The Democrats run the cities where this is happening. What are they going to do about it? Quoting the article:
'I recently finished reading “San Fransicko,” by Michael Shellenberger. I recommend it. The subtitle is provocative: “Why Progressives Ruin Cities.” But, as Shellenberger explains, he does not mean to imply that progressives always ruin the cities they govern. He’s just interested in the specific phenomenon of when progressives do ruin cities, and explaining why that happens.
And progressives—I count myself as one of them—do ruin cities. Or, at least, they put in place policies that cause profound harm to the people living in them.'
I think we should start differentiating between Democrats and progressives. At least here in Portland, the differentiation is already complete. Basically everyone is a Democrat and most residents would like to have our police force back and see people prosecuted for property crimes. The city leadership is beholden to a radical fringe who aren't really even liberals so much as anarcho-communists.
This is roughly like saying that the Republicans in Congress aren't denouncing the Capitol rioters. My point about progressive cities is that a portion of the leadership is afraid of the extremists. Ted Wheeler, the Mayor of Portland, had to run his last election against an actual Stalinist who had very vocal supporters but ultimately not overwhelming numbers on her side. She catalyzed the average Dems to get out and vote for Wheeler, who no one really likes. So what I mean is there's a large silent majority of Dems, if not the leadership, who are rattled by the progressives' increasingly unhinged, illiberal program. Just as I think there's a bulk of Republicans who don't believe in attacking the Capitol.
> I think we should start differentiating between Democrats and progressives.
Most US institutions are Marxist today, so stop lying about Democrats not being progressives (Marxists.)
The only 2 institutions that are not yet Marxist are local police and the US Supreme Court. Note how both are under relentless attack by Marxists.
What will happen in 2022 is that government at the Federal and state level will become Republican (ie. American) majority, but you're stuck with Marxists at the local level. So vote accordingly.
Note that half of cnn's anchors (2/4) are under investigation this week for fake news, so that should tell you how corrupt the left has made the MSM. They've retracted (or worse, not yet retracted) every major story they aired since early 2020. One of their investors just said, "Maybe we should go back to reporting instead of opinion." Because their ratings are down 80% since the Nov. 2020 election.
> And progressives—I count myself as one of them—do ruin cities
The word progessive can be translated as Marxist - shame on you.
And if you're hoping for "racial justice", I'm from the Detroit area. Blacks think liberal SJW's are dupes, and without stable families and educational success, there is nothing to be done. Racism is the least of their problems, as any honest black leader will tell you.
In the case of Detroit, it was not rebuilt after the 1969 riots - that's over 50 years ago. I expect the same of most of the cities the 2020 Marxist riots burned.
Those looters you see in security camera videos - that's all they know how to do, until they're back inside prison.
> they put in place policies that cause profound harm to the people living in them.
So stop doing it. As the Black leader Frederick Douglas said, "Leave us alone." He meant stop the do-good white liberal SJW policies that destroyed the Black family with welfare programs.
US Blacks used to have a higher marriage rate than whites, but now only 20% of Black women get married. That means almost all Black children grow up in a single-parent household, without a male authority to teach discipline and boundaries. Hence the looting.
Please don't take HN threads straight into partisan flamewar. This is a site for intellectually curious conversation. Those are opposite things.
This is especially important when a thread is fresh, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. If someone shows up with a low-information provocation like this one, that's extremely likely to leave a negative imprint. Please don't do that.
Nonsense. The Democrats are deliberately ruining cities through their BLM, antifa and activist DA proxies, including in Silicon Valley. What could be more relevant to HN than that?
dang, I've noticed that you come out on the wrong side of just about every major issue. Do your homework - this is not Communist Russia, where HN wouldn't even be allowed to exist.
> Defund advocates often claim that police don’t actually prevent crimes, that they only bust the perpetrators after the fact. But that’s untrue. Police presence deters crime[citation provided]. Arresting career criminals takes them out of circulation. And, most important, effective policing bolsters a community’s faith in government-administered justice.
Regardless of whether defunding is good/bad for crime, this is the core justification for existing funding in this article and it is quite thin.
Edit: I am unclear on why this is getting downvoted. Almost nothing in that paragraph is adequately substantiated anywhere in the article. I am not married to any particular perspective on this topic, but remain unconvinced of the author's conclusion.
Why is it thin? There are several studies showing how policing reduces crime through a couple of measures.
Intuitively it would make sense that locking up criminals would reduce crime (making them unable to commit more crime), that increasing the chance of a criminal getting locked up would reduce crime (via incentives), and just seeing more police officers around would reduce crime.
I would be really surprised if for the past 1000 years, civilization was tricked into believing in a criminal justice system was necessary when in reality it wasn't.
Are there any studies where they dramatically reduced police presence and crime wasn't affected?
In its current form, yes absolutely. We do not need a "justice" system focused purely on retribution and punishment, there isn't really evidence that retribution and punishment are effective
The Nordic countries have a better system of rehabilitation
I didn't downvote but I would imagine it's because the author cited a study, you said the evidence was thin, but you didn't elaborate on how it was thin.
Not devoid, but lower prevalence with tighter restrictions. Quite a few have moved out over the years, or chosen not to move there in the first place.
For example, approximately 1 in 10 adults in PA have a license to carry a firearm. Compared to about 70k CA CCW in a population of about 39M people (didn't find adults only). CA also mandates that guns be stored locked up and unloaded when not on their person. This can prevent some of the safes or lock boxes designed for rapid deployment.
It depends where you are in CA, I specifically moved to a place where I would know people around me don't own guns (SF). I have a hard time seeing myself live anywhere where people are allowed to carry or buy guns liberally.
I’ve lived here (SF)for almost 20yrs and I have yet to see anyone open carry here unless they’re trying to make some political statement. Sure it could be that I just don’t see all the people that are carrying concealed but I do think there is much less of a gun carry culture here. As for ownership I know of one neighbor that has guns. I’m sure there are probably more but I imagine they’re kept mainly for recreational not defensive purposes much like how people kept guns in the small town I grew up in in Oregon before the whole “patriotic” gun toter culture became a thing.
A surprising number of people I've known who lived in SF proper owned handguns, fully aware of the legal ramifications. They were mostly well-off tech people, and didn't care about the legal risk any more than they obeyed speed limits.
As always, there's laws, and then there's enforcement of those laws.
You're completely delusional if you believe nobody in SF has guns at home because the law says so. Ask yourself how on earth such a thing would be enforced without police searching everyones' homes on a regular basis.
My connections to the city have waned in the past decade or so, during which it sounds crime has only worsened. I'd assume there's even more gun ownership in response to what seems to be a police force unwilling to enforce laws and a continuous stream of growing area crime reported in the news.
Out by me which is rural desert CA there's just guns all over the place. Technically it's illegal to fire anything other than a scattershot round in a shotgun openly around here (Morongo Basin), yet on any given weekend you'll hear all sorts of semi-auto and even full-auto shooting without any police response.
Meh, there's a whole lot of virtue signaling going on in a place like SF. What people say vs. what they do privately rarely align in my experience. It's even worse in LA IMO.
Virtue signaling about what though? The people I know that are pro-gun here aren't shy about it but they're not whining about their 2nd Amendment rights all the time either.
In a place like SF there's a lot of pressure to conform, and it's not in a pro-gun right-leaning trajectory. So what I mean to say is there's plenty of presentation of conformity, and it's often inauthentic. The stakes are high in a place like SF. People will keep their mouth shut or even fly the opposition's flag in the interests of preserving/increasing their salaries and stock refreshes until they can GTFO with their spoils in tow.
Unless you have your gun on you at all times in your house what are the chances you’re going to move fast enough to return fire on people cruising through a neighborhood randomly shooting at houses?
> Walking and spraying multiple houses... I was surprise there was no return fire, then I saw it was CA.
Most folks on my street own a gun.
First of all, I probably wouldn't have time to wait for cover, make it to my safe, pull a gun, take the safety off, make it to a safe position, aim, and fire before the threat left.
But set that aside.
No way in hell me or any of my neighbors would return fire at a moving target in a residential neighborhood. That's 100% how you accidentally kill someone (or get killed yourself).
My understanding from the article is that the person was on foot, not in a vehicle. There is risk in any action you take. If they're spraying more houses, nor acting could mean they kill some of your neighbors. There are a lot of variables that were missing just discussing this online.
The article didn't say anything about whether the person was on foot or in a vehicle. I assumed they were in a vehicle because that's the way people would spray bullets into random houses in the neighborhoods I grew up in, precisely because it's enormously less risky, for precisely the reasons described above.
It could just be a poorly written article, but I was going off of this.
"Apparently, in the Bay Area right now, you can walk up a residential street firing your gun into houses, and you still won’t be able to compete for attention with all of the other sensational crimes."
I did see that, but the author doesn't claim to have been there, or claim that his "nanny" saw the perpetrator, or indeed claim that he was able to find any information about the crime from any other source. So I think he's just guessing about how this sort of thing happens.
And, maybe I'm unreasonably reasoning from stereotypes here, but I think maybe a guy named "Leighton Woodhouse," who describes himself as a "progressive" and hires a "nanny" to raise his toddler, possibly may know too little about drive-by shootings to know what he doesn't know.
That's certainly possible. I didn't see it mentioned as being a drive-by either. Usually that's treated almost like a buzz word people like to throw in a headline. Either way, I guess the data isn't there for us to ever know.
And... what? standing still? People use their feet to MOVE. (Also, drive-bys are so called for reason...)
If I shoot across my street, that bullet is either going into:
1. a (small, and, again, MOVING) human target, or
2. my neighbor's house.
Have you ever shot at a target moving at 6-10+ miles/hour roughly perpendicular to your line of fire? Shit's not easy. If I let off more than one round, odds are high that at least one bullet is going into my neighbor's house.
Oh. And if a bullet is shot into my house, that shit is coming into the house. Or did you think think glass panes/drywall stop bullets? So where the hell am I even going to take cover when exchanging fire?
> There is risk in any action you take
Basement. Lock door. Find cover. Wait. Rule zero of self defense: don't get into gunfights in an open street, and don't depend on drywall as a bulletproof barrier. (Actually, that's not even rule zero because most people aren't stupid enough that it has to be explicitly stated.)
I can't speak for Oakland specifically. But when I see police departments with lots of fancy combat gear, but with minimal fitness standards and minimal training in things like unarmed combat, I can't help but feel like the people are not getting their tax money's worth.
Threatening to defund the police generally lowers the quality of your existing police. Pretend you run a business and say you are cutting salaries. Employees will look for other jobs or just be demotivated in general. Couple that with an increasing hostile work environment, you have the situation at hand.
Do you work as hard when you know management is gunning for your job?
So the excuse is that the police are allowing shootings and other crimes because they aren't motivated enough? Because they might be held to a higher standard? Because they might not get their awesome new toys? Stop treating them like children. I'm amazed when people will go to any lengths to excuse the police.
this article has no content. just show some contextualized statistics of how police funding correlates with crime. in seattle, it really hasnt from what ive seen. but if you have compelling numbers, go ahead
Seattle crime statistics are misleading. It's been reported many times that since the police no longer even show up for shoplifting crimes, business owners no longer bother to report it.
Nobody knows what the crime rate actually is as a result. But the accountants at the retail stores know, and they're raising prices, installing armored doors, or simply leaving the city.
The local bank branch I patronize now sports an armed guard wearing body armor standing outside the door. It's only a block from the police station. Pretty sad.
> The local bank branch I patronize now sports an armed guard wearing body armor standing outside the door. It's only a block from the police station. Pretty sad.
Well that's certainly a vote of confidence for the professionalism and effectiveness for the police.
If you want more indications, on the Seattle side the bank branches have heavy armored glass completely separating them from customers. On the eastside, no such glass. These are branches of the same bank.
From my discussions with current SPD personnel, the SPD itself is doing a stop work protest. Money In doesn't mean Services Out (MISO), it only reaffirms the thuglike nature of our relationship with the police.
"The 2021 adopted SPD budget is nearly $363 million. During the previous budget cycle, the Mayor and City Council made about $70 million in cuts, but because of funds added elsewhere in the police budget, the net reduction was $46.1 million (about 11 percent) from the 2020 Adopted Budget of $409.1 million."
I read most of the article, in which the author implies that defunding the police increases crime, and blames the people in charge of Oakland with this crime.
Yet I recalled hearing that police budgets in Oakland were steady to up this year, despite the protests.
>Despite claims to the contrary, the Oakland City Council did not make any cuts to the police budget at all this year. In fact, Oakland police were allotted about $39 million more than in the previous two years, according to a KTVU analysis of city records.
You're right on the mark. A lot of articles scare-mongering about defunding the police point to numbers in places that haven't seen any defunding (quite the contrary, many of them have had boosts to their budgets, as usual).
Nothing. There is a narrative being pushed that tries to correlate Black Lives Matter, Defund The Police, etc. activity with increasing crime. That narrative might have some validity in some localized cases, but is clearly not universally causal.
Actual instances of police funding being reduced are so rare that the author reaches for incidents of low police-citizen interaction following controversial police-on-citizen violence as evidence of what a straw-man version of "defund the police" advocates for.
"Defund the police" has to be the most poorly conceived political slogan of all time. It sounds more like a pejorative its opponents came up with.
wouldn't that mean the cause of the increased crime is either criminals who are angry at the police so they commit more crimes or the police not working as hard (or a combination)
Could be, but those aren’t exhaustive possibilities. There might also just be more crime e.g. because of the pandemic rather than anger at the police, or there might be the same actual level of crime but more is getting reported.
Wait what? Why would criminals be angry at the police for not interacting with them as much? I think a more likely explanation for increased crime is increased opportunity due to reduced police presence.
