I'm not from US and when I see people claim for abolition of police I can only imagine the world they live in, completely disconnected from reality.
Seriously, abolishing police? Is this some kind of demolition-man-like future?
Then please explain why abolition of a basic public service would lead to better living conditions. Would you like to abolish water service or the army too?
You know, you can go and read why they advocate for that position. You can do more than just imagine--more than just imprinting your own biases onto their position. It's just lazy.
> Well, we gave them the chance to create their own utopia in the CHAZ area and that became another stunning failure.
I heard that during its existence, the six blocks of CHAZ were by capita the most dangerous place in the world, exceeding anywhere in South America or the Middle East.
Is abolishing the police primarily an actual sub-movement or is it primarily a straw-man?
"De-fund the police," as I've heard explained from people who actually claim to hold the belief, is about taxpayers being very generous when funding police and very stingy when funding education, infrastructure, and social programs. The idea is that the next marginal dollar might not best be spent on the police, even though taxpayers following historical trends would overwhelmingly vote to spend it there.
I'm no social scientist, but I've certainly noticed that in the inner city the police always seem to have freshly painted, frequently-washed, current-year cars, freshly paved and remodeled offices with new signs and landscaping, new uniforms, and so on, while the food bank and the school are decrepit and run-down. The one time I bothered to look up salaries, they were, uhhh, entirely in-line with those outer appearances. On the basis of this purely personal and anecdotal evidence, I would tentatively support such proposals.
Visiting San Francisco and seeing signs in every parking lot warning you to keep your valuables out-of-sight when parked and then learning that apparently they've decided to not punish crimes with damage below $1000, resulting in a predictable crime wave, makes me think that some part of the "de-fund the police" movement actually does want to get rid of the police, though.
I haven't been paying enough attention to figure out how large these relative sub-groups are. Legitimately, I mean -- obviously if you listen to conservative media you'll get the impression that the crazies are the majority, while if you listen to liberal media you'll get the impression that they're a tiny minority -- I just haven't done the homework to make up my mind as to who's right.
Either way, I'll give a close reading to any proposals they manage to get on to the ballot.
If your reality were getting stopped and frisked statistically more because of your color or pulled over more for “looking suspicious”, your viewpoint might change. There have been plenty of cases where Black men were “suspiciously” going into their own homes.
But if that one time they are against you they short you in the back seven times, suffocate you for nine minutes, or arrest you on trumped up charges, it doesn’t really balance out does it?
That’s about like an abused spouse. “He doesn’t always beat me”.
Did you read the article? Or forget the title of this thread?
Anecdotes aside, there doesn't seem to be a significant difference between races on their opinions of police (and whether they want more or less of them in their neighborhoods).
Roughly seven-in-ten white Americans (72%) say police officers treat racial and ethnic groups equally at least some of the time. By way of comparison, half of Hispanics and just 33% of black adults say the same
That doesn't mean 66% of black adults want to defund the police.
I'm sure they, along with many others, want changes in police behavior and improved accountability, but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with funding (or "abolishing" as the root of this thread wondered about).
there doesn't seem to be a significant difference between races on their opinions of police
I'm sure they, along with many others, want changes in police behavior and improved accountability,
Is “improved accountability” a nice way to say “stop shooting and beating unarmed Black people” or “stop pulling over Black people in neighborhoods where they ‘don’t look like they belong’”?
I'm a black American and I've been pulled over twice here in Japan (in the past 5 years) for what I concluded was basically "Driving While Black". I still think "Abolish/defund the police" are terrible slogans and equally terrible policy positions to take. But I continue to live in Japan because I know that the police here aren't inclined to put a bullet in my ass either. I like the Japanese "koban" model for deploying police forces. I also recognize that the overall baseline level of violence, and the proliferation of firearms, presents a vastly different force protection situation for urban American police than it does for their Japanese counterparts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dban
There's a ton of problems I have law enforcement in the US, and the bulk of it boils down to terrible screening of personnel and inappropriate training. Fixing both of those issues will require more funding, not less. Better psychological screening (to eliminate sociopaths), higher pay (to retain quality personnel, and be able to rotate people off the streets more frequently), longer training and with different curriculum (stop learning tactics from Israeli counter-insurgency personnel), etc...
Come to America, experience American police when you get a chance. My university's (an also-ran regional institution) police force got a million dollar's worth of military surplus!
“Abolish the police” isn't “abolish law enforcement” or even “abolish armed law enforcement”, but “abolish the centralize all-purpose paramilitart law-enforcement agencies that dominate local law enforcement (and, often, more than that, up to and sometimes including local politics) throughout the US. Its a call to radically redesign local government and community services and redesign how law enforcement fits into that, because of the perception not only that the current model is broken, but that decades of pouring money into reforms of police within the current model in response to problems has exacerbate the problems by draining resources from other priorities and forcing the police to expand the scope of their responsibility further out of the scope of their competency. Reform within the existing basic model being viewed as a failure leaves seeking a different model.
It’s truly amazing. You must be thinking, people can’t possibly be this dumb. Unfortunately it’s true. Marxism is alive and well. Anarchists in west coast cities have been emboldened by the riots. The whole movement is a combination of the painfully naive and criminals.
People keep jumping in to say “defund doesn’t mean defund” or “abolish doesn’t mean abolish”, but they really do mean it literally. They also chant “all cops are bastards”.
This poll is either disingenuous or misguided - what percent of black Americans want better social services?
The call the defund the police doesn’t end with taking money from the police, the goal is to be able to provide more specific services using other departments outside of law enforcement.
Because the call to "defund the police" has been referenced implying it meant "get rid of police" and do nothing else? That's the whole pole... it's not implied that there will be other services provided to go along with the reduction in standard policing.
The whole "defund the police" movement feels very much in line with the "Luxury beliefs" [1] idea that has been floating around for the past year or so.
> The whole "defund the police" movement feels very much in line with the "Luxury beliefs"
Why do you believe this? It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
The net effect of people hearing "Black Lives Matter protesters clashed with police again last night" on the news for an entire summer is going to be a giant step backwards for whatever BLM is actually trying to achieve.
That is true whether or not the riots have actually been geographically widespread.
I'm an American and have only seen the police rioting. Defunding the police is the most reasonable option I have heard in my lifetime. Seems like the perfect solution, there is nothing bad to say about it, it's opponents are left to make up "widespread rioting".
> I'm an American and have only seen the police rioting
I'm an American. I can't believe you can say that with a straight face. As soon as you say that ONLY the police are doing something wrong means you have an understanding of the situation that no facts will fix.
I mean I was targeted. By personally I meant that I had that personal experience. It was as part of a group - the cops tend to use "collective punishment" when it comes to protests, after all.
The use of tear gas is the use of a chemical weapon and a war crime, but when you turn it against civilians in your own country we give it a pass.
So you weren't personally targeted. In what way were you targeted? Were you doing nothing to arouse police attention? I think most first world countries have a gas they can use for riot control. Are you insisting that most first world countries are regularly engaging in what you would call war crimes... that are worse than other countries?
I think I've clarified what I meant. I was targeted. I can't specify the exact degree to which anyone was skipped over to get to me.
> In what way were you targeted?
First time, it was indiscriminate use of teargas. Second time, indiscriminate use of teargas and a flashbang shot at my feet.
> Were you doing nothing to arouse police attention?
I was standing in a protest.
> I think most first world countries have a gas they can use for riot control. Are you insisting that most first world countries are regularly engaging in what you would call war crimes... that are worse than other countries?
It would be a war crime if it were a foreign military force using it against the exact same crowd, but not if it's cops. War crimes have a way of being selectively (un)enforced when it comes to those in power, in any case.
Police are fairly atrocious in most countries, so I don't think there's much point in trying to figure out exactly where I'd rank the police in the US. It wouldn't make it right if it were average or not.
You've done it poorly. You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected. And you've given two examples of them shooting indiscriminately. So no, they didn't personally target you.
The other commenter seemed to understand well enough. Maybe instead of playing a blame game you could accept my clarification and move on?
> You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected.
And I never claimed to.
> And you've given two examples of them shooting indiscriminately. So no, they didn't personally target you.
The second example was closer to me than anyone else and I was at the rear of the crowd.
I don't know how productive it is for me to keep telling you what I mean by saying I was personally targeted. But okay, I'll try again with the same substitution: I had a first-hand experience being targeted by police with chemical and explosive weapons.
I'm really still missing your clarification... I'm not really sure what game blame you think I'm playing?
> You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected.
> And I never claimed to.
AND YET 2 SENTENCES LATER......
>I don't know how productive it is for me to keep telling you what I mean by saying I was personally targeted. But okay, I'll try again with the same substitution: I had a first-hand experience being targeted by police with chemical and explosive weapons.
You are misunderstanding what they meant by "personally." They don't mean they were singled out. They mean it was a first-hand experience. As in "I thanked him personally for the gift." This is the primary definition of personally
your own definition relies on a 1 to 1 communication between people. so you're wrong right? I don't personally thank Rotary International for all their hard work.
"I personally cursed the cop for pepper spraying me"
Just that one cop huh? They're literally saying all the cops targeted them.
How is that better? In what world is police officers dosing large groups of protestors acceptable?
Give it enough years, and people will talk about the brave protestors of 2020. But like all "brave protests" of the past, today they should be supported, and are not.
In the perfectly reasonable world where the protest was escalated by rioters, anarchists, and arsonists (you know, like every protest in portland, since ever) and the police issue a dispersal order as a response to buildings on fire and violent attacks. Then they issue 5 more. Then they announce it on twitter. There is NO other way to deal with a riot. The police are vastly outnumbered and have very few tools to do their job. Well there is another way, but it’s far worse.
Nothing about these “protests” after dark is brave. It’s shameful and cowardly. So is the response from politicians.
In SEA, that's not how it's worked. The police violence has come before the announcements. Before any serious property damage (not that property damage justifies collective punishment or chemical weapons).
Have you been to the protests in PDX? Seen the cops hurting people for standing in a protest?
Absolute nonsense. I was there, repeatedly. They shot first and either then made an announcement or never made one.
Example: they announced a curfew via text a few minutes before it went into effect. Many didn't get this because they didn't have their phones with them. Tear gas and flashbangs had already been deployed with zero warnings from police.
It is not helpful or okay to assert such falsehoods with confidence.
No, it's not. I did a search for the string "lawnchair_larry" on this, the second page (i.e. the low-quality page) of comments on this story. It shows up 15 times. Then I went to the third page (i.e. the really low-quality page), opened all the hidden "[more]" subthreads, searched again, and found the string another 10 times. (Nothing showed up on the first page!) You have a lot to say. I read quite a few of these excretions, and found nothing but prejudice, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and unwarranted fear. You should better educate yourself about the situation in this nation and you should be a better person. The fact that you feel more empathy for abusive white cops than for their minority victims is a fact about you, not about the world.
Ok, I’ll bite. It’s racist, by the way, to point out the cops race. So that tells us a little about you.
I challenge you to show me a single example of:
1) A conspiracy theory
2) Prejudice
3) Misinformation
4) Racism
5) Feeling more empathy for abusive cops (of any race) than their victims (of any race).
All my info is either from primary sources, actual data, documentation, or first hand knowledge, not news or blogs, so no need to get cute with the snark. Try to have an adult discussion?
No one relevant agrees with your tired attempt to redefine the word "racist". By the way like 90% of all the white Americans I've ever met I certainly have done and said racist things. It isn't the end of the world, to admit that. Apologize and move on. Don't persist in error.
I can't believe you've trolled me into this. Twenty minutes of my life, down the drain:
The first one is literally on the BLM website. Not a conspiracy theory. Go read it.
Second one said Seattle’s lost their black female police chief. Basic fact, not a conspiracy theory.
Third one also contains no conspiracy theory.
3 strikes, you’re out. I assume the rest are more links of me not saying anything close to what you purport. Which I knew, because I didn’t say those things.
You were in both portland and seattle? have you considered your correlation to madness? Is it a 100% correlation? I'm sorry, but are you saying protesters didn't have their phones on them? As opposed to literally every other protester who is filming every unfortunate human interaction at every protest?
1. In the sense that I used the term, I had the personal experience of being targeted. Attempting to browbeat me with your misapprehension is not going to work.
2. You're now editorializing my experience of which you have no knowledge, calling it a mob. Oh my. Please refrain from using your imagination regarding my experiences.
I don't think you really understand the meaning of the words "I had the personal experience of being targeted." Mostly because you seem to ignore the words you use. Especially the word "targeted." Also because you could eliminate the word "personally" and you'd be more correct. But really, you can't just be in the middle of a protesting mob and then they get tear gassed and then say "HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO ME AND ONLY ME?!"
>2. You're now editorializing my experience of which you have no knowledge, calling it a mob. Oh my. Please refrain from using your imagination regarding my experiences.
I think that's a lesson you could learn from regarding other people as well. It seems like a right you reserve just for you.
My definition doesn't imply communication between people or any interaction at all. It just means literally physically present for something.
"After a long solo hike, the researcher was able to personally see the inside of a volcano." There is only one person in that story. No 1:1 communication. It just means the person was there for the thing. This is how personally was used in the comment.
"Personal in this sense clearly means 1:1." Why is that clear? The commenter said they meant the other definition. Wouldn't they know what they meant better than you do?
The scare words really kill your credibility. It’s tear gas and pepper spray, not mustard gas. Stop trying to manufacture an oppressed victim narrative. We can call a water cannon a chemical weapon too.
> The scare words really kill your credibility. It’s tear gas and pepper spray, not mustard gas.
If it were a foreign military doing the exact same action to the exact same people, it would be a war crime. There are serious impacts from using tear gas, including poorly-understood hormonal impacts to women, particularly pregnant women.
> Stop trying to manufacture an oppressed victim narrative.
I haven't manufactured anything, these are things that have been happening for three months via aggressive, proactive police action. You can go see it for yourself by attending a protest at a major city. Or you can review the countless videos. Or you can listen to people (like me) who were there.
> We can call a water cannon a chemical weapon too.
No we can't. Water cannons are also unacceptable in these situations, however. People like to act like these weapons are relatively harmless, but people have been disabled, nearly killed, or straight-up killed with them.
I'm just trying to put GP's dubious numbers in their proper context. Of those 1000, how many would you estimate are killed without reasonable cause? Could it be 30? 300? 970? We shouldn't turn off our brains just because somebody said someone died. USA society is fine with the carnage on the highway and throughout the Middle East; I think we can deal with a tiny amount of carnage in order to improve.
That list includes deaths caused by law enforcement and death of rioters killed by people trying to protect themselves from the rioters as well.
There are some additional deaths by the rioters that are not in the list though but that does provide a decent synopsis of some of the deaths.
That usually means that the police used fairly extreme violence and chemical weapons on protesters and received maybe a handful of water bottles thrown at them after doing so.
Your news sources have an agenda and tend to get these things wrong. Go to a protest and see for yourself if you want to viscerally watch them lie in real time.
It's dragged on to the point that I fully expect support to start dropping precipitously. Especially as the protests have become continuously more destructive riots.
> A non trivial number of the protesters are advocating for complete elimination of the police though.
This categorically isn't defunding police, this is police abolition, and getting them confused is likely why you think it's a luxury belief because I fail to see what's luxurious about getting tear gassed every Friday/Saturday night or having the cops stand aside letting groups like the Proud Boys brutalize protestors and journalists. There's nothing luxurious about getting tear gassed for 3 months straight, it's a genuine struggle.
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which specific politics you support or abhor. If you'd like to understand why, there are extensive past explanations at these links. (If you or anyone reads those explanations and still has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.)
SPD routinely started firing into crowds prior to making any such announcements, including the first time I was hit. The second time, they announced it and then immediately started firing at the crowd.
Announcing an unlawful assembly is not carte blanche to dole out collective punishment or violence, either.
There's already lawsuits ongoing. They won't go anywhere in terms of reforms because individual cops are virtually always indemnified, difficult to identify in these situations (many covered their badge numbers and nametags with tape), and the city will absorb the cost without the department taking any real hits.
Perception is all that matters, and a large chunk of the country follows conservative media.
Unfortunately the country is doing a great job of lining up behind their preferred propaganda outlets rather than looking for truth. This is true for both Liberals and Conservatives.
You were the one who brought it up to support your argument. Your argument doesn't seem to rest on what the public preception is but in what is actually happening.
So yes i would say the veracity of the statement is relavent here.
The point of disbanding the Minneapolis Police Department (your 3rd link) is to work around police protections like minimum force size and union protections that are codified in the city's charter. The plan is to remove and replace, not just remove [0].
As for the other two - two is not a "non trivial number" regardless of who gives them a platform. This YouGov poll [1] shows 11% support (and ~20% support among blacks and hispanics) for abolishing the police as of June, which is a non trivial number. But framing it as a yes/no question loses a lot of granularity - I bet most of those people would advocate replacing the current police force with something that materially resembles a (more community-based, less militarized) police force.
Sure, I don't disagree. The implication though was that this was a story mainly/entirely coming out of so-called conservative media, so I posted a small sampling of links from other places.
If the movement were "Demilitarize the police", then yes, that is absolutely something I could be in favor of.
As it stands, "Defund the police" is to me a weasel word version of "Abolish the police" and I honestly do think people are just being coy when they claim not to see that.
Most people using the word "defund" mean to reduce the level of funding for police and spend more on other social services. One argument is that police are not well equipped to provide services to people who are having a mental health, relationship, or substance abuse crisis and not actively doing violence. A mental health nurse or social worker might be a more appropriate first responder in situations that are not primarily characterized by violence.
There are a small but significant number of people in the current protests calling for policing as we know it to be abolished; they don't beat around the bush about it. The phrase "abolish the police" has 2.5 million google hits, a NYT op-ed, and a Wikipedia article.
Maybe they should carry signs that read “Fund social services” instead. The entire country has been through a traumatic event, coming at the heals of a massive opioid epidemic, I’m pretty sure it would be a unifying message that every American would support unequivocally.
Notably these funds don’t need to come at the expense of police funding.
We just dumped something like $5 trillion into a fire pit called COVID. There’s no lack of emergency funding for these programs if people demanded it.
Defund also means balkanization of police duties. The police spend about 5% of their time on violent crime. They're also highly resistant to reforms and oversight. If we reduced police budgets by 80%, restricting their duties to those we consider necessary police work, they would be much smaller and easier to manage. The excess budget could go both to funding social services and to paying social workers, etc to do the other jobs that police currently do (and do badly).
Why fret so much over the language though, that's what I don't understand. I think most people, of any POV, would agree it's not the best phrase given that without explanation it means what a small minority wants. Move past it, to the issue.
They've achieved many, though far from all, of their goals in various municipalities.
Why do you believe that a PR campaign is the only protest of value?
> The way you phrased it, the protests are nothing more than tantrums by oversized children.
That is in no way implied from how I phrased it. Pain and weariness from racialized murders and intimidation by cops is not a childish tantrum and I hope you never have to endure that pain yourself. I do hope that you find the empathy to consider their position.
You say the protests have achieved their goals. To me, that means they are an organized campaign of some sort.
The fact is, BLM is a national organization with nearly universal name recognition at this point. They have funding. They have PR teams. They are directing messaging.
And the fact remains that I think "Defund the Police" is terrible messaging.
> Please treat them like people.
As I said at the beginning, I think we're talking past each other.
I never meant to dehumanize the protesters.
The main point I am trying to make is that as someone with no horse in this race (i.e. I am neither pro-BLM nor pro-police) if I were forced to pick a side on the issue based on my current view of what is and has happened over the past couple months, I would come down on the side of the police. I'd rather just stay out of it.
All this said, as much as I think our politics differ, I really do respect the way you've responded to people in this thread, and I hope there are more people like you among the protesters because then maybe you've got an actual shot at achieving your goals.
> You say the protests have achieved their goals. To me, that means they are an organized campaign of some sort.
As in there are various demands by various groups and you can identify the core where they overlap.
> The fact is, BLM is a national organization with nearly universal name recognition at this point. They have funding. They have PR teams. They are directing messaging.
BLM is decentralized. They don't have most of that.
> And the fact remains that I think "Defund the Police" is terrible messaging.
Okay. But it's not PR. It's not some campaign crafted by an overpaid consultant. It's a decentralized protest movement. I don't want it to be that, either. That's part of the problem in politics - caring far too much about this kind of thing. Focus on the realities, the people dying. The violent and aggressive and frequently racist police.
> > Please treat them like people.
> As I said at the beginning, I think we're talking past each other.
I think the attempt to infantilize was nearly dehumanizing.
> I never meant to dehumanize the protesters.
Then stop calling protests in response to murders by police a tantrum by oversized children.
> The main point I am trying to make is that as someone with no horse in this race (i.e. I am neither pro-BLM nor pro-police)
We all have a horse in this race. We live together in a society that has some level of control over things like policing, equity, violence, crime, poverty. The "neutral" position is implicit support for the status quo, much as being a "moderate" in politics indicates the same.
> if I were forced to pick a side on the issue based on my current view of what is and has happened over the past couple months, I would come down on the side of the police. I'd rather just stay out of it.
As I said before, ha.
> All this said, as much as I think our politics differ, I really do respect the way you've responded to people in this thread, and I hope there are more people like you among the protesters because then maybe you've got an actual shot at achieving your goals.
The vast majority of people in the protests are like me. You should go to one.
There is a real risk in politics that people mean literally what they are saying.
There is a situation where a group of people have together under the slogan "defund the police". There is a very high risk that if they get the power to do something they will, literally and only, defund the police.
Not many people are reading policy documents. The point of unity in politics is usually the literal meaning of the words being used. Secret signals of "really we meant this other thing" tend not to work.
Defund can easily mean abolish; there isn't really a feasible way to run a police force if they can't pay salaries. It is a literal reading of the phrase and in line with what some (hopefully a tiny minority) of protesters have been asking for.
> It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
While that sounds great on paper, nothing the schools do is going to make a difference if the family support at home isn't there. You can't just throw money at the problem to make it better.
Anecdotal, but my sister used to work as a teacher & reading specialist in poorer areas. Per my last conversation with her on this topic, she said maybe 20% of the kids have a solid backing from family for education. The rest she had interacted with for one reason or another were a mix of parents who told her it was her job to teach and they wouldn't do that at home; another group of parents that were too drunk/drugged out to even answer the phone or call back; and another that would just swear at her for bothering them at home. All of her co-workers had similar accounts of this happening.
Kids that did want to learn in class were bullied for "acting white" and there were physical fights occurring weekly. She didn't teach high school, she taught 4/5th grade.
For us to make any progress with poorer schools there needs to be a community focus on education, having respect for each other, and having respect for the law. If you grow up for 18 years in an environment without those then nothing matters long term and we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.
It is sad to see this downvoted, I know several people who were outcasts for "acting white" by trying hard in school (their words, not mine).
The issue really isn't about race though, it is about poverty and culture. I know a kindergarten teacher from a very rural, very white, very poor school district who was cussed out by one of her 5 year old students. The parents don't care, and it shows in the students' progression through school and young adulthood. If parents show up at all, it is to yell at teachers for giving their children bad grades or any sort of discipline.
Of course, putting any sort of onus on the parents gets talked down, as it undermines the argument that things will magically get better if only we threw more money at the problem... because the problem isn't the school or the teachers at all.
What responsibility do we have as a nation to reconcile our past actions that caused unmeasurable suffering for untold millions of people? Have we no courage, no sense of moral obligation to make things right?
The culture of black communities dealing with poverty and crime that you refer to didn't come from nowhere. It was not simply imported from 17th century Africa, in the way that the apple pie was brought over from England. It is a product of a people who were bravely struggling and striving to cope in the worst possible circumstances.
Brutally enslaved for more than 200 years, their literal chains finally removed, they continued to be viciously abused and systematically and savagely oppressed throughout the following century. They weren't event treated as fully human by the federal law until 2 generations ago. Only two generations! Many states had incredibly racist and oppressive laws even more recently than that. The most cursory research reveals an utterly depraved history. One simple and terrible example is redlining, which unfortunately was occurring even after the civil rights act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining).
We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused. It is impossible to fully mend what we have broken, but we damn well better try.
> We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused.
25% percent of the US’s population as a nation is 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, a substantial portion of which arrived after 1965 because desegregation and immigration reforms coincide. [1] Whatever “we” you might be thinking, it risks running an egocentric fallacy to assume it expands to the entirety of the US population.
Most people who come to US are escaping horrid conditions of their home countries (a good portion of which is not unrelated to US foreign policy).
Most immigration is not a luxurious, touristic affair but comes out of necessity. There are even people who would consider immigrations as voluntarily getting themselves colonized, coming here for the country to extract their resources in exchange of a promise of better life circumstances. We certainly extract more out of immigrants economically, academically, psychologically, who were raised and educated elsewhere, who are incentivized to work very hard or go back, who also suffer mentally from this process.
Requiring them to pitch in assuming they had perfect information and made a completely free preference is at best ignorant. Of course it is the honorable thing to answer the suffering of fellow humans, but that goes both ways, and thinking that that problem is always the one and only problem of this world is plain, pure narcissism.
Also you say this as though the US is the only country that had slaves. Chattel slavery was (unfortunately) the predominate form of labor in the entire world for centuries. The US was the 3rd to last country in the Americas to abolish it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
Other societies in the world have largely decided that we’re better off just burying the hatchet.
That’s rather presumptuous of you. I never said the solution is reparations. I’m not sure what the solution is. I have some ideas, but obviously it is a non-trivial problem.
We aren’t talking about other countries. I’m familiar with history. I know many terrible things have happened.
You're right — s/reparations/<responsibility [...] to reconcile our past actions that caused unmeasurable suffering for untold millions of people? >.
Whatever it may be, I want no part of it. To assume that all immigrants, who today represent 25% of Americans, are willing to sign onto policy positions that are focused on correcting (distant) past wrongs as opposed to solving the problems we have TODAY — is what I'm calling presumptuous.
I think we are still miscommunicating. I don’t want to ignore present day problems and solely focus on some sort of atonement for past wrongs. We should fix current day problems with a proper understanding of how they can be, taking ownership of our failures as a nation.
Radical delegitimization of the nuclear family in the late 60’s and early 70’s got intertwined with the black power movement which essentially argued that single mother’s are better off than married. They have more agency and the nuclear family is a patriarchal tool of male supremacy. Then taken further into the black power movement with aid of that eras new feminism, it was argued that the nuclear family is a white European ideal and a tool of oppression.
So then the problem became one of the state not doing enough to fund the single mother family. Not only accepting this but making it an ideal.
Read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s research from the early 1960’s that could have been a corner stone of the civil rights movement. But then it wasn’t.
