General Discussion

“We are in a moment when a lot of our public conversation gets chewed down into 280 characters or less. And that is not the best way to talk about anything. So, you’ll note, I didn’t say ‘defund the police,’ I just described what needed to be done. And I do think we need to be really focused on describing or explaining rather than sort of hedging on one side or the other behind a hashtag.”

“Defunding the police is disinvesting in the means of incarcerating someone or killing them on the streets and investing more in the means of educating and empowering and engaging communities with the means of being able to take on systemic poverty that we’ve allowed to fester in too many communities.”

El-Sayed says he like to talk about it as “re-funding.”

“I want a re-fund on the taxpayer dollars that I pay to police who use that to buy war materiel to wage war in our streets. And I want to re-fund public health and public libraries and public schools and the means of uprooting poverty,” he says. “What we call that is, to me, less important than what we do on the problems on the ground.”