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There are a lot of tweets going around about the utility of voting for Democrats for people who want to change the police in this country. The thing is that they're both right.
On the one hand, national Democrats are more willing than Republicans, and especially than Trump, to use the power of the Federal Government to help with reform. Trump rolled back efforts at the DOJ's civil rights division to enforce consent decrees and such.
On the other, there are many, many things that national Dems could have done but didn't even try to do. The Democratic party still contains a bunch of ex-prosecutors, many with awful records, who are very much still members in good standing. (Looking at you, Harris and Klobuchar)
To further complicate matters, the real movers and shakers on these issues are state and local politicians. Big city police departments are basically all under the at least nominal control of Democratic city governments.
So to my mind what we need is a both/and approach. Yes, vote Trump out. Voting Trump out will help in a real way. But voting Trump out ain't nearly enough. We need to keep protesting, we need to engage with state and local politics.
We need to be paying attention to primary races for Sheriffs and DA's, we need to be paying attention to judicial elections, we need to be lobbying spend less money on cops, more money on social services and Public Defender's offices.
And we need to keep protesting and speaking out. There's a long, long way to go, and it's going to take a lot of work. But we have to do that work and we have to do it at every level of government.