Not op. When the call for reform is "defund" and that seems like the wrong thing to do, then people don't support sensible reform. One would imagine that many if not most police officers support some kinds of sensible reform but probably hesitate to support "defunding" their wages and have their and their colleagues jobs cut, which is what "defund" really sounds like. It's a total us and them mentality which is not the way policing is supposed to be. In fact it's one of the things many people want reformed. Policing should be for us and us in our community with our consent as a population.
My point is that it doesn’t make sense to say “you called for defunding the police, we didn’t defund the police, things got worse, therefore your slogan is bad.”
I would want to evaluate the merits of a particular slogan by means other than whether the intended reform happened. It’s easy to say “no thanks” to reform regardless of how good of a slogan it is.
But a misleadingly bad slogan makes it much more likely that people will say "no thanks". If what you said isn't what you meant, and what you said makes people reject what you meant, why did you say it?
I suspect that proponents thought anger at the police was much more widely spread than it was, so they grabbed what they thought would sell.
The slogan is bad because it channels the energy initiated by real problems into the worst idea possible. True, in many - though not all - cases this terrible idea was recognised as such even by the woke city managers and kept at the level of bloviating without doing much. That's still bad and the slogan still bad, and the opportunity wasted still bad. Not as bad as when this idea is actually implemented (not in Oakland but happened in other places afaik).
> their wages and have their and their colleagues jobs cut
Is this not literally the idea? The issue with "defund the police" slogan is that defunding isn't the end goal. The idea is to reduce the size, scope, militarization, and budget of the police force _and_ use that money to instead fund programs to help citizens and the local economy.
Part of the platform is absolutely to reduce the current scope of the widely militarized police force in the US.
>One would imagine that many if not most police officers support some kinds of sensible reform but probably hesitate to support "defunding" their wages and have their and their colleagues jobs cut, which is what "defund" really sounds like.
I'd argue that the reason that folks rallied 'defund' is that police aren't willing to accept reasonable reform and they have enough power to keep it from happening.
Reform isn't realistic in a system that required the group being reformed to consent to the type of reform.
I'm personally a fan of 'reallocate' police funds.
I think the frustration that led to "defund" is that a lot of sensible reforms have been resisted or watered down, and protections like qualified immunity have sheltered abusive cops from accountability.
I think there is likely a de-escalation path that involves sensible reform, but it will also require that reform to be embraced and implemented by the police
If education reformers cry "Feed shit to children" but don't actually feed shit to children, would you argue that it wasn't a terrible slogan because they didn't actually did it?
If I read this article correctly then the author's point is that simply the passage of a bill to be enacted in the future is the cause of increased crime in the present, which seems like a shaky argument to me.
Also I'm noticing that the ABC7News article says
>More than $17 million will be diverted from the police to violence prevention and other services not involving police. Another $3.6 million will be put into the new MACRO program which will basically be a civilian crisis response program within the Oakland Fire Department addressing those in mental health crises.
This means that even assuming this is a net decrease of $20.6 million to budget, this is still giving back only ~half the net increase from this year's budget. So we should still be up $16 million or so vs. 2020
Sorry I don't seem to understand your argument. You're comparing the budgets in nominal terms without accounting for inflation. For example the $630 million this year won't be able to fund as many officers and services like the year prior due to inflation. Budgets are typically increased across the board to account for inflation.
Slight correction. The bill didn't redirect funds, it proposed redirection of funds. In reality, Oakland's police department is getting a larger budget [0].
It must have been a calculated decision to name it 'Defund the police' - if it had been called what it really is, which is 're-allocate percentages of funds from the enforcement arm of the police to more pre-emptive interventions and other services while still increasing budgets all around' or even just 'reform the police' it would not have had legs. 'Defund the police' has legs but it's easily used by political opponents. Perhaps a student of political science can chime in on the merits of blunt messaging and if it has a longer term impact.
It wasn't just "defund the police", it was "abolish the police".
If your argument is that the police haven't been defunded or abolished, maybe your issue is with the mainstream media that were publishing arguments in favor of abolishing the police?
Have you considered holding them to account for that?
Aside from the author saying so, I don't see any data in the linked article supporting that LAPD funding has been reduced. Moreover, a quick search seems to indicate that LAPD received a funding increase in 2021.
"The City Council cut the LAPD by $150 million in July, after massive protests following Floyd’s death, pledging to put the proceeds into disenfranchised communities. Council members quickly set aside $60 million, using much of those funds to balance the budget, leaving about $89 million for various programs."
L.A. cut millions from the LAPD after George Floyd. Here’s where that money is going
From the same article: "Although activists expressed satisfaction in seeing law enforcement funding go into social programs, some remained frustrated that Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council recently increased the LAPD’s budget for the fiscal year that starts on July 1."
And just one month ago, LAPD's budget was increased by 12% for the upcoming fiscal year, up $213 million.
People are conflating "Defund the Police" with a reduction of Policing enforcement and staffing. Whereas, I believe the original intent of DTP was the stop the militarization of the Police by not allowing them to acquire APC and other war-surplus items. The movement feared, rightly so IMO, that having such things would allow Police Departments to train and begin to act in a manner more consistent with field battle and a less like Community-based Policing enforcement.
I expected more stats because of the word "meets" in the title. But there are none, only a collection of anecdotes. The blog name is "Common Sense" too, so it's like the author didn't think statistics on police effectiveness matters, it's just common sense that police stop crime.
It's more than an implication, it's a direct statement:
> As the surge in violence has become less theoretical to white, middle class residents, Oakland’s mayor has been afforded the political space to push to restore the funds that were cut from the police budget.
Crime is going up in cities all over the country, including those in red states that never had a sniff of "Defund the Police". I'm unconvinced that it's a direct contributor.
When I saw Texas, I thought to myself - I bet they mean Austin. And sure enough...
Austin is the Portland of Texas. Bringing it up as if it is politically aligned to the right with the rest of Texas makes no sense. On the contrary, if anything it'd support the hypothesis that leftist policies drive crime up.
When I'm reading/looking at the news from Portland, "safer" is not the first word that comes to my mind. But in this particular case, what I meant is that Austin government has always been very liberal/left leaning, and considering it a typical representative of Texas would be wrong.
Perhaps you shouldn't form your opinion of the world based on 'news'. I live in Portland and don't feel in danger, and our homicide rate is one of the lowest for a big city in the country.
The poster you're responding to is correct. St. Louis, KC, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Nashville are wild places. I feel much safer in Portland than in any of those cities. Especially the ones toward to top of that list. Lots of cities in bright red states are cesspools compared to Portland.
Perhaps because the police are changing their tactics (for the worse) to reduce any possible repeat of George Floyd's killing?
Here in the UK, "stop and search" was massively reduced because it was seen as racist. The result has been a marked increase in knife and drug related crimes.
Of course it is the poor and minorities who suffer from these progressive policies.
The article you posted is dated July 1st. The author's citation for the "defunding" bill was approved on June 24 [1], in which funds were redirected from the police to "violence prevention programs." Obviously both articles are talking about different things.
If I read this article correctly then the author's point is that simply the passage of a bill to be enacted in the future is the cause of increased crime in the present, which seems like a shaky argument to me.
Also I'm noticing that the ABC7News article says
>More than $17 million will be diverted from the police to violence prevention and other services not involving police. Another $3.6 million will be put into the new MACRO program which will basically be a civilian crisis response program within the Oakland Fire Department addressing those in mental health crises.
This means that even assuming this is a net decrease of $20.6 million to budget, this is still giving back only ~half the net increase from this year's budget. So we should still be up $16 million or so vs. 2020
The budgets shouldn't be compared in nominal terms because of inflation (6.2%) and the increased costs of pensions (more police officers retiring). Your article also says that 18% of the budget is now allocated to the police as compared to prior year's 20% (not accounting for the $17 million redirection)
Sorry, I don't see why inflation and pensions should be removed from police budgets and not from other budgets. I'm very uninformed about city budgeting but this feels a little "lies, damn lies, and statistics"-y to me. The change in proportional allocation is more convincing, but I'm too ignorant to understand the implications and nuances.
When city police forces go on strike against the city for not giving them raises it often takes the form of solving "crime with a victim" while ignoring all the traffic stuff, intoxication stuff and fishing stuff that rakes in $$ through fines in order to stick it to the city. Other than a few Karens who write angry FB posts about people riding dirtbikes on the street as though they're real motorcycles it's generally a boon for the citizenry.
I think the most recent city to have this kind of strike was Baltimore in the 2015-18ish time range.
I think it is that the movement itself has caused crime to increase.
My friend is a police officer and is moving out of my progressive state to a more conservative one. He told me this is happening in nearly every department.
His reasoning was that they use to feel like they were on the side of the community, but in many places it is now the community is opposed to the police. Also they don’t risk certain things because they might have to use force and they’re worried they’ll be charged with a crime f or doing so, (especially if people riot enough and the DA needs to satisfy them).
All that adds up to more crime, even though budgets will probably rise to pay more to try to convince officers to stay.
How do we both protest police brutality when it rears its head, while still treating officers like they’re on the side of the good guys (like most, but not all, are).
That may or may not be true and is worth exploring more. Although as another poster points out, this is a vastly different argument than saying as the article does:
>As the surge in violence has become less theoretical to white, middle class residents, Oakland’s mayor has been afforded the political space to push to restore the funds that were cut from the police budget.
Which seems to be to be a misunderstanding of consensus reality
The evidence relies on self-reporting. If use of force data resulting in death has proven to be inaccurate than what reliability can be expected when we’re talking about an unjustified assault?
>His reasoning was that they use to feel like they were on the side of the community, but in many places it is now the community is opposed to the police.
This is like your grandpa telling you kids have no respect nowadays when all he does is scream at any kid he sees and then demands respect. It works both ways. Police used to be part of the community. Then they put themselves in tanks and body armor and come into every situation guns blazing and scared of everyone in the community.
If cops aren't willing to do their jobs, and instead let their feelings get in the way, they are negligent in their service and incompetent... to say the least.
It is not the jobs of people being policed to watch their own tone so they avoid offending cops. It is the job of cops to serve and protect, full stop.
It is well-known that police departments align closely with the cultural segments that (among other things) critique alleged "snowflakes". If what you say is true then there is ironically a glut of snowflakes at our local precincts and they cannot be trusted to handle weapons in public spaces.
You're not necessarily wrong, but if the conditions of any job are such that people are no longer interested in doing it, it becomes harder to attract, replace, and retain people. Reluctance of police to get involved or respond to incidents, law enforcement discretion, is not new and has a long history, including abuses and refusal of service.
The real question is how can we attract and retain officers that want to do the job?
> The real question is how can we attract and retain officers that want to do the job?
Maybe the job just doesn't make sense in modern America? If police as a concept didn't exist already, no one would create it.
If you broke it down into its parts, you find plenty of people who would sign up to handle mental health crisis and plenty of people to sign up to handle quality of life problems. You'd have a third group that wants to do the more dangerous stuff.
"If police as a concept didn't exist already, no one would create it."
Is there any evidence of that? Seems there are quite a few who support them as-is and many more who want to see minor reforms.
What do you mean by quality of life problems? How do we plan to staff in that model given police response time already averages 5 minutes (would it then be 15, or would we have 3x the cost to fill 3x the positions)?
> Seems there are quite a few who support them as-is and many more who want to see minor reforms.
Sure, that's the not the same thing. Many people reflexively back the police because they perceive themselves as benefitting from the status quo or otherwise have it as part of their socio-political identity. Some people back the police because they think they are "good enough" and don't want to think about how to reshape the system. But that isn't what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about a hypothetical. We have a list of problems such as theft, drunk driving, speeding, people in mental health crisis, domestic violence, crowd control, etc. In the hypothetical situation where we have all of these problems, but we don't have the police and never had, do you honestly think we'd assign all of these duties to one position?
> What do you mean by quality of life problems?
Cat in a tree, unwanted person, taking a report about a stolen bicycle, responding to a traffic collision. Non-life threatening situations that have absolutely no need for someone with a gun to respond.
>How do we plan to staff in that model given police response time already averages 5 minutes (would it then be 15, or would we have 3x the cost to fill 3x the positions)?
The police are unqualified to handle most of the calls they are called out to. You'd have different teams that respond to different types of calls. Non-armed responders are a hell of a lot cheaper and are able to respond to the majority of calls. You'd have a small group of armed LEOs who would respond to violent crimes in progress, and then you'd have hybrid responses to stuff like domestic violence where you need a social worker as the primary response and an armed person as a secondary security.
You'd construct your force around those principles. Remember, most cops never fire their weapon.
> I'm talking about a hypothetical. We have a list of problems such as theft, drunk driving, speeding, people in mental health crisis, domestic violence, crowd control, etc. In the hypothetical situation where we have all of these problems, but we don't have the police and never had, do you honestly think we'd assign all of these duties to one position?
Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who think that those problems should be beaten into submission by the state.
Studies, surveys, anything at all to back up your claim. Sounds like there isn't (use of absolutes in your statement was probably the problem).
"Non-life threatening situations that have absolutely no need for someone with a gun to respond."
Depends on one's perspective and a bunch of other factors. You might be surprised about how many people carry guns in various professions (medical workers, mental health worker, various first responders, the general public, etc). The vast majority of people never have to fire their weapon. Most never even have to use their weapon. It's utility isn't solely based on being fired.
"In the hypothetical situation where we have all of these problems, but we don't have the police and never had, do you honestly think we'd assign all of these duties to one position?"
Yes, mostly due to staffing issues like response time and cost, which is something you didn't really addresses in your answer. You also mention things like domestic violence, which is actually one of the most high risk calls you can get.
