What exactly is the difference between a demand and a slogan? Or the difference, asserted in the next paragraph, between "a catchphrase" and "a mandate"? The author doesn't say, and I think that's because she doesn't know. That's because "defund the police" is really just a slogan and a catchphrase. Calling it a demand doesn't make it any less disastrous if it were literally implemented.

There are bad people who do bad stuff, and we need police to protect good people from those bad people. The police are doing a lousy job of that right now, so they need to be either reformed or replaced by another organization or organizations that will perform that function more efficiently.

It's clear that this is what many people now mean by "defund the police", and according to some polls, miraculously a majority of people have gradually come to understand this. But a substantial minority of people still think, silly creatures that they are, that "defund the police" actually means defund the police, and a lot of them voted for Trump for the first time in 2020 because of that.

There were two articles in the NYtimes that made points similar to this article, which I replied to here. Both articles claimed they literally wanted to abolish the police, but once you read the fine print, it was clear that they didn't.

https://teedrockwell.medium.com/no-one-wants-to-abolish-the-police-not-even-the-people-who-say-they-do