Anyways this rejection of the traditional family structure is essentially what triggered the family values movement on the right in the late 70’s and early 1980’s.
Interestingly as the legitimization of single mothers became more and more mainstream we continued to see black kids grow up in entrenched poverty as dropout rates and criminal activity climbed year over year for these kids compared to previous generations.
So now the solution is “reparations”. Of course it wasn’t the radical ideas of middle class radicals being experimented on black people that has caused this inescapable spiral. It’s that we need to give money to single mothers and we are here because we simply haven’t given enough.
Some misguided people will say blacks did better before the Civil Rights Act. But they are wrong not in that the Civil Rights Act was bad - it is good - mandatory to be sure. It’s that during this same era we rejected rigorous research and science for so called theories that claimed the 2-parent family was a tool of oppression. This got interlaced into the black power movement and we saw the destruction of the black family and the resulting mess we are in today.
It goes all the way back to The Communist Manifesto. These are old ideas that have just been recast through a new lens. Conflict Theory just takes on new forms from one based on class (made sense at the time) to one based on so called “identity” which makes sense in a multicultural country.
In the end these ideas are illiberal and it is my hope they wither away after enough people are able to look past the facade and the tyrannical machinery is exposed. And then maybe some of these orgs can grow into something that’s actually useful.
We can argue about the marginal benefit of investing in late-stage interventions, but it's certainly doing more than cops buying Humvees and LARPING as tacticool warriors.
Generally armored vehicles police get as surplus are sold at basically the price of gas / transportation to get them to their destination. The feds just want them off their books. That compared to the price of a new Lenco Bearcat is hundreds of thousands of dollars less for a more capable vehicle.
I have never once seen those vehicles used in regular law enforcement duties such as traffic stops.
They are used in exceptional cases like active shooter situations, hostage / barricaded / swat scenarios, natural disasters like flooding due to their high clearance, and the occasional parade or community day to let kids play in the big truck. In all, they are a defensive vehicle with no weapons that costs the department very little and has a wide range of uses if the shit hits the fan.
I really don't get the outrage of them other than the optics of it "being from the military" and idiots calling them "tanks". If there are specific bad uses of police force those are great to call out, but the utility of the vehicle which is basically free for a real world need is a no brainer.
My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.
They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things. People standing around chanting. Then they wait until curfew is over, maybe declare the assembly unlawful, and start using chemical weapons and intimidation on the crowd.
> rock-throwing protesters versus police officers wearing body armor and gas masks, carrying ballistic shields and lobbing flash grenades.
So regular riot control equipment in 95% of the world...
The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.
> My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.
How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization? I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose. They also still use fire hoses in many other countries which we stopped doing in the 60s due to the bad optics of them during the racial tension.
> They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things.
Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so. Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too. But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
> So regular riot control equipment in 95% of the world...
Yes, militarization of the police is normalized in many countries. That doesn't make it acceptable. They're trigger-happy and violent. It's part of the culture.
> The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.
Do you believe that there needs to be a line of officers wielding rifles behind a line of riot cops with flashbangs and tear gas launchers (used liberally and indiscriminately) behind a line of shielded riot cops grabbing things from protesters and generally trying to provoke a reaction? These things all work in tandem, in this context. That line of cops is part of their show of force, as they take anti-cop protests very personally. It's a form of intimidation and escalation.
> How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization?
Half of that is literally military equipment and US police departments are frequently under a "warrior" mindset. It's been heavily exported to various different PDs. They treat confrontations as a fight between them and the "bad guys", not public safety or law enforcement. Having a bunch of military or tacticool gear is part of that mindset.
> I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose.
Normalization is not the same as moral or acceptable. Plus, this isn't quite a consistent take when it comes to these kinds of things. When Soviet bloc countries used far less serious responses to color revolutions, they were decried as totalitarian, antidemocratic monsters. But we do worse here and it's just normal business as usual.
And those "crowd control" agents are chemical weapons, explosives, and "less lethal" weapons causing permanent disability and injury. I watched a woman get shot with a grenade (either flashbang or teargas) and she went into cardiac arrest, only living because medics rushed her to the hospital. She was forward but still 30 feet from any officers. She was shot straight in the chest. She was just standing there and yelling.
> Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so.
They absolutely are not. It's a form of escalation and the cops have frequently provoked these responses with theses "shows of force".
> Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too.
The cops aren't trying to stop people from burning down communities. They don't actually do that, they don't deescalate, they don't actually even defend the private property (which is usually much of their function) so much as blast through and hurt people indiscriminately.
> But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
I'm very familiar with their tactics, they used them against me.
Are you familiar with the Rodney King riots, or the national wave in the late 60s? You seem to be presuming that large groups of angry protesters will never start trying to kill people, that this isn't even a problem the police need to plan for. And I'm just not sure that's true.
You don't need to militarize the police in order to have a riot response. The warrior mentality is toxic and actually exacerbates the problem.
In every protest I went to where things escalated, it was the police doing the primary escalation. Bull rushing the crowd. Trying to grab things from the crowd. Shooting teargas and OC gas and flashbangs into the crowd prior to even making any announcements. Bicycle cops hitting passersby with their bicycles. A kid got maced.
None of this requires the straw man that protests never turn into riots.
But that's the goal! When the police are worried the crowd might escalate, they preemptive action to end the situation before it can happen, because crowd-initiated escalations are much more destructive and deadly. Once protesters are shooting at people it's too late to step in.
This is incoherent. Beating peaceful protesters doesn't serve the goal of deescalation. Every single time, it resulted in more anger and frustration. Water bottles being thrown.
> When the police are worried the crowd might escalate, they preemptive action to end the situation before it can happen, because crowd-initiated escalations are much more destructive and deadly.
End the situation? It escalated every single time, exactly how you'd expect. Cops becoming aggressive and violent against protesters is not going to cool any heads. They teargassed kids, you know. In what world is that considered a way to "end the situation"?
> Once protesters are shooting at people it's too late to step in.
This is part of that dangerous warrior mentality, treating every group like an immediate existential threat that must be neutralized with violence based on nothing but speculation.
If you're justifying police violence and aggression based on what you imagine might happen, you're part of the problem.
We've just circled back around. You seem to be saying that groups of protesters are never threats, and I don't agree; it seems to me that once they start breaking random things, there's a serious and unacceptable risk they'll start killing people.
Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.
> We've just circled back around. You seem to be saying that groups of protesters are never threats
I've never said this.
> and I don't agree; it seems to me that once they start breaking random things, there's a serious and unacceptable risk they'll start killing people.
That is absurd. Damaging property is nothing like hurting people. In fact, alleging that the two are comparable is somewhat dehumanizing, as it's used to justify hurting people over damage to things. Things* should not have any level of parity with human life, particularly things like broken windows.
> Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.
Last time, you said the police could preemptively assume a protest will hurt people and start engaging in the violence we've been talking about. Now there's the good protester / bad rioter dichotomy, something often decried by civil rights leaders because it was the rallying cry of segregationists. That and outside agitators.
I was gassed and flashbanged in a protest where we were holding our hands up and chanting, "hands up, don't shoot".
I would add that the LA Bank Shootout provided a lot of justification for effective firepower. Two men pretty much pinned down several law enforcement organizations due to superior firepower.
If you are going to post an article to support your argument, you might want to make sure it actually supports your argument.
Police don't pay for surplus military gear, the DoD offers it for free. Police only have to pay for shipping. It has been this way since the program was created in 1988.
The police often pay for shipping, maintenance, and kitting out the equipment. They might receive a free stripped-down M16, but they still use their own budgets to make it tacticool. Just an optic and light run $1k or so.
Look into studies that evaluate self-reported crimes or violence, etc. Not police stats. Police stats are highly unreliable for drawing these kinds of conclusions a lot of reasons before you even consider malevolence or corruption.
Nearly all crimes that are policed are crimes of poverty. Rather than focusing so thoroughly on punitive measures, it is far better for everyone to focus on the root causes.
>...we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.
Poverty. That's the root issue. But it's cheaper to blame the poverty on bad additudes and poor choices rather than acknowledge the causality goes in the other direction and pony up the cash for programs to break the cycle of poverty.
Not only is that a copout and demonstrably false, but giving people money makes poverty worse, not better. It’s counterintuitive, and unfortunately proponents of hand-outs act out of emotion and (naive) intuition, not data. They often harm those they intend to help as a result.
It isn’t, it only shows you know absolutely nothing about police budgets, and your well intentioned but incredibly naive attempt at social engineering using completely untested ideas will get more people killed.
This is tosh. If the idea is to defund the surplus, then the police will effectively maintain the exact same level of presence as already displayed.
Basically, with your suggestion, nothing will change, other than police garages. That's clearly not what the protestors want, and as such, we can immediately discard your assertion.
Why do you believe that? Isn't it possible that in high crime areas it would make more sense to focus on the police first, so that everybody, including school counselors, is not too afraid to go to work?
> Another luxury belief is that religion is irrational or harmful. Members of the upper class are most likely to be atheists or non-religious. But they have the resources and access to thrive without the unifying social edifice of religion. Places of worship are often essential for the social fabric of poor communities. Denigrating the importance of religion harms the poor.
Since when is human rationality “luxury”? This article just shot itself in the foot.
I'm not so sure it did. The social fabric point is something that even comes up in HN discussions. Religion and religious activities are things that connect strangers and communities. That helps build social trust. With religion gone there isn't much positive that tends to replace it among poor purple.
Wow, what an amazing article. I never thought of it this way. But it matches what I've noted in many people.
Super interesting concept. Thanks for this mental mode of seeing this phenomena. I'm going to really think it over. Even if I end up rejecting it in favor of some other mental mode, it's still an amazingly interesting lens for looking at recent events.
I'd like to see how this cuts by age. A lot of older folks I talk to see police very differently, and often say "You just don't know how things used to be before the police", which I think really misses what people are asking for ie: redistribution of grossly overbudgeted police departments to preventative measures like better schooling, community centers, and more subtle reactive measures like un-armed "police" (or whatever you want to call this new role).
I also wonder if the question were phrased differently (and more accurately representing what is actually being asked for), more like "Would you support an N% cut to police budgets, which would come from X part of the police budget, to support preventative measures like social services?", if we'd see a different response.
Often they're referring to New York in the 60s/70s. Of course, there were absolutely police back then. But they largely attribute the increase in their feeling of personal safety with a larger investment in police.
Murders peaked 1990 and not a lot of murders goes unreported. Then in just a few years NYC went from being one of the most murderous cities in USA to one of the least murderous cities.
My town just had the sheriff for example. The sheriff had a small crew of 1-2 deputies and a secretary. When something really rough would happen, the sheriff would round up a crew. It was a really light group of people. Lots of differences between that, a militia, community policing, etc. Even today some rural communities are “policed” very differently. Now that same town has a standing police force of 40 officers, a K-9 unit, and they have fancy military vehicles. This is with a change from 5000->10000 in population.
This was all up until pretty recently (1940s-1950s) too.
It’s hard to blame people for misunderstanding slogans that supposedly don’t mean what the plain meaning would suggest. Perhaps the young activists should say what they mean and mean what they say and then all those “older folks” might not miss the point.
"They" are many people. I suspect that many of them don't understand that it's a motte and bailey argument. But I suspect that some of them do understand, and are doing it deliberately.
> It’s hard to blame people for misunderstanding slogans that supposedly don’t mean what the plain meaning would suggest.
I find it very easy to blame people who are not willing to spend 10 seconds researching what a movement stands for. We can't say that it's okay to read three words on a sign, interpret it in your own context, and then blame the movement when you don't "understand" it. It's a slogan! What do you expect for a less-than-five-word sentence that people can unite under?
I'd expect something that's not so much more extreme than the idea it's trying to communicate. If people march around saying "tear down the bridges", tagging bridges with little Xs where the demolitions should start, I'm not gonna stick around to hear that they actually mean rural highways should be better funded.
I'm willing to invest time, but I start from the assumption that the slogans and symbols of the marchers are honest attempts to explain what they're marching for.
At a minimum, I'd hope that if you asked 5 people who were uniting under that less-than-five word slogan what that slogan meant, in terms of desired policy, that at least 3 of those 5 people would agree with one another.
All the supporters I have talked to are in favor of "reform", yes. The specifics of what exactly it means to "defund" the police varies pretty significantly between supporters though -- some say "obviously we still need police but maybe try sending in a social worker for the homeless guy who is lying unconscious onthe ground" and others say "defund means entirely defund, as in abolish, I mean what I say" (I'm assuming that is the slogan in question, but not entirely positive because the post I was replying to was vagueposting).
I’ve heard hundreds of supporters speak and the message is fairly uniform: reduce the operational scope and budget of police significantly and use those resources on programs - proven to work elsewhere - which help people and communities in ways that are more appropriate to the specific problem and more efficient in reducing crime. The degree in which the scope/budget varies, but of course some people are arguing for what they think is realistically achievable and others are arguing their ideal; both are valid debate strategies and don’t necessarily mean that they aren’t aligned.
The few people I’ve heard say “remove police entirely,” when asked to elaborate, meant that the entire organization/concept of policing should be rebuilt from the ground up, not that there should be no one in society available to respond to crimes occurring.
> I find it very easy to blame people who are not willing to spend 10 seconds researching what a movement stands for.
Then you suffer from a profound lack of empathy.
I invested your "10 seconds". Google took me to a site called Defund the Police[1].
Reading this site, it seems that they want to... defund the police. As in, take the majority of their funding away, and put it somewhere else (nominally into social programs).
Not making a value judgement here, but I'm pretty sure this thing does what it says on the tin.
> I invested your "10 seconds". Google took me to a site called Defund the Police[1].
Weird. That page is not even at page 1 for me. Wikipedia comes up first for me and would generally be my go-to source for these topics.
> Reading this site, it seems that they want to... defund the police. As in, take the majority of their funding away, and put it somewhere else (nominally into social programs).
> Not making a value judgement here, but I'm pretty sure this thing does what it says on the tin.
Yes? This is correctly what the movement is about. The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.
> The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.
Pretty sure people understood that part.
Edit: I am also seeing downvotes on my above comment, which seems to indicate that a fair number of people disagree with the assessment that "defund the police" means "defund the police".
It's as straightforward as it sounds: Instead of funding a police department, a sizable chunk of a city's budget is invested in communities, especially marginalized ones where much of the policing occurs.
Wikipedia states
"Defund the police" is a slogan that supports divesting funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full defunding as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services.
> The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.
You'd think conservatives would be all for that - smaller state, lower taxes
> You'd think conservatives would be all for that - smaller state, lower taxes.
I think conservatives might get behind defunding the police if those funds were routed back to the taxpayer, rather than to expanding social programs -- or any government program, for that matter.
Moving money from a strongly conservative part of the government to a strongly leftist part of the government looks too much like a power grab to gain traction with conservatives.
You'd also get conservative buy-in if it came with a pro-gun stance.
If citizens are going to police their own communities, then they need to have the option to carry and employ arms as necessary for the task.
I think there's a lot of opportunity for give-and-take in criminal justice reform -- prisons and drug policy should also be on the table! -- but it requires both sides putting things of equal value on the fire, and I don't see that happening.
I would expect a slogan that is not so insane that that it constantly has be explained and interpreted by apologists. Lets cut the crap. Defund the police means defund the police.
NYC tried unarmed “police” to handle minor moving violations and parking. It was a disaster. People bullied them, assaulted them, and/or ignored them.
The sad truth is that people respect police not because of the badge but because of the gun, and because of the threat of violence.
Many of the reform ideas being thrown around lately are ideas that places across the US have already tried.
I think people are saying photos and videos from Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Kenosha, WI. They’re thinking they’ll take their chances with the police than with arsonists and rioters.
> It's a pretty sad realization that perhaps the reason we have such violent police is, in part, because we have such a violent society.
In terms of violent crime overall the US isn't an outlier, it is located at the median of the OECD in terms of violent crime. The outlier for the US is murder, overwhelmingly due to the mass proliferation of illegal gun possession.
This has been written about for decades and remains true today.
"America doesn’t have more crime than other rich countries. It just has more guns."
"The seminal work here is a 1999 book by Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, called Crime Is Not the Problem. Zimring and Hawkins set out to examine what was, at the time, the conventional wisdom: that America had a uniquely terrible crime problem, one without any parallel in other developed democracies.
"They found, pretty definitively, that the conventional wisdom was wrong. "Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher," they write."
... "A landmark 1997 study actually tried to answer this question. Its findings — which scholars say still hold up — are that America doesn't really have a significantly higher rate of crime compared to similar countries. But that crime is much likelier to be lethal: American criminals just kill more people than do their counterparts in other developed countries. And guns appear to be a big part of what makes this difference."
> The outlier for the US is murder, overwhelmingly due to the mass proliferation of illegal gun possession.
Emphasis mine.
Most people miss that part and just blame people having guns in general, when law-abiding citizens with legally registered guns is not part of the overall problem.
Each of the three factions has a blindspot that it taboos and finds impossible to understand. Each faction is held in the thrall. I'll describe a Left wing version where their hero lives in Right wing world and a Liberal version.
So - our Society in caricature.
Left
Suppose you were studying economics or sociology and everybody had a odd paradox they couldn't solve. There were these different groups of people. Some lead long healthy lives and have most quality of life indicators in their favour. The other group has dire outcomes - nasty brutish and short. Nobody can figure it out. The same pattern plays out in different countries and in different centuries. Everybody would like for the people suffering not to suffer but we're perplexed and the newspapers report on a regular basis the status of these people, great people and intellectuals write books about it, classes are held in universities all over the country in the search for the solution.
Then one day some autistic figures it out. It's because some are poor and others are rich. It can be confirmed by checking bank balances. Surprisingly this person does not receive a round of applause and confetti in the streets - he is promptly fired from his job, his friends avert their eyes. Soon he is homeless and is found proclaiming his Truth under a bridge - to find him just turn Left on James Damore St.
Liberal
The Liberals believe in Robots, AGI and similar ideas for artificial humans - have so for centuries. Their fable is the Android - the dream of the artificial human that coincidentally replaces all forms of blue collar labour. The root of the word Robot literally means slave. Their nemesis is the Computer - the information processing machine that works best at replacing their own human generated information processing. Of course they try to use this machine to replace blue collar labour instead. They invest incredible energies here but ignore that each of their schemes for technological and economic improvement is based on some type of forced transfer or even slavery. While technologies not based on theft or slavery exist - these are ignored. They are mostly preoccupied with schemes to move groups of people around the surface of the planet to disrupt their foreign and domestic competitors in the name of social improvement - which it is for them.
I can pass the idealogical Turing test - can't say the same of the people who inhabit Reddit, Metafilter and HN - and I think most of the Right's intellectual firepower remains subtext in our society unless you read old books to find plot holes or the exchange between other civilizations and ours opens up in a way that cannot be censored by the information organs of the West.
Where the hell are unarmed police the norm other than the UK and NZ? I lived in NZ for three years and the police still had guns, just locked in the boot of their cars. Australian cops (lived there for 1 year) had firearms.
Unarmed police are pretty rare on this planet. Even Japanese cops carry guns.
Germany has a force separate from the police to handle parking infractions and things of that sort (Ordnungsamt), and they're not armed. I think this is somewhat common in Europe.
That specific thing is common in the US, too. Parking enforcement, at least in places populous enough to warrant dedicated parking enforcement personnel, usually don't arm their meter maids.
> Where the hell are unarmed police the norm other than the UK and NZ?
Here's a sampling. I think not every country is considered in these lists though. Or at least, given there can be multiple police forces in a jurisdiction with only some of them armed, it's not always a clear-cut answer.
> In some countries including Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland excepted), Maldives, the police do not carry firearms unless the situation is expected to merit it.
I always get a chuckle when UK and US media bash the Japanese justice system. English speakers are lucky they don't have to hear the devastating retorts the Japanese would be able to make back - they must be falling off their chairs laughing at the kind of reporting the BBC and Vox make on them.
> In some countries including Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland excepted), Maldives, the police do not carry firearms unless the situation is expected to merit it.
Is there a source for this? If I search up "NYPD unarmed officer", I get a bunch of results regarding police violence on unarmed civilians, and if I search up "new york unarmed officer", I get a bunch of results relating to security guards.
I don't mean all the officers. If you "disarmed" 50% of the officers, you'd expect officer shootings to drop by 40% (random estimate), but I doubt people would alter their behavior knowing that there's still 50% chance they can get shot.
Of course there isn't, hence why instead of providing you a source, OP just tells you to look up some vague thing. (Hilariously, you are now the top result for 'nypd brownies unarmed')
I'm many days late, so I don't expect an actual response, but there's literally not a single article on the front page of that search that says anything that matches your original claim?
There's an article from the NY Post, which is literally a tabloid, that claims the "only thing keeping them safe" is people mistaking them for cops, but not that they were explicitly disarmed and attacked as a result?
This just sounds mad coming from a British person. Almost all of our police are unarmed and do a decent job, the only place police routinely carry guns are airports for obvious reasons and Northern Ireland which literally had a decades-long sectarian insurgency happen there. At least nominally, the British police operate under Peel's idea of "policing by consent" where police officers are merely citizens in uniform charged with keeping order rather than the more Continental (at the time) model of armed enforcers of royal/state power.
It's hard to genuinely respect someone when there's a gun-related power dynamic forcing you to. That's not respect, that's just the threat of force. It's probably too late for America to adopt Peel's principles of policing but it's not done us much harm.
Fear and respect are two completely different things though. Under the Peelite model of policing, it's impossible to create genuine community police officers when there's a huge power differential (IE a tool that can easily end a life) between police and public.
> “You just don't know how things used to be before the police", which I think really misses what people are asking for ie: redistribution of grossly overbudgeted police departments to preventative
Or more likely they don’t think preventative measures work as well as you think they do.
Edit: Once you have seen acts of senseless violence - real cruel stuff - it is hard to believe that some people can be reliably rehabilitated.
Maybe that cruelty could have been nipped in the bud if they had received better care in the past - but that’s not a risk I would take with my community.
I think it'd also be productive to have community education on your rights and responsibilities with police.
You have rights, you don't have to do anything outside the law. But you do have to comply with lawful orders. If everybody understood these things, there would be much less trouble, fear, and violence.
Agreed! We should start by teaching police what lawful orders they're actually able to give, prevent them from lying about their powers and individuals' rights, and putting the ones who do intimidate people into relinquishing their rights in prison.
and putting the ones who do intimidate people into relinquishing their rights in prison
Are you saying if a cop is interrogating someone and says "I know you did this, if you don't talk you're going to prison for a long time", we should send that cop to prison?
That would be intimidating a person into relinquishing their rights.
Other than undercover cops being able to lie to cover their background, the fact that police can -- legally! ruled so by the supreme court! -- lie to citizens is a real problem.
How are citizens supposed to trust police that can freely lie to them without consequence?
I think this falls into better education of the public, many times these incidents arise because people try to argue their case with the officer but the officer is not the judge nor the jury. Trying to argue your case with a belligerent officer is only going to serve their purpose. Whereas if people know that have an absolute right to remain silent and exercise that right, they will be better served, especially if the officer is issuing unlawful orders / abusing power. If the officer thinks you are guilty, you cannot talk your way out of jail, but you can certainly give them more ammo to charge you with. e.g Resisting, Obstruction charges.
I think the age difference might be caused by the fact that people over 65 are now watching television as a full-time job and their brains have turned to soup.
Rather than missing the point, they might just be disagreeing. It might be skepticism about the effectiveness of many of these “preventive measures”.
Just because they are named by their hoped for results, it doesn’t mean that they will lead to that outcome.
At least many might think that the effect from reducing police presence in the neighborhood (=defunding) won’t be counteracted by the other measures sufficiently.
This headline buries the more material difference outlined in the article, which is the major difference between black/Asian Americans and other groups in how likely they feel they are to be treated with respect by the police in any individual encounter.
You can want a police presence, you can also want those police to be properly trained in use of force, and you can want a more robust policy for dealing with emergent mental health issues all at the same time. None of those are exclusive of each other.
If I were a police officer or worked in that area of policy, I would be appalled at the degree of correlation that the more frequently people reported seeing the police, the less they wanted to see police around.
This is yet another false and divisive zero sum framing of a complex issue. Everyone deserves quality police service from their municipal and state authorities, police deserve accountability for colleagues that break the law and put good police officers at risk, and everyone deserves policing that is unbiased and increases public safety regardless of race, creed, or any other factor.
To improve police presence and interactions wouldn't you actually want to fund the police and make sure they go through proper training to ensure they can handle difficult situations? A lack of funding would probably result in a worse trained police force, no?
Pretty much. I keep seeing people here use the multi-year police academies in Europe as an example of why they have less issues with police brutality, while at the same time saying that the police in the USA need less resources.
The police chief of the city in which I live, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, was asked why we haven't seen the sort of cases here that we've seen in Dallas and even other suburbs. His response was that we require all applicants to have a bachelors degree.
Could be correlation rather than causation, of course.
The same city where a police officer broke into the wrong apartment, thinking it was hers, and killed the man inside? Not sure I'd be pointing fingers if I were the Dallas PD.
The same city where a police officer broke into the wrong apartment, thinking it was hers, and killed an unarmed black man inside? Not sure I'd be pointing fingers if I were the Dallas PD.
Reading comprehension: I said I live in "a suburb of Dallas," while the incident you reference happened in the city of Dallas itself. I even drew a contrast between my city and what "we've seen in Dallas and even other suburbs."
You'd have been better off noticing the contrast I drew and talking about McKinney, another suburb of Dallas, in which a cop infamously stormed onto the scene and threw 15-year-old girl in a bikini to the concrete and pointed a gun at a teenage boy who objected.[0]
Ferguson is a suburb of St Louis. Kenosha is a suburb of either Milwaukee or Chicago, depending on who you ask. McKinney is a suburb of Dallas. Most of the footage from "Minneapolis" was actually from suburbs of Minneapolis. Current political advertising is heavily focused on using current footage from protests and warning that our suburbs are next if the other candidate is elected.
Police violence isn't only a suburban problem, but it is definitely also a suburban problem.
I think the "defund the police" movement has a very unfortunate name. Many (hopefully most) people don't want to pull _all_ funding from the police. They want to appropriately redistribute funds. That means stopping spend on surplus military weapons and tanks, and instead put more money towards the proper training you mentioned.
This is not based in reality. How much money do you think police are spending on “surplus military weapons”? It is minimal and most of the purchase of surplus military items are mundane. They aren’t acquiring carriers and missiles. You mentioned tanks - are you literally claiming that local police departments are purchasing M1 Abrams battle tanks? Because that’s not happening.
