It's really important to stress that policing is primarily a municipal issue and in many cases, the people blocking real reform aren't MAGA hat-wearing Republicans.

They're often Dem. politicians who say "Black Lives Matter" while doing the bidding of police unions in office.

This is a difficult point to make so let me stress two points in particular:

First, Republicans are infinitely worse on policing and every other issue, so don't get it twisted. The issue is that in most big cities Republicans *are not a factor*.

That's not an exaggeration: Take, for example, the New York City Council, which has a whopping 46 Dem. to 3 GOP majority. Despite this, the body has repeatedly shot down efforts to meaningfully combat policing policy. You do the math here!

Secondly, I must stress that the relevance of me bringing this up is that, if the current wave of protests sparked by Daunte Wright's murder reach the level of what we saw last summer, many of the Mayors who will push to clamp down on the protests will be Democrats.

In the aftermath of the Summer 2020 protest wave, most commentators placed blame upon organizers who pushed for defunding the police (these organizers were, and are, correct!) for the lack of concrete policy changes re: policing.

In reality, the Dem. municipal executives who endorsed "Black Lives Matter" as a slogan while directing city police to clamp down on protests through illegal curfews abandoned any pretense of wanting change as soon as the spotlight was off of them.

Anyway, for starters: Cut cop budgets, clamp down on the power of police "unions" (they are not real labor organizations in any meaningful sense, they're de facto protection rackets), take away their guns and end qualified immunity. It's only going to get worse if we don't.

Yep, this is what I'm trying to convey! "Vote Blue No Matter Who" doesn't apply in a place like New York, where everyone from FinTech executives and billionaire real estate magnates to democratic socialists and tenant organizers run in the same party. https://twitter.com/snoogles9000/status/1381826154533957632?s=20

But yeah, I think the fact that last year's protests occurred during a presidential election year is one of the main/underrated factors behind the fact that they unfortunately did not result in meaningful policy change across the board.

What I mean is that the point I'm trying to convey in this thread is especially hard to articulate when the country is gearing up to vote out an unequivocal white supremacist who has long been an open proponent police brutality.

When popular energy is devoted to removing a man as odious as Trump from office, it's very hard to convey to people that the centrist Dem. Mayors who painted "Black Lives Matter" on streets as a PR stunt are actually a major reason *why* change is being stalled.