You talk about armed personnel being more expensive. That's not exactly true. People become expensive based on the level of training they need/have. A gun is a part of that, but so are many other things like mental health training. You could still use police as responders for mental health issues with some level of training while waiting for existing social workers or medical professionals to arrive. Even under the model of using another type of person police likely have to show up in case things turn violent anyways.
"The police are unqualified to handle most of the calls they are called out to."
How so? Or is this another case of using the wrong words (most or unqualified)? If it's a matter of training, it may be cheaper to provide police with additional training rather than hire additional forces an incur all that overhead of benefits etc. The three things you mentioned were quality of life, violent situations, and mental health issues. You seem to accept that violent situations require police response, so would be qualified for that. Although there are numerous situations in the other two categories that could quickly turn violent an would likely require police presence even if they are not the sole responders. It sounds like the quality of life stuff are generally easy tasks that police are qualified to handle (you even mention a police report for a stolen bike). The mental health situations depend on the level of training. Relatively few departments have adequate mental health training. I think this could be handled with training on how to approach those situations and talk people down while the social worker or mental health professional arrives.
> Studies, surveys, anything at all to back up your claim. Sounds like there isn't (use of absolutes in your statement was probably the problem).
Most people are generally capable of reading that as an opinion absolute statement.
Like, if I said 'Casino Royale is the best James Bond movie of the Daniel Craig era' that's an absolute statement but the reader can intuitively understand that its not going to be objectively provable and that it's clear its an opinion.
Now, if I said 'It's a fact that....' it'd be fair to ask for evidence. But I didn't.
> Depends on one's perspective and a bunch of other factors. You might be surprised about how many people carry guns in various professions (medical workers, mental health worker, various first responders, the general public, etc). The vast majority of people never have to fire their weapon. Most never even have to use their weapon. It's utility isn't solely based on being fired.
The norm in most of the world is that unarmed people respond to most issues. If you think mental health workers are carrying guns on the job, you are just extremely uninformed on this topic.
>You talk about armed personnel being more expensive. That's not exactly true. People become expensive based on the level of training they need/have.
So it is exactly true then isn't it? Not only do you have to pay the increased cost of training and certifying , you actually pay them more hourly too to carry that gun too.
>You could still use police as responders for mental health issues with some level of training while waiting for existing social workers or medical professionals to arrive.
Why would you though? Police have no real training in mental health, the week long classes they take are really not useful. Remember that actual mental health professionals generally need a minimum of six years of education. Why in the world would you want someone with no training and gun to be the first responder to someone having a mental health crisis?
> How so? Or is this another case of using the wrong words
No, they are unqualified
> If it's a matter of training, it may be cheaper to provide police with additional training rather than hire additional forces an incur all that overhead of benefits etc.
It isn't though. Police are by far more expensive than people who are more qualified, which in many ways is sad, but it is what is. The idea that you can train police into being mental health professionals just shows the lack of understanding about what it takes to be a mental health professional. When it comes to lower level calls, why would it be better to send a more expensive employee to handle a call a less expensive can handle? Is that what your work does? Send the most expensive labor possible to handle simple problems?
> ou seem to accept that violent situations require police response, so would be qualified for that.
It's the only thing they are somewhat qualified for, yes. They do need much better training and weed all the 'killology' cops.
> It sounds like the quality of life stuff are generally easy tasks that police are qualified to handle (you even mention a police report for a stolen bike).
Sorry, they are unqualified to handle most of their calls, but that is an example of one where they are overpaid to handle that call.
>The mental health situations depend on the level of training. Relatively few departments have adequate mental health training. I think this could be handled with training on how to approach those situations and talk people down while the social worker or mental health professional arrives.
Mental health is a professional degree. There is no amount of week long trainings that will make police officers good responders to mental health calls.
You of course have spent a lot of time talking about how armed police could do all these jobs, but you really haven't talked about why they should.
"Now, if I said 'It's a fact that....' it'd be fair to ask for evidence. But I didn't."
Then there's no reason to discuss this. Based on the rest of the comment, you are not listening to what I'm saying, nor are you offering anything to back up any opinions. It's a matter of temporal response time within spacial constraints. Specialization and limitations of labor means that you need to drastically increase headcount to maintain current surface levels, which is more expensive even if a significant subset is currently cheaper (non-union police are cheaper, but once these public sector unions unionize, costs go up significantly). Then you still have questions about efficacy of the replacements (mental health pros don't have a great track record without patient history in these situations) and the fact that you still need to provide training to the existing force due to their exposure to these events either spontaneously or through misclassification. It also sounds like you have some odd and unexplained bias against armed people (in many states, the people you're adding can be and currently are armed even if it's not a part of their job).
Simply put, demands for evidence where none is required derail conversations. By trying to re-orient the conversation toward a debate, you are stifling any kind of contemplative progress. Practically, debates of this style are not dialectical and do not pursue synthesis or truth per se. Look around HN at any hour of any day to see people continually conflate the two. Folks who employ this and related tactics do little more than stroke their superiority complex with logical gotchas.
> Based on the rest of the comment, you are not listening to what I'm saying, nor are you offering anything to back up any opinions.
I'm listening to what you're saying, it's just incorrect.
> Specialization and limitations of labor means that you need to drastically increase headcount to maintain current surface levels, which is more expensive even if a significant subset is currently cheaper (non-union police are cheaper, but once these public sector unions unionize, costs go up significantly).
Why do we do any specialization in the labor force then? What's the point? After all, specialization only increases labor costs.
Or, perhaps specialized labor is more efficient, which is why it exists. An LEO is by far the most expensive person you could have respond to a situation and they aren't particularly effective at most of the situations they are called to.
You could replace huge chunks of your inefficient armed staff and increase the head count while not increasing costs. For Portland, our unarmed PS3 position is a little more than 1/2 the cost of an entry level armed LEO. That means we can have almost two of them for every one cop. We could have more people out on the street. More people helping out, having eyes in the community and generally being useful. As an added bonus, non-armed staff are more useful to the community because a huge chunk of the community is terrified of police and wont call them or communicate with them making them effectively useless in certain neighborhoods.
> Then you still have questions about efficacy of the replacements (mental health pros don't have a great track record without patient history in these situations)
Yikes, you want to talk about track records
"People with Untreated Mental Illness 16 Times More Likely to Be Killed By Law Enforcement"
Mental health professionals are far far far far far more qualified to safely help someone who is experiencing a crisis.
> and the fact that you still need to provide training to the existing force due to their exposure to these events either spontaneously or through misclassification.
The mild amount of training they get is fine. If they encounter someone in mental health crisis, they should disengage immediately and call for someone who is trained to handle that situation.
> It also sounds like you have some odd and unexplained bias against armed people (in many states, the people you're adding can be and currently are armed even if it's not a part of their job).
Guns make almost every single situation worse. I'm not sure my 'bias' is odd. Most of developed world recognizes that guns are terrible and that people walking around with them is a pretty dumb idea. The USA just has a fetish for making boom boom with them so we live with our school shootings, mass shootings, and frequent accidental deaths.
I'm not aware of any governmental agency that lets their staff bring guns to work when it isn't part of their job. Would you care to provide a source? Even the gutter backwater of Texas doesn't allow them.
>If police as a concept didn't exist already, no one would create it.
Eh? Community policing has been an universal in every culture. Not in the way conventional "modern"/Western police forces are, which was invented in Paris, but city and village militias took turns standing guard and arrest/whack away violators, drunkards, thieves, etc.
So if there's no police, expect communities to make their own.
Hell, don't crime gangs like the Mafia have their own professional policing forces? To catch members who are too violent, or dissuade informing the state/police?
Look at the LA times report on the the Torrence police department. A substantial number of officers were texting klan like message and bragging about racially profiling and lying about it.
Note the articles refer back to earlier texting scandals in places like SF where recently cops were caught on camera just sitting around watching people rob a dispensary.
It’s obvious some cops do not serve and protect, and there are too few good cops holding their own accountable.
We need cops but the current state of the force is untenable and unprofessional
> It’s obvious some cops do not serve and protect,
Completely agree
> and there are too few good cops holding their own accountable
Maybe true in SF and other progressive cities, but I’m doubtful this is the norm across all police departments.
The problem is people are treating all cops the same. In Oakland there might be a good precinct, and a bad one, if you treat the good like the bad, all you will be left with is the bad.
Still if it is bad enough might make sense to just turn it all over.
> Maybe true in SF and other progressive cities, but I’m doubtful this is the norm across all police departments.
Hypothesizing too few good cops in progressive cities, and implying (happily assuming) there are plenty of good cops in conservative areas to keep checks and balances? Color me unconvinced.
> The problem is people are treating all cops the same.
The phrase "a bad apple spoils the barrel" absolutely applies in fraternistic, spartan settings of indoctrination such as "the brotherhood". Yes cops literally call it that; the dominant culture has most people in the course of their duties acting tough by cosplaying military with looser rules of engagement, and other impressionable folks fall into a similar pattern to be accepted by a community that they hold in respect (their brothers, not the citizenry). If you are relatively free-thinking, you are filtered out at the application level. If you somehow slip through, you have no power to make real change. We know this from countless examples of those who left the force after seeing obscene behavior. Chris Dorner's case is the most prominent recent example I can think of right now.
> Look at the LA times report on the the Torrence police department. A substantial number of officers were texting klan like message and bragging about racially profiling and lying about it.
LA also has a serious problem with cop gangs[1] that have murdered people.
dude the cops on power trips don't need to be fired, they need to be prosecuted.
It is insane we give people both deadly weapons and wide judgement for when to use them and then the worst that occurs in most cases of misuse is firing.
Aside from the other responses you have received, I want to say:
Exceptions do not disprove the rule. We can look to one or a handful of officers who put on their big kid pants and fulfilled the nominal job description that they consensually agreed to (despite not being required to do so, by law). Statistically speaking, they are completely insignificant when you want to draw conclusions such as those you imply are proven by the counterexample you've provided.
"Police officers you know" are probably nice to you, and recount stories from their perspective. Sure some may actually be decent, but again, that's not exactly a safe bet considering the evidence we have. Even with the 5th amendment, we can include the evidence that cops regularly hide evidence which would otherwise make them look bad as a factor in comprehending the reality of the situation.
Even the nice ones among the officers you know are regularly silent about numerous abuses, large and small. The fact that no one speaks up against the ne'er-do-wells means they are complicit. Complicity is generally not any more morally good than performing the action yourself, especially when you are in a position to prevent it from happening.
for every story of heroics there are 10^n times as many of bad experiences ranging from petty issues to brutality. police do not only not serve and protect, they frequently actively harm the communities they patrol
anecdotal counter-evidence will not be taken as a valid argument, either - just because you know cops that haven't either harmed you or claim to not have harmed anyone unjustly doesn't make policing as a whole less morally reprehensible
Sure, people are angry and primed to riot at a moments notice. All it takes is a short video uploaded to the Internet to set one off now. They have lost patience because they have lost trust. How did this happen? It wasn't overnight.
I am trying to find the source, but I remember reading about how increased police presence actually decreases police brutality because they keep the others cops in check.
Yeah I think this is definitely part of the answer.
Though I think there is some guilt on the other side when they’ve treated police departments as if they’re all the same. When every use of force against even the most vile of criminals, in legitimate life or death situations, is somehow proof of their racist tendencies if the perp was a PoC.
> every use of force against even the most vile of criminals, in legitimate life or death situations, is somehow proof of their racist tendencies if the perp was a PoC.
Examples? Isn’t it enough that I feel like it is true?
Think about it; if others read my statement and feel it is true they will think it is true. Cops who read it will think it is true as well.
The facts might be it is not true, but if you believe the story being told... well it doesn’t matter does it.
Which story is being believed, that the cops are evil racists, or that they are good guys with some bad apples?
What story is being believed, that blacks are victims who need white mans help? Or that they are glorious victors over even oppression, so much so that the most loved president of the last 20 years is a black man?
The facts don’t matter, because we only use them to promote the story we already agree with it?
> Also they don’t risk certain things because they might have to use force and they’re worried they’ll be charged with a crime f or doing so, (especially if people riot enough and the DA needs to satisfy them).
It's simple: don't commit crime.
> How do we both protest police brutality when it rears its head, while still treating officers like they’re on the side of the good guys (like most, but not all, are).
Get rid of the bad apples. Simple as that. No more unions and charges for those who decided to cover up instead of reporting malpractice. And liability insurance not paid by the taxpayers.
The main item in certain states is not prosecuting crime. We recently had a smash and grab robbery that made news here in SoCal. The suspects were quickly apprehended, but it turns out they were released on bail almost immediately afterwards. Due to the non-prosecution of criminal acts, these people will probably never do any jail time. People are definitely cognizant of this at this point, and it's eroding peoples trust of the government.
Releasing on bail isn't the same as non-prosecution. Tons of people who are released on bail are later convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.
> The suspects were quickly apprehended, but it turns out they were released on bail almost immediately afterwards.
Bail is given when someone hasn't had a court determine their guilt yet. Getting rid of bail means that innocent people will sit in jail until their trials.
Seems reasonable to have bail for a smash-and-grab rather than jail. I'd vote against someone proposing otherwise, as do most people I know, so I'm guessing this is just a reflection of the general democratic will of the citizenry here.
Interesting because I’m all for bail reform and alternative punishment for petty crime, but a smash-and-grab seems awfully brazen. Bail seems appropriate for someone stealing an unattended bike, less so for other crimes.
Related to OPs point, Proposition 47 in California reclassified certain thefts under $950 to a misdemeanor instead of a felony. There is evidence that this has resulted in increases in such crimes.