Keep in mind the total transfer of military surplus equipment to police departments is just $5.1B over the entire lifetime of the program, since 1997 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Support_Offi...). The scale of this program has been completely blown out of proportion by activists.
There's no irony there and it was not a "screaming mob". I'm concerned about your sources of information.
Chief Best stepped down after constantly lying about the police actions and the protesters for months. Best was hired against the recommendations of the federal consent decree that SPD is under because of repeated excessive force and racial profiling issues, hand-picked by the mayor. The reasons given for her stepping down are relatively boring and unlikely to be the real reason, which probably involves political calculus and the mayor.
No, she didn’t lie, and yes, it was a screaming mob. A mob that literally showed up on city council members doorsteps, among others. I see you’re siding with the anarchists though, so this won’t be a productive conversation.
Accusing a black woman of racial profiling. Good lord. You people are more racist than anyone.
The consent decree did not recommend against hiring her (I just read it). It’s also over 8 years old, long before her time, and they have since found them compliant.
The data says they use force in only 0.3% of encounters, and significant force likely to cause injury is only a small fraction of that:
Further, the use of serious levels of force – force that causes or may be reasonably expected to cause substantial bodily injury – remained extraordinarily low, occurring in 21 of nearly 870,000 (0.0024% - or less than one quarter of one hundredth of a percent) of officer dispatches.
Considering how unwilling many perps are, 21 out of 870,000 is shockingly low. Well done on the reform!
There may be evidence of racism, but probably not the kind you think you are protesting. 42% of this force was used against white people, including 2 officer involved shootings, while 28% was against black people, including 0 officer involved shootings.
I watched her lie about something of which I have personal direct knowledge. Her claims have also been repeatedly contradicted by video evidence.
> and yes, it was a screaming mob. A mob that literally showed up on city council members doorsteps, among others.
Ah, the charged language. What's the difference between a "mob" and a protest making demands? This language reveals the sources you've been using for such information and they ain't great.
> I see you’re siding with the anarchists though, so this won’t be a productive conversation.
I would be curious to know what you think anarchists are.
> Accusing a black woman of racial profiling.
1. If this seems impossible to you, you should check out the actions of black cops. Profiling doesn't require the individual to be a white supremacist, e.g.
2. I didn't even claim that. I referred to the department.
> Good lord. You people are more racist than anyone.
In what way is anything I said racist?
> The consent decree did not recommend against hiring her (I just read it).
Ah, I misremembered which group it ran afoul of. Best's hiring was a mess. There was supposed to be a process: search committee finds options, Mayor makes a suggestion / selection, council confirms. What actually happened: search committee finds options, suggests hiring outside the department as the whole point was to institute reforms, and an outside hire would have no baggage in the department. The police union raises a ruckus about Best not being in the final 3 (she was already at SPD), this becomes news, and Durkan personally puts her on the finalist list, then selects her and council confirms.
> It’s also over 8 years old, long before her time, and they have since found them compliant.
The consent decree is a very low bar and the civilian oversight board has repeatedly stated that SPD is not following their recommendations or ready for end the consent decree. Despite this, Durkan and Best had applied for release from the consent decree in April. Part of that decree were issues regarding excessive force. As a reminder, SPD has been routinely beating protesters and indiscriminately teargassing protesters for nearly three months.
> The data says they use force in only 0.3% of encounters, and significant force likely to cause injury is only a small fraction of that:
> Further, the use of serious levels of force – force that causes or may be reasonably expected to cause substantial bodily injury – remained extraordinarily low, occurring in 21 of nearly 870,000 (0.0024% - or less than one quarter of one hundredth of a percent) of officer dispatches.
Based on police reporting. And remember, the vast majority of situations police are deployed to are in no way violent nor involve an arrest.
> Considering how unwilling many perps are, 21 out of 870,000 is shockingly low. Well done on the reform!
Uncritically accepting police number is going to lead you astray.
> There may be evidence of racism, but probably not the kind you think you are protesting. 42% of this force was used against white people, including 2 officer involved shootings, while 28% was against black people, including 0 officer involved shootings.
Those numbers imply a disproportionate racial impact already. Look at Seattle's demographics.
Unfortunately after all the lies and vitriol from activists, I don’t blame her for stepping down and quietly collecting her pension. Here, there have been weeks of mobs showing up at the homes of the mayor, city council, and the police chief, committing violence, destroying property, and threatening neighbors. Take a look at this account of what happened at the police chief’s neighborhood (https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2020/08/02/hundreds-of-blm-support...):
> A crowd of about 200 persons, mostly white men and women in their twenties, were dressed in black with masks and black hoods and carried signs that read “Black Lives Matter.” Black Lives Matter protestors shouted profanity and insults at neighbors, took license plate information on vehicles, took pictures of homes, and asked little kids who lived in the neighborhood what schools they attended.
The military connection is very interesting. You're right, of course. Military training is very rigorous and, more importantly, consistent. Police training is a wild hodgepodge and also sometimes basically non-existent.
The other thing I have seen talked about in this context, and which I agree with, is that in the military you are trained as part of a larger unit and loyal to an even larger cause/organization.
Police, on the other hand, are given a partner who they might serve with primarily for years almost-exclusivity. They become loyal to a very small group of people over their career and don't have the same esprit de corps as the military.
To some degree I think they both attract dangerous/violent people who are joining for the wrong reasons. (The desire to hold power over others or just flat-out hurt people). But the Military is more likely to drum these people out, especially before the worst happens, where police don't.
Have you noticed how the military - even up to the generals - are generally always publicly respectful to the civilian command whether or not they agree with them?
As a 23 year veteran, I can tell you that statement is missing a ton of context, and almost certainly is very inaccurate.
Most people in the military rarely if ever touch a firearm for their entire time in the military after they qualify with it in bootcamp - some don't even do that. De-escalation training? That's diametrically opposite of how an infantryman is trained, and totally irrelevant to anyone outside those combat arms fields. Most people in the military would never receive a single moment of training relevant to police work in their entire time in the military.
What you might be seeing is that most veterans tend to be a bit older, a bit more mature, and perhaps tend to view a badge less as a power trip and more of a responsibility due to the experiences they've had. I can't say that for sure, but it makes a bit more sense than saying military are better trained than police, when the vast majority of military members get absolutely no relevant training in anything related to police work.
I see a lot of people lately citing the military as some bastion of self control when it comes to ROE too.
What they usually fail to see is that the military on patrol is usually in squads or at least in pairs, not alone like civilian officers. It's much easier to maintain control of a situation when you outnumber potential bad actors. When a normal beat cop is on patrol though they are usually alone (unless in a top 10 major city like NYC). That changes the dynamic as officers have to maintain the upper hand as if they get overpowered the suspect now has access to multiple firearms both on the officer and in a patrol vehicle.
That's also a fair point in a slightly different manner as well -- Soldiers on patrol are heavily supervised. They have an officer and usually a relatively senior NCO who directs the majority of their actions.
I've seen cops get downright giddy over having an excuse to gas and beat a protest. One of them had a little smiley face on the end of their baton and was fully kitted in riot gear.
Defunding the police addresses the overspending. Despite millions of dollars for training, outcomes in police interactions haven't gotten better. Purchasing military surplus is another area they've spent increased budgets on as well.
Well, the number of people killed by officers, and the number of officers killed in the line of duty are both metrics that have remained fairly steady. Overall violent crime rate looks pretty steady as well over the past decade, though it's much decreased from the 2000-2010 rates.
It's not a single-metric question though. Probably not just a 10-20 metric question either.
>Purchasing military surplus is another area they've spent increased budgets on as well.
Police only pay for shipping. If those costs are swelling their expenses, they have a tiny budget.
The 1988 National Defense Authorization Act created a temporary program within the DoD to funnel surplus equipment to state law enforcement agencies involved in anti-drug activities at no cost other than shipping. The 1997 National Defense Authorization Act added anti-terrorism activities and made the program permanent.
You should look at how much of the budget the police dept takes of an average town. In my med-small town they're 50% of the city budget. Police depts are shockingly well funded compared to the problems they actually end up solving.
My town may have something atypicial about its finances at 50%, if you look at the budget of San Jose it seems about $400m for city services and $200m for police and fire. I didn't pick it apart further between police/fire, but IIRC fire tends to have much smaller budgets than police depts. But I would say that's still shockingly large vs the budget for other city services.. (that's setting aside some large chunks for airports etc..., I was also a bit surprised SJ had a $4B budget and how much was for airport services).
Edit: I guess looking at Oakland/Chicago, it's 50% or close to it too though.
"Oakland PD receives nearly half of the city's discretionary spending( $264 million out of $592 million), dwarfing every other expenditure, including human services, parks and recreation, and transportation combined. A whopping 39 percent of Chicago's 2017 budget went to police, and still the department got even more money, peaking in 2020 with a 7 percent increase to nearly $1.8 billion. "
While training is important, the deeper problem is that of incentives. Our usual catchall way of discouraging uncivilized behavior is with the justice system - follow these laws or else. But when a perp can put on a uniform, commit violent crimes with impunity, and then not even be charged, the justice system has been coopted into something else.
(Or coming at it from the other direction, when a person can be destroyed by that "justice system" for simply smoking a plant. The war on drug users is also a large part of how the rule of law has been undermined)
This shouldn't be a suprise. Some people like to pretend that higher crime rates in some areas is strictly due to higher police presence, but it's clearly not the case. I remember after the protests in Baltimore from FreddIe Gray, the police were told to have a much smaller presence, and not do as much proactive policing. It wasn't long before the people who actually live in those neighborhoods were complaining about the increasing crime rate due to a smaller police presence.
>I remember after the protests in Baltimore from FreddIe Gray, the police were told to have a much smaller presence, and not do as much proactive policing. It wasn't long before the people who actually live in those neighborhoods were complaining about the increasing crime rate due to a smaller police presence.
* (Deleted by /r/baltimore moderators on Reddit) Baltimore gang members directed looters away from black-owned businesses. "Instead, he said, they pointed the rioters toward Chinese- and Arab-owned stores." (https://np.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/34ek59/baltimore_...)
* Baltimore killings soar to a level unseen in 43 years. "Baltimore reached a grim milestone on Friday, three months after riots erupted in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody: With 45 homicides in July, the city has seen more bloodshed in a single month than it has in 43 years." (https://np.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/3fcawm/baltimore_...)
PS - I was banned from /r/baltimore after posting the above comment (dang↗
> it's obviously because of racism so feel free to riot
Posting flamebait on inflammatory topics will get you banned on HN too, so please don't.
Well you can't just remove police and think everything is going to be okay.
The police abolitionist movement is calling for removing untrained, armed, and oftentimes extremely racist individuals from the streets and replacing them with social programs, housing, education, healthcare.
You can't just do 10% of the ask here and then be surprised when shit doesn't magically get better.
Would it be accurate, then, to say that the "police abolitionist movement" does not want to abolish the police? If that is the case, why call it the police abolitionist movement? It seems like all that does is generate ill-will from people who are potential allies.
Re-read the person you're responding to, I think you'll see your response makes no sense. They didn't say "replacing them with nicer cops", they said: replacing them with social programs, housing, education, healthcare.
None of these require cops. Yes, you likely need some form of police force for the very, very edge case scenarios where the others won't do, but abolish police means abolish the police.
Unless you assume all cops are "untrained, armed, and oftentimes extremely racist individuals", simply removing those who are would not "abolish the police", which is why I asked.
* Dissolving existing police departments and making officers reapply as a way to eliminate the worst offenders that are currently protected by the blue line of silence.
* Re-establishing the police as a much smaller operation where their duties are limited to situations where deadly/coercive force is needed.
Things that would become police “adjacent” and would be handled by other government officials.
- detective work
- calls about the homeless
- all non-violent offenses like noise complaints, property disputes, drug possession, moving violations, shoplifting, etc.
The hope being that many people who are currently officers would actually rather be part of the non-violent operation.
>replacing them with social programs, housing, education, healthcare.
Unfortunately, this part is extremely vague and is missing a track record. So how it ends up in the real human world, is police funding gets cut and the funds get diverted into corrupt politicians' pockets. Like the Chicago mayor that successfully reduced police funding only to have a separate police detachment placed near her home.
There are many people who are apologists for the police abolition movement (or whatever it should be called).
I’m sorry but it is quite obvious that a whole lot of people carrying around ACAB (all cops are bad) and “defund the police” signs don’t go along with the this-is-what-they-actually-mean explanations. They mean to have their message taken at face value.
I saw myself spraypainted on a Minneapolis building “actually defund the police”. it is hard to reinterpret all cops are bad as anything but the obvious, and it is quite popular.
Urban Dictionary can say what it wants, I saw many signs in protests, in media coverage of protests, and on social media with All Cops Are Bad and zero with Bastards. Both in first hand experience seeing with my own eyes the messaging people who are saying it and through various means of showing someone else's message.
Everything is vastly more complex than those signs. Sure that's the effort and motivation, end goal of protesters but that isn't a plan to accomplish it. Protest leaders and linked organizations need to draft those plans and lobby local/state/federal officials to pass such legislation and create change via compromise. At some point that change will satisfy the bulk of protesters and the movement will slow until momentum is built back up.
It's a compromise and likely won't come easy or fast given current federal government setup. But other than generational change (ie old people who are heavily conservative die off so younger, more liberal people become the voting base) likely combined with removing money from Us politics (no easy fight there) I doubt it will happen soon.
You cannot replace the police with social programs. What are you going to do when somebody breaks into your house, assaults you, robs you, kills someone? Call your social worker?
Canada had an experiment of removing policing for just one day. It did not go well at all.
What are the police going to do? You’re already robbed/dead.
Police abolition is asking for a change to the socioeconomic systems that lead people to rob in the first place. The threat of police locking you up surely isn’t doing it.
Maybe. Yet this crime still happened, in spite of all the perps got arrested before.
> Or maybe they will get to you in time
Unlikely.
> Because the criminals keep getting released, especially for political reasons.
Like most states, NY, IL, and WA have each eliminated parole for violent offenders, so that’s not it.
You’re going to have to be more specific with your stats. Crime rates continue to decrease in those cities - even in Chicago. The 2016 spike in homicides is an interesting topic if you care learn the driving forces behind it. There wasn’t a mass release of criminals as you suggest, but there was a series of gun laws invalidated by the courts.
Strange that in all those NYC/Chicago links, none of the police quoted blamed the surge on the release of criminals from prison, a lack of policing, or a lack of police resources.
> Police were motivated to strike because of difficult working conditions caused by disarming FLQ-planted bombs
Montreal in 1969 was on the brink of civil war. The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) was basically the Canadian version of the IRA. Having police on the streets wasn't enough. The situation continued to escalate until the Canadian Armed Forces were deployed to police Montreal in 1970.
I don't think that time and place is representative of any Canadian city today. As such, it's rather hard to draw any conclusions from your example.
The thing is they need more support for enforcement. The complaints you get from police are that a big chunk of the job is just racing from one call to the next, and flat out ignoring calls that don’t seem important enough because they’re forced to triage.
Crime rates across the board have dropped by huge amounts in the past 30 years. The recent uptick hasn't gotten us anywhere near the crime rate of the 90s. It's difficult to attribute any particular program as having been helpful or not but we know that a lot of fundamental issues like health care and wages are still very problematic. Most anti-poverty programs are means-tested and go to more white citizens than minority. It's hard to say why crime gas dropped precipitously in NYC but not as much in Chicago. But we do know that aggressive police tactics like Stop and Frisk have been proven to not be part of that success.
This is why the defund the police people really need a better slogan. You can argue that the police should work differently than they do, but it's just obviously stupid to not have police.
"Defund the police" refers to trimming bloated budgets and fully funding other programs that reduce crime such as funding inner city schools, child care for poor parents, etc.
Anecdotally from seeing discussions online and interviews on the news (which to be fair has some sample bias that will emphasize more extreme beliefs), a non negligible number of people who say "Defund the police" believe that police should be abolished.
There's a case to be made that while a city needs police it maybe doesn't need _these_ police. At some point an organization is so corrupt that it cannot be reformed. I have no problem with plans to reshape law enforcement through complete dissolution of current police departments.
Do you find that you frequently need to explain "defund the police" to people? Don't you think that's a problem, given that a slogan is supposed to convey a clear message that is easy for everyone to understand what you're about?
It's a conversation starter. It's definitely sparked a lot of meaningful dialogues about the state of policing in the US and how to make it better for all involved.
I believe it's a conversation ender rather than starter. When people are throwing around a abolishing the police and using violent riots to push it that ends conversation rather than starts it.
It hasn't seemed to stop you from reading and even engaging with this conversation. I would think it's doing it's job as a slogan just fine. Of course you shouldn't forget the context of these "violent" riots were brought out of police violence, an on-going conversation in large part still because of the actions taken by protestors.
Hey this is me engaging with you saying everyone who holds that opinion is wrong and I'd vote the other way because won't be held hostage at the whim of mobs based on the color of people's skin.
That's not me having a conversation. That's me telling you this is actively harmful for whatever it is you're trying to talk about, because there is nothing to talk about anymore.
By allowing these riots to continue the local and state governments have abandoned the rule of law and have thus made the law unimportant.
Similarly those pushing political agendas through violent riots are terrorists and those who support them are enabling terrorism.
This isn't me having a conversation about your issue this is me telling you that your issue doesn't matter because resorting to violence and demanding those who are supposed to abate violence be abolished You've ended any converation possible.
Whatever you think it's doing it's not communicating anything except "accede or we will riot" and my response to that is violence begets violence be prepared to have things escalate instead of causing legitimate conversations.
It's a conversation like being held up is a conversation.
Lot to unpack in this response for sure. If you _personally_ feel you're being held up by this "mob based on the color of people's skin" I'm sorry you feel that way, but it shows a severe lack of of understanding when it comes to policing and how that affects communities of color.
If the police followed the "Rule of Law" there wouldn't be a disproportionate amount of Black men who face violence from the police. Should "bad cops" be held accountable? Or is everything fair game when "enforcing the law"?
Similarly, "accede or we will riot" is precisely the logical progression from "we've asked nicely to not kill us". Do you expect Americans to simply watch their family, friends and neighbors being extra-judicially killed?
It's this inability to empathize with a population, and an uncritical view of those who enforce the law that will lead to non-action, leading to more riots.
>If the police followed the "Rule of Law" there wouldn't be a disproportionate amount of Black men who face violence from the police. Should "bad cops" be held accountable? Or is everything fair game when "enforcing the law"?
For sure. but not with violent riots.
>Similarly, "accede or we will riot" is precisely the logical progression from "we've asked nicely to not kill us".
No, its terrorism. I have no problem with protests, but violent riots to push police reform are political violence, something I think leads to only more violence.
>Do you expect Americans to simply watch their family, friends and neighbors being extra-judicially killed?
No. But I expect people who perpetuate violence for political aims to keep perpetuating violence for political aims. I don't think its acceptable unless they're ready to receive political violence in kind.
>It's this inability to empathize with a population,
No. I empathize, but my empathy sits behind the knowledge that the rule of law and state monopoly of force must be maintained or all will devolve into tribal war.
>and an uncritical view of those who enforce the law that will lead to non-action, leading to more riots.
Choosing to commit political violence is a choice the rioters make. If the options are abolish the police or get riots, my reaction is "call in the national guard".
There are plenty of people to empathize with, and I don't think political violence is worth any empathy. Justifying political violence is a precursor to real civil war.
"No. I empathize, but my empathy sits behind the knowledge that the rule of law and state monopoly of force must be maintained or all will devolve into tribal war."
Some political violence is okay if the state is involved? Even if that violence is oppressive?
Politically motivated violence on behalf of the police is why we're in this situation to begin with. Any you're of the opinion that any retaliation to this violence to reform a broken system of state violence is somehow out of turn?
Now all violence is political violence because politically we don't want mobs of violent rioters looting and burning things down, so stopping them is political.
No thanks, I don't believe you to be anywhere near correct. You're an advocate for tribal warfare and that is where your policies will lead. Disaster.
You mean other programs that you wildly speculate will reduce crime, but like all attempts at social engineering, probably won’t turn out how you expect at all. Maybe get something in place that is already working before you try your lethal experiments on humans?
Why does the US incarcerate individuals at world records? Tax Payers spend millions housing / feeding / providing healthcare to 1.4 million incarcerated people. Does the US simply have more criminals? or are we wasting money providing a ban-aid fix to crime which most first world countries have figured out.
It's much more expensive to over-police a broken social system than it is to foster the conditions which produce less crime overall.
Let's flip the framing: if the republicans said they have a plan to "defund social security and medicare", what do you think they are trying to do? Would your immediate reaction be positive or negative? Would "shifting budget to other programs" come to your mind?
I fail to see how this framing is useful to this discussion: Republicans enact austerity measures constantly, so I wouldn't think they would be shifting the money around anyways.
The "Defund the Police" line is coming from the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which believe in funding the social programs.
> This is why the defund the police people really need a better slogan.
The defund and/or dismantle groups have acheived sufficient support to drive policy in a number of cities. What they need is concrete results to point to. While defund might also benefit from a better slogan, truly novel complex positions just aren't ever going to be effectively communicated by any simple slogan, especially when they have opponents that so understand what it means, don't want it, and are dedicated to fogging the issue to avoid direct engagement. But when you've got concrete examples to point to, it's a lot harder to fog the issue.
This is even more pronounced among so-called fragile communities, where 95% of black residents want to retain police presence, and in the Chicago area, 68% want increased police presence.
it is of course the officer's job to deal with the situation.
--
here is an analogy of a pedestrian crossing. It is the job of the motorist to pay attention, but it helps to train the pedestrian as well.
While the responsibility for the accident is put on the motorist, wont the pedestrian be better off with the training?
The 2nd Amendment explicitly disagrees with you :)
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Everybody always remembers that last part, but take a look at the very beginning. Three branches—Executive, Legislative, and Judicial—deal in the world of law and are supposed to keep each other in check and balance. Three branches—Militia, Police, and Military—deal in the world of force and are supposed to keep each other in check and balance. Except now in 2020 we're being told nobody in the first group should ever need a tool to defend themselves, and the other two groups resemble each other more and more every day.
> Three branches—Militia, Police, and Military—deal in the world of force and are supposed to keep each other in check
That's not actually the underlying model of the 2nd Amendment.
The underlying model of the second amendment is that professional standing armed forces are a threat to liberty (even when nominally dedicated to external security, because they are inevitably applied internally; permanent paramilitart police were not a thing at the time of the 2nd.) Because of this, it is essentially to have effective citizen militia that can be called up for internal and external security needs, so that governments aren't tempted to create permanent forces for this purposes beyond cadres to support the mobilization of the militia. The 2A isn't about having a balanced triangle (“police” didn't really exist for several decades after the 2A), it's about having one of those three obviate the need for the others.
There is probably a good debate to be had about whether that model was durably workable at the time, whether it is workable in the modern world, and whether it would in particular be reachable from where the US is now. But we've lost that in our 2A debates.
Really? Which of the recent high profile incidents didn't involve someone physically resisting the police and/or acting aggressively to others while repeatedly ignoring the police yelling at them to back off?
For each case you can find (if you can find any at all), there are millions - yes, literally millions - of police interactions that don't end that way.
If you interact with the police peacefully, the odds of you experiencing any violence are virtually zero.
You were asked to link an example of people not physically resisting. You linked Breonna Taylor, who's death while unfortunate, doesn't quite fit the bill. She had links to 2 known drug sellers, a warrant was being executed, and her boyfriend fired on officers.
Ryan Whitaker (who was white, incidentally), who opened his front door armed with a gun he was legally and constitutionally permitted to have and to use to protect his home and was kneeling to put his gun down when he was killed?
(And, uh, Jacob Blake?)
I mean, yes, I have been pulled over by the police on 101 and not killed, and I once ran a stop sign in Palo Alto and I wasn't killed either, and I went to pay my ticket at the police station and I still wasn't killed then. But that's true in the other direction - I'm sure I have interacted with millions of people throughout my life, and yet if I killed a single one of them without cause, I would rightly be called a murderer. No one would be saying that the risk of encountering me is virtually zero.
I'm glad you had the good sense not to mention any of the cases over the past few months that have been the main source of riots, but please re-read what I was responding to and what I wrote because it still stands: these cases - though tragic, and worth trying our best to prevent - are so incredibly rare (relative to the number of total interactions with police) that the odds of violence truly are virtually zero.
(FWIW Breonna Taylor wasn't asleep, not that it justifies her death and Jacob Blake was most definitely resisting - even the super shaky cell phone coverage from a bystander makes that obvious)
I mean, yeah that's fun. "Perhaps someday there won't be any violence." Cops carry guns, it's for a reason.
Cops are people, not some idealized identity of justice. Perhaps it would be prudent to consider the idea that the people with guns who can legally shoot you should be treated with a little more consideration. I can't imagine turning my back on cops and reaching into my vehicle, but maybe that's white privilege.
The government is legally able to take violent action. You don't want it another way. So then really, what's your point besides all cops are bad?
I carry a gun every day too, and there is precisely zero mortal danger to anyone who peacefully interacts with me. It is an entirely reasonable expectation to demand that from government staff.
The police do not have any special legal privileges when it comes to shooting people over any private citizen. To grant them such, de facto, as we have done, is to abandon the rule of law (or the equal application thereof) in society.
I think a higher standard is reasonable and possible. Indeed, almost everyone in society is subject to it. Police, if they are to exist, should be as well.
The law dictates when it's okay to shoot people in self-defense. No person should receive special extra privileges to shoot people with a different standard.
The police do not legally have that right; but in practice they get to murder anyone they want and get away with it.
The rules for the police are very different than the rules for everyone else. That's due to inequality in the application of the law: the rules that apply to you and I do not apply to them.
Perhaps you, as many do, think the police should be in a special class of their own, above the law.
I think the laws should apply equally to all people.
> The police have all the responsibility to de-escalate situations. If they're not doing that then they're the ones in the wrong.
I strongly disagree, and submit that a big part of the problem is this exact mentality.
Police should get gobs of training, they have to take the high road, they have to learn to not let their buttons get pushed, etc., etc. - all of those things are true. But the primary responsibility has always rested and should always rest on the shoulders of individual citizens that the police are interacting with. People need to be accountable for their actions.
I'm very sorry when anyone loses their life due to an altercation with the police, but the elephant in the room is that pretty much all of these are completely and easily preventable if people show even a smidgen of accountability for their actions. The common factors across victims of police shooting is not race, but (a) commission of a crime and (b) resisting arrest. Remove either from the equation and the death rate drops dramatically; remove both and it's virtually zero.
