding from the city government in the first place was by proving they could do it better.
also, as much as this story may illustrate an example of fixing the system from outside it, it still required cooperation with & working alongside the pre-existing system. they used donated police vehicles. the police called them in to help. they didnāt say āfuck the systemā wholesale, burn it to the ground, & make something better in the ashes. they sprang up from the community, ensured their quality of service was better, & offered their help.
Weād get a lot farther if we actually learned from & emulated our past successes instead of just using them as rhetorical defenses for our current failures.
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