I don’t believe this argument. The dollar amount was $400 previously. Most shoplifting was already under $400 and I’m being asked to believe, from unreliable sources, that changing it to $950 alone changed things?
Misdemeanors still carry punishment and possible jail time.
People with a burning desire to believe that anything that isn't overly punitive is a sign of weakness and moral decay. The sociopaths aren't the ones looking at ridiculous punishments for minor offenses and trying to get them reduced. They're the ones who are held back from committing obvious crimes by criminal penalties, instead of just not being an asshole.
A felony for $950 in stolen goods? You're not gonna get that conviction without a court, which means that everyone involved in that chain, from the judge, to the lawyers, to the compensation of the jury, to the bailiff, to the entire police apparatus involved in apprehending and charging them, and so on, is gonna need to be compensated for handling the issue. And that's before any time is served.
If you aren't going to try to root out the true cause of why people are stealing, you might as well just throw a ton of money in a giant pit and have a cookout.
> I read most of the article, in which the author implies that defunding the police increases crime, and blames the people in charge of Oakland with this crime.
Yet I recalled hearing that police budgets in Oakland were steady to up this year, despite the protests. What did I miss?
You missed the part about people linking together statistics, that are not necessarily related in any meaningful way, into a BS narrative or story. This is commonplace on various Substacks that people write. Also, I especially tend to find this from people with formal economics backgrounds and training.
Many urban police departments are seeing a lot of officers quitting, and having problems filling vacancies. They are down hundreds of positions, and this has the effect of reducing police presence for deterrence, and also lower arrest rates so that more criminals are out on the streets.
There were only 2 city council-members who voted against defunding.
Whether or not actual budgets get reduced, urban cops got the message that they are not appreciated, or worse. The good ones can easily get jobs somewhere less stressful and with higher job satisfaction.
His main point is that defunding the police without an alternative that has been proven to reduce crime does the opposite. It increases crime over time. What he outlines is true. I hear a lot about cutting the police but little to nothing about what will replace it as a proven way to reduce crime.
Also, all budgets need to increase just to keep up with inflation. So just because a budget is increased or it stays the same does not imply that it has not been cut. An increase of $39 mil. can only be properly evaluated if we know the size of the original budget and inflation.
Maybe that's their point, but it's not convincing if it's using made-up information, which is my point.
The inflation argument is not very convincing to me either. Both of those measures (inflation, budget) are objective facts that are absent from the article. Also "police budgets not quite keeping up with inflation is causing chaos in my neighborhood" is not very convincing.
His main point is a straw man, since none of the "defunding" initiatives are as banal as simply taking money away from the entire picture. Defunding has always been about reallocating the money to help fix the root causes of criminal behavior in ways that don't involve a bunch of middle aged men in uniforms pretending to be the heroes of their own action movies.
The part where police forces across the country in the wake of Defund, did a work-stoppage strike (illegal) and basically said, "swim in your sht". The data will bear this out.
> They claim that, by taking money from police and putting it toward social programs, they can eliminate the need for heavy-handed policing in the first place. But the social programs are an afterthought.
This feels like a strawman. I don't think it's surprising that there's a rise in crime when police are defunded, especially when those social programs aren't enacted. I think most reasonable progressives who support defunding the police also recognize the whole point is to shift investment away from punishment (police) into aid (social programs) to deter crime. It takes years for that to happen, and really needs to happen on a societal level to provide opportunities that otherwise 'career criminals' do not have which leads them down that path.
i think it's worth pointing out giving the still semi-inflammatory nature of the headline, no serious advocate of defunding the police has ever suggested that simply doing that is the goal. the idea is to shift funding from cops walking around with guns killing people to things that actually prevent crime from happening, and as the piece points out, even in the few places that have actually reduced funding to police, that has not occurred in any significant way.
it's a resource allocation argument, not an 'everything would be better if police instantly winked out of existence' argument.
'Defund' is far more inflammatory than alternative phrasing.
RE-form the Police -- this is a movement I can more readily support and I hope is self descriptive and accurate. Police departments have become alienated from communities because they are no longer about the mission to protect and serve the common people and the commons; they have instead become yet another type of organization using violence for control. The videogame Crackdown got that right many years ago.
As horrid as the Japanese justice system is about the presumption of guilt; their practice of neighborhood officers and community involvement seem like positive traits that should be copied in the USA and elsewhere as one facet of improving the positive interaction of peace officers and the community.
> RE-form the Police -- this is a movement I can more readily support and I hope is self descriptive and accurate.
What this is missing here from "defund the police" is that part of the point of that slogan is to take responsibility (and, yes, funding) for some duties away from police entirely and give them to new organizations that have more limited scope and much more limited use of force.
A prime example here is parking enforcement, which is often performed by the police despite having no particular need for the legal monopoly on violence that comes with police officers.
... with a sadly very stupid title. One that gets an instant angry reaction from "the other side" instead of a discussion. Even Obama says that much: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-defund-the-police-slogan/ . You even have to write this comment to explain "Actually, the idea behind those 3 words are..."
If I were in charge of naming the idea, I'd suggest something like "Get Rid of Thug Cops!". Focus on how cops are supposed to be part of society instead of prison guards. Focus on the fact that e.g. Western European police get multiple years of education.
Even the UK has a problem, since the lying thieving government has been squeezing budgets for the last decade, the police have been underfunded there and it's harder to do the "be a part of society" part of policing.
But it's incredible how a protest slogan has been morphed by "the other side" into "this is actually happening, and look at all the results", when, as many have said, no actual defunding is happening.
Defunding the police, along with every other policy, applies well in some areas and poorly in others. When I was a kid, our town decided to defund the police, cutting the force from 3 to 1 officers IIRC. It made sense because there was no crime, and the townspeople didn't want to waste the money on police. All useful politics are local.
The people who support defunding the police have never felt genuine fear from being victimized by crime.
It's only after the crime, when you're thinking about how someone else had the hubris to threaten your life, thinking about how you could have died, or worse, if your loved ones had been with you, that they could have died, that you begin to wade yourself into a deep and abiding anger.
I used to feel sympathy for criminals. Especially seeing how many of them have led rough lives, having been raised by bad parents, in horrible environments, having been led by others to delinquency as youth, then into crime as adults.
However, once you have been victimized, this sympathy vanishes. It does not matter how bad you've had it -- violence is never justified. Any person who resorts to violence instantly loses all justification.
It is only the rich who can afford to stroke their moral ego in such an egregious manner. It is the poor and the middle class who pay with their lives for this sanctimony.
I dunno man, both me and my mom have been mugged before and the police didn't help. Same with when my car was broken into and someone tried to break my front door lock.
People make this argument all the time but I fail to see how the police have helped any time I've experienced any actual crime, not to mention so many others. That's not even getting into the politics of who can call the police and how the police react differently to situations, either.
I don't see how defunding the police provides any kind of solution to the problems you mention. I know there's a strawman argument here, do you think that you'll get better treatment from local gangs/militias/warlords, in a society without police?
'Police Abolitionism' can't be taken seriously as an ideology. I'm not white, and I've been the victim of crime multiple times, unfortunately. I don't think the police are perfect, or a perfect institution. They did their job, and helped me in these cases. Whenever I hear people talk about being afraid to call the police I switch off immediately. Total bunk.
You don’t believe there are people afraid to call the police? You’re not familiar of any stories of people who requested police assistance only to end up a victim?
Yeah, I personally know people who were mugged at gunpoint and the police did nothing. The assailant is on social media and the victims provided the police with their account names. Nothing was done.
I've been a victim of both violent crime and property theft. Police did nothing. It was pulling teeth just to get them to write up reports so that I could file insurance claims.
Police don't prevent crime. Hell, they barely even respond to crime.
And cops in our city have criminally generous pensions -- when you count the pension, lots of these high school grads making 100K+/yr. To say nothing of the absurd capital expenditures. So, I'm super okay with shifting resources from PDs to basically any other program. Value per dollar spent is just super low. Probably lower than literally every other item on the budget sheet.
Doesn't have to be a political thing. Hell, prior to 2019, right-leaning libertarians were the only ones who I could find who agreed with me on this. PDs are just a shit use of tax dollars until we figure out how to bust up the unions and reign in the excessive toy purchases.
With most crime you rarely need someone to show up who is trained to use guns and kill people because any violent threat is long gone.
If I find my truck has been broken into and stuff is stolen, all those abilities are deeply useless to me. I need someone who is good with taking down details and filling out forms and following up and ideally investigating. Up until that leads to the act of actually arresting someone there's very little need to have people who are trained in the violent use of force involved at all.
And that's before you start asking questions about how our current police force is trained to use violent force and if they could do all that differently or not.
> If I find my truck has been broken into and stuff is stolen, all those abilities are deeply useless to me. I need someone who is good with taking down details and filling out forms and following up and ideally investigating.
Which is not at all what our hiring standards at police departments select for.
> Police don't prevent crime. Hell, they barely even respond to crime.
Awarding a well-marked group with some measure of public accountability the right to use violent countermeasures for the protection of life and property in a geographic area facilitates commercial trade and societal advancement.
However, the “garbage-in, garbage-out” phenomenon applies to policing, which makes it less of a silver bullet. A certain amount of criticism lobbed at police forces in America can be reduced to hysteria over police being unable to turn lead into gold.
I mean, accountability is severely lacking nearly across the board because the incentives are so messed up. (E.g. internal reviews are just the police governing themselves, and external reviews would be a prosecutor prosecuting the police, but that’s a professional relationship the prosecutor doesn’t want to mess up.)
But I think you’re also saying that police can’t change a local community, if it’s already filled with crime. If that’s the case and they don’t have a big impact… what’s the point?
I’d also say it works the other way around, where garbage input to the police force will result in garbage policing. And since education and training isn’t that rigorous, it’s hard to correct that.
Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily. Perhaps you could argue whether or not the “hysteria” is justified given the number of times it happens. But the biggest outcries are normally against things you see where police are pretty obviously in the wrong. (Or at the very least, where police were incredibly brutal. Which in my opinion is nearly always wrong.)
> But I think you’re also saying that police can’t change a local community, if it’s already filled with crime. If that’s the case and they don’t have a big impact… what’s the point?
The point is to preempt a power vacuum threatening social order, e.g. imagine if Japan didn’t have a police force.
> Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily.
I don’t disagree, nor did I claim to. However, I’d be curious to know whether you’d prefer all police be replaced by robots and drones which perfectly upheld the law. For many, that’s an even scarier thought than imperfect, human policing.
- More intensive training and education with less focus on violence.
- Better laws to increase accountability and to reduce conflicts of interest.
- Police or social worker units which don’t need to carry guns. Basically separate dangerous crime from vice or disturbances in terms of enforcement. I fully agree the FBI should have resources to hunt down serial killers. I don’t think we need a similar level of force (guns) for dealing with a drug addict on the street, or a drunk driver.
And other things would be good or better I’m sure! My feeling now is that police are entrenched in their own system of power enough that many types of good changes are unlikely to happen. Why would police want to increase their risk by adding more oversight, for example?
> The people who support defunding the police have never felt genuine fear from being victimized by crime.
A lot of them felt more than once genuine fear from being victimized by crime committed by the police. Which, of course, is almost never reported as a crime by whoever survives it.
I used to believe as you do. Then I was a little down on my luck and found myself living in a poor, high-crime neighborhood. It was a shocking for me. There were cops everywhere, but they somehow never managed to help a situation.
I called the police multiple times because of violence in the area -- including for a discharged firearm in the apartment upstairs. Sometimes they showed up, sometimes they didn't. And when they did, they invariably contrived to make things worse.
I could have walked to the precinct station in less time than the police typically responded to calls. They were routinely aggressive and bullying to victims. They were dismissive of eye-witness testimony and anyone who volunteered assistance. They made open threats to anybody who questioned them or asserted their rights -- to record an interaction, retrieve their personal effects, or even help calm a neighbor in distress.
The police in that community drove around in custom cars and body armor, armed to the teeth. They hassled hard-working men, women, and even children as they went about their daily business, humiliating them in front of their neighbors for sport. They were -- almost to a man -- officious, patronizing cowards.
I moved to that neighborhood believing that police dedicated their lives to serve and protect their communities. I have several police officers in my family and, prior to my time south of the tracks, had always believed their side of the story. Criminals bad. Cops heroes.
But I left that neighborhood afraid of the cops. Far more afraid than of any of the many criminals in that community. I left with the understanding that most American police are little more than a terrifyingly well-armed gang. They have a fundamentally oppositional stance to the communities they are supposed to serve. And they are almost completely unaccountable for their actions and inaction.
So no, it's not the luxury of the rich to criticize the cops or call for a reallocation of police funds from guns to training and crime prevention. The poor have been doing it for ages. We were just ignoring them.
The knee-jerk reaction of "defund the police" to the power abuses of police officers struck me as deeply weird from the beginning.
It made me wonder whether the right NOR the left had any clue left as what the role of a police force in a democracy was actually supposed to be — or whether that battle cry _really_ originated from the same forces trying to split the US society: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/14/russia-us-po...
Like, there would have been lots of great claims: "Train police", "Restructure Police", "Rebuild Police"... but what's a single good argument to "Defund Police" other than wanting to go back to anarchy?
> there would have been lots of great claims: "Train police", "Restructure Police", "Rebuild Police"... but what's a single good argument do Defund Police other than going back to anarchy?
I believe it's a reaction to police forces now having military gear when it should be totally unnecessary. In many places police officers don't even need guns.
Maybe spending less money in militaria and more in training would be a consequence of not having to fund military equipment, supplies, and maintenance. It'd, at least, limit the violent options police has when they are going to engage a suspect.