Yes, let's continue to figure out how to improve law enforcement. If we find actual instances of racism, let's work to eradicate them. Whatever problems exist in policing, let's study them and fix them. But let's not pretend for a moment that any real progress will be made while there is a pervasive attitude that crime and/or belligerence towards cops isn't a massive part of the problem.
Why does this study show that so many black people want the same or more police presence? Because the overwhelming majority of them (and everyone else) obey the law and, in the event they do interact with the police, refrain from punching them, fleeing the scene, etc.
> Police should get gobs of training, they have to take the high road, they have to learn to not let their buttons get pushed, etc., etc. - all of those things are true. But the primary responsibility has always rested and should always rest on the shoulders of individual citizens that the police are interacting with. People need to be accountable for their actions.
Maybe if cops can't control their emotions they shouldn't be given a gun and then immune to essentially any misuse of the gun?
> (a) commission of a crime and (b) resisting arrest.
We have a judicial system for a reason. The police isn't the arbiter of justice. Especially when the historical reasons for the formation of police in many countries and the US was to control slaves, former slaves, and economic activists.
> Whatever problems exist in policing, let's study them and fix them.
The studies are all out there. Are you refusing to take a look?
> while there is a pervasive attitude that crime and/or belligerence towards cops isn't a massive part of the problem.
You're trying to shine a piece of turd and say it'll get better. A piece of turd, no matter how shiny, is going to be a piece of turd. Police, the way & the numbers they have today, are not necessary for a functioning society.
meanwhile study:
Results are based on a Gallup Panel web study completed by 36,463 U.S. adults, aged 18 and older, fielded June 23-July 6, 2020. The survey was conducted in English. Individuals without internet access were not covered by this study. The Gallup Panel is a probability-based panel of U.S. adults whom Gallup selects using address-based sampling methods and random-digit-dial phone interviews that cover landlines and cellphones. The sample for this study was weighted to be demographically representative of the U.S. adult population, using the most recent Current Population Survey figures.
So they excluded the lowest income Black Americans.
And the issue here is that the question just asked "should there be less police" - that's not what the police abolition movement is arguing for.
How would've the results been if the question asked:
"Should we reduce police force presence in your neighbourhood by 90% while also ensuring that you will get more grants for education, healthcare, and housing"
Or even:
"Should we abolish policing (while still maintaining a skeleton force to respond to aggressive incidents) in exchange for providing housing for everyone making below a certain amount of money?"
>> (a) commission of a crime and (b) resisting arrest.
> We have a judicial system for a reason.
I don't disagree; I'm actually making a different point, a pragmatic one, that it is really easy to almost entirely eliminate the risk of dying at the hands of the police, and that it is completely within one's own power.
I'm all for doing what we can to do to improve the police to make an already rare problem (relatively speaking) even more rare, but if the objective is to reduce deaths at the hands of the police, that's not where the low hanging fruit is.
The claim is not "Citizens need to take responsibility for de-escalating situations," the claim is "If the citizenry, as a whole, were less deferential to police and more aware of when police were overstepping their authority, police would be less inclined to abuse their authority."
It's not the job of any individual citizen to fix the police, but it sure is the job of the democratic society as a whole to fix it (because if you make it the police's job, they're certainly not going to actually do it).
> there needs to be basic training for citizens as well.
Agreed. Citizens need to understand their Constitutional rights and their role as civil masters, and stop deferring, when setting policy, to totalitarians that are supposed to be their paid agents, but prefer to invert that power structure at the expense of citizen rights.
The state of civics education in America is appalling, as is the state of history education that would demonstrate the cost of the problem.
Sure, no one has suggested police departments as currently constituted should both exist and withdraw from Black neighborhoods, except for police unions applying terrorist negotiating tactics.
More relevant questions
(With regard to “defund the police”): should significant funding and responsibility be redirected from the police to preventive and specialized responsive social services?
(With regard to “dismantle/abolish the police”:) Should centralized all-purpose paramilitary local law enforcement agencies be disbanded, with law enforcement responsibilities distributed within specialized agencies whose agents (both armed law enforcement and other) would be domain specialists as well (for law enforcement officers) trained in law enforcement (which also involves transferring non-law enforcement responsibilities and funding more to non-law-enforcememt units.)
I walk with the dog and sometimes the kids every day, so I see police patrolling around. Had an interesting conversation the other day with the police officer:
- So officer, how have things changed since covid?
- Sir, you won't believe the stuff I get called for. Getting teenagers off their cell phones, wife angry that husband didn't do his share of the chores
- What about what people associate with "crime"?
- Down.
As crime declines overall (it has been for many years now), I believe we really need to rethink the jobs we ask police officers to do. They are hammers and they go into situations that don't require hammering and bad things happen.
Ya, that's what anyone intelligent says any time "defund the police" is mentioned (and I completely agree with it, btw). But they should probably choose another slogan if that's what they actually mean. "Defund" in the context of government policy generally means to eliminate via the funding mechanism.
The reality is defunding does literally mean completely eliminate to many of the groups calling for defunding. The partial reduction in funding is just a stepping stone. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol..., an opinion piece titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”
Note that “defund” and “dismantle/abolish” are separate positions (though many people who hold one as their preferred also view the other as superior to the stays quo, and worse yet while there is a strong tendency in what the language means, the use of each isn't perfectly consistent.)
Which probably shouldn't be surprising since there isn't a single top-down organization behind any of them.
I don't disagree, but then I'm in the “abolish" camp anyway; the misunderstanding there is, I think, not something that can be cured with a different slogan, because “Redesign community services and local government, with a particular focus on deemphasizing force-based law enforcement and decentralizing it within domain specialized agencies, usually with broader responsibility for their focal domain than just law enforcement.” Doesn’t reduce well to bumper sticker size. It's just something you have to explain a lot until people understand it.
"Reform the police" is a perfectly fine slogan that captures what they claim to want. Its only flaw is that it isn't controversial, and so won't get the same level of attention. This slogan, like all too many things of late, is a perfect example of Scott Alexander's "toxoplasma" theory:
> "Reform the police" is a perfectly fine slogan that captures what they claim to want. I
It is not, because the “police reform” movement of the last several decades that drives more funding for retraining and additional resources to police in the name of correcting the exact same problems “defund the police” sellar to address is exactly what they are diametrically opposed to and a reason against, and blame for exacerbating the problem by further draining resources from other local services and leading to police taking even more responsibilities outside of their core competencies.
I mean, sure, in a context-free sense, yes, what they seek is, or includes, reform of policing, but that slogan has existing loading in the current context and it's something the group in question defines themself on opposition to, so no, it's not a perfectly fine slogan, any more than “pro-life” would be for a movement for robust publicly funded universal healthcare including comprehensive reproductive health coverage.
Situation: half the country wants to enclose the country in a giant styrofoam bubble to keep people out. The other half wants to import foreigners at gun point.
Conclusion: We have 100% popular support for immigration reform! Why can't those layabouts in government make it happen?
One of the problems is how police education happens. In Europe, police education starts in high school, you go to a specialized high school for it (and then continue to police college). As a result, the police are much more skilled and professional. You start by studying the law. I don't think you even shoot a gun before you know the law very well.
It's unheard of that the police would say shoot a drunk guy with a knife. The way it happens, is that one of the cops who has more martial arts experience (which is one of the things the cops study, which they can do since their education takes much longer) puts on a protective vest and physically immobilizes the drunk.
In the US, the same situation is very likely to end up with the the drunk having more holes in him than a colander.
What's also funny to me is the extent to which police in the US tackle people. Tackling someone is like the worst idea in the world.
I read several years ago that policing unions were initially reluctant to wear body cameras but are now very much in favour as they usually provide evidence that supports the police officer's statement of events.
This is a horribly spun headline. The question was not whether to "retain presence", it was "Would you rather the police spend more time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently spend in your area?".
And unsurprisingly the answers split with roughly half the respondents saying "same" and the remainder split between "more" and "less". Which is about what you get with any status-quo question like this.
The headline, being phrased along the lines of a protest demand, makes this sound like a majority disagreeing with the premise of the BLM movement, when that's not the question at all.
(It is worth noting, though, that the answers anticorrelate with the amount of actual police work! The more people see the police, the LESS they want them around.)
It always annoys me when some random unelected, unselected person or people purport to speak on behalf of a community. Half the time the self appointed spokesperson isn’t even in the relevant community.
Upper middle class morons who’ve never faced hardships or seen true evil, just lived in their bubble want to feel important and hyper tribalism reinforced via social media anger bubbles makes it a waste of time to have any nuance or discussions. These mobs are ruining primarily low income and minority lives while blue check marks rile them up and media gaslights and fans the flames. Every single city which has had these riots has seen a dramatic upshot in violent crime and economy ravaged. None have recovered since Ferguson
A number that have been caught actually rioting are white supremacists seeking to provoke a race war, and at least some caught encouraging it online (haven't seen any caught actually rioting)have been specifically police officers that are also white supremacists seeking to provoke a race war.
just look at any photos of the protests and count the white to black ratio
if those are all far righters white rioters, this is even more confusing!!!
plot twist, they are actually anti fa claiming to be alt right and start a race war so there is more police brutality and there is more evidence to call for defunding police !$$!
1. You are falsely drawing an equivalence between protesters and rioters; they aren't identical groups.
2. I never said all the rioters were white supremacist provocateurs, just that a number of the roots that have been arrested, and some of the online encouragers, have turned out to be (and, in the latter case, specifically also law enforcement officers.)
so you are claiming majority of the rioting is by alt right and law enforcement? i am very interested to see you substantiate that claim
i attended one blm march in my town and it was mostly (almost entirely) white, and the most active participants seemed to be mostly white non local college kids, who gave no indication of being alt right
the organizers were also predominantly white, some seemed very experienced with this sort of thing (and pretty elderly)
i cannot help but draw comparisons with ellison's book
it also seemed to be mostly organized as a photo op, and had us spend most of our time marching around an abandoned high school, with perhaps a few minutes along a main road which is when some participants spent their time taking pics and filming
i personally was highly disappointed with the march, and do not see how it can bring about greatly needed local change in the most racist county in my state
I'd like to see some sources for this claim. It's not impossible, and it would even make some sense, but... evidence?
[Edit: Even harder: There's a difference between "it happened, but rarely" and "it's responsible for the majority of the cases". If it happens, how often does it happen?]
Well yes. But it goes both ways. I would argue that the Right doesn't have the ability to have a nuance discussion around this topic either. They read the headline "defund the police" and assume that means less police to deal with violent crimes. "defund the police" means to reallocate resources from police to people better capable of resolving low impact community issues. And let the police deal with violent crimes. If done properly you might see more police resources available to keep the community safe from violent crime.
If the staff in your local monopoly grocery store is underperforming, do you defund the store? How about your engineering company? In each case, the solution is to replace/remove under-performers while increasing funding, rather than to defund.
This is what Camden did when they "defunded": dissolve the city police, bringing the city under county sheriff jurisdiction, then pay for new staffing at the county level. They may have been able to save some money because they broke the police union, but in the long term funding increased.
But the grocery store doesn't do surgeries or tennis lessons. If the grocery store was responsible for surgeries and doing a bad job, i absolutely would defund them and give the money to surgeons instead. Surgeons are trained at doing surgery. See what i did there? Same applies to police dealing with mental ill people. Mental health professionals should be involved instead.
This sounds like an absurd analogy but only because America doesn't know how to operate community services in any other way than with a heavy police force. It's a failure of imagination and / or unwilling to look at the rest of the world for successful examples of alternative methods.
Agreed riots against individualsand businesses and people in communities is extremely counterproductive and is mostly a result of directionless and angry people acting like idiots.
Instead, there should be organization and all violence should be directed to the state sponsored goon squads that can break into people's home and murder them with little to no consequence.
Of course, this has happened before and ended with the comical exposure of the right wing clowns that still serve as idols of right wingers today.
Having a demilitarised civilian police force maintaining order through the consent of the public has been a thing since the 1820s. I’d like to see how Americans would respond to a police force formed with a modern version of the peelian principles as its guiding rule set.
In my opinion a huge amount of damage has been done by the deliberate choice to act aggressively and quell the protests by ever greater force, and that damage has been done to the respect of the legitimacy of the power police forces hold. People aren’t going to cooperate with a force they see as an armed occupier.
A point that often gets lost in the discussion is that the United States, having no gendarmarie [1], has a police force that is less militarized than many European nations. Gendarmaries are literally a branch of the armed forces for the sole purpose of internal policing.
No, it's a different concept. The gendarmarie is specifically internal military police. The Gendarmerie Nationale [1] and Garde Nationale [2] are separate entities. There is some minor overlap, but they have fundamentally different mission statements.
This is true in a de jure sense, but nonsensical in a de facto sense. Simply comparing video footage of riots in france vs the US shows the US police police to be considerably more heavily equipped and aggressively inclined.
What? Have you watched any of the riot video from France?[1] Lots of tear gas and at the end, the police corral the crowd under a bridge and then hit them with batons when they start to leave. Seem at a minimum as rough as US police if not more.
Nobody is trying to quell protests. I don’t know how that misconception is still alive. The problem is the rioting. Nobody would be trying to disperse crowds if everyone was peaceful.
Yep. In Seattle the vast majority of protests had no issues, because they were peaceful, permitted, and constructive. Literally the only ones that ran into problems with the police were the ones that were breaking the law, violating police orders, committing violence, blocking highways, etc. Those particular situations were often claimed to be “peaceful protests” in social media but were definitely just violent rioting and opportunistic destruction/theft.
I have no idea how people have fallen for the misleading narrative that violence was caused by police. It’s a textbook example of either the naivety of an emotionally charged mob, or incredible social media marketing, or both.
Unfortunately many well-meaning protesters were also swept up in events that were subsumed by antifa/far left groups whose aim was confrontation and violence. For them, the coming backlash against their movement (due to violence) is going to sting.
Today I watched a police officer in kenosha wisconsin get knocked unconscious with a brick. The fellow police officers picked him up and dragged him away - while the crowd changed "Fuck the police" and recorded it.
In the same vein, I saw store owners starting to shoot at protestors.
I suspect, generally, all parties would rather have police keeping the peace. No one wants a gun battle in the streets as people try to protect their property from looters.
I'm not 100% sure what I'd do in this case, but these are not friendly protests. I'm finding the police remarkably restrained. Even in some of these videos we are seeing, people are taking police officers weapons and / or assaulting a police officer before they open fire.
If you're attacking someone who's armed (police officer or not) you should be prepared to suffer the consequences. (I'm not saying all cases are like this, just mentioning that there's a clear tilt to the coverage here).
This kinda elides the context of it being a response to what looked to many people like a blatant attempted murder.
If you're attacking someone who's armed (police officer or not) you should be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Conversely, if police departments abuse their authority, shouldn't they expect to be punished by the people they serve, and in a similarly peremptory manner?
> Nobody would be trying to disperse crowds if everyone was peaceful.
That's not really true. There is an area between "lawful protesting" and "rioting" that's usually called civil disobedience. Civil disobedience as usually understood is peaceful, but it's also by design inherently disruptive.
In Austin, TX protestors blocked the main highway through the city. That was obviously incredibly disruptive, but many people believe the city police's forceful response of shooting less-lethal rounds relatively indiscriminately into the crowd was the exact type of response people were protesting against. A large group of trauma doctors in Austin wrote a paper arguing against using these types of rounds for crowd control due to the horrific injuries they treated: https://www.statesman.com/news/20200816/beanbag-rounds-cause...
Honestly, this is kind of like putting your hand inside the mouth of a crocodile and then complaining that you have been bitten. Or if you start insulting/harassing and physically blocking someone and then start complaining that you were punched as a result.
I would consider civil disobedience something more like as a policeman to refuse to disrupt a peaceful protest, or illegally publishing data (consider Aaron Swartz, Alexandra Elbakyan, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning), or someone like Oskar Schindler.
I am not implying that. For example a worker in a gun manufactory can be civilly disobedient too by not showing up, slacking off, or intentionally making arms of subpar quality.
Edit: I am talking about wartime labor mobilization. In addition the government owns gun manufactories too.
> to make themselves heard in a way that cannot be ignored.
You are stepping away from just civil disobedience then. Riots, sieges, or a full scale revolution fit that description better.
> For example a worker in a gun manufactory can be civilly disobedient too by not showing up, slacking off, or intentionally making arms of subpar quality.
You can't just redefine words to suit your fancy because you don't like what the word actually means. That example you give is literally 100% not what civil disobedience means. Civil disobedience by definition means defying government, not your employer.
I feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. Civil disobedience is protest against a government, and is usually assumed to be non-violent. Look at Wikipedia, pick any result out of Google. Blocking a highway is classic civil disobedience, in line with making a human chain and blocking access to government buildings.
Equating these acts with "siege" screams bad faith to me, I feel like every example you've given is intentionally misleading or missing the point.
If I blocked someone from getting in their driveway and shouted insults at them, I think getting punched would be reasonable. I am not a professional conflict resolver.
Police, on the other hand, are our paid civil servants. It is their job to remove passion and emotion from the interaction and to deescalate potentially dangerous situations. They have a duty to respond sub-proportionately in a way that resolves conflict unless their life is in danger.
Time and time again we see police responding by escalating tension, passion, and violence. This is a spectacular failure of their duty and huge breach of public trust.
A crocodile is a vicious wild animal. And in your analogy... the police are the crocodiles?
Sorry for being facetious, but the whole point is that people expect police to have some self-control (unlike an animal) and behave better in these situations. If you're a cashier, and a customer is yelling at you, berating you, taunting you, etc. you're expected to try to remain calm and attempt to de-escalate the situation - certainly you're not supposed to attack the person. If anything, police should be held to an even higher standard than this.
In their planning what did the consider would be the response from the police? There is no oracle that says civil disobedience for cause X is just but cause Y is unjust. The police cannot simply allow it to occur so they will react with the amount of force needed to end it swiftly.
EDIT:
Downvote if you want but in the absence of an oracle to determine justness then you need to accept any group has the right to cause major disruption, such as blocking highways.
> There is no oracle that says civil disobedience for cause X is just but cause Y is unjust.
I'm not making any comment about the justness or unjustness of the underlying cause of the protests
> The police cannot simply allow it to occur so they will react with the amount of force needed to end it swiftly.
This statement, however, is simply bullshit, and the US has literally hundreds of years of examples of how civil disobedience can be dealt with reasonably and humanely (of course as well as other examples where it's dealt with viciously). The protest would have eventually died down (an effective strategy to dealing with these kinds of protests is just to cordon them off and wait it out, they'll eventually need food and water), protestors would have been arrested and cited with an appropriate misdemeanor.
Your proposed strategy opens civil society up to endless denial of service attacks. Normal life grinds to a halt every time someone feels like they need to "protest". Would you be OK with a single person just sitting in the middle of a highway holding a protest sign? 5 people? 10? 50? Is the nature of the protest important?
The classical notion of civil disobedience is that you have to be willing to accept the consequences, so you can't resist arrest and you have to accept being jailed or paying the fine etc. What I don't see in the recent "protests" is any willingness to be arrested. In fact I see lots of people resisting arrest.
Civil disobedience only works when there's civil reciprocity in a reasonable time frame. It's being abandoned as a tactic because it has been yielding diminishing returns, and radical folk are conscious that conditions keep worsening, in terms of both direct violence and funding of a repressive status quo.
Just as every single human being desires peace in the same way they desire happiness. The love of peace, therefore, is not a virtue. When those who are leading their nations sing the praise of peace they are sincere. They seek war to achieve their peace. Even violent criminals demand peace, if only for themselves. They do not love war; they aspire to an unjust peace.
That is at least an honest statement that what is going on isn't "civil disobedience". Yet there are people who are insisting that the riotous activities can be accurately given that label.
Just as there are lots of people that insist on conflating all protests with riots and cheer when the police gas the former only to act surprised when that leads to the latter.
I realize that we all struggle to overcome confirmation bias, but I really am not seeing the police preemptively gassing people prior to the riotous or threatening behavior. I don't doubt that there might be some examples of this but it is overwhelming outnumbered by people rioting but claiming that they are "peacefully assembling". What I really can't figure out is how many of these people are honest in thinking that the riotous behavior is legitimate (and useful) protest, how many of them are just excited to participate in a very realistic LARP game, and how many are attempting insurrection/rebellion.
Go back and look at the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis around May 30 - people were protesting peacefully the day after the incident (the most disruptive thing I saw was blocking intersections and some graffiti), but cops broke out the tear gas. That heavy-handed behavior in my view led directly to the full on riot the following day. (There's also an allegation that a right wing provocateur got things going by smashing the windows of an Autozone store, but I'm not sure how much of a causal role that played, and think the riot would probably have happened anyway).
Certainly, this is not always the case as local and temporal contexts vary widely. Some riots are spontaneous, some are planned to target state property or force its defense, some are engineered to exploit chaos for profit. You might find it informative to drop in on one if it is occurring in your area; counterintuitively it's not particularly dangerous to attend as a neutral person, though you should be prepared for the possibility of being tear gassed.
Folks, this concept isn't that difficult, and there seem to be a bunch of comments arguing about what civil disobedience really is, as if we didn't have hundreds of years of examples and jurisprudence to go by.
I'm in no way disagreeing that there were clear, obvious examples of violence and property destruction, just as clearly as there were many examples of peaceful protests. But these protests are like Rorschach tests: everyone sees in them what their mind tells them to see. I can say for a fact that in the particular instance I cited in Austin there were clear examples of police firing into the crowd in an indiscriminate fashion. Not even the police chief is really trying to defend it anymore.
My understanding is that in many historical examples of civil disobedience there was often an prior understanding between the protesters and the police as to what was going to happen. In a sense, it was scripted.
I'm not going to try to justify the police actions in Austin -- I don't know the details, but it seems to me that taking a large number of people into custody with no "script" and with the people not ready to be detained is probably quite hazardous, stressful, and ripe for something to go very wrong.
> Folks, this concept isn't that difficult, and there seem to be a bunch of comments arguing about what civil disobedience really is, as if we didn't have hundreds of years of examples and jurisprudence to go by.
I think what I've learned it discussing this is that in fact most people don't understand the philosophy of civil disobedience. Most people seem use the term to mean "breaking things, intimidating people, and baiting the police to draw attention to a just cause". And there is a unexplained rule that determines when the cause is "just" enough to excuse committing the crime that draws the attention.
In my mind civil disobedience, as an ethical concept, is about refusing to comply with one or more laws that you believe to be unjust. Disregarding the Jim Crow laws seems to be the "textbook" example in this regard.
So blocking a road in order to draw attention to some other incident of injustice isn't about how the law about blocking roads is unjust, nor is it even about the some other unjust law. In your example the protest was about the George Floyd killing in which the police officers were rather quickly charged with a crime.
The protesters in your example are indeed "protesting" but I don't think that their tactics are an illustration of civil disobedience, as I understand it.
So if we are to excuse protestors for breaking laws I think there needs to be a different ethical argument that must be made. And that argument has to tackle the problem of which crimes can be excused: disorderly conduct, assault, arson, vandalism, theft/looting, manslaughter? And perhaps it matters how that disobedience is directed? For example, torching the police vehicle of the police force that is implicated in the injustice seems different to me (but still not necessarily excusable) than torching the police vehicle in a city thousands of miles a way from the incident, or than looting your local Best Buy.
For those of you who feel like these types of protests are ethical/warranted/justified, I would ask, what is the limiting principle? What would represent the protesters going "too far"? When would it be appropriate to say enough is enough? When is it no longer protesting and is just criminal behavior?
I would add that another component of civil disobedience is a willingness to accept the consequences, to be arrested without violence or any resistance. I should have included that in my original comment.
> to be arrested without violence or any resistance.
Again, why are people insisting on redefining words because they don't like their meaning? Chaining yourself to a physical structure like a building or tree, and going so far as to make cutting those chains difficult, is one of the prototypical examples of civil disobedience. The whole point is to make it difficult for police to arrest and remove the protestors in those situations.
I would argue that those are examples of non-violent approaches. Another tactic is to "play dead" so that the protesters have to be physically carried away, tedious and time consuming.
But those tactics are very different than what is going on and I think it is quite easy to distinguish between that sort of thing and rioting.
> In my mind civil disobedience, as an ethical concept, is about refusing to comply with one or more laws that you believe to be unjust.
I’m sorry, but that's stupid. How is a citizen supposed to refuse to comply with the qualified immunity laws? You read about bus seats and lunch counters and took them literally. For Thoreau, not paying taxes was a way to protest state-enforced slavery. When Gandhi broke the law against salt not supplied by the British, he wasn’t protesting the salt, he was protesting British rule. Here, people are protesting the entire state that imposes its authority over black lives.
Sorry, I was feeling adversarial last night because of Jacob Blake. Discussion about the right way to protest without the context of the actions precipitating it isn’t getting the job done.
Perhaps I focused too much on one type of civil disobedience. The examples you cite are useful in illustrating that the disobedience has to be peaceful. Or perhaps it might be better to say that the moral authority or message of the protest is vastly strengthened by peaceful disobedience. The willingness to be arrested without resisting is also an important component as it communicates a concurrent belief in the rule of law while still protesting.
When the disobedience includes assault, vandalism, arson, looting, and so on, it is no longer a protest, it is a riot and it looses all its moral legitimacy as a protest in my mind.
It is an interesting question. My first thought is that a core element of the Boston Tea Party was that the colonist had no representation, there was no legitimate way for them to participate in their governance and they were protesting specific laws/taxes that were being imposed without their consent.
I don't think that the current situation in the US is analogous. There are lots of ways to affect change without resorting to violence: peaceful protest, drafting new laws, voting for more police funding, voting for different representatives, voting for different executives.
The idea that all those options have been exhausted and the only solution is to physically and economically destroy communities in order to draw attention to the problem is illogical and self-defeating. In an even more bizarre twist, the story that seems to be emerging is that the rioter's demands are to make changes that aren't wanted by the people in the communities that the rioters purport to represent (see recent polls that minority communities want more police, not less).
Pretty sure police officers nightly beating of protestors, pulling off masks and pepper spraying their eyes and assaulting reporters is a very direct attempt at quelling protestors.
If you followed the nightly protests in Portland OR with any closeness it'd be abundantly clear. Examples just in the past 20 days:
You see enough of these videos and you appreciate the cops and just vindictive and angry at the prospect of losing "power". It doesn't matter what protestors do (and they most they've done to directly threaten officers is thrown water bottles and apples and flares into an empty police building), police will use any reason (or none) to beat protestors.
