I do not know the origin of 'Defund the Police' - but it is a Loser.

[qwlauren35]

33. Not the first time.

Of course, this is not the first Black-created protest slogan that has caused such debate. “Black Lives Matter” wasn’t the first either. Current debates around “Defund the Police” reminds me of an even older contested political slogan—Black Power.

On June 16, 1966, police in Greenwood, Mississippi, arrested Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee chairman Stokely Carmichael after a dispute over allowing participants in James Meredith’s March Against Fear to set up a campsite at a local school. After leaving jail, Carmichael declared in an electrifying speech, “What we gonna start sayin’ now is Black Power!” While many ideas associated with Black Power (i.e., racial pride and solidarity, self-determination, cultural integrity) had circulated among activists for decades, Carmichael’s call for Black Power launched a new debate about civil rights, Black politics, and liberation.

The response from critics was quick after Carmichael’s speech. Less than a month later, NAACP President Roy Wilkins denounced the slogan, calling it “antiwhite” and suggesting that it “leads to black death.” The goals of Black Power—and the strategies for achieving them—remained too vague for some. Black leftist Robert L. Allen remarked on its limitations, concluding, “revolutionary rhetoric is no substitute for a thorough analysis upon which a program can be constructed.” Martin Luther King Jr. found “Black Power” too militant. However, in an excerpt of his final book published in June 1967 in the New York Times, King argued for Black Americans to cultivate and exercise their collective power as workers, consumers, voters, and political leaders through massive civil disobedience—a clear engagement of Black Power ideas.

https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/summer-2020/defund-the-police-protest-slogans-and-the-terms-for-debate