Oftentimes they are given this military gear for pretty much free. When is the last time you've even seen SWAT deployed that made you think "I wish they didn't deploy SWAT?"
Federal programs transfer this equipment to police force for free other than like shipping and ongoing maintenance(1). Easy for ARs since they already have the gun lube. Harder for the Armored Personel Carrier so that is usually found parked in front of HQ just for show like an old WWII tank. SWATTING is extremely rare and unlikely to ever happen to you or anyone you personally know. Meanwhile there's been plenty of cases that have demonstrated the need for police to have access to weaponry, like the north hollywood shootout(2).
The reality of ongoing maintenance is that they just don't maintain the APC and leave it parked out front. If it doesn't work in 30 years they don't care, it's a playpiece for kids to climb over worst case like the Sherman WWII tanks given to U.S. cities under a similar program in the 1950s. For the other ongoing maintenance, for something like an M16 it's not going to require very much costly specialized things from the armory. It's going to use the same gun lube, the ammunition used is economical, it's literally the toyota corolla of spare parts in terms of a gun given how many manufacturers exist producing AR15 parts at scale and therefore at affordable prices. Stuff like a military flashlight or a rifle sight or ballistic vest doesn't really need ongoing maintenance either.
> If someone is truly valuable they tail them and conduct a fishing stop and arrest them. SWAT is all for show these days.
While I agree that there is a trend in this direction, an import exception where SWAT is used that isn’t just for show (and where a tail + fishing stop as you describe would not work) is high-threat hostage situations, which do occur.
You must not be following what SWAT is actually used for. This was from just two months ago in my city (1). You couldn't use traditional police for a hostage situation like this; it reads like a scene in a Tom Clancy novel but this happens in real life too.
"Unfortunately, as a reaction to our budget cuts, the department has decided today to drop all unneccessary training, public relations, proactive policing and vehicle maintenance. We hope there won't be more cuts in the future so we can afford maintaining the urban tanks and full battle gear our officers so direly need in these dangerous times."
Duh. Who could possibly have foreseen that defunding would not change their attitude?
It's almost like a job where you get to work in military cosplay and just intimidate and sometimes kill people you don't like without facing any consequences would attract people suitable for being a police officer. When you offer sociopath-candy, you attract sociopaths.
Also to police forces closing ranks around their own misbehaving officers, such that it's not possible to effect change within the system short of tearing down the whole system and replacing it with something else.
I think that 2020s protests might've gone very differently if, after the previous 18 complaints against Chauvin for racially-motivated excessive use of force, his department had said "Yes, this is a problem. He is no longer with the force" rather than continuing to employ him until somebody died. Most police officers I know have been decent people, with some bad apples. But unfortunately the bad apples are protected and ruin the trust in the police force for everyone.
Since I had kids in school, I talked with people who expressed "defund the police" at the time. My observation is that it was a hasty reaction to things that people were acutely observing, such as the school police "resource" exclusively engaging with black students, sometimes violently, in one case lethally.
And in fact, they had no clue what a police force or a democracy were supposed to look like.
"Train police", "Restructure Police", have been tried, and that has just inflated police budgets.
That last one "Rebuild police" has not been tried. Many PDs need that. From the ground up. One applicant at a time. Carefully screened and lavishly trained.
I think it’s a justified emotional reaction to injustice. A significant amount of the public exposure police have is extremely negative. Is it clear to anyone barely following along that police are providing value to society?
Here’s a simple example. Portland, OR has had extremely high gun violence this year, like many cities. The public perception is that the police are doing a very poor job handling that, either with bringing people to justice or preventing crime. Now, just a month ago, there was a manhunt near where I live. It seemed like half the force showed up for it, and the reason was that someone allegedly shot at police. It is very difficult to take this in a positive light when it seems the police are only turning up in force when they are threatened, rather than when the public feels unsafe.
I’m not trying to make a claim about what they should or shouldn’t be doing really, I’m just pointing out the severe PR problem the police have created for themselves. And it seems like they continue digging themselves into a hole.
I also think this has less to do with individuals, but it’s clear that the system of policing in place just isn’t working for the community. I don’t think the community will or even has to be experts on what the system should look like. We’re just people who want to feel safe in our city!
But everything about policing seems set up to primarily protect the police (qualified immunity, asset seizure, police unions, lack of accountability from top to bottom, extreme focus on violence as a solution), rather than the public. That’s very concerning.
Anyways, my point is that when average people see a system that isn’t working for them, and don’t really get the “good” that the system may also be doing, of course the reaction is going to be very negative. It just makes sense. And since if you have a very negative view of a system, why would you want to deal with it at all?
And there aren’t clear solutions to the problem! I’d say getting rid of qualified immunity and asset seizure (to an extent) is a start, but that probably requires constitutional changes. And that’s unlikely to get anywhere anytime soon. And police unions seem to prevent local changes as well. If the police aren’t willing to reform themselves despite the very obvious need, it’s no wonder the public is not reacting in a “constructive” way.
I thought violence is up almost everywhere in the US compared to previous years. It would be interesting to see whether this increase correlates with police funding or not. My bet would be no.
Police funding is also not significantly reduced basically anywhere in the US afaict - in fact, it increased in Oakland, though not by as much as police chiefs had hoped and as a slightly smaller percentage of the overall city budget due to increases elsewhere.
https://oaklandside.org/2021/06/25/oakland-2021-2023-budget-...
Separately, the article links to this source[0] when talking about how progressives are "ruining cities", arguing that progressives have successfully pushed for decreases police budgets despite violent crime increases. But the article linked shows increases in police budgets by percentage of the overall budget. There are real instances of yoy "cuts" but they seem to occur with disproportionately larger cuts elsewhere across the budget, which does not support the hypothesis that progressives are defending the police; it shows that when cutting budgets we still prioritize policing.
[0] https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-the-crime-wave-hits-yo...
Obviously crime is Oakland is too high, what happened to the author shouldn't happen anywhere. These experienced incidents are an important barometer on whether or not what we measure statistically is working to describe reality. We need good metrics prescribe the cure. However, it doesn't follow to me that the issue was caused by lower police budgets looking at how police budgets changed, and I am not convinced that there a progressive voting block to blame yet.. Maybe the morale issue is related, but the budget seems like a red herring.
Exactly this, I've seen so much made of local budgets giving less to PD's in percentage terms, which is disingenuous in the era of increased municipal spending during COVID.
> Try to rob me or hurt my family - be carried away in a body bag.
If the criminal expects you to be armed, they'll just shoot first, before you even have the chance to reach your weapons. Remember they have the surprise on their side. This expectation should by itself increase violent crime and turn violent crimes that wouldn't be.
That's what conceal weapons permits are for. Criminals won't know and every attempt to do stupid thing might mean the end of them.
If wanabe robbers expect citizens to be armed and legally able to protect themselves and their loved ones - they will think twice if it worth dying for $100.
They don't have to know. They just assume and kill everyone before they have a chance to defend themselves. From their point of view, it's simple and neat. Remember it's always them surprising their victims, not the other way around.
Dunno, when I was growing up, around 01990, there was a bank robbery in my town where one of the bank customers shot the robbers dead. Bank robbery is already a pretty bad career choice but it gets worse in a hurry when mass-murdering the customers is a prerequisite.
My point being that, if they suspect you have weapons, their lives are worth more to them than yours and your family's and they'll not think twice before making that choice before you make yours.
If they enter your house when your family is in, they are prepared for it. You are not.
Remember, it's a violent criminal we are talking about. Were it not a violent criminal, they'd stalk your house and wait for it to be empty. And still it'd be wise for them to expect whoever they find inside to be armed.
If they expect people to be armed, it's much simpler to just kill them before they can mount a reaction. From the point of view of a criminal who already committed crimes sufficient for life imprisonment, that's a very easy choice.
> armed citizen has much higher chance to survive the attack.
That’s objectively wrong and goes against every single study on the subject.
The best overall strategy for survival is to be cooperative and not surprise the attacker. Armed victims have a lower chance of survival because, again, they are not expecting the attack. If the victim starts a reaction, they usually get shot.
Please understand that the robberies and crimes are flourishing in the cities where citizens are not allowed to protect themselves and local judicial system coddling criminals.
And criminals ARE WELL AWARE of that.
When every single citizen CAN be carrying a gun - the criminal WILL think twice before engaging in stupidity.
If not the victim, then the random bystander or nearby family member can make a colander out of criminal engaging in active crime.
When possibility of this is present and political and legal system is supportive to keep our streets clean - the crime will cease or be reduced to minimal levels.
This is one of many articles which are trying to suggest that we cut police budgets and then crime went up, but the first half of that never actually happened. Oakland's police budget is the highest it's ever been and was not cut in 2020. The article it links to as a source for police budgets being cut has the headline "Cities Say They Want to Defund the Police. Their Budgets Say Otherwise.", and shows that police budgets as a percentage of major city budgets slightly _increased_.
The police departments can get 100 billion a year and it won't matter when the DA just lets criminals walk after they are arrested. I think that is one of the main factors in the rise of crime and violence. The Waukesha tragedy is a good example of this.
Sorry, but I haven't seen any evidence for a "crime wave" in 2020-2021. FBI stats show a slight uptick in violent crimes. These rates haven't been seen since... gasp ... 2017.
If police-civilian interactions really decreased 80% (as quoted in the article), and in exchange violent crime only raised 5.6% [0], personally that shows even dramatic reductions in police presence don't lead to complete "anarchy".
I fear, given the increasing discussion around this crime """wave""", that some disastrous "tough on crime" policies are going to be (re)introduced in the coming years.
That data doesn't show 2021. It only goes up to 2020.
You don't have to try very hard to find data that supports a massive uptick in violent crime in 2021. Dozens of cities have reported all-time-high murder rates. Even cities like Philedelphia, which was already pretty high to begin with.
I don't think it is due to defunding the police, however. As has been pointed out, murder rates are up in large cities, and small towns, both Red and Blue.
There is a simple explanation: Nobody is getting incarcerated, because of COVID requirements in jails.
In my hometown, which is not a major metro area, a friend of mine (who lives inside city limits) even had a cow stolen. When discussing this with the police officer, the officer's remark was "crime is up over a thousand percent" because "they can't incarcerate anyone" because of covid. They would book people, but the jails are at max capacity, so they don't even do time. They get "booked and released".
Also, COVID as an ongoing thing isn't great for anybody's mental health in general. I suspect there's some similarity to how crime rates go up during heat waves.
You are correct. Murders in most cities matched or exceeded their previous records from the 80s or 90s. But the population in most of those cities is almost double.
The population of Portland has increased by 92% since 1987, but the murders just passed the 1987 level.
All that said, murder *rates* across the U.S. have jumped significantly vs 2019. Though they're not yet to their highs from the early 90s.
This should probably be flagged, but I've thought about creating an HN clone where people could put some kind of code in their profile to validate their identity, to have these kinds of conversations with the same handle they use here, while keeping HN clean and tech friendly.
Bari doesn’t sound to me a genuine person. I have seen her first podcast with Joe Rogan where she sounded like a layperson with typical 21yr old understanding of sociology-political affair. Then she suddenly became pro free speech and anti establishment media. This is a person who has worked for NYT for gods sake.
> I have seen the unraveling over the past year in my own neighborhood. In October, about three blocks from my house, a neighbor was shot and killed in a home invasion. About a mile south in the same month, a 15-year-old girl was shot to death in an act of road rage. And just a few weeks ago, a little more than a half-mile west of me, another teenager was fatally shot.
What exactly would police have done in any of these situations to prevent them from happening?
> They claim that, by taking money from police and putting it toward social programs, they can eliminate the need for heavy-handed policing in the first place. But the social programs are an afterthought. What matters most to these activists is tearing down the cops, not building up the tattered neighborhoods those cops are charged with protecting.
Progressives in the US want an increased federal minimum wage and guaranteed healthcare for everyone. Studies seemed to show mixed results on whether or not this will result in a decrease in overall crime, but now seems like the time to try.
> What exactly would police have done in any of these situations to prevent them from happening?
They would have arrested and imprisoned the perpetrators, who are more than likely to have long criminal histories, after their first offence. People don't often go from zero to armed home invasion.
> Progressives in the US want...
I'm not sure any of this will work if there's insufficient order as to prevent smash-and-grab robberies and shootings from being a daily occurence. I don't suppose these people are stealing to eat or pay for healthcare. Dollars are best spent incarcerating violent people a la Japan, rather than paying them and hoping they behave themselves. Living in a peaceful society is a right afforded only to those who remain nonviolent.
I don't know why that is but it is clearly not because they are tolerant of criminal behavior. If the US is more tolerant of criminal behavior wouldn't they have a lower incarceration rate than Japan? If a higher incarceration rate lead to less crime wouldn't the US have less crime than Japan? Clearly our high incarceration rate hasn't fixed criminal behavior. Instead we should look at Japan and other countries with low crime rates to see what they do.
Just days ago, Jacqueline Avant, the 81 year old wife of music industry legend Clarence Avant, was murdered in the wee hours of the morning in her Beverly Hills home during a home invasion [1].
Police were able to catch the murderer when he (literally) shot himself in the foot shortly thereafter… during a second home invasion in the Hollywood Hills [2].
> What exactly would police have done in any of these situations to prevent them from happening?
What if threatening would-be criminals with prison wasn’t an effective deterrent anymore? Singapore employs corporal punishment [3] in addition to prison, and I’d be interested in reviewing any studies examining whether swift corporal punishment delivered early in life for minor offenses (e.g. bullying) could be shown to prevent future criminality.