* As far as I know these videos have resulted in NO reprimands to officers, might as well be standard operating procedure as it continues to happen nightly
> Today I watched a police officer in kenosha wisconsin get knocked unconscious with a brick. The fellow police officers picked him up and dragged him away - while the crowd changed "Fuck the police" and recorded it.
The idea that the worst the protesters have done is throw apples at the police is so crazy I don't even know how you could be that deep in a bubble
I'm directly talking about Portland, where plenty of protestors have been knocked unconscious by police. People get pepper sprayed in the eyes for no reason besides cops are angry.
If you want to conflate places to strengthen a case then you need to dive in to what happened at Kenosha and the lack of police response to that tragedy or any of the others.
If you want to bring up how "protestors were asking for it" by showing up to protests then we got to ask if police are asking for mass nation wide protests by actively resisting change and harming black lives.
Do you even live in Portland? I do and I live a mile away from the Justice Center where protests centered. There was looting the first night but not much at all since. Also, it's been normal COVID times business as usual in the surrounding area during business hours. If you want to make up narratives choose a different city.
Also, if you think police can just beat people senseless because they feel challenged then you're just a short step away from text book fascism.
I believe the commonly used term for this is "largely peaceful".
Sure. They're largely peaceful, except when attacking and almost killing civilians[1]. And it's not even intended as a joke. There's some crazy levels of cognitive dissonance going on.
Yep, one night protestors were just as brutal as police, mistaken identity and tensions high from the other night when a car almost ran protesters over.
You have one example versus dozens of examples of police violence. And it's Andy Ngo, who once again didn't actually take the video footage.
You're the one with cognitive dissonance claiming all nights are violently attacking civilians when you have one example. Somehow though most nights police beat protestors or use tear gas and that’s ok by you?
Are you being willfully dishonest or just naive? Portland is not doing this to protesters. They are rioting. They do this after giving half a dozen warnings. They say that anyone who does not vacate the riot will be subject to crowd control measures and arrest. The rioters remain and continue to be violent and to intentionally shield those committing the most egregious acts. It’s disgusting. The police must respond to the nightly attempts to burn down buildings and attacks on them from projectiles, laser blinding attempts, incendiary devices, and more.
There is no justification for it whatsoever. There is no legitimate cause behind any of it.
Watch the hour long interview with the Portland cop that was going around. It’s good perspective.
Nobody gives a shit about peaceful protests. If they did the Iraq war would never have happened and many policy areas would be far different from how they are. Riots should not be a first resort but when other types of civic engagement have failed they're a wholly legitimate tactic to force change.
> Riots should not be a first resort but when other types of civic engagement have failed they're a wholly legitimate tactic to force change.
This statement is devoid of any explanation as to what types of "change" are important enough to override "other types of civic engagement". The legislative process, voting, representative democracy, the "rule of law" are all designed to avoid having people take matters into their own hands. If you are going to argue that all that should be thrown out it has to be more convincing than just some generic statement that "change" is necessary.
You aren't making the case for abandoning the rule of law, you are just asserting that it is the right thing to do in this case.
Your argument seems to be that everything possible has been tried to address police violence and that there is no other solution other than to riot.
I could point to various crime statistics to suggest that the problem is not in fact intractable or "fairly common" (while still being a problem to be addressed) but it really isn't worth it. Even if I shared your apparent assessment of the problem, how does it make sense to physically and economically destroy communities in response? How does it make sense to make it impossible to actually "police" in these communities? How does it make sense to drive away anyone with resources from these communities? Why do you even think the people reacting this way are making a principled statement about police violence and aren't just taking advantage of the situation?
The phrase "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" comes to mind but it is entirely inadequate to describe the disastrous sequence of events that is going on in so many communities right now.
It's simple enough. The police primarily operate to preserve the existing social order which prioritizes property over life. The deliberate infliction of economic pain is being used to coerce change, because other avenues have failed. The authorities there could very easily preempt this by arresting the police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back and charging him with attempted murder. He'll have his day in court and be given ample opportunity to make the argument for why his actions were justified.
In general, rioting is used selectively, targeting official buildings followed by corporate concerns, which extract capital from local communities. Little of the news coverage about Kenosha drew attention to the fact that the largest building burned down Monday night was the WI Dept of Corrections; many commentators prefer to focus your attention on commercial damage in order to push the idea that it's indiscriminate.
> The authorities there could very easily preempt this by arresting the police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back and charging him with attempted murder.
You think the mob will stop? You are advocating for a justice system driven by threats from the mob that must be responded to in real time. You aren't even attempting to grapple with the particular facts that are in evidence at the moment in this case, never mind what might be discovered by actually asking questions. You aren't describing a justice system based on the rule of law, you are describing mob rule. It won't end well for anybody. Why would anyone in their right mind be a police office given the framework you describe? Why would anyone choose to stay in that type of a jurisdiction? The logical consequences of your framework would be disastrous for the community. The medicine you are prescribing is far, far worse than the disease.
Yes, I'm pretty sure it would, or at least would have had this happened earlier. I'm not advocating for mob rule; I'm saying that riots are a response to the lack of justice that prevails. The police officer should have been arrested immediately on suspicion of attempted murder, much as Derek Chauvin should have been arrested immediately on suspicion of murder for killing George Floyd.
The reality is that police often shoot and kill with a sense of impunity because they enjoy considerable legal immunity, to the point that the identity of a police officer who carries out a shooting is often withheld from the public. I'm saying that any time a police officer shoots, kills, or seriously injures someone, they should be immediately relieved of duty pending a full inquiry, no matter what the circumstances. If there is a colorable suspicion of misbehavior (eg the shooting was not a case of returning fire or action during the commission of a crime), then they should be subject to arrest like any other criminal suspect, while retaining their full panoply of legal rights like presumption of innocence, access to counsel etc.
If a lot of people don't want to be cops who are subject to such restraints, good. I don't want cops who use force casually. What we have now is a system that throws the book at anyone who takes or threatens life (with far higher sentences than most other developed countries despite little evidence of a deterrent effect) while frequently applying light or no penalties, or sometimes no serious investigation, to police officers who commit similar acts. These inequities are compounded by economic and racial disparities in the application of force, legal sanctions and so on.
Unless you've lived in other countries or have significant first- or second-hand experience (including talking to current and former police officers) this might be hard information to accept.
> If a lot of people don't want to be cops who are subject to such restraints, good. I don't want cops who use force casually. What we have now is a system that throws the book at anyone who takes or threatens life (with far higher sentences than most other developed countries despite little evidence of a deterrent effect) while frequently applying light or no penalties, or sometimes no serious investigation, to police officers who commit similar acts.
A core principle of a civil society with the rule of law is the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to enforce the laws. If someone steals from you, you don't get to hunt them down and kidnap them for 1 year even if the punishment for the crime is 1 year of imprisonment. We explicitly grant police the authority to use force and when they don't use it properly they are subject to exactly the same punishment as you and I. There is no conceptual asymmetry on the use of illegitimate force. Self-defense is another example of this. You can legitimately use force against an attacker in self-defense. If you kill someone in self-defense that isn't murder and isn't an example of a double standard.
> I'm saying that any time a police officer shoots, kills, or seriously injures someone, they should be immediately relieved of duty pending a full inquiry, no matter what the circumstances.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly what happens. The mob isn't waiting more than 30 minutes never mind for a "full inquiry".
> If there is a colorable suspicion of misbehavior (eg the shooting was not a case of returning fire or action during the commission of a crime), then they should be subject to arrest like any other criminal suspect, while retaining their full panoply of legal rights like presumption of innocence, access to counsel etc.
Tell that to the mob and its enablers. We have state governors opining on who was right or wrong just hours after tragic events, without any attempt to understand what really happened. This encourages mobs and rioting.
Same thing happened in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. Some ridiculously vague account on social media regarding an interaction with police and a mob arrives to loot and pillage all night long.
Just a couple of days ago in Mineapolis someone committed suicide while police approached and that triggered more rioting.
We won't survive as a society if every police interaction is interpreted immediately as yet another racial injustice, never mind if every rumor of a police interaction is interpreted that way. Mobs and rioting need to be shutdown hard so we have room for "full inquiry", but there are political leaders who not only won't shut down this activity they are actively encouraging it.
It's not a misconception. As an example, here's a video of riot-gear-clad police marching on a crowd that is peacefully listening to a violin vigil for a man murdered by that same police department: https://twitter.com/jessiedesigngal/status/12771260192462602...
The parent claimed that it was a misconception that police were "quelling" peaceful protest and I shared a video of police disrupting a very obviously peaceful protest - feels relatively straightforward?
Watching the original video, do you legitimately believe that any of the police officers are in danger? Do you believe that a single (unsubstantiated claim, without any evidence of a) thrown object justifies pepper spraying reporters and attacking bystanders with batons?
I originally shared the video claiming that police were interfering with a peaceful protest. You disputed that the police were interfering, saying they were marching past. When I shared further evidence that the police were in fact disrupting the protest and hurting people who were participating, you found reason to instead believe that the protest was not peaceful. Consider your biases.
Here [0] [1] [2] [3] are more examples of and news articles discussing police attacking peaceful protesters.
I have trouble with this view. I don't see it. I've lived in a few protest capitals, in different countries, and I've even been on organizing teams for protests. Polices are always either just there, or they escort specifically, unless there's that one group of shitheads that wants to cause trouble.
Portland is greatly misportrayed by the media. NY Times and USA Today show people shaking a fence. You jump to AndyNgo and there's video of people sawing through fences with power tools. Political cartoonist like Matt Bors say police are afraid of laser pointers. People are using green lasers that can blind people, and may have blinded at least three federal officers. People I know there say it's pretty normal for a few hours, and then at night, a lot of anarco-anticaps cause a shit ton of damage.
Police are not actively quelling protests. I think most of them are fine with people just protesting. Police do want to stop riots. Looting is destroying cities and should be stopped. CHAZ was a nightmare where the police stopped showing up when businesses and residents repeatably called them[0]. I watched police cruisers on fire in Chicago back in May, and two weekends ago businesses took a second massive hit. The bigger chains are open again, but many small stores may be closed for good.
Not all police officers are good, but it's insane to think the majority of them are psychos. The vast majority of people I know who are police, want to do the right thing.
There was a time when local police would turn fire hoses on peaceful protestors and release dogs. It's what turned the nation towards ML King and the movement he stood for, because America wanted to stand against the violence. When protestors burn down gas stations and car dealerships, the American people will still turn against the violence.
That's patently ridiculous. There's dozens and dozens of incidents like the videos I have listed below of police just brutalizing people, and they've done this to journalists too. Police are angry and want to violently stop protestors.
Pretty sure police officers nightly beating of protestors, pulling off masks and pepper spraying their eyes and assaulting reporters is a very direct attempt at quelling descent.
In my view, these videos are evidence of serious and pervasive cultural problems in police departments around the country, and with how they see their role in society. There’s simply no way to justify the behavior seen in many of these clips.
So the best reply you could come up with was to assert that those videos are lies with weasel words without addressing facts or providing any substance or counterpoint?
Burying your head in the sand does not count as honest discourse or objective reasoning.
Every video in marricks's post started after things started happening; right in the middle. There is not context. We have no idea what happened BEFORE. That's the context that's missing.
Go back and watch the newly released Floyd bodycam videos; the entire 30min and 18min clips. Dude was reaching around in the car, was being a total fucking asshole, swallowed 2mg of fentenyl; the cops were nothing but nice (as they could be) to him. Dude was claiming he couldn't breath and cried out to his mom even before they asked him to get in the car, and long before he was on the ground.
It's a complete and total lie compared to the narrative that's been stuffed down our throat by the 24/7/365 Insta-rage-a-media.
> Every video in marricks's post started after things started happening;
If you really believe that pulling the "they did it first" card helps your case in any way, I'm sorry to break it to you but people only started to protest after the police was caught, again, doing pretty egregious stuff against innocent members of the public, including killing people in broad day light.
And I'm dumbfounded by your attempt at whitewashing police murders by spewing bullshit like "the guy was being a total fucking asshole".
What's wrong with selectively chosen videos of police brutality? They still prove it exists and is unprovoked. (And as mentioned in another post, there's a thread cataloging hundreds of them, so they're not really that selective...)
Andy Ngo, the right-wing troll who set out to smear Antifa from the beginning, and who was discovered to have received protection from violent right-wing groups in exchange for favorable coverage of those groups?
How do you know the people taking power tools to fences weren't right-wing agents provocateurs? If your source is Andy Ngo, I think that's the more likely explanation.
Andy Ngo is an amazing, on the ground journalist. He has covered an amazing amount of stuff in Seattle and Portland that's not reported on any other major new media outlet. I've watched a lot of his coverage and I use to live in Seattle. Based on what I see and what I hear from others on the ground there, I respect his reporting and think it's valuable.
Is it bias? Of course. Every single news agency has a bias. But I still think Andy is trying to report accurately and do the right thing. I balance what he says against his opposition and I have decided for myself that I think his intent is good.
He mostly just reposts other people’s work with his own very selective spin. You might as well follow the original photo journalists and watch the raw scenes to form your own opinion rather than have Andy Ngo spin it for you. You won’t find videos of pipe bombs exploding and proud boys pointing guns at protestors and police assaulting protestors if all you follow is Andy Ngo because those things don’t fit his agenda.
Andy's reporting in Portland this year was just 100% stealing videos from other reporters and adding his own narrative to them.
Most memorably to me he took a video of a couch burning at the justice center and claimed antifa were burning a homeless persons belongings.
Truth was he wasn't even there and stole the video from another journalist. That journalist post accurately described what happened but he didn't care, he knew the story he wanted to tell.
Andy's tone is extremely neutral but it seems like pretty much everything he says is pulled out of his ass to smear leftists.
The people taking power tools to the fence weren’t provocateurs. There was an effort to remove the fence. It’s reasonable to debate whether that’s legitimate form or protest or warrants the outsized and very violent responses we continue to see, but I think most people discussing Portland have very little grasp of the whole context of the past 90 days of continuous protests unfortunately. I also think people fail to put things in proper perspective when weighing small acts of vandalism against responses.
But I agree with you Andy Ngo is not a legitimate journalist. An example of that was compile by this thread last year.
As I said it’s reasonable to debate. Personally I don’t think the fence should’ve been attacked because it gives people like yourself who are looking for an excuse to ignore the problems raised by these problems everything you need to do so. But that’s the thing about protests, they’re a large diverse group of people who have their own ideas about things. In the end after following 90 days of what’s happened in Portland including the violence against protestors from police that included them nearly killing one protestor for sport and showing up in paramilitary units abducting people. They got exactly what they wanted. Clips that will switch off your brain to the rest of the issues.
Oh that Twitter thread seems quite unbiased. Here's the author's tagline "Exclusively practicing non-consensual redistribution of corporate wealth into the hands of working families by exploiting rules the plutocracy wrote for itself."
Antifa supporter doesn't like Andy Ngo. No surprise there.
Its true. I've been watching the Live Streams with hours and hours of content rather than just highlights and summaries, and overwhelmingly the police forces have shown incredible restraint.
To everyone who views individual events out of context and condemns an entire system, I say you are actively harming society with your hubris.
How can a police officer, armed to the teeth, beating or shooting at an unarmed person be taken "out of context"? Did their feelings get hurt by the angry protester that they just had to fight back using physical force? What possible context are you talking about?
From what I've seen, Portland protests turns into a riots, with stones and firebombs being hurdled at police. Police then decide to clear the area (clearly within the law), antifa members refuse to move, so are forcefully moved. Usually involves antifa screaming and crying. They are then arrested and released and it starts all over again the next night.
Have you looked at any of the videos of police beating up peaceful protesters from the last few months?
Sure, there are cases where protests escalate into riots, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the many, many, documented cases of peaceful protests where police initiated violence.
How do you reconcile behaviour like this https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/20/christopher... with your view that "Polices are always either just there, or they escort specifically"? In this case they actively escalate violence against a peaceful and unarmed protester (who also happens to be a Navy vet).
How about Buffalo police assaulting this old man, leaving him with blood pouring from his ears? (https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/06/05/buffalo-police-push...) Are the riot police "wanting to do the right thing" here? Especially when they walk past him and leave him lying as his blood pools on the sidewalk? Can you honestly watch that video and feel fine with how the police handled that situation?
> but it's insane to think the majority of them are psychos.
This is a strawman. The post you replied to was not claiming anything close to this.
> I think most of them are fine with people just protesting.
This can be true at the same time as the viewpoint you're arguing against being true. A couple bad actors escalating things can result in a peaceful protest turning into an uncontrollable riot. Also, use of force orders vary by county, as do the orders handed down to the cops on the ground. Read https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-escalation-keeps-pro... for some evidence-based discussion around varying use-of-force policies and how they affect the outcomes during protests.
> There was a time when local police would turn fire hoses on peaceful protestors and release dogs.
We've made progress since then, but to claim we've fixed the problem is like claiming that racism in the USA ended with the victory of the civil rights movement.
This is my view as well. I think the American public has unrealistic expectations of what law enforcement can actually do in these situations and further, what federal law enforcement and the national guard is capable of.
It seems like when they sent DHS down to Portland it ended up just exacerbating the situation. No "order" was restored; they just left after a week or so.
And I think more broadly, the "tough on crime" crowd needs to recognize the limits of its own ideology. We have the largest prison system in the world and still do not have law & order on our streets.
The rioting mobs who are blindly against police and using recent tragedies for broader politics leverage have gotten out of control. It was bad enough that their proposals for defunding are not what any community wants, as this Gallup poll shows.
But beyond the reckless and dangerous calls for defunding, the violence/theft/arson from the rioters and far-left groups that back them is just completely unacceptable. Just yesterday some of these rioters sealed in Seattle police using quick dry concrete while setting the precinct on fire:
https://mynorthwest.com/2114190/rantz-rioters-burn-seattle-p...
I wonder how many people here have personally been wrongfully shot at by the police versus just watching it on the media? I for one have been shot at several times after being mistaken for carrying a gun when it was really just groceries.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 441 ms ] threadYou know, you can go and read why they advocate for that position. You can do more than just imagine--more than just imprinting your own biases onto their position. It's just lazy.
It goes to show that realistically, they (who ever wants to defund the police) are really asking for an anarcho-communist utopia.
I heard that during its existence, the six blocks of CHAZ were by capita the most dangerous place in the world, exceeding anywhere in South America or the Middle East.
"De-fund the police," as I've heard explained from people who actually claim to hold the belief, is about taxpayers being very generous when funding police and very stingy when funding education, infrastructure, and social programs. The idea is that the next marginal dollar might not best be spent on the police, even though taxpayers following historical trends would overwhelmingly vote to spend it there.
I'm no social scientist, but I've certainly noticed that in the inner city the police always seem to have freshly painted, frequently-washed, current-year cars, freshly paved and remodeled offices with new signs and landscaping, new uniforms, and so on, while the food bank and the school are decrepit and run-down. The one time I bothered to look up salaries, they were, uhhh, entirely in-line with those outer appearances. On the basis of this purely personal and anecdotal evidence, I would tentatively support such proposals.
Visiting San Francisco and seeing signs in every parking lot warning you to keep your valuables out-of-sight when parked and then learning that apparently they've decided to not punish crimes with damage below $1000, resulting in a predictable crime wave, makes me think that some part of the "de-fund the police" movement actually does want to get rid of the police, though.
I haven't been paying enough attention to figure out how large these relative sub-groups are. Legitimately, I mean -- obviously if you listen to conservative media you'll get the impression that the crazies are the majority, while if you listen to liberal media you'll get the impression that they're a tiny minority -- I just haven't done the homework to make up my mind as to who's right.
Either way, I'll give a close reading to any proposals they manage to get on to the ballot.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/07/29/missio...
That’s about like an abused spouse. “He doesn’t always beat me”.
Anecdotes aside, there doesn't seem to be a significant difference between races on their opinions of police (and whether they want more or less of them in their neighborhoods).
https://www.cato.org/blog/do-police-treat-all-races-equally
Roughly seven-in-ten white Americans (72%) say police officers treat racial and ethnic groups equally at least some of the time. By way of comparison, half of Hispanics and just 33% of black adults say the same
I'm sure they, along with many others, want changes in police behavior and improved accountability, but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with funding (or "abolishing" as the root of this thread wondered about).
there doesn't seem to be a significant difference between races on their opinions of police
I'm sure they, along with many others, want changes in police behavior and improved accountability,
Is “improved accountability” a nice way to say “stop shooting and beating unarmed Black people” or “stop pulling over Black people in neighborhoods where they ‘don’t look like they belong’”?
There's a ton of problems I have law enforcement in the US, and the bulk of it boils down to terrible screening of personnel and inappropriate training. Fixing both of those issues will require more funding, not less. Better psychological screening (to eliminate sociopaths), higher pay (to retain quality personnel, and be able to rotate people off the streets more frequently), longer training and with different curriculum (stop learning tactics from Israeli counter-insurgency personnel), etc...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
Many articles from BLM leaders making this unambiguous statement.
People keep jumping in to say “defund doesn’t mean defund” or “abolish doesn’t mean abolish”, but they really do mean it literally. They also chant “all cops are bastards”.
The call the defund the police doesn’t end with taking money from the police, the goal is to be able to provide more specific services using other departments outside of law enforcement.
[1] https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...
Why do you believe this? It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
The level of "defund" people are advocating for varies pretty wildly.
Yes, reallocating budget is perhaps a reasonable thing.
A non trivial number of the protesters are advocating for complete elimination of the police though.
Oddly enough, I'd expect the widespread riots that have continued all summer long will have the exact opposite effect in the medium to long term.
Uh, what? No. Just, no.
That is true whether or not the riots have actually been geographically widespread.
I'm an American. I can't believe you can say that with a straight face. As soon as you say that ONLY the police are doing something wrong means you have an understanding of the situation that no facts will fix.
Have you gone to any protests where the police used chemical weapons?
Gas is a chemical weapon. Pepper spray is a chemical weapon. Please don't compare Assad's use of chemical weapons to tear gas.
The use of tear gas is the use of a chemical weapon and a war crime, but when you turn it against civilians in your own country we give it a pass.
I think I've clarified what I meant. I was targeted. I can't specify the exact degree to which anyone was skipped over to get to me.
> In what way were you targeted?
First time, it was indiscriminate use of teargas. Second time, indiscriminate use of teargas and a flashbang shot at my feet.
> Were you doing nothing to arouse police attention?
I was standing in a protest.
> I think most first world countries have a gas they can use for riot control. Are you insisting that most first world countries are regularly engaging in what you would call war crimes... that are worse than other countries?
It would be a war crime if it were a foreign military force using it against the exact same crowd, but not if it's cops. War crimes have a way of being selectively (un)enforced when it comes to those in power, in any case.
Police are fairly atrocious in most countries, so I don't think there's much point in trying to figure out exactly where I'd rank the police in the US. It wouldn't make it right if it were average or not.
The other commenter seemed to understand well enough. Maybe instead of playing a blame game you could accept my clarification and move on?
> You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected.
And I never claimed to.
> And you've given two examples of them shooting indiscriminately. So no, they didn't personally target you.
The second example was closer to me than anyone else and I was at the rear of the crowd.
I don't know how productive it is for me to keep telling you what I mean by saying I was personally targeted. But okay, I'll try again with the same substitution: I had a first-hand experience being targeted by police with chemical and explosive weapons.
> You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected.
> And I never claimed to.
AND YET 2 SENTENCES LATER......
>I don't know how productive it is for me to keep telling you what I mean by saying I was personally targeted. But okay, I'll try again with the same substitution: I had a first-hand experience being targeted by police with chemical and explosive weapons.
"You've done it poorly".
> AND YET 2 SENTENCES LATER......
Please do me the courtesy of explaining your position rather than throwing around quotes and assuming it's clear.
"I personally cursed the cop for pepper spraying me"
Just that one cop huh? They're literally saying all the cops targeted them.
Give it enough years, and people will talk about the brave protestors of 2020. But like all "brave protests" of the past, today they should be supported, and are not.
Nothing about these “protests” after dark is brave. It’s shameful and cowardly. So is the response from politicians.
Have you been to the protests in PDX? Seen the cops hurting people for standing in a protest?
Example: they announced a curfew via text a few minutes before it went into effect. Many didn't get this because they didn't have their phones with them. Tear gas and flashbangs had already been deployed with zero warnings from police.
It is not helpful or okay to assert such falsehoods with confidence.
if you call someone racist don't back down.
Ok, I’ll bite. It’s racist, by the way, to point out the cops race. So that tells us a little about you.
I challenge you to show me a single example of:
1) A conspiracy theory
2) Prejudice
3) Misinformation
4) Racism
5) Feeling more empathy for abusive cops (of any race) than their victims (of any race).
All my info is either from primary sources, actual data, documentation, or first hand knowledge, not news or blogs, so no need to get cute with the snark. Try to have an adult discussion?
I can't believe you've trolled me into this. Twenty minutes of my life, down the drain:
1) conspiracy theory
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278910
2) Prejudice
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24279521
3) Misinformation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24284118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24286768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278829 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278879 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278990
4) Racism
5) Feeling more empathy for abusive cops (of any race) than their victims (of any race).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24284044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278704 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283485 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278990
6) Unwarranted fear
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278750 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24278910
Second one said Seattle’s lost their black female police chief. Basic fact, not a conspiracy theory.
Third one also contains no conspiracy theory.
3 strikes, you’re out. I assume the rest are more links of me not saying anything close to what you purport. Which I knew, because I didn’t say those things.
Your list for racism was empty, btw.
2. You're now editorializing my experience of which you have no knowledge, calling it a mob. Oh my. Please refrain from using your imagination regarding my experiences.
>2. You're now editorializing my experience of which you have no knowledge, calling it a mob. Oh my. Please refrain from using your imagination regarding my experiences.
I think that's a lesson you could learn from regarding other people as well. It seems like a right you reserve just for you.
"After a long solo hike, the researcher was able to personally see the inside of a volcano." There is only one person in that story. No 1:1 communication. It just means the person was there for the thing. This is how personally was used in the comment.
In fact it's a little weird. Personal in this sense clearly means 1:1. I doubt the commenter pepper sprayed themselves?
If it were a foreign military doing the exact same action to the exact same people, it would be a war crime. There are serious impacts from using tear gas, including poorly-understood hormonal impacts to women, particularly pregnant women.
> Stop trying to manufacture an oppressed victim narrative.
I haven't manufactured anything, these are things that have been happening for three months via aggressive, proactive police action. You can go see it for yourself by attending a protest at a major city. Or you can review the countless videos. Or you can listen to people (like me) who were there.
> We can call a water cannon a chemical weapon too.
