"DEFUND the Police." That's the slogan of the American protesters against the racist police brutality that's difficult to translate, and let alone interpret it equivocally. Still, it has recently been louder and more widespread.

There's a significant disagreement - among the journalists, politicians, activists, and the protesters themselves - about the correct meaning of this request. One thing is clear - defunding the police has become almost an official request of the protest movement Black Lives Matter. 

"Black Lives Matter means to defund the police," said the Black Lives Matter DC, the Washington subdivision of this movement, on its official Twitter account, addressing Mayor Emily Badger. 

"Yes, we mean literally abolish the police" 

When Jacob Frey, the Mayor of Minneapolis and a young, progressive democrat, refused to defund the police on a plenum of the Black Lives Matter movement, the crowd booed him out in a collective righteous rage tantrum. His exact answer to the question if he's going to withhold funds to the Minneapolis police department was: "I don't support the complete defunding of the Minneapolis police department." Following his response, he was booed with whistling, swearing, and chanting: "Shame! Shame!"

"Yes, we mean literally abolish the police," is the title of an article in the New York Times by Mariame Kaba, a radical left African American activist who has been advocating the abolition of, as she calls it, the American "prison-industrial complex" for years.

In the most prominent American newspaper's column, Kaba claims that the attempts to solve the problem of police brutality through liberal reforms, such as those advocated by the leading democrats, were unsuccessful in the past nearly a hundred years. 

"Enough. We can't reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police. There is not a single era in the United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people," Kaba writes, reminding that the police in the South emerged from the slave patrols which caught the runaway slaves, while in the North, the first municipal police departments helped quash labor strikes and riots. As a confirmation of an inability to introduce a useful reform, she lists a series of official investigations about police brutality, from the 1894 Lexow Committee in New York, 1931 Wickersham Committee during the prohibition, to 1967 Kerner Committee after major race riots. The conclusions and recommendations have been similar during the past decades, but the problems with police brutality and impunity have remained the same. 

What about rapists and other violent criminals? 

Kaba implicitly admits that crimes such as rape would' t be eradicated solely by social work and solving social issues. Still, she doesn't offer a constructive alternative to the police and prisons for such violent criminals. She simply answers with a rebuttal argument that even the current police-prison model doesn't penalize the majority of rapists.

Kaba rejects the argument about the safety the police offer as simply being a manipulation of concepts, since that the "safety," as she claims, is ensured by threats of arrest, violence, prison, and death for black people and other marginalized members of the American society. She advocates an alternative that includes larger investments in the needs of the society such as mental health, education, housing, poverty reduction, creating new workplaces, "community social workers" that intervene instead of the police and the "restorative justice" model, i.e., rehabilitation of offenders in terms of providing opportunities to undo the harm they did to the victims, instead of going to prison.

But Kaba offers the starting compromise to the moderate leftists and liberals who don't want to abolish the police - the reduction in the number of police officers and the reduction of the police funding in half. 

In the meantime, the Minneapolis city council has gone even farther and, contrary to the mayor Frey's wishes, but with the support of the two-thirds majority which it can use to bypass his veto, voted for disbanding of the city police, which would subsequently be replaced by "the new system of public safety."

Who to call when someone is breaking into a house in the middle of the night? 

Although they didn't offer any details, the city counsels said that they would be guided by expert studies and the local community's advice in working out the alternative for the police, bearing in mind the needs of the local community. Interestingly, when CNN reporter asked what should the citizens do if someone breaks into their house in the middle of the night, the Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender answered that she "knows that it comes from a place of privilege" because for the white people such as herself "the system does function," while for the black people, calling the police could mean the police brutality.

In an interview with NBC, the Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Alicia Garza gave quite an ambiguous answer about what defunding the police means - "investing in resources that our communities need" instead of the police. 

In an article for the Boston Review, Tracey Meares, an African American professor of law at Yale Law School and member of the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing, founded by Barack Obama, concluded that "the police work as we know it should be abolished before it could be transformed."

Despite that, many commentators and politicians closer to the mainstream, as well as many moderate protestors, interpret this request as simply a request for police reform.

Confusion about the slogan's meaning - the reduction of power and duties or abolition?

"The concept is that the role of the police can significantly shrink because they're not (anymore) responding to the homeless, or mental health calls, or arresting children in schools, or other situations where the best solution isn't someone showing up with a gun. It's an idea behind "defunding the police," if you really pay close attention," said the famous comedian and a host of a politically engaged evening show, John Oliver. 

Such a proposal sounds quite reasonable and constituted - the police power and funding are increasing in the USA, and the financing of psychiatric care, social work, and similar vital services are constantly reduced. At the same time, the police, which is dealing more and more with the mentally ill, drug addicts, and the homeless, and putting them into prisons, are provided with more and more equipment and weaponry, as well as the training that befits the army more than the ordinary police. 

Reshaping and deep restructuring of the police is a welcoming step forward to putting an end to unjustified, often completely reckless police brutality, especially towards black people and similar minorities.

We can frequently hear the news from the USA about the police harassing someone, over relatively innocent reasons, in houses, on the streets, in shops, or schools, just as to make things far worse, and sometimes kill a person. George Floyd, the death of which under the police officer's knee started mass protests in the USA and across the world, had been arrested because of a suspected counterfeit 20 dollar bill. Breonna Tyler was killed in her home because the plainclothes police officers filled her with bullet holes after literally breaking into her home under suspicion that drug dealers hide drugs there. Rayshard Brooks was killed while running away from the police officers and after grabbing an electro shocker out of their hands. The officers tried to arrest him because he had drunkenly fallen asleep in his car in front of a drive-through restaurant. 

Other countries will probably follow whatever America decides

Those and many other deaths of black or white people, or people of different races in America - a total of 1,000 per year - could have been avoided if the police weren't as easy on the trigger and didn't react with repression to every problematic situation. Of course, the same applies to brutal violence toward the protesters, who often behave very calmly. It's logical to expect that the abolition of the police, as such, would cause a dramatic rise in violent crime. Social workers and psychiatrists cannot and don't have the capacity to protect the citizens from murderers, burglars, rapists, and other criminals.

The protests against racism have quickly gone global, suggesting that even the initiative for abolishing the police could soon also go global. And if this request really gets accepted, the governments of other western countries will also be under pressure to initiate such a dangerous experiment. Thus, this discussion isn't something that concerns only the Americans, black or white people. And it's up to those who adopt the slogan to unambiguously explain the meaning of it. If they really want to abolish the police, it's up to them to think of ways to ensure the safety of living, physical integrity, and citizens' property, which is the primary duty of any country.