General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDefund "Republicanist" Police (specifically) by defunding the Republican Drug War
If you want to defund something, take the money out of the so-called Drug War. That would deal a death blow to bad policing (Republican-oriented officers) and mass incarceration (Republican-oriented for-profit prisons).
We have a legal drug in this country, alcohol. It does massive damage, but it clearly has a beneficial side when used responsibly. It has found its equilibrium. The culture has worked out a way of living with alcohol as a regulated recreational drug. We are doing the same with marijuana right now, and (as anyone could have predicted) it's working out fine. There is no reason to think we wouldn't find a way of living with decriminalized and regulated drugs of all categories. That's the way things were before criminalization. We survived.
The Republican "Drug War's" explicit goal was to inflict suffering and damage on minorities while benefiting Republican politics. It has been a massive "success" from that perspective. It's a race war by other means. As such, it attracts Republican-oriented lowlife to policing. It's a racism money tree, a recruiting tool for racist soldier wannabes, and the lifeblood of the dirtiest Republican politics and corruption.
Defund the Drug War if you want to defund bad policing and evil in general. Lift the curse. Decriminalize. That's the way to defund bad policing and a whole lot of bad everything else.
ck4829
(34,977 posts)thomski64
(441 posts)Won't Mitch"s refusal to fund State and Local Governments effectively
defund schools, infrastructure and police?
The Magistrate
(95,237 posts)Decriminalizing most drug use would remove a good deal of real crime by removing its profit, and would certainly reduce the number of young people set out into their adult lives with police records owing to over-zealous enforcement of laws against possession or petty sale. The effect on communities of color would in particular be much for the better.
Drug enforcement has driven a good deal of the erosion of the people's rights against search and seizure. It has hollowed these out to a mockery of what they were considered before the Nixon administration.