Repubs only latched onto “defund” because it was dropped in their laps like manna from heaven.

Bad sloganeering habits are evident among dems and repubs. This defund stuff coincided with a dramatic spike in crime that IMO mostly had nothing to do with the slogan, but it certainly enhanced the repubs’ opportunity to trash the dems with it.

I’m not enough of a law enforcement guy to get very specific, but I do think the first place to start is the ethos of nationwide police depts - too many have a warrior ethos, so they leave their station houses to do battle with enemies, instead of a guardian ethos, where they leave their station houses to protect and serve a community. And then from there I have no doubt we could find broad agreement about tasks currently falling to cops that should not be. And if we stepped back to view the big picture I think we would see that there are too many police shootings in this country period, and addressing that would go a long way.

Same holds with all the election bullshit. It’s not as though repubs don’t have potential points about holding future elections as remote and early voting catch on more and more - it’s just impossible to hear them through all the noise. And because it’s been all about a partisan effort to overturn a fully certified election result from the beginning, there is no collaboration; no open minds. Nobody’s trying to solve anything or even just identify pressing problems - it’s just about winning political wars, and all is fair in love and war. We got a lot of the latter and almost none of the former.