By Martin Schram

Tribune News Service

If the justifiably enraged “Defund the Police” protesters and reformers didn’t exist, in Minneapolis and just about everywhere, President Donald Trump would’ve had to invent them.

These vehement anti-Trumpers have made themselves Trump’s best hope — maybe his only hope — of avoiding the re-election defeat he deserves.

Every time those well-intentioned progressive protesters or reformers are seen on TV demanding that we “defund” our police forces, here’s the main thing they are actually accomplishing: They are frightening the hell out of millions of family folks — Democrats, independents and Republicans — who have become offended by, and fed up with, Trump’s three-plus years of mean-spirited malperformance as president.

What the protesters and reformers fail to grasp is that every time they say “defund,” millions of Americans think it’s a code word for “disband.” Indeed, many reformers admit that “disband the police” is what they mean! So people rightly wonder: Does this mean when I hear a burglar and dial 911, no cops will come to save our family?

We are watching progressive protesters who desperately hope to defeat a president who once bragged that “I have the best words” — yet they are trying to do it with the worst words. So, instead of a budgeter’s “defund” or an anarchist’s “disband,” let me suggest a replacement that may be the protesters’ best words. Chant: “Remake the police.”

That’s what the reformers really want to accomplish — totally remake the police culture. Police have perhaps the toughest job in our violent world. We want and need them to be tough at times. But we also want them to be humane as they serve and protect us in this tough and often heartless world.

America’s most recent focus of this problem is, of course, the city of Minneapolis. Today it is the place the world knows not for its lakes and summer greenery but for a horrific, inhuman unforgettable visual: a policeman’s knee pressing the life out of the neck of a black man, George Floyd, who had committed no violent act against anyone.

The Minneapolis City Council has endorsed defunding the police department. But it hasn’t made it clear precisely what it is — and is not — talking about. On June 8, City Council President Lisa Bender went on CNN’s “Cuomo Prime Time,” but unfortunately was short of reassuring specifics and long on platitudes.

Host Chris Cuomo began by asking: “Are you really calling for the disbanding of the police department, meaning it goes away?” But the city council president began talking about the need to “start a yearlong conversation … reimagine what public safety looks like.” And then: “I think the idea of having a police-free future is very aspirational.” She added that she stands with people who “think of that as the goal.” A “police-free future?” Sleep well.

Trump is already locking, loading and weaponizing for target practice on this one. He may even want to start secretly funding the defunders. They may become his secret weapon.

As protests of police violence swept the nation following Floyd’s death, some turned violent —and police erupted in violence and abuses that became viral videos. In Buffalo, N.Y., police shoved a nonviolent 75-year-old man backward; his head smashed on the concrete, blood poured out his ear — yet police walked past his prone body and didn’t help. He was seriously injured and hospitalized.

Journalists lawfully doing their jobs sometimes became targets of police abuse. A Louisville, Ky., TV crew was shot by pepper bullets as a way of requesting that they move somewhere else. And on CNN, the world saw a surreal police-state moment played out in slow motion, as Minnesota state police surrounded CNN’s Omar Jimenez, while he was broadcasting live, cuffed his hands behind his back and took him, his cameraperson and producer to headquarters. The world saw him showing his credentials to the cops and asking where they wanted him to be standing. But the cops, never violent, kept silent. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz belatedly intervened, freed the journalists and apologized. That could only happen in a pathetically warped police culture — it must be remade.

And that brings us to one more thing that all these incidents of police abuses had in common: No fellow cops or police officials or political leaders intervened to immediately halt any of the incidents of police abuse that the world saw. Human tempers can flare when things get violent; but when one goes rogue, it should be the law that all other cops move immediately to halt the abuse and attend to the injured. Humanity and legality require nothing less.

In a week of police excesses and abuses, we never saw a police supervisor or fellow cop intervene to restore law and order. All are criminally complicit in the abuses they failed to halt.

Martin Schram, an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service, is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Reach him at martin.schram@gmail.com.