Canadian Politics Today

You really don't know much about what police do. You should ask for a ride along with your local police force and find out.

I've done ride alongs when I worked as a journalist. They were boring for the most part except when two separate patrol cars converged to hassle some teens making out in a car in a field and stopped to pick up a white drunk kid and take him home (a trip that probably would have had a different outcome if the kid was Black or Indigenous).

But you keep saying "oh you don't know what police do" so why don't you enlighten us?

Is anybody really advocating for abolition?

 -k

Yes.

It's one of those unfortunate slogans which polarize people. Refund the Police would have been much less antagonistic as well as more accurate.

No, we mean defund the police.

I think it's worth asking why this is such a polarizing slogan. I think the idea that we'd collapse into anarchy without the police is largely a byproduct of decades of nonstop copaganda with a big dash of racism ("if you get rid of the police *those people* will be able to do whatever they want!").