No we can't. Water cannons are also unacceptable in these situations, however. People like to act like these weapons are relatively harmless, but people have been disabled, nearly killed, or straight-up killed with them.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...
That list includes deaths caused by law enforcement and death of rioters killed by people trying to protect themselves from the rioters as well. There are some additional deaths by the rioters that are not in the list though but that does provide a decent synopsis of some of the deaths.
Your news sources have an agenda and tend to get these things wrong. Go to a protest and see for yourself if you want to viscerally watch them lie in real time.
So do yours, let's not pretend otherwise.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/upshot/black-...
It's dragged on to the point that I fully expect support to start dropping precipitously. Especially as the protests have become continuously more destructive riots.
This just doesn't seem to be happening as you believe it does.
Campaign advertising is not news.
No, but Twitter live streams aren't campaign advertising.
The protests are demonstrably violent and destructive.
This categorically isn't defunding police, this is police abolition, and getting them confused is likely why you think it's a luxury belief because I fail to see what's luxurious about getting tear gassed every Friday/Saturday night or having the cops stand aside letting groups like the Proud Boys brutalize protestors and journalists. There's nothing luxurious about getting tear gassed for 3 months straight, it's a genuine struggle.
What's luxurious is you and I.
Why are you being tear gassed so often? I've been in US many times, for many months, I have never been tear gassed by police.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended, we'd appreciate it.
I got teargassed holding my hands up and chanting. Twice.
If the protest was deemed an unlawful assembly you were participating in civil disobedience where a police response should be expected.
If not, you should file a civil rights lawsuit.
Announcing an unlawful assembly is not carte blanche to dole out collective punishment or violence, either.
There's already lawsuits ongoing. They won't go anywhere in terms of reforms because individual cops are virtually always indemnified, difficult to identify in these situations (many covered their badge numbers and nametags with tape), and the city will absorb the cost without the department taking any real hits.
https://www.8toabolition.com/defund-the-police
Now, do they represent the majority of the people calling for defunding the police? I don't know. But it's not "categorically" different.
That's certainly what the conservative news outlets are reporting, but is it actually true?
Perception is all that matters, and a large chunk of the country follows conservative media.
Unfortunately the country is doing a great job of lining up behind their preferred propaganda outlets rather than looking for truth. This is true for both Liberals and Conservatives.
We hear what we want to hear.
So yes i would say the veracity of the statement is relavent here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-i-beca...
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/george-floyd/minne...
As for the other two - two is not a "non trivial number" regardless of who gives them a platform. This YouGov poll [1] shows 11% support (and ~20% support among blacks and hispanics) for abolishing the police as of June, which is a non trivial number. But framing it as a yes/no question loses a lot of granularity - I bet most of those people would advocate replacing the current police force with something that materially resembles a (more community-based, less militarized) police force.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...
[1] https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/vgqowgynze/econTabReport.pdf
If the movement were "Demilitarize the police", then yes, that is absolutely something I could be in favor of.
As it stands, "Defund the police" is to me a weasel word version of "Abolish the police" and I honestly do think people are just being coy when they claim not to see that.
It's clickbait if they want to shift budgets.
I honestly have no idea whether it's primarily one vs the other.
There are a small but significant number of people in the current protests calling for policing as we know it to be abolished; they don't beat around the bush about it. The phrase "abolish the police" has 2.5 million google hits, a NYT op-ed, and a Wikipedia article.
Notably these funds don’t need to come at the expense of police funding.
We just dumped something like $5 trillion into a fire pit called COVID. There’s no lack of emergency funding for these programs if people demanded it.
Because impressions matter, and if you want to get buy-in from an already weary broader populace, you need to have clear messaging.
Shouting "defund the police" in the middle of riots where innocent bystanders are attacked and businesses are looted is terrible messaging.
BLM have overplayed their hand at this point and are on the cusp of real public backlash.
Then they are utterly useless.
The way you phrased it, the protests are nothing more than tantrums by oversized children.
Tantrums should not be rewarded.
They've achieved many, though far from all, of their goals in various municipalities.
Why do you believe that a PR campaign is the only protest of value?
> The way you phrased it, the protests are nothing more than tantrums by oversized children.
That is in no way implied from how I phrased it. Pain and weariness from racialized murders and intimidation by cops is not a childish tantrum and I hope you never have to endure that pain yourself. I do hope that you find the empathy to consider their position.
> Tantrums should not be rewarded.
Please treat them like people.
You say the protests have achieved their goals. To me, that means they are an organized campaign of some sort.
The fact is, BLM is a national organization with nearly universal name recognition at this point. They have funding. They have PR teams. They are directing messaging.
And the fact remains that I think "Defund the Police" is terrible messaging.
> Please treat them like people.
As I said at the beginning, I think we're talking past each other.
I never meant to dehumanize the protesters.
The main point I am trying to make is that as someone with no horse in this race (i.e. I am neither pro-BLM nor pro-police) if I were forced to pick a side on the issue based on my current view of what is and has happened over the past couple months, I would come down on the side of the police. I'd rather just stay out of it.
All this said, as much as I think our politics differ, I really do respect the way you've responded to people in this thread, and I hope there are more people like you among the protesters because then maybe you've got an actual shot at achieving your goals.
As in there are various demands by various groups and you can identify the core where they overlap.
> The fact is, BLM is a national organization with nearly universal name recognition at this point. They have funding. They have PR teams. They are directing messaging.
BLM is decentralized. They don't have most of that.
> And the fact remains that I think "Defund the Police" is terrible messaging.
Okay. But it's not PR. It's not some campaign crafted by an overpaid consultant. It's a decentralized protest movement. I don't want it to be that, either. That's part of the problem in politics - caring far too much about this kind of thing. Focus on the realities, the people dying. The violent and aggressive and frequently racist police.
> > Please treat them like people.
> As I said at the beginning, I think we're talking past each other.
I think the attempt to infantilize was nearly dehumanizing.
> I never meant to dehumanize the protesters.
Then stop calling protests in response to murders by police a tantrum by oversized children.
> The main point I am trying to make is that as someone with no horse in this race (i.e. I am neither pro-BLM nor pro-police)
We all have a horse in this race. We live together in a society that has some level of control over things like policing, equity, violence, crime, poverty. The "neutral" position is implicit support for the status quo, much as being a "moderate" in politics indicates the same.
> if I were forced to pick a side on the issue based on my current view of what is and has happened over the past couple months, I would come down on the side of the police. I'd rather just stay out of it.
As I said before, ha.
> All this said, as much as I think our politics differ, I really do respect the way you've responded to people in this thread, and I hope there are more people like you among the protesters because then maybe you've got an actual shot at achieving your goals.
The vast majority of people in the protests are like me. You should go to one.
It is. Great that you support it.
> As it stands, "Defund the police" is to me a weasel word version of "Abolish the police"
So you understood the phrase wrong and now you know better.
TLDR: You support it but don't like the wording of the slogan.
There is a situation where a group of people have together under the slogan "defund the police". There is a very high risk that if they get the power to do something they will, literally and only, defund the police.
Not many people are reading policy documents. The point of unity in politics is usually the literal meaning of the words being used. Secret signals of "really we meant this other thing" tend not to work.
While that sounds great on paper, nothing the schools do is going to make a difference if the family support at home isn't there. You can't just throw money at the problem to make it better.
Anecdotal, but my sister used to work as a teacher & reading specialist in poorer areas. Per my last conversation with her on this topic, she said maybe 20% of the kids have a solid backing from family for education. The rest she had interacted with for one reason or another were a mix of parents who told her it was her job to teach and they wouldn't do that at home; another group of parents that were too drunk/drugged out to even answer the phone or call back; and another that would just swear at her for bothering them at home. All of her co-workers had similar accounts of this happening.
Kids that did want to learn in class were bullied for "acting white" and there were physical fights occurring weekly. She didn't teach high school, she taught 4/5th grade.
For us to make any progress with poorer schools there needs to be a community focus on education, having respect for each other, and having respect for the law. If you grow up for 18 years in an environment without those then nothing matters long term and we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.
The issue really isn't about race though, it is about poverty and culture. I know a kindergarten teacher from a very rural, very white, very poor school district who was cussed out by one of her 5 year old students. The parents don't care, and it shows in the students' progression through school and young adulthood. If parents show up at all, it is to yell at teachers for giving their children bad grades or any sort of discipline.
Of course, putting any sort of onus on the parents gets talked down, as it undermines the argument that things will magically get better if only we threw more money at the problem... because the problem isn't the school or the teachers at all.
The culture of black communities dealing with poverty and crime that you refer to didn't come from nowhere. It was not simply imported from 17th century Africa, in the way that the apple pie was brought over from England. It is a product of a people who were bravely struggling and striving to cope in the worst possible circumstances.
Brutally enslaved for more than 200 years, their literal chains finally removed, they continued to be viciously abused and systematically and savagely oppressed throughout the following century. They weren't event treated as fully human by the federal law until 2 generations ago. Only two generations! Many states had incredibly racist and oppressive laws even more recently than that. The most cursory research reveals an utterly depraved history. One simple and terrible example is redlining, which unfortunately was occurring even after the civil rights act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining).
We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused. It is impossible to fully mend what we have broken, but we damn well better try.
25% percent of the US’s population as a nation is 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, a substantial portion of which arrived after 1965 because desegregation and immigration reforms coincide. [1] Whatever “we” you might be thinking, it risks running an egocentric fallacy to assume it expands to the entirety of the US population.
[1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/second-generation...
If you're talking about reparations, I think you might find that the math doesn't really work in this case.
Most immigration is not a luxurious, touristic affair but comes out of necessity. There are even people who would consider immigrations as voluntarily getting themselves colonized, coming here for the country to extract their resources in exchange of a promise of better life circumstances. We certainly extract more out of immigrants economically, academically, psychologically, who were raised and educated elsewhere, who are incentivized to work very hard or go back, who also suffer mentally from this process.
Requiring them to pitch in assuming they had perfect information and made a completely free preference is at best ignorant. Of course it is the honorable thing to answer the suffering of fellow humans, but that goes both ways, and thinking that that problem is always the one and only problem of this world is plain, pure narcissism.
Only 1 in 5 Americans supports it: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/504511-1-in-5-supports-rep...
Also you say this as though the US is the only country that had slaves. Chattel slavery was (unfortunately) the predominate form of labor in the entire world for centuries. The US was the 3rd to last country in the Americas to abolish it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
Other societies in the world have largely decided that we’re better off just burying the hatchet.
We aren’t talking about other countries. I’m familiar with history. I know many terrible things have happened.
Whatever it may be, I want no part of it. To assume that all immigrants, who today represent 25% of Americans, are willing to sign onto policy positions that are focused on correcting (distant) past wrongs as opposed to solving the problems we have TODAY — is what I'm calling presumptuous.
So then the problem became one of the state not doing enough to fund the single mother family. Not only accepting this but making it an ideal.
Read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s research from the early 1960’s that could have been a corner stone of the civil rights movement. But then it wasn’t.
Anyways this rejection of the traditional family structure is essentially what triggered the family values movement on the right in the late 70’s and early 1980’s.
Interestingly as the legitimization of single mothers became more and more mainstream we continued to see black kids grow up in entrenched poverty as dropout rates and criminal activity climbed year over year for these kids compared to previous generations.
So now the solution is “reparations”. Of course it wasn’t the radical ideas of middle class radicals being experimented on black people that has caused this inescapable spiral. It’s that we need to give money to single mothers and we are here because we simply haven’t given enough.
Some misguided people will say blacks did better before the Civil Rights Act. But they are wrong not in that the Civil Rights Act was bad - it is good - mandatory to be sure. It’s that during this same era we rejected rigorous research and science for so called theories that claimed the 2-parent family was a tool of oppression. This got interlaced into the black power movement and we saw the destruction of the black family and the resulting mess we are in today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Family:_The_Case_For...
https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies...
In the end these ideas are illiberal and it is my hope they wither away after enough people are able to look past the facade and the tyrannical machinery is exposed. And then maybe some of these orgs can grow into something that’s actually useful.
To really underscore this point, it’s worth looking at the inflation adjusted total per-pupil education expenditures over time: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...
I have never once seen those vehicles used in regular law enforcement duties such as traffic stops.
They are used in exceptional cases like active shooter situations, hostage / barricaded / swat scenarios, natural disasters like flooding due to their high clearance, and the occasional parade or community day to let kids play in the big truck. In all, they are a defensive vehicle with no weapons that costs the department very little and has a wide range of uses if the shit hits the fan.
I really don't get the outrage of them other than the optics of it "being from the military" and idiots calling them "tanks". If there are specific bad uses of police force those are great to call out, but the utility of the vehicle which is basically free for a real world need is a no brainer.
My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.
They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things. People standing around chanting. Then they wait until curfew is over, maybe declare the assembly unlawful, and start using chemical weapons and intimidation on the crowd.
So regular riot control equipment in 95% of the world...
The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.
> My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.
How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization? I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose. They also still use fire hoses in many other countries which we stopped doing in the 60s due to the bad optics of them during the racial tension.
> They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things.
Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so. Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too. But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
Yes, militarization of the police is normalized in many countries. That doesn't make it acceptable. They're trigger-happy and violent. It's part of the culture.
> The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.
Do you believe that there needs to be a line of officers wielding rifles behind a line of riot cops with flashbangs and tear gas launchers (used liberally and indiscriminately) behind a line of shielded riot cops grabbing things from protesters and generally trying to provoke a reaction? These things all work in tandem, in this context. That line of cops is part of their show of force, as they take anti-cop protests very personally. It's a form of intimidation and escalation.
> How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization?
Half of that is literally military equipment and US police departments are frequently under a "warrior" mindset. It's been heavily exported to various different PDs. They treat confrontations as a fight between them and the "bad guys", not public safety or law enforcement. Having a bunch of military or tacticool gear is part of that mindset.
> I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose.
Normalization is not the same as moral or acceptable. Plus, this isn't quite a consistent take when it comes to these kinds of things. When Soviet bloc countries used far less serious responses to color revolutions, they were decried as totalitarian, antidemocratic monsters. But we do worse here and it's just normal business as usual.
And those "crowd control" agents are chemical weapons, explosives, and "less lethal" weapons causing permanent disability and injury. I watched a woman get shot with a grenade (either flashbang or teargas) and she went into cardiac arrest, only living because medics rushed her to the hospital. She was forward but still 30 feet from any officers. She was shot straight in the chest. She was just standing there and yelling.
> Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so.
They absolutely are not. It's a form of escalation and the cops have frequently provoked these responses with theses "shows of force".
> Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too.
The cops aren't trying to stop people from burning down communities. They don't actually do that, they don't deescalate, they don't actually even defend the private property (which is usually much of their function) so much as blast through and hurt people indiscriminately.
> But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
I'm very familiar with their tactics, they used them against me.
In every protest I went to where things escalated, it was the police doing the primary escalation. Bull rushing the crowd. Trying to grab things from the crowd. Shooting teargas and OC gas and flashbangs into the crowd prior to even making any announcements. Bicycle cops hitting passersby with their bicycles. A kid got maced.
None of this requires the straw man that protests never turn into riots.
This is incoherent. Beating peaceful protesters doesn't serve the goal of deescalation. Every single time, it resulted in more anger and frustration. Water bottles being thrown.
> When the police are worried the crowd might escalate, they preemptive action to end the situation before it can happen, because crowd-initiated escalations are much more destructive and deadly.
End the situation? It escalated every single time, exactly how you'd expect. Cops becoming aggressive and violent against protesters is not going to cool any heads. They teargassed kids, you know. In what world is that considered a way to "end the situation"?
> Once protesters are shooting at people it's too late to step in.
This is part of that dangerous warrior mentality, treating every group like an immediate existential threat that must be neutralized with violence based on nothing but speculation.
If you're justifying police violence and aggression based on what you imagine might happen, you're part of the problem.
Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.
I've never said this.
> and I don't agree; it seems to me that once they start breaking random things, there's a serious and unacceptable risk they'll start killing people.
That is absurd. Damaging property is nothing like hurting people. In fact, alleging that the two are comparable is somewhat dehumanizing, as it's used to justify hurting people over damage to things. Things* should not have any level of parity with human life, particularly things like broken windows.
> Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.
Last time, you said the police could preemptively assume a protest will hurt people and start engaging in the violence we've been talking about. Now there's the good protester / bad rioter dichotomy, something often decried by civil rights leaders because it was the rallying cry of segregationists. That and outside agitators.
I was gassed and flashbanged in a protest where we were holding our hands up and chanting, "hands up, don't shoot".
If you are going to post an article to support your argument, you might want to make sure it actually supports your argument.
Police don't pay for surplus military gear, the DoD offers it for free. Police only have to pay for shipping. It has been this way since the program was created in 1988.
Most policing is just policing,
The 'tactical cops' should be punted for reasons other than cost obviously, but that's not it.
This is exactly the OP's point - it's 'luxury thinking'.
Usually when police presence goes down, crime goes up. We see this in London over the last few years.
We want more, better, police in rough ares, not less.
And good jobs, obviously, parents with stability create better conditions for their kids.
Nearly all crimes that are policed are crimes of poverty. Rather than focusing so thoroughly on punitive measures, it is far better for everyone to focus on the root causes.
Poverty. That's the root issue. But it's cheaper to blame the poverty on bad additudes and poor choices rather than acknowledge the causality goes in the other direction and pony up the cash for programs to break the cycle of poverty.
> having respect for the law
Additional humvees buy you fear not respect.
- putting food on the table
- putting kids through school with at least one new set of clothes a year
- having food in your belly makes it far easier to cope with the endless "why" questions of the curious child
Sure, there are social issues to address as well, but don't go assuming that throwing money at the problem won't help at all.
they clearly mean defund when they say defund. Many other activists feel the same. why say defund when you mean something else.
Basically, with your suggestion, nothing will change, other than police garages. That's clearly not what the protestors want, and as such, we can immediately discard your assertion.
Your comment is based on a false assumption. Demilitarizing the police would be a great idea! But the idea of defunding presumes excess funds.
Data on funding amounts are a bit harder to come by but they generally show the US has less police funding than Europe per capita.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
Since when is human rationality “luxury”? This article just shot itself in the foot.
Most people's interpretation of "human rationality" is little more than a religion of its own.
Super interesting concept. Thanks for this mental mode of seeing this phenomena. I'm going to really think it over. Even if I end up rejecting it in favor of some other mental mode, it's still an amazingly interesting lens for looking at recent events.
I also wonder if the question were phrased differently (and more accurately representing what is actually being asked for), more like "Would you support an N% cut to police budgets, which would come from X part of the police budget, to support preventative measures like social services?", if we'd see a different response.
My town just had the sheriff for example. The sheriff had a small crew of 1-2 deputies and a secretary. When something really rough would happen, the sheriff would round up a crew. It was a really light group of people. Lots of differences between that, a militia, community policing, etc. Even today some rural communities are “policed” very differently. Now that same town has a standing police force of 40 officers, a K-9 unit, and they have fancy military vehicles. This is with a change from 5000->10000 in population.
This was all up until pretty recently (1940s-1950s) too.
I find it very easy to blame people who are not willing to spend 10 seconds researching what a movement stands for. We can't say that it's okay to read three words on a sign, interpret it in your own context, and then blame the movement when you don't "understand" it. It's a slogan! What do you expect for a less-than-five-word sentence that people can unite under?
The few people I’ve heard say “remove police entirely,” when asked to elaborate, meant that the entire organization/concept of policing should be rebuilt from the ground up, not that there should be no one in society available to respond to crimes occurring.
Then you suffer from a profound lack of empathy.
I invested your "10 seconds". Google took me to a site called Defund the Police[1].
Reading this site, it seems that they want to... defund the police. As in, take the majority of their funding away, and put it somewhere else (nominally into social programs).
Not making a value judgement here, but I'm pretty sure this thing does what it says on the tin.
[1] https://defundthepolice.org
Weird. That page is not even at page 1 for me. Wikipedia comes up first for me and would generally be my go-to source for these topics.
> Reading this site, it seems that they want to... defund the police. As in, take the majority of their funding away, and put it somewhere else (nominally into social programs).
> Not making a value judgement here, but I'm pretty sure this thing does what it says on the tin.
Yes? This is correctly what the movement is about. The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.
Pretty sure people understood that part.
Edit: I am also seeing downvotes on my above comment, which seems to indicate that a fair number of people disagree with the assessment that "defund the police" means "defund the police".
1) CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/06/us/what-is-defund-police-...
2) https://defundthepolice.org
3) Wikipedia
4) Daily Caller (sigh)
5) Guardian
CNN opens with
It's as straightforward as it sounds: Instead of funding a police department, a sizable chunk of a city's budget is invested in communities, especially marginalized ones where much of the policing occurs.
Wikipedia states
"Defund the police" is a slogan that supports divesting funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full defunding as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services.
> The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.
You'd think conservatives would be all for that - smaller state, lower taxes
I think conservatives might get behind defunding the police if those funds were routed back to the taxpayer, rather than to expanding social programs -- or any government program, for that matter.
Moving money from a strongly conservative part of the government to a strongly leftist part of the government looks too much like a power grab to gain traction with conservatives.
You'd also get conservative buy-in if it came with a pro-gun stance. If citizens are going to police their own communities, then they need to have the option to carry and employ arms as necessary for the task.
I think there's a lot of opportunity for give-and-take in criminal justice reform -- prisons and drug policy should also be on the table! -- but it requires both sides putting things of equal value on the fire, and I don't see that happening.
Defunding the police in high crime areas will only result in more crime.
Most Black communities are underpoliced, not overpoliced, and they don't get a response often enough when they call 9/11.
So many areas have called for 'more policing' - we saw this in the UK/London where crime rates came up in the last 24 months due to cuts in policing.
What we want are police that avoid having to shoot people necessarily.
The personal is political
We’re here. We’re queer.
We are the 99%
Black Lives Matter
The sad truth is that people respect police not because of the badge but because of the gun, and because of the threat of violence.
Many of the reform ideas being thrown around lately are ideas that places across the US have already tried.
I think people are saying photos and videos from Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Kenosha, WI. They’re thinking they’ll take their chances with the police than with arsonists and rioters.
It's a pretty sad realization that perhaps the reason we have such violent police is, in part, because we have such a violent society.
In terms of violent crime overall the US isn't an outlier, it is located at the median of the OECD in terms of violent crime. The outlier for the US is murder, overwhelmingly due to the mass proliferation of illegal gun possession.
This has been written about for decades and remains true today.
"America doesn’t have more crime than other rich countries. It just has more guns."
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9217163/america-guns-europe
"The seminal work here is a 1999 book by Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, called Crime Is Not the Problem. Zimring and Hawkins set out to examine what was, at the time, the conventional wisdom: that America had a uniquely terrible crime problem, one without any parallel in other developed democracies.
"They found, pretty definitively, that the conventional wisdom was wrong. "Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher," they write."
... "A landmark 1997 study actually tried to answer this question. Its findings — which scholars say still hold up — are that America doesn't really have a significantly higher rate of crime compared to similar countries. But that crime is much likelier to be lethal: American criminals just kill more people than do their counterparts in other developed countries. And guns appear to be a big part of what makes this difference."
Emphasis mine.
Most people miss that part and just blame people having guns in general, when law-abiding citizens with legally registered guns is not part of the overall problem.
So - our Society in caricature.
Left
Suppose you were studying economics or sociology and everybody had a odd paradox they couldn't solve. There were these different groups of people. Some lead long healthy lives and have most quality of life indicators in their favour. The other group has dire outcomes - nasty brutish and short. Nobody can figure it out. The same pattern plays out in different countries and in different centuries. Everybody would like for the people suffering not to suffer but we're perplexed and the newspapers report on a regular basis the status of these people, great people and intellectuals write books about it, classes are held in universities all over the country in the search for the solution.
Then one day some autistic figures it out. It's because some are poor and others are rich. It can be confirmed by checking bank balances. Surprisingly this person does not receive a round of applause and confetti in the streets - he is promptly fired from his job, his friends avert their eyes. Soon he is homeless and is found proclaiming his Truth under a bridge - to find him just turn Left on James Damore St.
Liberal
The Liberals believe in Robots, AGI and similar ideas for artificial humans - have so for centuries. Their fable is the Android - the dream of the artificial human that coincidentally replaces all forms of blue collar labour. The root of the word Robot literally means slave. Their nemesis is the Computer - the information processing machine that works best at replacing their own human generated information processing. Of course they try to use this machine to replace blue collar labour instead. They invest incredible energies here but ignore that each of their schemes for technological and economic improvement is based on some type of forced transfer or even slavery. While technologies not based on theft or slavery exist - these are ignored. They are mostly preoccupied with schemes to move groups of people around the surface of the planet to disrupt their foreign and domestic competitors in the name of social improvement - which it is for them.
I can pass the idealogical Turing test - can't say the same of the people who inhabit Reddit, Metafilter and HN - and I think most of the Right's intellectual firepower remains subtext in our society unless you read old books to find plot holes or the exchange between other civilizations and ours opens up in a way that cannot be censored by the information organs of the West.
Unarmed police are pretty rare on this planet. Even Japanese cops carry guns.
Here's a sampling. I think not every country is considered in these lists though. Or at least, given there can be multiple police forces in a jurisdiction with only some of them armed, it's not always a clear-cut answer.
https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/10601.jpeg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country
> In some countries including Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland excepted), Maldives, the police do not carry firearms unless the situation is expected to merit it.
Some island police don't carry firearms, although those aren't really comparable. Also many (most?) street cops in China aren't armed.
> In some countries including Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland excepted), Maldives, the police do not carry firearms unless the situation is expected to merit it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country#...
Every time they try to disarm part of the police force, those officers get attacked.
https://buffalonews.com/news/traffic-brownies-join-nypd/arti...
It's not like this is secret information.
https://bfy.tw/Osdd
There's an article from the NY Post, which is literally a tabloid, that claims the "only thing keeping them safe" is people mistaking them for cops, but not that they were explicitly disarmed and attacked as a result?
It's hard to genuinely respect someone when there's a gun-related power dynamic forcing you to. That's not respect, that's just the threat of force. It's probably too late for America to adopt Peel's principles of policing but it's not done us much harm.
There is a lot more respect for police, less mob violence, petty fighting and doesn't require a large camera network.
Guns provide more respect.
Or more likely they don’t think preventative measures work as well as you think they do.
Edit: Once you have seen acts of senseless violence - real cruel stuff - it is hard to believe that some people can be reliably rehabilitated.
Maybe that cruelty could have been nipped in the bud if they had received better care in the past - but that’s not a risk I would take with my community.
Could it?
California is one of the richest places on earth and has an incredibly progressive population.
