How Media Transformed “Defund the Police”

Before “defund the police” became a rallying cry at gatherings, marches, and protests for social justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, it was an idea unformed but incubated within something known as abolition democracy. The term “abolition democracy” was first coined by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1935 and resurfaced by the work of Angela Davis, most prominently in her book Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture written after the Abu Ghraib prison travesty.  A line to “defund the police” can be drawn from that to the prison abolition movement, which itself could be said to predate Du Bois, featured in Joseph Smith’s (yes, THAT Joseph Smith) presidential campaign in 1844, during which he advocated for the dismantling of the “cruel custom of prisons (except certain cases) [and] penitentiaries.”

The point is, before it was a chant, it was a serious idea for discussion and debate about equality within the civil rights movement, academia, criminal justice policy making, and anti-terrorism efforts.

According to a piece in the New York Times from that summer of 2020, the slogan of “defund the police” was popularized by the Black Visions Collective (a group of activists focused on the community and political interest of Black people in Minneapolis) shortly after Mr. Floyd’s murder.

But in a matter of a week or two, “defund the police” went from high concept to rally chant to slogan.  By early June 2020, it was being redefined both by those for and against it. This took place almost entirely in the media.

We’ve seen this before with critical race theory, which experienced a similar media-fueled transformation.

The Twittersphere and social media took the phrase “defund the police” mostly at face value.  A pervasive sense of burning the whole thing down to start over ran throughout a lot of those advocating (or signaling advocacy) for a genuine paradigm shift in policing that originated in liberal policy movements for decarceration and into the public consciousness to include policing.   

The mainstream media and, by association, the mainstream political left, reacted to this, by refining and watering it down. Then-governor of NY Andrew Cuomo positioned the phrase as meaning more of a fundamental reframing of how policing is done, not to signify policing’s elimination from the ‘civitas.’  Barack Obama, speaking on “Good Luck America,” went even further saying that the phrase – “a snappy slogan” – immediately alienates a large segment of people who will just turn you off, and made the point that a more comprehensive, nuanced, and – dare we say? – complicated articulation of transforming the current policing system would enlist more allies in the cause for real reform.

The conservative media and, by association, the political right, took no time to render “defund the police” as a declaration of war on law and order; a kind of anarchic relativism that might take the alleged words of Hassan-I Sabbah as its motto: “nothing is true, everything is permitted.”  In less time than data supporting the claims could possibly become available, avatars of the right were declaring that a rise in crime and violence were the result of anti-police rhetoric. Throughout the summer a drumbeat of bad news was associated with local movements to “defund the police.”

Much of the framing of “defund the police” took place through social media interwoven with text-forward and printed news outlets. Television carried some of it in brief news segments, right-leaning news media spending a lot more time with it than mainstream news media did (Fox News is still beating the drum). But Hollywood, too, made some shifts in its portrayal of police in some shows (The Rookie, SWAT) and shelved others entirely (after 33 years on the air, reality police show Cops was retired).

But nowhere was a real, honest, intelligent, discussion about “defund the police'' ever had in the public square. The reason is the public square – such as it exists today – consists of varying types of media, almost none of them discussive or enabling dialogue. And political figures, policy makers, civil servants, and intellectuals all are forced to express themselves and represent ideas through the same media sieve of “this or that.”  Only a binary framework is permitted.  Like our two-party system, little quarter is left for the multifaceted and subtle. It’s the thesis and antithesis parts of the dialectic, without room left for synthesis. That sieve structures the material of what we think, how we think, and what we know.

The mode of transmission shapes the way a thing is received and understood. To brush off Marshall McLuhan’s old adage, “the medium is the message.” TV is about sound and moving images; social media is a combination of brief text accompanied by images that try to reinforce the meaning of that text. Both are decontextualized – and often non-random – representations of concepts and phenomena that exemplify or are exemplified by those concepts. Both are optimized for engagement and rely on enragement to get it. They form our encounter with words and images, and the ideas they represent, asserts form on how those ideas are understood; and the technology underlying those forms dictate what ideas we are exposed to.  Some modes of transmission are inadequate to the concepts they are used to convey. “Defund the police” signifies a concept more complex than the media carrying those words can render meaningful or even make understood. “Defund the police” can mean more than the words used to construct the phrase themselves mean.

All sides of serious and complex debate need to acknowledge the existence of the most extreme characterizations of the subject being examined; that some on each end mean exactly what they say, while at the same time acknowledge a binary representation is not a complete one.  Most issues are complex, and most require an “also/and” approach, not an “either/or” one.

Something I’ve learned from more than two decades in marketing is that a quippy catch-phrase can go a long way towards introducing, establishing, and growing a brand. But when what’s signified is complex and the stakes are high, slogans are poor analogies. “Defund the police” can signify exactly what the words mean, but out of context and without the ballast of contrasting conceptual frameworks, it works best only to incite and inflame rather than inform and explain.