Google Groups no longer supports new Usenet posts or subscriptions. Historical content remains viewable.
Dismiss
'Defund the Police' is a media fantasy
0 views
Skip to first unread message
Willie Brown's Cum Dumpster
Jan 1, 2021, 8:30:09 PM1/1/21
to
A new, exhaustive study by Gallup and the Knight Foundation
found that Americans across the board are losing trust in the
media. Some people might be shocked by this finding, but I
suspect more people will be shocked to learn that the media had
any trust left to lose.
Either way, I think a separate poll conducted by Gallup might
illuminate the problem.
If you’ve paid any attention to the news, particularly cable
news, over the last couple of months since George Floyd’s
killing by police in Minneapolis, you might think “defunding” or
“abolishing” the police is a widely held and even somewhat
mainstream desire.
Gallup suggests this is untrue. The vast majority of Americans
of all races and ethnicities don’t want the police to leave
their communities.
Respondents were asked: “Would you rather the police spend more
time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently
spend in your area?” Sixty-one percent of black respondents said
they wanted the same amount of time; 20 percent said more.
Hispanics had similar numbers (59 percent same, 24 percent more).
Has anything close to that reality been reflected in the
“national conversation” about race and policing? How many
softball interviews did CNN or MSNBC conduct with activists
claiming to speak for “communities of color,” in which
“defunding the police” was not only taken seriously but
sympathetically?
My point isn’t that all is great with policing in America. But
“defund the police” or “abolish the police” — slogans that got
wide traction in the elite media for much of the summer, buoyed
by polished academics and activists with ready-made talking
points — was always an absurd idea, politically and practically.
Politically, because even the most victimized populations don’t
want to get rid of the police, and practically, because a police-
free modern society is simply unworkable. (Just ask the former
denizens of that “autonomous zone” in Seattle.)
The Gallup/Knight study found that nearly 8 in 10 Americans
think the media is trying to convince people “to adopt a certain
opinion.” Well, for much of this year, skepticism toward “defund-
the-police” rhetoric has been quickly dismissed as just another
manifestation of white privilege. Except, as the Gallup poll
suggests, black people don’t view police the same way the
activists and journalists who dominate the debate do.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 50
million Americans have at least one interaction with police in a
given year. Most of those were traffic stops of one kind or
another. Eighty-five percent of black people reported that
traffic stops they were involved in were conducted properly.
Again, my point isn’t that all is fine with race and policing in
America. Any unjustified killing by a police officer should be
condemned and prosecuted for all of the obvious reasons. And the
evidence that black people are disproportionately and unfairly
singled out for traffic stops seems compelling to me.
But the narrative pushed by the media is almost allegorical when
held up against reality. I lost track of the number of times
reporters and interviewers said, or allowed people to get away
with saying, that policing originated as “slave patrols.”
Policing is thousands of years old, and while some police
departments in slave states had antecedents in such patrols,
those in, say, Boston and Minneapolis didn’t.
More important, the purpose of this talking point is to buttress
an almost biblical narrative of some original sin that
supposedly animates police departments today. I would bet that
not one cop in 10,000 had ever heard that policing was the
legacy of slave patrols until this year.
The debate over policing is just one facet of this complex
problem. For instance, journalists at elite outlets often use
“Latinx” to describe a diverse Hispanic or Latino population to
avoid gendered or colonial connotations. Never mind that 98
percent of American Latinos told pollsters at ThinkNow Research
that they don’t like, know or use the term.
This isn’t just about liberal media bias. (The right-wing media
has biases, too). It reflects a tendency for American media
outlets to speak to audiences that are unrepresentative of
America as a whole. Why they do it can’t be reduced to a single
explanation. That they do it is obvious to a lot of Americans.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/09/defund-the-police-is-a-media-
fantasy/
found that Americans across the board are losing trust in the
media. Some people might be shocked by this finding, but I
suspect more people will be shocked to learn that the media had
any trust left to lose.
Either way, I think a separate poll conducted by Gallup might
illuminate the problem.
If you’ve paid any attention to the news, particularly cable
news, over the last couple of months since George Floyd’s
killing by police in Minneapolis, you might think “defunding” or
“abolishing” the police is a widely held and even somewhat
mainstream desire.
Gallup suggests this is untrue. The vast majority of Americans
of all races and ethnicities don’t want the police to leave
their communities.
Respondents were asked: “Would you rather the police spend more
time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently
spend in your area?” Sixty-one percent of black respondents said
they wanted the same amount of time; 20 percent said more.
Hispanics had similar numbers (59 percent same, 24 percent more).
Has anything close to that reality been reflected in the
“national conversation” about race and policing? How many
softball interviews did CNN or MSNBC conduct with activists
claiming to speak for “communities of color,” in which
“defunding the police” was not only taken seriously but
sympathetically?
My point isn’t that all is great with policing in America. But
“defund the police” or “abolish the police” — slogans that got
wide traction in the elite media for much of the summer, buoyed
by polished academics and activists with ready-made talking
points — was always an absurd idea, politically and practically.
Politically, because even the most victimized populations don’t
want to get rid of the police, and practically, because a police-
free modern society is simply unworkable. (Just ask the former
denizens of that “autonomous zone” in Seattle.)
The Gallup/Knight study found that nearly 8 in 10 Americans
think the media is trying to convince people “to adopt a certain
opinion.” Well, for much of this year, skepticism toward “defund-
the-police” rhetoric has been quickly dismissed as just another
manifestation of white privilege. Except, as the Gallup poll
suggests, black people don’t view police the same way the
activists and journalists who dominate the debate do.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 50
million Americans have at least one interaction with police in a
given year. Most of those were traffic stops of one kind or
another. Eighty-five percent of black people reported that
traffic stops they were involved in were conducted properly.
Again, my point isn’t that all is fine with race and policing in
America. Any unjustified killing by a police officer should be
condemned and prosecuted for all of the obvious reasons. And the
evidence that black people are disproportionately and unfairly
singled out for traffic stops seems compelling to me.
But the narrative pushed by the media is almost allegorical when
held up against reality. I lost track of the number of times
reporters and interviewers said, or allowed people to get away
with saying, that policing originated as “slave patrols.”
Policing is thousands of years old, and while some police
departments in slave states had antecedents in such patrols,
those in, say, Boston and Minneapolis didn’t.
More important, the purpose of this talking point is to buttress
an almost biblical narrative of some original sin that
supposedly animates police departments today. I would bet that
not one cop in 10,000 had ever heard that policing was the
legacy of slave patrols until this year.
The debate over policing is just one facet of this complex
problem. For instance, journalists at elite outlets often use
“Latinx” to describe a diverse Hispanic or Latino population to
avoid gendered or colonial connotations. Never mind that 98
percent of American Latinos told pollsters at ThinkNow Research
that they don’t like, know or use the term.
This isn’t just about liberal media bias. (The right-wing media
has biases, too). It reflects a tendency for American media
outlets to speak to audiences that are unrepresentative of
America as a whole. Why they do it can’t be reduced to a single
explanation. That they do it is obvious to a lot of Americans.
https://nypost.com/2020/08/09/defund-the-police-is-a-media-
fantasy/
0 new messages