So “we” have the desire and the money - and have for at least 20 years - and yet we have more violent crime than much poorer places.
It's ironic that this is exactly how many feel about the police themselves.
You have rights, you don't have to do anything outside the law. But you do have to comply with lawful orders. If everybody understood these things, there would be much less trouble, fear, and violence.
Are you saying if a cop is interrogating someone and says "I know you did this, if you don't talk you're going to prison for a long time", we should send that cop to prison?
That would be intimidating a person into relinquishing their rights.
Other than undercover cops being able to lie to cover their background, the fact that police can -- legally! ruled so by the supreme court! -- lie to citizens is a real problem.
How are citizens supposed to trust police that can freely lie to them without consequence?
https://www.statista.com/chart/15224/daily-tv-consumption-by...
Just because they are named by their hoped for results, it doesn’t mean that they will lead to that outcome.
At least many might think that the effect from reducing police presence in the neighborhood (=defunding) won’t be counteracted by the other measures sufficiently.
If I were a police officer or worked in that area of policy, I would be appalled at the degree of correlation that the more frequently people reported seeing the police, the less they wanted to see police around.
This is yet another false and divisive zero sum framing of a complex issue. Everyone deserves quality police service from their municipal and state authorities, police deserve accountability for colleagues that break the law and put good police officers at risk, and everyone deserves policing that is unbiased and increases public safety regardless of race, creed, or any other factor.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/316247/black-americans-police-e...
Could be correlation rather than causation, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Botham_Jean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Botham_Jean
You'd have been better off noticing the contrast I drew and talking about McKinney, another suburb of Dallas, in which a cop infamously stormed onto the scene and threw 15-year-old girl in a bikini to the concrete and pointed a gun at a teenage boy who objected.[0]
But no, not that suburb either.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Texas_pool_party_incident
Police violence isn't only a suburban problem, but it is definitely also a suburban problem.
Keep in mind the total transfer of military surplus equipment to police departments is just $5.1B over the entire lifetime of the program, since 1997 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Support_Offi...). The scale of this program has been completely blown out of proportion by activists.
Here in Seattle, protesters/rioters have been calling for a 50% defunding despite 96% of police budget being spent on people expenses, and not “military weapons” like Twitter claims. See https://sccinsight.com/2020/06/30/understanding-the-seattle-...
Chief Best stepped down after constantly lying about the police actions and the protesters for months. Best was hired against the recommendations of the federal consent decree that SPD is under because of repeated excessive force and racial profiling issues, hand-picked by the mayor. The reasons given for her stepping down are relatively boring and unlikely to be the real reason, which probably involves political calculus and the mayor.
Accusing a black woman of racial profiling. Good lord. You people are more racist than anyone.
The consent decree did not recommend against hiring her (I just read it). It’s also over 8 years old, long before her time, and they have since found them compliant.
The data says they use force in only 0.3% of encounters, and significant force likely to cause injury is only a small fraction of that:
Further, the use of serious levels of force – force that causes or may be reasonably expected to cause substantial bodily injury – remained extraordinarily low, occurring in 21 of nearly 870,000 (0.0024% - or less than one quarter of one hundredth of a percent) of officer dispatches.
Considering how unwilling many perps are, 21 out of 870,000 is shockingly low. Well done on the reform!
There may be evidence of racism, but probably not the kind you think you are protesting. 42% of this force was used against white people, including 2 officer involved shootings, while 28% was against black people, including 0 officer involved shootings.
I watched her lie about something of which I have personal direct knowledge. Her claims have also been repeatedly contradicted by video evidence.
> and yes, it was a screaming mob. A mob that literally showed up on city council members doorsteps, among others.
Ah, the charged language. What's the difference between a "mob" and a protest making demands? This language reveals the sources you've been using for such information and they ain't great.
> I see you’re siding with the anarchists though, so this won’t be a productive conversation.
I would be curious to know what you think anarchists are.
> Accusing a black woman of racial profiling.
1. If this seems impossible to you, you should check out the actions of black cops. Profiling doesn't require the individual to be a white supremacist, e.g.
2. I didn't even claim that. I referred to the department.
> Good lord. You people are more racist than anyone.
In what way is anything I said racist?
> The consent decree did not recommend against hiring her (I just read it).
Ah, I misremembered which group it ran afoul of. Best's hiring was a mess. There was supposed to be a process: search committee finds options, Mayor makes a suggestion / selection, council confirms. What actually happened: search committee finds options, suggests hiring outside the department as the whole point was to institute reforms, and an outside hire would have no baggage in the department. The police union raises a ruckus about Best not being in the final 3 (she was already at SPD), this becomes news, and Durkan personally puts her on the finalist list, then selects her and council confirms.
> It’s also over 8 years old, long before her time, and they have since found them compliant.
The consent decree is a very low bar and the civilian oversight board has repeatedly stated that SPD is not following their recommendations or ready for end the consent decree. Despite this, Durkan and Best had applied for release from the consent decree in April. Part of that decree were issues regarding excessive force. As a reminder, SPD has been routinely beating protesters and indiscriminately teargassing protesters for nearly three months.
> The data says they use force in only 0.3% of encounters, and significant force likely to cause injury is only a small fraction of that:
> Further, the use of serious levels of force – force that causes or may be reasonably expected to cause substantial bodily injury – remained extraordinarily low, occurring in 21 of nearly 870,000 (0.0024% - or less than one quarter of one hundredth of a percent) of officer dispatches.
Based on police reporting. And remember, the vast majority of situations police are deployed to are in no way violent nor involve an arrest.
> Considering how unwilling many perps are, 21 out of 870,000 is shockingly low. Well done on the reform!
Uncritically accepting police number is going to lead you astray.
> There may be evidence of racism, but probably not the kind you think you are protesting. 42% of this force was used against white people, including 2 officer involved shootings, while 28% was against black people, including 0 officer involved shootings.
Those numbers imply a disproportionate racial impact already. Look at Seattle's demographics.
Unfortunately after all the lies and vitriol from activists, I don’t blame her for stepping down and quietly collecting her pension. Here, there have been weeks of mobs showing up at the homes of the mayor, city council, and the police chief, committing violence, destroying property, and threatening neighbors. Take a look at this account of what happened at the police chief’s neighborhood (https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2020/08/02/hundreds-of-blm-support...):
> A crowd of about 200 persons, mostly white men and women in their twenties, were dressed in black with masks and black hoods and carried signs that read “Black Lives Matter.” Black Lives Matter protestors shouted profanity and insults at neighbors, took license plate information on vehicles, took pictures of homes, and asked little kids who lived in the neighborhood what schools they attended.
I've even heard of police forces declining equipment because even though it's free, they don't have the budget to maintain it.
We train the military much better than the police.
The other thing I have seen talked about in this context, and which I agree with, is that in the military you are trained as part of a larger unit and loyal to an even larger cause/organization.
Police, on the other hand, are given a partner who they might serve with primarily for years almost-exclusivity. They become loyal to a very small group of people over their career and don't have the same esprit de corps as the military.
To some degree I think they both attract dangerous/violent people who are joining for the wrong reasons. (The desire to hold power over others or just flat-out hurt people). But the Military is more likely to drum these people out, especially before the worst happens, where police don't.
Can you say the same about police?
Most people in the military rarely if ever touch a firearm for their entire time in the military after they qualify with it in bootcamp - some don't even do that. De-escalation training? That's diametrically opposite of how an infantryman is trained, and totally irrelevant to anyone outside those combat arms fields. Most people in the military would never receive a single moment of training relevant to police work in their entire time in the military.
What you might be seeing is that most veterans tend to be a bit older, a bit more mature, and perhaps tend to view a badge less as a power trip and more of a responsibility due to the experiences they've had. I can't say that for sure, but it makes a bit more sense than saying military are better trained than police, when the vast majority of military members get absolutely no relevant training in anything related to police work.
What they usually fail to see is that the military on patrol is usually in squads or at least in pairs, not alone like civilian officers. It's much easier to maintain control of a situation when you outnumber potential bad actors. When a normal beat cop is on patrol though they are usually alone (unless in a top 10 major city like NYC). That changes the dynamic as officers have to maintain the upper hand as if they get overpowered the suspect now has access to multiple firearms both on the officer and in a patrol vehicle.
LOTS of accountability there.
By which metric?
It's not a single-metric question though. Probably not just a 10-20 metric question either.
(Hint: barely anything)
Police only pay for shipping. If those costs are swelling their expenses, they have a tiny budget.
The 1988 National Defense Authorization Act created a temporary program within the DoD to funnel surplus equipment to state law enforcement agencies involved in anti-drug activities at no cost other than shipping. The 1997 National Defense Authorization Act added anti-terrorism activities and made the program permanent.
Edit: I guess looking at Oakland/Chicago, it's 50% or close to it too though.
https://www.gq.com/story/cops-cost-billions
"Oakland PD receives nearly half of the city's discretionary spending( $264 million out of $592 million), dwarfing every other expenditure, including human services, parks and recreation, and transportation combined. A whopping 39 percent of Chicago's 2017 budget went to police, and still the department got even more money, peaking in 2020 with a 7 percent increase to nearly $1.8 billion. "
(Or coming at it from the other direction, when a person can be destroyed by that "justice system" for simply smoking a plant. The war on drug users is also a large part of how the rule of law has been undermined)
In a city with a black mayor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanie_Rawlings-Blake), black police chief (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Batts), 50% black police force (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore_Police_Department#Af...), and black district attorney (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Mosby), when black suspect Freddie Gray dies in police custody in unclear circumstances, it's obviously because of racism so feel free to riot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Baltimore_protests). (The accused officers—three black, three white—were acquitted by a black judge (http://www.courts.state.md.us/publications/jmonline/2012spri... .)
Reminder of Baltimore events during the original rioting:
* Baltimore Looters Take Everything But a Family’s Pennies / Chinese store-owners and a soldier who fought in Afghanistan both return to find their hometown transformed into a war zone. (https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/34cu4j/baltimore_loote...)
* (Deleted by /r/baltimore moderators on Reddit) Baltimore gang members directed looters away from black-owned businesses. "Instead, he said, they pointed the rioters toward Chinese- and Arab-owned stores." (https://np.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/34ek59/baltimore_...)
* City Paper calls the purse incident "a dumb distraction". Closest thing to an apology/retraction as is likely from the publication (https://np.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/347f0d/city_paper...)
and, inevitably, what you mentioned:
* Baltimore killings soar to a level unseen in 43 years. "Baltimore reached a grim milestone on Friday, three months after riots erupted in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody: With 45 homicides in July, the city has seen more bloodshed in a single month than it has in 43 years." (https://np.reddit.com/r/baltimore/comments/3fcawm/baltimore_...)
PS - I was banned from /r/baltimore after posting the above comment ( dang ↗ > it's obviously because of racism so feel free to riot [deleted] ↗ (comment deleted)
Posting flamebait on inflammatory topics will get you banned on HN too, so please don't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The police abolitionist movement is calling for removing untrained, armed, and oftentimes extremely racist individuals from the streets and replacing them with social programs, housing, education, healthcare.
You can't just do 10% of the ask here and then be surprised when shit doesn't magically get better.
So you have to rotate your entire police force every few years.
Can you not fathom that we're systemically keeping said group of people weak and hopeless?
That’s exactly what tools like the scientific method do. Systems of law enforcement could be similarly redesigned to sidestep many cognitive biases.
None of these require cops. Yes, you likely need some form of police force for the very, very edge case scenarios where the others won't do, but abolish police means abolish the police.
* Dissolving existing police departments and making officers reapply as a way to eliminate the worst offenders that are currently protected by the blue line of silence.
* Re-establishing the police as a much smaller operation where their duties are limited to situations where deadly/coercive force is needed.
Things that would become police “adjacent” and would be handled by other government officials.
- detective work
- calls about the homeless
- all non-violent offenses like noise complaints, property disputes, drug possession, moving violations, shoplifting, etc.
The hope being that many people who are currently officers would actually rather be part of the non-violent operation.
Unfortunately, this part is extremely vague and is missing a track record. So how it ends up in the real human world, is police funding gets cut and the funds get diverted into corrupt politicians' pockets. Like the Chicago mayor that successfully reduced police funding only to have a separate police detachment placed near her home.
Literally any other first country has these, how is this vague and missing track records ?
I’m sorry but it is quite obvious that a whole lot of people carrying around ACAB (all cops are bad) and “defund the police” signs don’t go along with the this-is-what-they-actually-mean explanations. They mean to have their message taken at face value.
I saw myself spraypainted on a Minneapolis building “actually defund the police”. it is hard to reinterpret all cops are bad as anything but the obvious, and it is quite popular.
It's a compromise and likely won't come easy or fast given current federal government setup. But other than generational change (ie old people who are heavily conservative die off so younger, more liberal people become the voting base) likely combined with removing money from Us politics (no easy fight there) I doubt it will happen soon.
Canada had an experiment of removing policing for just one day. It did not go well at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot
Police abolition is asking for a change to the socioeconomic systems that lead people to rob in the first place. The threat of police locking you up surely isn’t doing it.
> The threat of police locking you up surely isn’t doing it.
Because the criminals keep getting released, especially for political reasons.
Increased policing does work. Crime rates have been going down.
Decreased policing doesn't work - crime rates go up, just see what's happening in NYC, Chicago, Seattle.
Maybe. Yet this crime still happened, in spite of all the perps got arrested before.
> Or maybe they will get to you in time
Unlikely.
> Because the criminals keep getting released, especially for political reasons.
Like most states, NY, IL, and WA have each eliminated parole for violent offenders, so that’s not it.
You’re going to have to be more specific with your stats. Crime rates continue to decrease in those cities - even in Chicago. The 2016 spike in homicides is an interesting topic if you care learn the driving forces behind it. There wasn’t a mass release of criminals as you suggest, but there was a series of gun laws invalidated by the courts.
Or it might not, because the prison is a deterrent.
> You’re going to have to be more specific with your stats.
People shot in NYC: up 206% compared to last year.
https://abc7ny.com/nyc-crime-increase-in-violence-gun/630297...
https://www.amny.com/police-fire/crime-stats-show-that-shoot...
Chicago: murders more than double compared to 2019
https://blockclubchicago.org/2020/08/03/chicago-sees-its-mos...
https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-crime-shootings-weekend-viol...
Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP zone (the left-wing socialist anti-police project, "summer of love", as the mayor describes it): 525% rise in crime.
https://www.the-sun.com/news/1073428/chop-zone-seattle-rise-...
Montreal in 1969 was on the brink of civil war. The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) was basically the Canadian version of the IRA. Having police on the streets wasn't enough. The situation continued to escalate until the Canadian Armed Forces were deployed to police Montreal in 1970.
I don't think that time and place is representative of any Canadian city today. As such, it's rather hard to draw any conclusions from your example.
That's not me having a conversation. That's me telling you this is actively harmful for whatever it is you're trying to talk about, because there is nothing to talk about anymore.
By allowing these riots to continue the local and state governments have abandoned the rule of law and have thus made the law unimportant.
Similarly those pushing political agendas through violent riots are terrorists and those who support them are enabling terrorism.
This isn't me having a conversation about your issue this is me telling you that your issue doesn't matter because resorting to violence and demanding those who are supposed to abate violence be abolished You've ended any converation possible.
Whatever you think it's doing it's not communicating anything except "accede or we will riot" and my response to that is violence begets violence be prepared to have things escalate instead of causing legitimate conversations.
It's a conversation like being held up is a conversation.
If the police followed the "Rule of Law" there wouldn't be a disproportionate amount of Black men who face violence from the police. Should "bad cops" be held accountable? Or is everything fair game when "enforcing the law"?
Similarly, "accede or we will riot" is precisely the logical progression from "we've asked nicely to not kill us". Do you expect Americans to simply watch their family, friends and neighbors being extra-judicially killed?
It's this inability to empathize with a population, and an uncritical view of those who enforce the law that will lead to non-action, leading to more riots.
For sure. but not with violent riots.
>Similarly, "accede or we will riot" is precisely the logical progression from "we've asked nicely to not kill us".
No, its terrorism. I have no problem with protests, but violent riots to push police reform are political violence, something I think leads to only more violence.
>Do you expect Americans to simply watch their family, friends and neighbors being extra-judicially killed?
No. But I expect people who perpetuate violence for political aims to keep perpetuating violence for political aims. I don't think its acceptable unless they're ready to receive political violence in kind.
>It's this inability to empathize with a population,
No. I empathize, but my empathy sits behind the knowledge that the rule of law and state monopoly of force must be maintained or all will devolve into tribal war.
>and an uncritical view of those who enforce the law that will lead to non-action, leading to more riots.
Choosing to commit political violence is a choice the rioters make. If the options are abolish the police or get riots, my reaction is "call in the national guard".
There are plenty of people to empathize with, and I don't think political violence is worth any empathy. Justifying political violence is a precursor to real civil war.
"No. I empathize, but my empathy sits behind the knowledge that the rule of law and state monopoly of force must be maintained or all will devolve into tribal war."
Some political violence is okay if the state is involved? Even if that violence is oppressive?
Politically motivated violence on behalf of the police is why we're in this situation to begin with. Any you're of the opinion that any retaliation to this violence to reform a broken system of state violence is somehow out of turn?
No thanks, I don't believe you to be anywhere near correct. You're an advocate for tribal warfare and that is where your policies will lead. Disaster.
It's much more expensive to over-police a broken social system than it is to foster the conditions which produce less crime overall.
The "Defund the Police" line is coming from the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which believe in funding the social programs.
The defund and/or dismantle groups have acheived sufficient support to drive policy in a number of cities. What they need is concrete results to point to. While defund might also benefit from a better slogan, truly novel complex positions just aren't ever going to be effectively communicated by any simple slogan, especially when they have opponents that so understand what it means, don't want it, and are dedicated to fogging the issue to avoid direct engagement. But when you've got concrete examples to point to, it's a lot harder to fog the issue.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/257798/low-trust-police-complic...
On the other hand, a majority in these communities also say that people have a negative view of the police there.
there needs to be basic training for citizens as well.
To recognize when to listen to a police officer, how to identify if the officer steps out of line, what rights are afforded, etc.
This lecture from a law school professor was very enlightening to me : NEVER TALK TO THE POLICE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
No.
> To recognize when to listen to a police officer, how to identify if the officer steps out of line, what rights are afforded, etc.
Sure, but no. The police have all the responsibility to de-escalate situations. If they're not doing that then they're the ones in the wrong.
Does that apply if a suspect pulls a gun or a knife on them? De-escalation clearly failed, must be their fault.
This is an absolutely naive position to take. Police have no such obligation, and citizens should absolutely be educated and informed on their rights.
Maybe the _sophisticated_ approach here is to say they should have that obligation?
it is of course the officer's job to deal with the situation. --
here is an analogy of a pedestrian crossing. It is the job of the motorist to pay attention, but it helps to train the pedestrian as well. While the responsibility for the accident is put on the motorist, wont the pedestrian be better off with the training?
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Everybody always remembers that last part, but take a look at the very beginning. Three branches—Executive, Legislative, and Judicial—deal in the world of law and are supposed to keep each other in check and balance. Three branches—Militia, Police, and Military—deal in the world of force and are supposed to keep each other in check and balance. Except now in 2020 we're being told nobody in the first group should ever need a tool to defend themselves, and the other two groups resemble each other more and more every day.
That's not actually the underlying model of the 2nd Amendment.
The underlying model of the second amendment is that professional standing armed forces are a threat to liberty (even when nominally dedicated to external security, because they are inevitably applied internally; permanent paramilitart police were not a thing at the time of the 2nd.) Because of this, it is essentially to have effective citizen militia that can be called up for internal and external security needs, so that governments aren't tempted to create permanent forces for this purposes beyond cadres to support the mobilization of the militia. The 2A isn't about having a balanced triangle (“police” didn't really exist for several decades after the 2A), it's about having one of those three obviate the need for the others.
There is probably a good debate to be had about whether that model was durably workable at the time, whether it is workable in the modern world, and whether it would in particular be reachable from where the US is now. But we've lost that in our 2A debates.
Do you actually consider it prudent to ignore situations of danger and not respond to them with the proper context?
For each case you can find (if you can find any at all), there are millions - yes, literally millions - of police interactions that don't end that way.
If you interact with the police peacefully, the odds of you experiencing any violence are virtually zero.
Ryan Whitaker (who was white, incidentally), who opened his front door armed with a gun he was legally and constitutionally permitted to have and to use to protect his home and was kneeling to put his gun down when he was killed?
(And, uh, Jacob Blake?)
I mean, yes, I have been pulled over by the police on 101 and not killed, and I once ran a stop sign in Palo Alto and I wasn't killed either, and I went to pay my ticket at the police station and I still wasn't killed then. But that's true in the other direction - I'm sure I have interacted with millions of people throughout my life, and yet if I killed a single one of them without cause, I would rightly be called a murderer. No one would be saying that the risk of encountering me is virtually zero.
(FWIW Breonna Taylor wasn't asleep, not that it justifies her death and Jacob Blake was most definitely resisting - even the super shaky cell phone coverage from a bystander makes that obvious)
More people get struck by lightning every year.
Cops are people, not some idealized identity of justice. Perhaps it would be prudent to consider the idea that the people with guns who can legally shoot you should be treated with a little more consideration. I can't imagine turning my back on cops and reaching into my vehicle, but maybe that's white privilege.
The government is legally able to take violent action. You don't want it another way. So then really, what's your point besides all cops are bad?
I carry a gun every day too, and there is precisely zero mortal danger to anyone who peacefully interacts with me. It is an entirely reasonable expectation to demand that from government staff.
The police do not have any special legal privileges when it comes to shooting people over any private citizen. To grant them such, de facto, as we have done, is to abandon the rule of law (or the equal application thereof) in society.
I think a higher standard is reasonable and possible. Indeed, almost everyone in society is subject to it. Police, if they are to exist, should be as well.
Well. Yeah. That's the critical part isn't it...
So can cops shoot people only when you think it's ok?
The police do not legally have that right; but in practice they get to murder anyone they want and get away with it.
The rules for the police are very different than the rules for everyone else. That's due to inequality in the application of the law: the rules that apply to you and I do not apply to them.
Perhaps you, as many do, think the police should be in a special class of their own, above the law.
I think the laws should apply equally to all people.
SO CAN COPS ONLY SHOOT PEOPLE WHEN YOU THINK ITS OK?
I strongly disagree, and submit that a big part of the problem is this exact mentality.
Police should get gobs of training, they have to take the high road, they have to learn to not let their buttons get pushed, etc., etc. - all of those things are true. But the primary responsibility has always rested and should always rest on the shoulders of individual citizens that the police are interacting with. People need to be accountable for their actions.
I'm very sorry when anyone loses their life due to an altercation with the police, but the elephant in the room is that pretty much all of these are completely and easily preventable if people show even a smidgen of accountability for their actions. The common factors across victims of police shooting is not race, but (a) commission of a crime and (b) resisting arrest. Remove either from the equation and the death rate drops dramatically; remove both and it's virtually zero.
Yes, let's continue to figure out how to improve law enforcement. If we find actual instances of racism, let's work to eradicate them. Whatever problems exist in policing, let's study them and fix them. But let's not pretend for a moment that any real progress will be made while there is a pervasive attitude that crime and/or belligerence towards cops isn't a massive part of the problem.
Why does this study show that so many black people want the same or more police presence? Because the overwhelming majority of them (and everyone else) obey the law and, in the event they do interact with the police, refrain from punching them, fleeing the scene, etc.
Maybe if cops can't control their emotions they shouldn't be given a gun and then immune to essentially any misuse of the gun?
> (a) commission of a crime and (b) resisting arrest.
We have a judicial system for a reason. The police isn't the arbiter of justice. Especially when the historical reasons for the formation of police in many countries and the US was to control slaves, former slaves, and economic activists.
> Whatever problems exist in policing, let's study them and fix them.
The studies are all out there. Are you refusing to take a look?
> while there is a pervasive attitude that crime and/or belligerence towards cops isn't a massive part of the problem.
You're trying to shine a piece of turd and say it'll get better. A piece of turd, no matter how shiny, is going to be a piece of turd. Police, the way & the numbers they have today, are not necessary for a functioning society.
meanwhile study:
Results are based on a Gallup Panel web study completed by 36,463 U.S. adults, aged 18 and older, fielded June 23-July 6, 2020. The survey was conducted in English. Individuals without internet access were not covered by this study. The Gallup Panel is a probability-based panel of U.S. adults whom Gallup selects using address-based sampling methods and random-digit-dial phone interviews that cover landlines and cellphones. The sample for this study was weighted to be demographically representative of the U.S. adult population, using the most recent Current Population Survey figures.
So they excluded the lowest income Black Americans.
And the issue here is that the question just asked "should there be less police" - that's not what the police abolition movement is arguing for.
How would've the results been if the question asked:
"Should we reduce police force presence in your neighbourhood by 90% while also ensuring that you will get more grants for education, healthcare, and housing"
Or even:
"Should we abolish policing (while still maintaining a skeleton force to respond to aggressive incidents) in exchange for providing housing for everyone making below a certain amount of money?"
I don't disagree; I'm actually making a different point, a pragmatic one, that it is really easy to almost entirely eliminate the risk of dying at the hands of the police, and that it is completely within one's own power.
I'm all for doing what we can to do to improve the police to make an already rare problem (relatively speaking) even more rare, but if the objective is to reduce deaths at the hands of the police, that's not where the low hanging fruit is.
It's not the job of any individual citizen to fix the police, but it sure is the job of the democratic society as a whole to fix it (because if you make it the police's job, they're certainly not going to actually do it).
Agreed. Citizens need to understand their Constitutional rights and their role as civil masters, and stop deferring, when setting policy, to totalitarians that are supposed to be their paid agents, but prefer to invert that power structure at the expense of citizen rights.
The state of civics education in America is appalling, as is the state of history education that would demonstrate the cost of the problem.
I don't want to live in a world where I need training in order to survive a police encounter...
More relevant questions
(With regard to “defund the police”): should significant funding and responsibility be redirected from the police to preventive and specialized responsive social services?
(With regard to “dismantle/abolish the police”:) Should centralized all-purpose paramilitary local law enforcement agencies be disbanded, with law enforcement responsibilities distributed within specialized agencies whose agents (both armed law enforcement and other) would be domain specialists as well (for law enforcement officers) trained in law enforcement (which also involves transferring non-law enforcement responsibilities and funding more to non-law-enforcememt units.)
