There is a persistent desire to suck the funds out of the police force budget and redirect the money to things the community values. This unlike occupy is a tangible goal and if people only elect people willing to give it to them it will happen regardless of what people outside of Seattle want.
I don't remember that being a consistent, clearly articulated goal. That's also orders of magnitude more difficult to accomplish than shifting some city budgets around.
Protests almost never have a "consistent, clearly articulated goal," because of the nature of protests. People protest a problem and there are sometimes hundreds of proposed solutions. Unfortunately, certain biased media outlets choose the most extreme offered solutions and highlight them to discredit the entire movement and ignore the problem. And "shifting some city budgets around" is not as easy as it sounds.
That's my prediction: they'll succeed in diverting tax funds from the police into social programs... and then three months later, the police budgets will be back where they started, but we'll be paying for the additional social programs, too. In a year, our taxes will go up, again, to pay for all of this.
That demand was not consistently communicated. My time at Occupy made it feel like it was basically against everything bad in society as believed by left/socialist/anarchists.
The Occupy demand messaging never really worked cause it was never nailed down to a simple single talking point. That this current movement can be simplified and understood as one demand, “abolish the police” seems related to the success of the movement.
The city is providing porta potties right now, as are local businesses and there are individually rented porta potties. Sanitation is much better than occupy right now.