Democratic leadership and the liberal left disagree on defunding the police.

Democrat leadership. Politico. 

Democratic leadership is trying to squash the liberal left's defunding the police plan. Politico. House leader Nancy Pelosi is trying to manage the crisis between her branch of the party, who thinks the idea plays terribly to the voters and the left wing of the party, which is pushing for it. Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the Senate are instead focusing on a crime reform bill that they say would ban chokeholds, crack down on excessive force and increasing transparency. Senator Manchin of West Virginia had a more blunt assessment, saying  “You can’t defund the police, that’s stupid, it’s crazy and anyone who talks about that is nuts,”. Republicans are already taking advantage of the idea with President Trump and other leadership commenting on recent efforts to do just that, with Minneapolis going to far as to vote to disband their entire department. 

My Comment:

Once again the Democrats have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. President Trump's handling of the riots was not the best and the Democrats had an opportunity there. Threatening to deploy the military without actually doing it was a bad move for Trump as he was seen as both doing to much to stop the riots and not doing enough at the same time. This gave the Democrats a rare opportunity to offer a real solution.

But since the lunatics are running the Democratic asylum they did no such thing. With the AOC wing of the party in control, the demands for the defunding and dismantling of the police have gone viral and even some municipalities are going through with it. Minneapolis is going so far as to dismantle their entire force and Los Angeles and New York have cut funding. 

And the reception to this is much worse as many people are saying that they want entire police departments to be disbanded, with little idea of what will replace them. The popular view of this is that this will leave nobody to enforce the laws and have a huge increase of crime. That's a bit of a strawman as most liberals understand that you have to have some kind of law enforcement, but it hasn't stopped some people from actually arguing that this should be the case. 

Even the more moderate positions, police departments should be restructured, replaced by county police or defunded, is still an unpopular and dangerous idea that will have major downsides. Indeed, if the problem is that police aren't trained well enough to avoid unnecessary deaths, how is cutting their budget going to help? Isn't that going to make the problem even worse, assuming that there's a problem at all? 

Furthermore, I think this is going to discourage the kind of people you want to be cops to actually get into the field. Policing is already a dangerous, underpaid and under appreciated job. If you take away the pay and benefits, cut the budget and make the rules even more restrictive you aren't going to get the best applicants. 

I also think that doing this in big cities is even worse. I know when I graduated college in 2008 I considered joining a police force. However, the only city in my state that had more jobs then applicants was Milwaukee, widely regarded as the worst place to work in the state. Think about that, even during a major rescission where most police jobs got hundreds of applicants for each available job, Milwaukee still couldn't get enough applicants! Can you imagine how much worse things will get if the police get defunded? This is not the way to ensure that you get good candidates for police jobs, most of whom already don't want to work in the big cities. Much better to work in a small town that actually appreciates the police. 

The worst thing for the Democrats is that their more moderate reforms aren't getting any traction. I do think there is some room for compromise here, but the loud minority is preventing the Democrats from getting any support for things like banning chokeholds, which is something even I would support. 

The Republicans are going to really focus on this as an election issue and the advertisements write themselves. President Trump is going to be the law and order candidate this time and the Democrats are trying to push for crazy ideas like this that will likely increase crime. After everyone is fairly nervous after the duel crises of the Coronavirus and the riots, I doubt that people will want to vote for a party that will make crime worse. 

I also think that the Democrats are going to alienate the hundreds of thousands of police officers, prison guards and federal law enforcement agents in this country. Though they aren't a huge constituency and are drowned out by larger ones, with 2016 being so close I don't think the Democrats can afford to alienate them.