I'm not sure this distinction matters much to most people, though. People hear "defund the police" and draw their own conclusions as to what that means, and it's not a far leap to go from "defund the police" to "welp, guess they want to tie the hands of cops and take away all of their funding so they can't do their jobs"
I think what your saying is that people are drawing the wrong conclusion when they hear 'defund the police'. But, if they knew what was really meant they may actually support it. So the distinction actually matters a lot.
Like if they heard that it meant sending trained mental health professionals to deal with a mental health crisis called into 911 instead of just sending some cops who may very well just shoot them, that might change their minds about it.
No, what we are hearing is that a group for some reason chose a horrible catch phrase that they now say does not mean what the phrase specifically, on it's face, means, and that the group now wants to tell everyone it's not them it's us.
Edit: I think the USA needs to completely change how we approach mental health. My grandfather spent his life cruisading for that. Allowing the catch phrase to distract from that point to the extent that the catch phrase is now pretty much a central focus shows that 'defend the police' very much is a problem.
But, let's complete the idea to make it bulletproof.
Regardless of moving goalposts due to changing definitions, the luxury belief still remains:
Reallocate (vs defund) police still moves funds around. Funds are not infinite.
- Less police means more crime. This means fewer personnel to combat crime. Crime strikes directly at the poorest.
- Less police means more mental care. This means more personnel and facilities to combat mental cases. This had been tried already, with no meaningful decrease in mental problems.
It isn't a good catchphrase, I fully agree. But the reason its been derailed is because there are people actively derailing it and deliberately misleading its meaning. They fight any plan that would diminish the authority and power of police. That's the problem here.
They correctly understood it to mean abolish the police. As was made very clear by those who created the statement as they carried it the BLM riots in 2020