Which probably shouldn't be surprising since there isn't a single top-down organization behind any of them.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
It is not, because the “police reform” movement of the last several decades that drives more funding for retraining and additional resources to police in the name of correcting the exact same problems “defund the police” sellar to address is exactly what they are diametrically opposed to and a reason against, and blame for exacerbating the problem by further draining resources from other local services and leading to police taking even more responsibilities outside of their core competencies.
I mean, sure, in a context-free sense, yes, what they seek is, or includes, reform of policing, but that slogan has existing loading in the current context and it's something the group in question defines themself on opposition to, so no, it's not a perfectly fine slogan, any more than “pro-life” would be for a movement for robust publicly funded universal healthcare including comprehensive reproductive health coverage.
Situation: half the country wants to enclose the country in a giant styrofoam bubble to keep people out. The other half wants to import foreigners at gun point.
Conclusion: We have 100% popular support for immigration reform! Why can't those layabouts in government make it happen?
It's unheard of that the police would say shoot a drunk guy with a knife. The way it happens, is that one of the cops who has more martial arts experience (which is one of the things the cops study, which they can do since their education takes much longer) puts on a protective vest and physically immobilizes the drunk.
In the US, the same situation is very likely to end up with the the drunk having more holes in him than a colander.
What's also funny to me is the extent to which police in the US tackle people. Tackling someone is like the worst idea in the world.
And unsurprisingly the answers split with roughly half the respondents saying "same" and the remainder split between "more" and "less". Which is about what you get with any status-quo question like this.
The headline, being phrased along the lines of a protest demand, makes this sound like a majority disagreeing with the premise of the BLM movement, when that's not the question at all.
(It is worth noting, though, that the answers anticorrelate with the amount of actual police work! The more people see the police, the LESS they want them around.)
what says black lives matter better than trashing their neighborhoods?
read ellison's invisible man written in 1950s to see how long white people have been exploiting African Americans in this way!
if those are all far righters white rioters, this is even more confusing!!!
plot twist, they are actually anti fa claiming to be alt right and start a race war so there is more police brutality and there is more evidence to call for defunding police !$$!
[...]
> if those are all far righters white rioters
1. You are falsely drawing an equivalence between protesters and rioters; they aren't identical groups.
2. I never said all the rioters were white supremacist provocateurs, just that a number of the roots that have been arrested, and some of the online encouragers, have turned out to be (and, in the latter case, specifically also law enforcement officers.)
i attended one blm march in my town and it was mostly (almost entirely) white, and the most active participants seemed to be mostly white non local college kids, who gave no indication of being alt right
the organizers were also predominantly white, some seemed very experienced with this sort of thing (and pretty elderly)
i cannot help but draw comparisons with ellison's book
it also seemed to be mostly organized as a photo op, and had us spend most of our time marching around an abandoned high school, with perhaps a few minutes along a main road which is when some participants spent their time taking pics and filming
i personally was highly disappointed with the march, and do not see how it can bring about greatly needed local change in the most racist county in my state
Am I? I don't see the word “majority” or any synonym used in my description.
The point of provocateurs isn't normally to numerically dominate.
[Edit: Even harder: There's a difference between "it happened, but rarely" and "it's responsible for the majority of the cases". If it happens, how often does it happen?]
This is what Camden did when they "defunded": dissolve the city police, bringing the city under county sheriff jurisdiction, then pay for new staffing at the county level. They may have been able to save some money because they broke the police union, but in the long term funding increased.
This sounds like an absurd analogy but only because America doesn't know how to operate community services in any other way than with a heavy police force. It's a failure of imagination and / or unwilling to look at the rest of the world for successful examples of alternative methods.
Instead, there should be organization and all violence should be directed to the state sponsored goon squads that can break into people's home and murder them with little to no consequence.
Of course, this has happened before and ended with the comical exposure of the right wing clowns that still serve as idols of right wingers today.
In my opinion a huge amount of damage has been done by the deliberate choice to act aggressively and quell the protests by ever greater force, and that damage has been done to the respect of the legitimacy of the power police forces hold. People aren’t going to cooperate with a force they see as an armed occupier.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendarmarie
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Gendarmerie
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_(France)
This pattern is mirrored across other European nations as well, and is not exclusive to France.
[1]
I have no idea how people have fallen for the misleading narrative that violence was caused by police. It’s a textbook example of either the naivety of an emotionally charged mob, or incredible social media marketing, or both.
Unfortunately many well-meaning protesters were also swept up in events that were subsumed by antifa/far left groups whose aim was confrontation and violence. For them, the coming backlash against their movement (due to violence) is going to sting.
In the same vein, I saw store owners starting to shoot at protestors.
I suspect, generally, all parties would rather have police keeping the peace. No one wants a gun battle in the streets as people try to protect their property from looters.
I'm not 100% sure what I'd do in this case, but these are not friendly protests. I'm finding the police remarkably restrained. Even in some of these videos we are seeing, people are taking police officers weapons and / or assaulting a police officer before they open fire.
If you're attacking someone who's armed (police officer or not) you should be prepared to suffer the consequences. (I'm not saying all cases are like this, just mentioning that there's a clear tilt to the coverage here).
If you're attacking someone who's armed (police officer or not) you should be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Conversely, if police departments abuse their authority, shouldn't they expect to be punished by the people they serve, and in a similarly peremptory manner?
By having a brick thrown at their head? No, that not reasonable in the least.
No rational person could think it looked like that, and this would still not be an acceptable response.
That's not really true. There is an area between "lawful protesting" and "rioting" that's usually called civil disobedience. Civil disobedience as usually understood is peaceful, but it's also by design inherently disruptive.
In Austin, TX protestors blocked the main highway through the city. That was obviously incredibly disruptive, but many people believe the city police's forceful response of shooting less-lethal rounds relatively indiscriminately into the crowd was the exact type of response people were protesting against. A large group of trauma doctors in Austin wrote a paper arguing against using these types of rounds for crowd control due to the horrific injuries they treated: https://www.statesman.com/news/20200816/beanbag-rounds-cause...
I would consider civil disobedience something more like as a policeman to refuse to disrupt a peaceful protest, or illegally publishing data (consider Aaron Swartz, Alexandra Elbakyan, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning), or someone like Oskar Schindler.
The entire intent is for the masses, with no qualifications whatsoever, to make themselves heard in a way that cannot be ignored.
Edit: I am talking about wartime labor mobilization. In addition the government owns gun manufactories too.
> to make themselves heard in a way that cannot be ignored.
You are stepping away from just civil disobedience then. Riots, sieges, or a full scale revolution fit that description better.
You can't just redefine words to suit your fancy because you don't like what the word actually means. That example you give is literally 100% not what civil disobedience means. Civil disobedience by definition means defying government, not your employer.
Equating these acts with "siege" screams bad faith to me, I feel like every example you've given is intentionally misleading or missing the point.
Police, on the other hand, are our paid civil servants. It is their job to remove passion and emotion from the interaction and to deescalate potentially dangerous situations. They have a duty to respond sub-proportionately in a way that resolves conflict unless their life is in danger.
Time and time again we see police responding by escalating tension, passion, and violence. This is a spectacular failure of their duty and huge breach of public trust.
Sorry for being facetious, but the whole point is that people expect police to have some self-control (unlike an animal) and behave better in these situations. If you're a cashier, and a customer is yelling at you, berating you, taunting you, etc. you're expected to try to remain calm and attempt to de-escalate the situation - certainly you're not supposed to attack the person. If anything, police should be held to an even higher standard than this.
No, I would feel safer with a crocodile around actually.
EDIT:
Downvote if you want but in the absence of an oracle to determine justness then you need to accept any group has the right to cause major disruption, such as blocking highways.
* Vegans * Conspiracy theorists * Radical churches * etc
Maybe try formulating an appropriate response if these groups caused major disruptions to your city daily. How should the government respond?
I'm not making any comment about the justness or unjustness of the underlying cause of the protests
> The police cannot simply allow it to occur so they will react with the amount of force needed to end it swiftly.
This statement, however, is simply bullshit, and the US has literally hundreds of years of examples of how civil disobedience can be dealt with reasonably and humanely (of course as well as other examples where it's dealt with viciously). The protest would have eventually died down (an effective strategy to dealing with these kinds of protests is just to cordon them off and wait it out, they'll eventually need food and water), protestors would have been arrested and cited with an appropriate misdemeanor.
The classical notion of civil disobedience is that you have to be willing to accept the consequences, so you can't resist arrest and you have to accept being jailed or paying the fine etc. What I don't see in the recent "protests" is any willingness to be arrested. In fact I see lots of people resisting arrest.
Just as every single human being desires peace in the same way they desire happiness. The love of peace, therefore, is not a virtue. When those who are leading their nations sing the praise of peace they are sincere. They seek war to achieve their peace. Even violent criminals demand peace, if only for themselves. They do not love war; they aspire to an unjust peace.
St Augustine, The City of God
That is at least an honest statement that what is going on isn't "civil disobedience". Yet there are people who are insisting that the riotous activities can be accurately given that label.
Certainly, this is not always the case as local and temporal contexts vary widely. Some riots are spontaneous, some are planned to target state property or force its defense, some are engineered to exploit chaos for profit. You might find it informative to drop in on one if it is occurring in your area; counterintuitively it's not particularly dangerous to attend as a neutral person, though you should be prepared for the possibility of being tear gassed.
I'm in no way disagreeing that there were clear, obvious examples of violence and property destruction, just as clearly as there were many examples of peaceful protests. But these protests are like Rorschach tests: everyone sees in them what their mind tells them to see. I can say for a fact that in the particular instance I cited in Austin there were clear examples of police firing into the crowd in an indiscriminate fashion. Not even the police chief is really trying to defend it anymore.
I'm not going to try to justify the police actions in Austin -- I don't know the details, but it seems to me that taking a large number of people into custody with no "script" and with the people not ready to be detained is probably quite hazardous, stressful, and ripe for something to go very wrong.
> Folks, this concept isn't that difficult, and there seem to be a bunch of comments arguing about what civil disobedience really is, as if we didn't have hundreds of years of examples and jurisprudence to go by.
I think what I've learned it discussing this is that in fact most people don't understand the philosophy of civil disobedience. Most people seem use the term to mean "breaking things, intimidating people, and baiting the police to draw attention to a just cause". And there is a unexplained rule that determines when the cause is "just" enough to excuse committing the crime that draws the attention.
So blocking a road in order to draw attention to some other incident of injustice isn't about how the law about blocking roads is unjust, nor is it even about the some other unjust law. In your example the protest was about the George Floyd killing in which the police officers were rather quickly charged with a crime.
The protesters in your example are indeed "protesting" but I don't think that their tactics are an illustration of civil disobedience, as I understand it.
So if we are to excuse protestors for breaking laws I think there needs to be a different ethical argument that must be made. And that argument has to tackle the problem of which crimes can be excused: disorderly conduct, assault, arson, vandalism, theft/looting, manslaughter? And perhaps it matters how that disobedience is directed? For example, torching the police vehicle of the police force that is implicated in the injustice seems different to me (but still not necessarily excusable) than torching the police vehicle in a city thousands of miles a way from the incident, or than looting your local Best Buy.
For those of you who feel like these types of protests are ethical/warranted/justified, I would ask, what is the limiting principle? What would represent the protesters going "too far"? When would it be appropriate to say enough is enough? When is it no longer protesting and is just criminal behavior?
Again, why are people insisting on redefining words because they don't like their meaning? Chaining yourself to a physical structure like a building or tree, and going so far as to make cutting those chains difficult, is one of the prototypical examples of civil disobedience. The whole point is to make it difficult for police to arrest and remove the protestors in those situations.
But those tactics are very different than what is going on and I think it is quite easy to distinguish between that sort of thing and rioting.
I’m sorry, but that's stupid. How is a citizen supposed to refuse to comply with the qualified immunity laws? You read about bus seats and lunch counters and took them literally. For Thoreau, not paying taxes was a way to protest state-enforced slavery. When Gandhi broke the law against salt not supplied by the British, he wasn’t protesting the salt, he was protesting British rule. Here, people are protesting the entire state that imposes its authority over black lives.
When the disobedience includes assault, vandalism, arson, looting, and so on, it is no longer a protest, it is a riot and it looses all its moral legitimacy as a protest in my mind.
I don't think that the current situation in the US is analogous. There are lots of ways to affect change without resorting to violence: peaceful protest, drafting new laws, voting for more police funding, voting for different representatives, voting for different executives.
The idea that all those options have been exhausted and the only solution is to physically and economically destroy communities in order to draw attention to the problem is illogical and self-defeating. In an even more bizarre twist, the story that seems to be emerging is that the rioter's demands are to make changes that aren't wanted by the people in the communities that the rioters purport to represent (see recent polls that minority communities want more police, not less).
If you followed the nightly protests in Portland OR with any closeness it'd be abundantly clear. Examples just in the past 20 days:
- police pulling down mask to pepper spray protestor in the eyes while pinned to the ground: https://twitter.com/_WhatRiot/status/1292012255714787330
- police randomly puncturing a support vans tires, they have done this on multiple occasions for no real reason: https://twitter.com/ScottHech/status/1291711270903844867
- police beating and kicking an unresisting protestor: https://twitter.com/1misanthrophile/status/12959623991035453...
- more police jabbing protestor with batons: https://twitter.com/danielvmedia/status/1292228819588452359
You see enough of these videos and you appreciate the cops and just vindictive and angry at the prospect of losing "power". It doesn't matter what protestors do (and they most they've done to directly threaten officers is thrown water bottles and apples and flares into an empty police building), police will use any reason (or none) to beat protestors.
* As far as I know these videos have resulted in NO reprimands to officers, might as well be standard operating procedure as it continues to happen nightly
> Today I watched a police officer in kenosha wisconsin get knocked unconscious with a brick. The fellow police officers picked him up and dragged him away - while the crowd changed "Fuck the police" and recorded it.
The idea that the worst the protesters have done is throw apples at the police is so crazy I don't even know how you could be that deep in a bubble
If you want to conflate places to strengthen a case then you need to dive in to what happened at Kenosha and the lack of police response to that tragedy or any of the others.
If you want to bring up how "protestors were asking for it" by showing up to protests then we got to ask if police are asking for mass nation wide protests by actively resisting change and harming black lives.
Portland where there’s been continuously rioting, looting and attack on civilians for three months now.
The police’s job is to provide law, order and security for the people, something Portland currently lacks, and which the police needs to restore.
When anarchists are obstructing that job, they can’t expect not to be handled appropriately.
Also, if you think police can just beat people senseless because they feel challenged then you're just a short step away from text book fascism.
That seems like a massive deflection. Sure, business as usual during the day, but what's happening every evening?
Sure. They're largely peaceful, except when attacking and almost killing civilians[1]. And it's not even intended as a joke. There's some crazy levels of cognitive dissonance going on.
[1] https://twitter.com/RationalTheory/status/129536995058932531...
You have one example versus dozens of examples of police violence. And it's Andy Ngo, who once again didn't actually take the video footage.
You're the one with cognitive dissonance claiming all nights are violently attacking civilians when you have one example. Somehow though most nights police beat protestors or use tear gas and that’s ok by you?
There is no justification for it whatsoever. There is no legitimate cause behind any of it.
Watch the hour long interview with the Portland cop that was going around. It’s good perspective.
This statement is devoid of any explanation as to what types of "change" are important enough to override "other types of civic engagement". The legislative process, voting, representative democracy, the "rule of law" are all designed to avoid having people take matters into their own hands. If you are going to argue that all that should be thrown out it has to be more convincing than just some generic statement that "change" is necessary.
Your argument seems to be that everything possible has been tried to address police violence and that there is no other solution other than to riot.
I could point to various crime statistics to suggest that the problem is not in fact intractable or "fairly common" (while still being a problem to be addressed) but it really isn't worth it. Even if I shared your apparent assessment of the problem, how does it make sense to physically and economically destroy communities in response? How does it make sense to make it impossible to actually "police" in these communities? How does it make sense to drive away anyone with resources from these communities? Why do you even think the people reacting this way are making a principled statement about police violence and aren't just taking advantage of the situation?
The phrase "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" comes to mind but it is entirely inadequate to describe the disastrous sequence of events that is going on in so many communities right now.
In general, rioting is used selectively, targeting official buildings followed by corporate concerns, which extract capital from local communities. Little of the news coverage about Kenosha drew attention to the fact that the largest building burned down Monday night was the WI Dept of Corrections; many commentators prefer to focus your attention on commercial damage in order to push the idea that it's indiscriminate.
You think the mob will stop? You are advocating for a justice system driven by threats from the mob that must be responded to in real time. You aren't even attempting to grapple with the particular facts that are in evidence at the moment in this case, never mind what might be discovered by actually asking questions. You aren't describing a justice system based on the rule of law, you are describing mob rule. It won't end well for anybody. Why would anyone in their right mind be a police office given the framework you describe? Why would anyone choose to stay in that type of a jurisdiction? The logical consequences of your framework would be disastrous for the community. The medicine you are prescribing is far, far worse than the disease.
The reality is that police often shoot and kill with a sense of impunity because they enjoy considerable legal immunity, to the point that the identity of a police officer who carries out a shooting is often withheld from the public. I'm saying that any time a police officer shoots, kills, or seriously injures someone, they should be immediately relieved of duty pending a full inquiry, no matter what the circumstances. If there is a colorable suspicion of misbehavior (eg the shooting was not a case of returning fire or action during the commission of a crime), then they should be subject to arrest like any other criminal suspect, while retaining their full panoply of legal rights like presumption of innocence, access to counsel etc.
If a lot of people don't want to be cops who are subject to such restraints, good. I don't want cops who use force casually. What we have now is a system that throws the book at anyone who takes or threatens life (with far higher sentences than most other developed countries despite little evidence of a deterrent effect) while frequently applying light or no penalties, or sometimes no serious investigation, to police officers who commit similar acts. These inequities are compounded by economic and racial disparities in the application of force, legal sanctions and so on.
Unless you've lived in other countries or have significant first- or second-hand experience (including talking to current and former police officers) this might be hard information to accept.
A core principle of a civil society with the rule of law is the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to enforce the laws. If someone steals from you, you don't get to hunt them down and kidnap them for 1 year even if the punishment for the crime is 1 year of imprisonment. We explicitly grant police the authority to use force and when they don't use it properly they are subject to exactly the same punishment as you and I. There is no conceptual asymmetry on the use of illegitimate force. Self-defense is another example of this. You can legitimately use force against an attacker in self-defense. If you kill someone in self-defense that isn't murder and isn't an example of a double standard.
> I'm saying that any time a police officer shoots, kills, or seriously injures someone, they should be immediately relieved of duty pending a full inquiry, no matter what the circumstances.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly what happens. The mob isn't waiting more than 30 minutes never mind for a "full inquiry".
> If there is a colorable suspicion of misbehavior (eg the shooting was not a case of returning fire or action during the commission of a crime), then they should be subject to arrest like any other criminal suspect, while retaining their full panoply of legal rights like presumption of innocence, access to counsel etc.
Tell that to the mob and its enablers. We have state governors opining on who was right or wrong just hours after tragic events, without any attempt to understand what really happened. This encourages mobs and rioting.
Same thing happened in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. Some ridiculously vague account on social media regarding an interaction with police and a mob arrives to loot and pillage all night long.
Just a couple of days ago in Mineapolis someone committed suicide while police approached and that triggered more rioting.
We won't survive as a society if every police interaction is interpreted immediately as yet another racial injustice, never mind if every rumor of a police interaction is interpreted that way. Mobs and rioting need to be shutdown hard so we have room for "full inquiry", but there are political leaders who not only won't shut down this activity they are actively encouraging it.
If you're looking for more information, https://twitter.com/MarcSallinger/status/1277063130523348995 is a Twitter thread showing the police using pepper spray and batons to disrupt and clear out said vigil.
So, not so peaceful it seems.
I originally shared the video claiming that police were interfering with a peaceful protest. You disputed that the police were interfering, saying they were marching past. When I shared further evidence that the police were in fact disrupting the protest and hurting people who were participating, you found reason to instead believe that the protest was not peaceful. Consider your biases.
Here [0] [1] [2] [3] are more examples of and news articles discussing police attacking peaceful protesters.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/police-keep-using-fo...
[1] https://www.orlandoweekly.com/Blogs/archives/2020/07/20/new-...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/06/police-viole...
[3] https://twitter.com/DavidBegnaud/status/1268716877355810818
I have trouble with this view. I don't see it. I've lived in a few protest capitals, in different countries, and I've even been on organizing teams for protests. Polices are always either just there, or they escort specifically, unless there's that one group of shitheads that wants to cause trouble.
Portland is greatly misportrayed by the media. NY Times and USA Today show people shaking a fence. You jump to AndyNgo and there's video of people sawing through fences with power tools. Political cartoonist like Matt Bors say police are afraid of laser pointers. People are using green lasers that can blind people, and may have blinded at least three federal officers. People I know there say it's pretty normal for a few hours, and then at night, a lot of anarco-anticaps cause a shit ton of damage.
Police are not actively quelling protests. I think most of them are fine with people just protesting. Police do want to stop riots. Looting is destroying cities and should be stopped. CHAZ was a nightmare where the police stopped showing up when businesses and residents repeatably called them[0]. I watched police cruisers on fire in Chicago back in May, and two weekends ago businesses took a second massive hit. The bigger chains are open again, but many small stores may be closed for good.
Not all police officers are good, but it's insane to think the majority of them are psychos. The vast majority of people I know who are police, want to do the right thing.
There was a time when local police would turn fire hoses on peaceful protestors and release dogs. It's what turned the nation towards ML King and the movement he stood for, because America wanted to stand against the violence. When protestors burn down gas stations and car dealerships, the American people will still turn against the violence.
[0]: https://battlepenguin.video/videos/watch/9f81cd38-3ee9-4f26-...
Pretty sure police officers nightly beating of protestors, pulling off masks and pepper spraying their eyes and assaulting reporters is a very direct attempt at quelling descent.
- police pulling down mask to pepper spray protestor in the eyes while pinned to the ground: https://twitter.com/_WhatRiot/status/1292012255714787330
- police randomly puncturing a support vans tires, they have done this on multiple occasions for no real reason: https://twitter.com/ScottHech/status/1291711270903844867
- police beating and kicking an unresisting protestor: https://twitter.com/1misanthrophile/status/12959623991035453...
- more police jabbing protestor with batons: https://twitter.com/danielvmedia/status/1292228819588452359
In my view, these videos are evidence of serious and pervasive cultural problems in police departments around the country, and with how they see their role in society. There’s simply no way to justify the behavior seen in many of these clips.
Lies
Damn lies
Statistics
Selectively chosen video snippets
Burying your head in the sand does not count as honest discourse or objective reasoning.
Go back and watch the newly released Floyd bodycam videos; the entire 30min and 18min clips. Dude was reaching around in the car, was being a total fucking asshole, swallowed 2mg of fentenyl; the cops were nothing but nice (as they could be) to him. Dude was claiming he couldn't breath and cried out to his mom even before they asked him to get in the car, and long before he was on the ground.
It's a complete and total lie compared to the narrative that's been stuffed down our throat by the 24/7/365 Insta-rage-a-media.
If you really believe that pulling the "they did it first" card helps your case in any way, I'm sorry to break it to you but people only started to protest after the police was caught, again, doing pretty egregious stuff against innocent members of the public, including killing people in broad day light.
And I'm dumbfounded by your attempt at whitewashing police murders by spewing bullshit like "the guy was being a total fucking asshole".
How do you know the people taking power tools to fences weren't right-wing agents provocateurs? If your source is Andy Ngo, I think that's the more likely explanation.
Is it bias? Of course. Every single news agency has a bias. But I still think Andy is trying to report accurately and do the right thing. I balance what he says against his opposition and I have decided for myself that I think his intent is good.
Most memorably to me he took a video of a couch burning at the justice center and claimed antifa were burning a homeless persons belongings.
Truth was he wasn't even there and stole the video from another journalist. That journalist post accurately described what happened but he didn't care, he knew the story he wanted to tell.
Andy's tone is extremely neutral but it seems like pretty much everything he says is pulled out of his ass to smear leftists.
But I agree with you Andy Ngo is not a legitimate journalist. An example of that was compile by this thread last year.
https://mobile.twitter.com/respectablelaw/status/11638952462...
Rioters sawing through a fence is not a legitimate effort to remove a fence. It is destruction of property plain and simple.
"Its blocking a bike lane" isn't a great excuse when the same riots are both the cause of the fence, and also blocking said bike lane.
Antifa supporter doesn't like Andy Ngo. No surprise there.
To everyone who views individual events out of context and condemns an entire system, I say you are actively harming society with your hubris.
Now they just shoot out their eyes.[1]
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2020/06/19/pol...
Have you looked at any of the videos of police beating up peaceful protesters from the last few months?
Sure, there are cases where protests escalate into riots, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the many, many, documented cases of peaceful protests where police initiated violence.
How do you reconcile behaviour like this https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/20/christopher... with your view that "Polices are always either just there, or they escort specifically"? In this case they actively escalate violence against a peaceful and unarmed protester (who also happens to be a Navy vet).
How about Buffalo police assaulting this old man, leaving him with blood pouring from his ears? (https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/06/05/buffalo-police-push...) Are the riot police "wanting to do the right thing" here? Especially when they walk past him and leave him lying as his blood pools on the sidewalk? Can you honestly watch that video and feel fine with how the police handled that situation?
> but it's insane to think the majority of them are psychos.
This is a strawman. The post you replied to was not claiming anything close to this.
> I think most of them are fine with people just protesting.
This can be true at the same time as the viewpoint you're arguing against being true. A couple bad actors escalating things can result in a peaceful protest turning into an uncontrollable riot. Also, use of force orders vary by county, as do the orders handed down to the cops on the ground. Read https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-escalation-keeps-pro... for some evidence-based discussion around varying use-of-force policies and how they affect the outcomes during protests.
> There was a time when local police would turn fire hoses on peaceful protestors and release dogs.
We've made progress since then, but to claim we've fixed the problem is like claiming that racism in the USA ended with the victory of the civil rights movement.
It seems like when they sent DHS down to Portland it ended up just exacerbating the situation. No "order" was restored; they just left after a week or so.
And I think more broadly, the "tough on crime" crowd needs to recognize the limits of its own ideology. We have the largest prison system in the world and still do not have law & order on our streets.
But beyond the reckless and dangerous calls for defunding, the violence/theft/arson from the rioters and far-left groups that back them is just completely unacceptable. Just yesterday some of these rioters sealed in Seattle police using quick dry concrete while setting the precinct on fire: https://mynorthwest.com/2114190/rantz-rioters-burn-seattle-p...
Even I don't want the police defunded.