Scotland and Portugal have had success in reducing crime rates by treating crime as a public health issue and focusing their efforts on prevention. If you're genuinely interested in how to build a less violent society, I'd suggest starting your research there.
I am unaware of any evidence that early, swift violence is an effective long- or short-term deterrent for crime.
> Defund advocates dismiss these arguments—not because they can refute them with evidence, but because they’re blinded by ideology.
I don't know how you are supposed to take a writer seriously when they write things like this.
> Even in the absence of a viable alternative, they demand that existing law enforcement structures be torn down.
And this actually just isn't true. The author has time to read academic papers on policing issues but he doesn't seem to have read any of the material that police abolitionists have written.
He also references Michael Shellenberger frequently, a man who has also written "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All" and "Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalist". I think Shellenberger had to put aside his 'liberal' credentials a long time ago.
> Today, with few exceptions, there is no more involuntary treatment for serious mental disease or drug addiction. But nor is there a humane alternative. There is only jail or the streets.
Maybe this has something to do with public funding for mental health being slashed almost everywhere and also linked to drug laws. So people who are on the streets and self-medicating because they couldn't get treatment can't be placed in the few available options because of their drug intake.
The entire article is a gloss over the issues without any real look at it.
San Fran is indeed a messed up city. So is Oakland. But I really don't have time for white people complaining about a situation that never affects them. He is complaining about his nanny having to move. Not him. His nanny. How does that compare to the police killing your friends and relatives for no reason?
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[ 0.58 ms ] story [ 418 ms ] thread'I recently finished reading “San Fransicko,” by Michael Shellenberger. I recommend it. The subtitle is provocative: “Why Progressives Ruin Cities.” But, as Shellenberger explains, he does not mean to imply that progressives always ruin the cities they govern. He’s just interested in the specific phenomenon of when progressives do ruin cities, and explaining why that happens.
And progressives—I count myself as one of them—do ruin cities. Or, at least, they put in place policies that cause profound harm to the people living in them.'
Well, I don't see the moderate democrat leadership denouncing the radical fringe, either.
Most US institutions are Marxist today, so stop lying about Democrats not being progressives (Marxists.)
The only 2 institutions that are not yet Marxist are local police and the US Supreme Court. Note how both are under relentless attack by Marxists.
What will happen in 2022 is that government at the Federal and state level will become Republican (ie. American) majority, but you're stuck with Marxists at the local level. So vote accordingly.
Note that half of cnn's anchors (2/4) are under investigation this week for fake news, so that should tell you how corrupt the left has made the MSM. They've retracted (or worse, not yet retracted) every major story they aired since early 2020. One of their investors just said, "Maybe we should go back to reporting instead of opinion." Because their ratings are down 80% since the Nov. 2020 election.
The word progessive can be translated as Marxist - shame on you.
And if you're hoping for "racial justice", I'm from the Detroit area. Blacks think liberal SJW's are dupes, and without stable families and educational success, there is nothing to be done. Racism is the least of their problems, as any honest black leader will tell you.
In the case of Detroit, it was not rebuilt after the 1969 riots - that's over 50 years ago. I expect the same of most of the cities the 2020 Marxist riots burned.
Those looters you see in security camera videos - that's all they know how to do, until they're back inside prison.
> they put in place policies that cause profound harm to the people living in them.
So stop doing it. As the Black leader Frederick Douglas said, "Leave us alone." He meant stop the do-good white liberal SJW policies that destroyed the Black family with welfare programs.
US Blacks used to have a higher marriage rate than whites, but now only 20% of Black women get married. That means almost all Black children grow up in a single-parent household, without a male authority to teach discipline and boundaries. Hence the looting.
This is especially important when a thread is fresh, because threads are so sensitive to initial conditions. If someone shows up with a low-information provocation like this one, that's extremely likely to leave a negative imprint. Please don't do that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
dang, I've noticed that you come out on the wrong side of just about every major issue. Do your homework - this is not Communist Russia, where HN wouldn't even be allowed to exist.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Regardless of whether defunding is good/bad for crime, this is the core justification for existing funding in this article and it is quite thin.
Edit: I am unclear on why this is getting downvoted. Almost nothing in that paragraph is adequately substantiated anywhere in the article. I am not married to any particular perspective on this topic, but remain unconvinced of the author's conclusion.
Intuitively it would make sense that locking up criminals would reduce crime (making them unable to commit more crime), that increasing the chance of a criminal getting locked up would reduce crime (via incentives), and just seeing more police officers around would reduce crime.
I would be really surprised if for the past 1000 years, civilization was tricked into believing in a criminal justice system was necessary when in reality it wasn't.
Are there any studies where they dramatically reduced police presence and crime wasn't affected?
The Nordic countries have a better system of rehabilitation
http://morganwilliamsjr.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Chalf...
I'm in CA and am surrounded by neighbors with guns, for better or worse. If you think CA is devoid of gun owners you're sorely mistaken.
For example, approximately 1 in 10 adults in PA have a license to carry a firearm. Compared to about 70k CA CCW in a population of about 39M people (didn't find adults only). CA also mandates that guns be stored locked up and unloaded when not on their person. This can prevent some of the safes or lock boxes designed for rapid deployment.
you're not safe from these people in SF unfortunately due to new jurisprudence around 2A post-heller.
As always, there's laws, and then there's enforcement of those laws.
You're completely delusional if you believe nobody in SF has guns at home because the law says so. Ask yourself how on earth such a thing would be enforced without police searching everyones' homes on a regular basis.
My connections to the city have waned in the past decade or so, during which it sounds crime has only worsened. I'd assume there's even more gun ownership in response to what seems to be a police force unwilling to enforce laws and a continuous stream of growing area crime reported in the news.
Out by me which is rural desert CA there's just guns all over the place. Technically it's illegal to fire anything other than a scattershot round in a shotgun openly around here (Morongo Basin), yet on any given weekend you'll hear all sorts of semi-auto and even full-auto shooting without any police response.
Is this a deliberate strawman?
In a place like SF there's a lot of pressure to conform, and it's not in a pro-gun right-leaning trajectory. So what I mean to say is there's plenty of presentation of conformity, and it's often inauthentic. The stakes are high in a place like SF. People will keep their mouth shut or even fly the opposition's flag in the interests of preserving/increasing their salaries and stock refreshes until they can GTFO with their spoils in tow.
Most folks on my street own a gun.
First of all, I probably wouldn't have time to wait for cover, make it to my safe, pull a gun, take the safety off, make it to a safe position, aim, and fire before the threat left.
But set that aside.
No way in hell me or any of my neighbors would return fire at a moving target in a residential neighborhood. That's 100% how you accidentally kill someone (or get killed yourself).
"Apparently, in the Bay Area right now, you can walk up a residential street firing your gun into houses, and you still won’t be able to compete for attention with all of the other sensational crimes."
And, maybe I'm unreasonably reasoning from stereotypes here, but I think maybe a guy named "Leighton Woodhouse," who describes himself as a "progressive" and hires a "nanny" to raise his toddler, possibly may know too little about drive-by shootings to know what he doesn't know.
And... what? standing still? People use their feet to MOVE. (Also, drive-bys are so called for reason...)
If I shoot across my street, that bullet is either going into:
1. a (small, and, again, MOVING) human target, or
2. my neighbor's house.
Have you ever shot at a target moving at 6-10+ miles/hour roughly perpendicular to your line of fire? Shit's not easy. If I let off more than one round, odds are high that at least one bullet is going into my neighbor's house.
Oh. And if a bullet is shot into my house, that shit is coming into the house. Or did you think think glass panes/drywall stop bullets? So where the hell am I even going to take cover when exchanging fire?
> There is risk in any action you take
Basement. Lock door. Find cover. Wait. Rule zero of self defense: don't get into gunfights in an open street, and don't depend on drywall as a bulletproof barrier. (Actually, that's not even rule zero because most people aren't stupid enough that it has to be explicitly stated.)
https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t...
Do you work as hard when you know management is gunning for your job?
Nobody knows what the crime rate actually is as a result. But the accountants at the retail stores know, and they're raising prices, installing armored doors, or simply leaving the city.
The local bank branch I patronize now sports an armed guard wearing body armor standing outside the door. It's only a block from the police station. Pretty sad.
Well that's certainly a vote of confidence for the professionalism and effectiveness for the police.
"In 2019, there were about 1,280 deployable officers in the Seattle Police Department. Today, the number of in-service cops stands at 1,015."
https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/council-must...
"The 2021 adopted SPD budget is nearly $363 million. During the previous budget cycle, the Mayor and City Council made about $70 million in cuts, but because of funds added elsewhere in the police budget, the net reduction was $46.1 million (about 11 percent) from the 2020 Adopted Budget of $409.1 million."
https://www.aclu-wa.org/story/follow-the-money-policing-seri...
This is typical of Weiss. She's made a second career out of "radical left" scaremongering since getting fired from the NYT.
Yet I recalled hearing that police budgets in Oakland were steady to up this year, despite the protests.
A quick search seems to confirm this: https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t...
>Despite claims to the contrary, the Oakland City Council did not make any cuts to the police budget at all this year. In fact, Oakland police were allotted about $39 million more than in the previous two years, according to a KTVU analysis of city records.
What did I miss?
Someone pushing their propaganda
Nothing. There is a narrative being pushed that tries to correlate Black Lives Matter, Defund The Police, etc. activity with increasing crime. That narrative might have some validity in some localized cases, but is clearly not universally causal.
"Defund the police" has to be the most poorly conceived political slogan of all time. It sounds more like a pejorative its opponents came up with.
I suspect that proponents thought anger at the police was much more widely spread than it was, so they grabbed what they thought would sell.
Is this not literally the idea? The issue with "defund the police" slogan is that defunding isn't the end goal. The idea is to reduce the size, scope, militarization, and budget of the police force _and_ use that money to instead fund programs to help citizens and the local economy.
Part of the platform is absolutely to reduce the current scope of the widely militarized police force in the US.
I'd argue that the reason that folks rallied 'defund' is that police aren't willing to accept reasonable reform and they have enough power to keep it from happening.
Reform isn't realistic in a system that required the group being reformed to consent to the type of reform.
I'm personally a fan of 'reallocate' police funds.
For example: There was an article on Hacker News today about how an FBI program to track use-of-force incidents may shut down due to a lack of police involvement (https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2021/12/09/fbi-poli...).
I think there is likely a de-escalation path that involves sensible reform, but it will also require that reform to be embraced and implemented by the police
[1] https://abc7news.com/oakland-police-funding-city-council-cut...
If I read this article correctly then the author's point is that simply the passage of a bill to be enacted in the future is the cause of increased crime in the present, which seems like a shaky argument to me.
Also I'm noticing that the ABC7News article says
>More than $17 million will be diverted from the police to violence prevention and other services not involving police. Another $3.6 million will be put into the new MACRO program which will basically be a civilian crisis response program within the Oakland Fire Department addressing those in mental health crises.
This means that even assuming this is a net decrease of $20.6 million to budget, this is still giving back only ~half the net increase from this year's budget. So we should still be up $16 million or so vs. 2020
I still think this amounts to the argument "next year's budget cuts are increasing crime in my neighborhood now" which doesn't make sense to me.
[0] https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t...
If your argument is that the police haven't been defunded or abolished, maybe your issue is with the mainstream media that were publishing arguments in favor of abolishing the police?
Have you considered holding them to account for that?
I'm not sure what you mean by rare, but many major cities did proceed with reducing police funds:
"New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Baltimore and a dozen other cities have all also reduced police spending. "
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-de...
L.A. cut millions from the LAPD after George Floyd. Here’s where that money is going
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-26/lapd-fun....
And just one month ago, LAPD's budget was increased by 12% for the upcoming fiscal year, up $213 million.
A cultural shift. We now have people getting mad about things that aren't happening and sharing this info as fact to anyone who will listen
> As the surge in violence has become less theoretical to white, middle class residents, Oakland’s mayor has been afforded the political space to push to restore the funds that were cut from the police budget.
False. Nearly every crime stat is trending downward.[1]
1. https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/us/ca/san-francisco/crime...
If someone puts a gun to your head and says they will kill you and you protect yourself. Well you will be made an example.
Mistaking a taser for a gun and killing someone is very risky.
Kneeling on someone's neck while they are handcuffed is risky.
Normal policing is not.
Increases in Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Kentucky would indicate to me a lack of correlation for various partisan policies driving this.
The filter bubble self-awareness is palpable.
The poster you're responding to is correct. St. Louis, KC, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Nashville are wild places. I feel much safer in Portland than in any of those cities. Especially the ones toward to top of that list. Lots of cities in bright red states are cesspools compared to Portland.
Here in the UK, "stop and search" was massively reduced because it was seen as racist. The result has been a marked increase in knife and drug related crimes.
Of course it is the poor and minorities who suffer from these progressive policies.
[1] https://abc7news.com/oakland-police-funding-city-council-cut...
If I read this article correctly then the author's point is that simply the passage of a bill to be enacted in the future is the cause of increased crime in the present, which seems like a shaky argument to me.
Also I'm noticing that the ABC7News article says
>More than $17 million will be diverted from the police to violence prevention and other services not involving police. Another $3.6 million will be put into the new MACRO program which will basically be a civilian crisis response program within the Oakland Fire Department addressing those in mental health crises.
This means that even assuming this is a net decrease of $20.6 million to budget, this is still giving back only ~half the net increase from this year's budget. So we should still be up $16 million or so vs. 2020
Police are intentionally allowing crimes specifically to boost the narrative of posts like this.
https://mises.org/power-market/police-have-no-duty-protect-y...
I think the most recent city to have this kind of strike was Baltimore in the 2015-18ish time range.
