Somewhat related question: it has always bothered me that the debate over defunding the police (which, to be sure, was never a genuine goal of the Democratic establishment) always devolves so quickly into bitching over the term itself, rather than substantive discussions of the underlying issues. Based on Minneapolis’s experience, do you see a path forward for the defund movement?

Ellis: We live in the most absurd era of bullshit rhetoric. It’s infuriating to see how “defund the police” became this weapon that could be so easily used against anyone who wanted to point out that law enforcement budgets operate on the same logic as a venture capitalist’s wet dream of hockey stick growth. Overtime costs for most departments only go up while case clearance rates mostly remain low and black people keep dying. Yet it’s wrong to say “maybe we could use that money in better ways,” because then you wind up as a chyron on Fox & Friends.

It’s now as bloated and captured as “woke.” The problem is “police reform” is the worst of all these terms because of how easily it is co-opted and can provide cover for cynical moderate liberals and the revanchinists on the other side. In the years leading up to Floyd’s death, local activists in Minneapolis were actually successful in clawing back or diverting money from the city’s police budget. And then Floyd was killed. And Dolal Idd. And Amir Locke. I think the way forward increasingly is going to mean bending light in the direction of an abolition people can live with in their communities. I think it will amount to all the ways police departments can have responsibilities, equipment and people peeled away. Or, to quote Grover Norquist, “to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”