On Wednesday morning, former President Barack Obama appeared on Snap Original Good Luck America,

which is an interview program on Snapchat, and thus a proper setting to chasten the young.

If you believe, as I do, that we should be able to reform the criminal justice system

so that it's not biased and treats everybody fairly.

I guess you can use a snappy slogan like defund the police, but you know you've lost a big

audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you're actually going

to get the changes you want done.

When they defunds the police and abolish the police idea first emerged this summer,

some politicians immediately sought to water it down. Reinterpreting abolition is just another go

at reform. Here's New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. When they're saying defund the police,

what are they saying? They're saying we want fundamental

basic change when it comes to policing. And they're right. Our state legislative packages

will do that. But I also believe you'll see that in every police department that is now

operating. They understand they're operating in a different reality

with different perceptions and different mandates.

So I think you will see a shift all across police departments.

But no, its proponents mean business,

and the business did not just open in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd last

spring. To understand how we got to this particular demand, we have to go back to September

1998, where 3,500 anti-prison academics and activists met at a conference called critical resistance beyond the prison industrial complex

convened to strategize and reignite a long-simmering movement to abolish prison and the police.

We want to talk this weekend about radical strategies that help to alleviate the misery and the pain.

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