My friend is a police officer and is moving out of my progressive state to a more conservative one. He told me this is happening in nearly every department.
His reasoning was that they use to feel like they were on the side of the community, but in many places it is now the community is opposed to the police. Also they don’t risk certain things because they might have to use force and they’re worried they’ll be charged with a crime f or doing so, (especially if people riot enough and the DA needs to satisfy them).
All that adds up to more crime, even though budgets will probably rise to pay more to try to convince officers to stay.
How do we both protest police brutality when it rears its head, while still treating officers like they’re on the side of the good guys (like most, but not all, are).
I have no answer.
>As the surge in violence has become less theoretical to white, middle class residents, Oakland’s mayor has been afforded the political space to push to restore the funds that were cut from the police budget.
Which seems to be to be a misunderstanding of consensus reality
And yet there is a dearth of evidence for this claim.
This is like your grandpa telling you kids have no respect nowadays when all he does is scream at any kid he sees and then demands respect. It works both ways. Police used to be part of the community. Then they put themselves in tanks and body armor and come into every situation guns blazing and scared of everyone in the community.
How is the community supposed to react...?
- Many in the community marched to "Defund the Police".
- Others in the community started committing more crimes.
Unfortunately those two groups are part of the same community, so they'll have to learn to get along.
It is not the jobs of people being policed to watch their own tone so they avoid offending cops. It is the job of cops to serve and protect, full stop.
It is well-known that police departments align closely with the cultural segments that (among other things) critique alleged "snowflakes". If what you say is true then there is ironically a glut of snowflakes at our local precincts and they cannot be trusted to handle weapons in public spaces.
The real question is how can we attract and retain officers that want to do the job?
Maybe the job just doesn't make sense in modern America? If police as a concept didn't exist already, no one would create it.
If you broke it down into its parts, you find plenty of people who would sign up to handle mental health crisis and plenty of people to sign up to handle quality of life problems. You'd have a third group that wants to do the more dangerous stuff.
Is there any evidence of that? Seems there are quite a few who support them as-is and many more who want to see minor reforms.
What do you mean by quality of life problems? How do we plan to staff in that model given police response time already averages 5 minutes (would it then be 15, or would we have 3x the cost to fill 3x the positions)?
How could there be any evidence of that?
> Seems there are quite a few who support them as-is and many more who want to see minor reforms.
Sure, that's the not the same thing. Many people reflexively back the police because they perceive themselves as benefitting from the status quo or otherwise have it as part of their socio-political identity. Some people back the police because they think they are "good enough" and don't want to think about how to reshape the system. But that isn't what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about a hypothetical. We have a list of problems such as theft, drunk driving, speeding, people in mental health crisis, domestic violence, crowd control, etc. In the hypothetical situation where we have all of these problems, but we don't have the police and never had, do you honestly think we'd assign all of these duties to one position?
> What do you mean by quality of life problems?
Cat in a tree, unwanted person, taking a report about a stolen bicycle, responding to a traffic collision. Non-life threatening situations that have absolutely no need for someone with a gun to respond.
>How do we plan to staff in that model given police response time already averages 5 minutes (would it then be 15, or would we have 3x the cost to fill 3x the positions)?
The police are unqualified to handle most of the calls they are called out to. You'd have different teams that respond to different types of calls. Non-armed responders are a hell of a lot cheaper and are able to respond to the majority of calls. You'd have a small group of armed LEOs who would respond to violent crimes in progress, and then you'd have hybrid responses to stuff like domestic violence where you need a social worker as the primary response and an armed person as a secondary security.
You'd construct your force around those principles. Remember, most cops never fire their weapon.
Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who think that those problems should be beaten into submission by the state.
Studies, surveys, anything at all to back up your claim. Sounds like there isn't (use of absolutes in your statement was probably the problem).
"Non-life threatening situations that have absolutely no need for someone with a gun to respond."
Depends on one's perspective and a bunch of other factors. You might be surprised about how many people carry guns in various professions (medical workers, mental health worker, various first responders, the general public, etc). The vast majority of people never have to fire their weapon. Most never even have to use their weapon. It's utility isn't solely based on being fired.
"In the hypothetical situation where we have all of these problems, but we don't have the police and never had, do you honestly think we'd assign all of these duties to one position?"
Yes, mostly due to staffing issues like response time and cost, which is something you didn't really addresses in your answer. You also mention things like domestic violence, which is actually one of the most high risk calls you can get.
You talk about armed personnel being more expensive. That's not exactly true. People become expensive based on the level of training they need/have. A gun is a part of that, but so are many other things like mental health training. You could still use police as responders for mental health issues with some level of training while waiting for existing social workers or medical professionals to arrive. Even under the model of using another type of person police likely have to show up in case things turn violent anyways.
"The police are unqualified to handle most of the calls they are called out to."
How so? Or is this another case of using the wrong words (most or unqualified)? If it's a matter of training, it may be cheaper to provide police with additional training rather than hire additional forces an incur all that overhead of benefits etc. The three things you mentioned were quality of life, violent situations, and mental health issues. You seem to accept that violent situations require police response, so would be qualified for that. Although there are numerous situations in the other two categories that could quickly turn violent an would likely require police presence even if they are not the sole responders. It sounds like the quality of life stuff are generally easy tasks that police are qualified to handle (you even mention a police report for a stolen bike). The mental health situations depend on the level of training. Relatively few departments have adequate mental health training. I think this could be handled with training on how to approach those situations and talk people down while the social worker or mental health professional arrives.
Most people are generally capable of reading that as an opinion absolute statement.
Like, if I said 'Casino Royale is the best James Bond movie of the Daniel Craig era' that's an absolute statement but the reader can intuitively understand that its not going to be objectively provable and that it's clear its an opinion.
Now, if I said 'It's a fact that....' it'd be fair to ask for evidence. But I didn't.
> Depends on one's perspective and a bunch of other factors. You might be surprised about how many people carry guns in various professions (medical workers, mental health worker, various first responders, the general public, etc). The vast majority of people never have to fire their weapon. Most never even have to use their weapon. It's utility isn't solely based on being fired.
The norm in most of the world is that unarmed people respond to most issues. If you think mental health workers are carrying guns on the job, you are just extremely uninformed on this topic.
>You talk about armed personnel being more expensive. That's not exactly true. People become expensive based on the level of training they need/have.
So it is exactly true then isn't it? Not only do you have to pay the increased cost of training and certifying , you actually pay them more hourly too to carry that gun too.
>You could still use police as responders for mental health issues with some level of training while waiting for existing social workers or medical professionals to arrive.
Why would you though? Police have no real training in mental health, the week long classes they take are really not useful. Remember that actual mental health professionals generally need a minimum of six years of education. Why in the world would you want someone with no training and gun to be the first responder to someone having a mental health crisis?
> How so? Or is this another case of using the wrong words
No, they are unqualified
> If it's a matter of training, it may be cheaper to provide police with additional training rather than hire additional forces an incur all that overhead of benefits etc.
It isn't though. Police are by far more expensive than people who are more qualified, which in many ways is sad, but it is what is. The idea that you can train police into being mental health professionals just shows the lack of understanding about what it takes to be a mental health professional. When it comes to lower level calls, why would it be better to send a more expensive employee to handle a call a less expensive can handle? Is that what your work does? Send the most expensive labor possible to handle simple problems?
> ou seem to accept that violent situations require police response, so would be qualified for that.
It's the only thing they are somewhat qualified for, yes. They do need much better training and weed all the 'killology' cops.
> It sounds like the quality of life stuff are generally easy tasks that police are qualified to handle (you even mention a police report for a stolen bike).
Sorry, they are unqualified to handle most of their calls, but that is an example of one where they are overpaid to handle that call.
>The mental health situations depend on the level of training. Relatively few departments have adequate mental health training. I think this could be handled with training on how to approach those situations and talk people down while the social worker or mental health professional arrives.
Mental health is a professional degree. There is no amount of week long trainings that will make police officers good responders to mental health calls.
You of course have spent a lot of time talking about how armed police could do all these jobs, but you really haven't talked about why they should.
What's the point of spe...
Then there's no reason to discuss this. Based on the rest of the comment, you are not listening to what I'm saying, nor are you offering anything to back up any opinions. It's a matter of temporal response time within spacial constraints. Specialization and limitations of labor means that you need to drastically increase headcount to maintain current surface levels, which is more expensive even if a significant subset is currently cheaper (non-union police are cheaper, but once these public sector unions unionize, costs go up significantly). Then you still have questions about efficacy of the replacements (mental health pros don't have a great track record without patient history in these situations) and the fact that you still need to provide training to the existing force due to their exposure to these events either spontaneously or through misclassification. It also sounds like you have some odd and unexplained bias against armed people (in many states, the people you're adding can be and currently are armed even if it's not a part of their job).
I'm listening to what you're saying, it's just incorrect.
> Specialization and limitations of labor means that you need to drastically increase headcount to maintain current surface levels, which is more expensive even if a significant subset is currently cheaper (non-union police are cheaper, but once these public sector unions unionize, costs go up significantly).
Why do we do any specialization in the labor force then? What's the point? After all, specialization only increases labor costs.
Or, perhaps specialized labor is more efficient, which is why it exists. An LEO is by far the most expensive person you could have respond to a situation and they aren't particularly effective at most of the situations they are called to.
You could replace huge chunks of your inefficient armed staff and increase the head count while not increasing costs. For Portland, our unarmed PS3 position is a little more than 1/2 the cost of an entry level armed LEO. That means we can have almost two of them for every one cop. We could have more people out on the street. More people helping out, having eyes in the community and generally being useful. As an added bonus, non-armed staff are more useful to the community because a huge chunk of the community is terrified of police and wont call them or communicate with them making them effectively useless in certain neighborhoods.
> Then you still have questions about efficacy of the replacements (mental health pros don't have a great track record without patient history in these situations)
Yikes, you want to talk about track records
"People with Untreated Mental Illness 16 Times More Likely to Be Killed By Law Enforcement"
https://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/key-issues/criminali...
Mental health professionals are far far far far far more qualified to safely help someone who is experiencing a crisis.
> and the fact that you still need to provide training to the existing force due to their exposure to these events either spontaneously or through misclassification.
The mild amount of training they get is fine. If they encounter someone in mental health crisis, they should disengage immediately and call for someone who is trained to handle that situation.
> It also sounds like you have some odd and unexplained bias against armed people (in many states, the people you're adding can be and currently are armed even if it's not a part of their job).
Guns make almost every single situation worse. I'm not sure my 'bias' is odd. Most of developed world recognizes that guns are terrible and that people walking around with them is a pretty dumb idea. The USA just has a fetish for making boom boom with them so we live with our school shootings, mass shootings, and frequent accidental deaths.
I'm not aware of any governmental agency that lets their staff bring guns to work when it isn't part of their job. Would you care to provide a source? Even the gutter backwater of Texas doesn't allow them.
Eh? Community policing has been an universal in every culture. Not in the way conventional "modern"/Western police forces are, which was invented in Paris, but city and village militias took turns standing guard and arrest/whack away violators, drunkards, thieves, etc.
So if there's no police, expect communities to make their own. Hell, don't crime gangs like the Mafia have their own professional policing forces? To catch members who are too violent, or dissuade informing the state/police?
Do you know any who rushed into active mass shooting scenes, which is clearly a dangerous place to be? If you did, then you might think differently.
Have cops used undue force? Yes. Are there some that are on a power trip and need to be fired? Yes.
That doesn’t change what the police officers I know are like, nor the risks they are taking with every patrol.
I think the main legitimate beef I’ve seen is how seemingly good cops still stand up for cops that are obviously bad.
Note the articles refer back to earlier texting scandals in places like SF where recently cops were caught on camera just sitting around watching people rob a dispensary.
It’s obvious some cops do not serve and protect, and there are too few good cops holding their own accountable.
We need cops but the current state of the force is untenable and unprofessional
All cops “serve and protect”.
The problem with isn’t that those verbs don’t apply, it is the objects of the verbs. Who do they serve and what do they protect.
Completely agree
> and there are too few good cops holding their own accountable
Maybe true in SF and other progressive cities, but I’m doubtful this is the norm across all police departments.
The problem is people are treating all cops the same. In Oakland there might be a good precinct, and a bad one, if you treat the good like the bad, all you will be left with is the bad.
Still if it is bad enough might make sense to just turn it all over.
Hypothesizing too few good cops in progressive cities, and implying (happily assuming) there are plenty of good cops in conservative areas to keep checks and balances? Color me unconvinced.
> The problem is people are treating all cops the same.
The phrase "a bad apple spoils the barrel" absolutely applies in fraternistic, spartan settings of indoctrination such as "the brotherhood". Yes cops literally call it that; the dominant culture has most people in the course of their duties acting tough by cosplaying military with looser rules of engagement, and other impressionable folks fall into a similar pattern to be accepted by a community that they hold in respect (their brothers, not the citizenry). If you are relatively free-thinking, you are filtered out at the application level. If you somehow slip through, you have no power to make real change. We know this from countless examples of those who left the force after seeing obscene behavior. Chris Dorner's case is the most prominent recent example I can think of right now.
LA also has a serious problem with cop gangs[1] that have murdered people.
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/los-ange...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
Nor are they required to rush into an active shooter situation any more than any other citizen
https://abcnews.go.com/US/cop-fired-parkland-shooting-job-ba...
It is insane we give people both deadly weapons and wide judgement for when to use them and then the worst that occurs in most cases of misuse is firing.
