What Obama Gets Wrong About “Defund the Police”

In a recent interview that you could originally only watch on Snapchat, of all places, Former President Barack Obama doubled down on earlier comments he made that expressed his disdain for the phrase “defund the police.” In his words, “you lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done.” Just a week ago, he said on Complex News’ 360 With Speedy Morman that he would not defund police departments if given the power to do so.

Reform not defund

In the latest interview, which took place on Snapchat’s Good Luck America, the former president explained that he believed it would be more effective for protesters to adopt less abrasive demands, such as “reform the police department so that everybody’s being treated fairly” and “divert young people from getting into crime….”

Perhaps this would be a reasonable suggestion if it were not for the comprehensive history of American policing and its inborn aptitude for avoiding significant reform like the plague. I am certain that Obama has not forgotten about the decades of respectful, nonviolent protests. Protests that only ever asked that everyone be “treated fairly” when they were not, but he sure is acting like it.

In a confusing twist of events, when speaking later in the interview about the future of the Democratic Party with Joe Biden as president, Obama let it slip that he believes that “people generally don’t listen to a bunch of policy analysis.” I’m sorry, what? If people don’t want to be barraged with policy talk, wouldn’t the pithier “defund the police” prove more effective than a series of reform suggestions?

The big audience

Returning to the “big audience” that the former president clearly believes it is detrimental for protesters to lose the support of. I very seriously doubt that losing them is any more of an impediment to police reform than the police and the system in which they work are. It is difficult for me to not see the fact that he is more focused on reforming protesters than reforming the police. Indicative of a dark and severe issue within moderate liberal politics that demands to be addressed.

Let us be realistic. The time for politely asking police officers not to wantonly shoot Black children has clearly passed. They have not stopped doing it. This is irrefutable. The only reason that American protest has come to the point of “defund the police” is because the police are still failing to use their funds responsibly.

Abolish the police

In his interview with Speedy Marmon, Obama explained that he dislikes the refrain because he thinks it “implies somehow that we could do without the police or that the police are the only source of our problem.” Wrong, and dead wrong. This rhetoric is exceedingly dangerous and offers a spurious account of what protesters want and believe. The people that want to abolish the police do not mince words—their chant is, believe it or not, “abolish the police.” And were the former president to ask any one of the protesters he is so insistent on criticizing if they thought that the police “are the only source of our problem,” he would be hard pressed to track down a “yes.”

My point is that implications are often wrong and unfounded, and in this case they don’t even make sense. If you hear “we do not need the police” when someone suggests that local governments cut into police budgets, your support is not needed anyway.

Obama’s moderacy betrays him when using such language. If we are going to talk implications, then his unwavering distaste for (as well as his misunderstanding of) the phrase in question, to me implies that he isn’t nearly as interested in the “robust [police] reform” he spoke to Marmon about as he claims to be. Washingtonians are all but new to this kind of liberal dalliance, as Mayor Muriel Bowser is also in the business of protecting police pockets. Additionally, her own contradictions give Obama a run for his money: How does one stand so tall at the unveiling of Black Lives Matter Plaza, only to turn around and try to give more money to one of the primary problems the Black Lives Matter movement was formed to rally against?