It was a branding fuckup more than a policy fuckup. The idea that we want types of response units other than armed gunmen available to respond to certain types of emergencies isn’t exactly radical.
We don’t send the police for medical emergencies or house fires. We send personnel with dedicated training for those types of events.
As someone who grew up with a dad who listened to conservative talk radio, "liberal" has been used as an epithet for at least thirty years. I was genuinely stunned in high school when I met people who would willingly refer to themselves as liberals.
You'll have to pardon me for rolling my eyes at the notion that modern liberals have somehow made the term a bad word given the general path of conservatism over the last several decades, not to mention the last eight years specifically.
> don't think we can judge the progressive wing from the antagonistic media coverage and bilateral party disdain of them
No, we can judge by the actions and results. Police reform in New York was a failure. Education priorities in San Francisco were a failure. The entire activist-interest group orientation is broken.
> proactive work for less policing is not some sort of lunacy
It’s not. But the people who attempted it were lunatics.
Defunding the police is dumb. Rebuilding police departments from the ground up is not. Unfortunately the latter requires being realistic about the occurrence of crime and criminals in a population. (They’re not all victims of circumstance. And they can’t all be community organised into a sculpting job or whatever.)
With "the left" you mean the SF DA?