Exceptions do not disprove the rule. We can look to one or a handful of officers who put on their big kid pants and fulfilled the nominal job description that they consensually agreed to (despite not being required to do so, by law). Statistically speaking, they are completely insignificant when you want to draw conclusions such as those you imply are proven by the counterexample you've provided.
"Police officers you know" are probably nice to you, and recount stories from their perspective. Sure some may actually be decent, but again, that's not exactly a safe bet considering the evidence we have. Even with the 5th amendment, we can include the evidence that cops regularly hide evidence which would otherwise make them look bad as a factor in comprehending the reality of the situation.
Even the nice ones among the officers you know are regularly silent about numerous abuses, large and small. The fact that no one speaks up against the ne'er-do-wells means they are complicit. Complicity is generally not any more morally good than performing the action yourself, especially when you are in a position to prevent it from happening.
anecdotal counter-evidence will not be taken as a valid argument, either - just because you know cops that haven't either harmed you or claim to not have harmed anyone unjustly doesn't make policing as a whole less morally reprehensible
But, specifically, the two largest recent ones:
* George Floyd protests happened almost one full year before the trial outcome (which wasn't an acquittal btw)
* Kenosha protests happened 6 months before the acquittal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosha_unrest
Though I think there is some guilt on the other side when they’ve treated police departments as if they’re all the same. When every use of force against even the most vile of criminals, in legitimate life or death situations, is somehow proof of their racist tendencies if the perp was a PoC.
Example?
Think about it; if others read my statement and feel it is true they will think it is true. Cops who read it will think it is true as well.
The facts might be it is not true, but if you believe the story being told... well it doesn’t matter does it.
Which story is being believed, that the cops are evil racists, or that they are good guys with some bad apples?
What story is being believed, that blacks are victims who need white mans help? Or that they are glorious victors over even oppression, so much so that the most loved president of the last 20 years is a black man?
The facts don’t matter, because we only use them to promote the story we already agree with it?
Is covid such a deadly virus we should have lockdowns and mandates that 40% of the population disagree with?
Yes?
What is the story you have believed in this situation, and what are the facts?
We had the same amount of drunk driving deaths here in my county the last month as we did covid. Yet bars are open, school children still wear masks.
It's simple: don't commit crime.
> How do we both protest police brutality when it rears its head, while still treating officers like they’re on the side of the good guys (like most, but not all, are).
Get rid of the bad apples. Simple as that. No more unions and charges for those who decided to cover up instead of reporting malpractice. And liability insurance not paid by the taxpayers.
Bail is given when someone hasn't had a court determine their guilt yet. Getting rid of bail means that innocent people will sit in jail until their trials.
to me, cutting a bike lock and smash & grabbing are like definitional petty crimes.
For me there’s a distinction between entering a locked building and stealing a bike locked on the sidewalk. It’s arbitrary I know.
Misdemeanors still carry punishment and possible jail time.
What’s missing?
A felony for $950 in stolen goods? You're not gonna get that conviction without a court, which means that everyone involved in that chain, from the judge, to the lawyers, to the compensation of the jury, to the bailiff, to the entire police apparatus involved in apprehending and charging them, and so on, is gonna need to be compensated for handling the issue. And that's before any time is served.
If you aren't going to try to root out the true cause of why people are stealing, you might as well just throw a ton of money in a giant pit and have a cookout.
When the property crime goes back up to where it was two years before I’m having a hard time seeing anything conclusive.
How do I know that police choosing not to pursue or investigate minor property crime after the passage of Prop 47 is not the cause?
Maybe it’s part of a greater social and economic shift in the region?
Are no other factors to be considered and ruled out?
Given the considerable cost of criminalization and incarceration it’s amazing to me that it seems to be the only solution being offered.
The author does provide a more holistic solution, but I can’t say I’m anymore convinced about the roughly $500 change making a big difference.
In real terms, the Oakland policing budget went from $706mm to $674mm. That is unambiguously a cut in their ability to fund their operations.
You missed the part about people linking together statistics, that are not necessarily related in any meaningful way, into a BS narrative or story. This is commonplace on various Substacks that people write. Also, I especially tend to find this from people with formal economics backgrounds and training.
There were only 2 city council-members who voted against defunding. Whether or not actual budgets get reduced, urban cops got the message that they are not appreciated, or worse. The good ones can easily get jobs somewhere less stressful and with higher job satisfaction.
Also, all budgets need to increase just to keep up with inflation. So just because a budget is increased or it stays the same does not imply that it has not been cut. An increase of $39 mil. can only be properly evaluated if we know the size of the original budget and inflation.
The inflation argument is not very convincing to me either. Both of those measures (inflation, budget) are objective facts that are absent from the article. Also "police budgets not quite keeping up with inflation is causing chaos in my neighborhood" is not very convincing.
This feels like a strawman. I don't think it's surprising that there's a rise in crime when police are defunded, especially when those social programs aren't enacted. I think most reasonable progressives who support defunding the police also recognize the whole point is to shift investment away from punishment (police) into aid (social programs) to deter crime. It takes years for that to happen, and really needs to happen on a societal level to provide opportunities that otherwise 'career criminals' do not have which leads them down that path.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-13463-002 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3509381 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655778
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28202?utm_source=npr_newsletter...
it's a resource allocation argument, not an 'everything would be better if police instantly winked out of existence' argument.
RE-form the Police -- this is a movement I can more readily support and I hope is self descriptive and accurate. Police departments have become alienated from communities because they are no longer about the mission to protect and serve the common people and the commons; they have instead become yet another type of organization using violence for control. The videogame Crackdown got that right many years ago.
As horrid as the Japanese justice system is about the presumption of guilt; their practice of neighborhood officers and community involvement seem like positive traits that should be copied in the USA and elsewhere as one facet of improving the positive interaction of peace officers and the community.
What this is missing here from "defund the police" is that part of the point of that slogan is to take responsibility (and, yes, funding) for some duties away from police entirely and give them to new organizations that have more limited scope and much more limited use of force.
A prime example here is parking enforcement, which is often performed by the police despite having no particular need for the legal monopoly on violence that comes with police officers.
If I were in charge of naming the idea, I'd suggest something like "Get Rid of Thug Cops!". Focus on how cops are supposed to be part of society instead of prison guards. Focus on the fact that e.g. Western European police get multiple years of education.
Even the UK has a problem, since the lying thieving government has been squeezing budgets for the last decade, the police have been underfunded there and it's harder to do the "be a part of society" part of policing.
But it's incredible how a protest slogan has been morphed by "the other side" into "this is actually happening, and look at all the results", when, as many have said, no actual defunding is happening.
No true Scotsman. The montages of prominent politicians and community leaders asking for the elimination of the police are easy to google.
It's only after the crime, when you're thinking about how someone else had the hubris to threaten your life, thinking about how you could have died, or worse, if your loved ones had been with you, that they could have died, that you begin to wade yourself into a deep and abiding anger.
I used to feel sympathy for criminals. Especially seeing how many of them have led rough lives, having been raised by bad parents, in horrible environments, having been led by others to delinquency as youth, then into crime as adults.
However, once you have been victimized, this sympathy vanishes. It does not matter how bad you've had it -- violence is never justified. Any person who resorts to violence instantly loses all justification.
It is only the rich who can afford to stroke their moral ego in such an egregious manner. It is the poor and the middle class who pay with their lives for this sanctimony.
People make this argument all the time but I fail to see how the police have helped any time I've experienced any actual crime, not to mention so many others. That's not even getting into the politics of who can call the police and how the police react differently to situations, either.
'Police Abolitionism' can't be taken seriously as an ideology. I'm not white, and I've been the victim of crime multiple times, unfortunately. I don't think the police are perfect, or a perfect institution. They did their job, and helped me in these cases. Whenever I hear people talk about being afraid to call the police I switch off immediately. Total bunk.
Police don't prevent crime. Hell, they barely even respond to crime.
And cops in our city have criminally generous pensions -- when you count the pension, lots of these high school grads making 100K+/yr. To say nothing of the absurd capital expenditures. So, I'm super okay with shifting resources from PDs to basically any other program. Value per dollar spent is just super low. Probably lower than literally every other item on the budget sheet.
Doesn't have to be a political thing. Hell, prior to 2019, right-leaning libertarians were the only ones who I could find who agreed with me on this. PDs are just a shit use of tax dollars until we figure out how to bust up the unions and reign in the excessive toy purchases.
If I find my truck has been broken into and stuff is stolen, all those abilities are deeply useless to me. I need someone who is good with taking down details and filling out forms and following up and ideally investigating. Up until that leads to the act of actually arresting someone there's very little need to have people who are trained in the violent use of force involved at all.
And that's before you start asking questions about how our current police force is trained to use violent force and if they could do all that differently or not.
Which is not at all what our hiring standards at police departments select for.
Awarding a well-marked group with some measure of public accountability the right to use violent countermeasures for the protection of life and property in a geographic area facilitates commercial trade and societal advancement.
However, the “garbage-in, garbage-out” phenomenon applies to policing, which makes it less of a silver bullet. A certain amount of criticism lobbed at police forces in America can be reduced to hysteria over police being unable to turn lead into gold.
But I think you’re also saying that police can’t change a local community, if it’s already filled with crime. If that’s the case and they don’t have a big impact… what’s the point?
I’d also say it works the other way around, where garbage input to the police force will result in garbage policing. And since education and training isn’t that rigorous, it’s hard to correct that.
Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily. Perhaps you could argue whether or not the “hysteria” is justified given the number of times it happens. But the biggest outcries are normally against things you see where police are pretty obviously in the wrong. (Or at the very least, where police were incredibly brutal. Which in my opinion is nearly always wrong.)
The point is to preempt a power vacuum threatening social order, e.g. imagine if Japan didn’t have a police force.
> Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily.
I don’t disagree, nor did I claim to. However, I’d be curious to know whether you’d prefer all police be replaced by robots and drones which perfectly upheld the law. For many, that’s an even scarier thought than imperfect, human policing.
What I would want is:
- More intensive training and education with less focus on violence.
- Better laws to increase accountability and to reduce conflicts of interest.
- Police or social worker units which don’t need to carry guns. Basically separate dangerous crime from vice or disturbances in terms of enforcement. I fully agree the FBI should have resources to hunt down serial killers. I don’t think we need a similar level of force (guns) for dealing with a drug addict on the street, or a drunk driver.
And other things would be good or better I’m sure! My feeling now is that police are entrenched in their own system of power enough that many types of good changes are unlikely to happen. Why would police want to increase their risk by adding more oversight, for example?
This is an argument for defunding the police.
Police reform is sorely needed. "Defund the police" as a slogan was insane political malpractice.
A lot of them felt more than once genuine fear from being victimized by crime committed by the police. Which, of course, is almost never reported as a crime by whoever survives it.
I used to believe as you do. Then I was a little down on my luck and found myself living in a poor, high-crime neighborhood. It was a shocking for me. There were cops everywhere, but they somehow never managed to help a situation.
I called the police multiple times because of violence in the area -- including for a discharged firearm in the apartment upstairs. Sometimes they showed up, sometimes they didn't. And when they did, they invariably contrived to make things worse.
I could have walked to the precinct station in less time than the police typically responded to calls. They were routinely aggressive and bullying to victims. They were dismissive of eye-witness testimony and anyone who volunteered assistance. They made open threats to anybody who questioned them or asserted their rights -- to record an interaction, retrieve their personal effects, or even help calm a neighbor in distress.
The police in that community drove around in custom cars and body armor, armed to the teeth. They hassled hard-working men, women, and even children as they went about their daily business, humiliating them in front of their neighbors for sport. They were -- almost to a man -- officious, patronizing cowards.
I moved to that neighborhood believing that police dedicated their lives to serve and protect their communities. I have several police officers in my family and, prior to my time south of the tracks, had always believed their side of the story. Criminals bad. Cops heroes.
But I left that neighborhood afraid of the cops. Far more afraid than of any of the many criminals in that community. I left with the understanding that most American police are little more than a terrifyingly well-armed gang. They have a fundamentally oppositional stance to the communities they are supposed to serve. And they are almost completely unaccountable for their actions and inaction.
So no, it's not the luxury of the rich to criticize the cops or call for a reallocation of police funds from guns to training and crime prevention. The poor have been doing it for ages. We were just ignoring them.
It made me wonder whether the right NOR the left had any clue left as what the role of a police force in a democracy was actually supposed to be — or whether that battle cry _really_ originated from the same forces trying to split the US society: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/14/russia-us-po...
Like, there would have been lots of great claims: "Train police", "Restructure Police", "Rebuild Police"... but what's a single good argument to "Defund Police" other than wanting to go back to anarchy?
I believe it's a reaction to police forces now having military gear when it should be totally unnecessary. In many places police officers don't even need guns.
Maybe spending less money in militaria and more in training would be a consequence of not having to fund military equipment, supplies, and maintenance. It'd, at least, limit the violent options police has when they are going to engage a suspect.
I don't want to be SWATTED (for script kiddie's Lulz) just because the police have the equipment and need to justify usage of it.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/24/pros-j24.html
Also, international good will increases.
1. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/09/why-police-pay-nothing-for-m... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout
Get it now and pay forever. Sounds like a sweet deal to the manufacturer.
Literally 100% of the times I hear about them using SWAT in the news I think this.
If someone is truly valuable they tail them and conduct a fishing stop and arrest them. SWAT is all for show these days.
While I agree that there is a trend in this direction, an import exception where SWAT is used that isn’t just for show (and where a tail + fishing stop as you describe would not work) is high-threat hostage situations, which do occur.
https://abc7.com/hostage-downtown-la-suspect-dead-police-sho...
Duh. Who could possibly have foreseen that defunding would not change their attitude?
It's almost like a job where you get to work in military cosplay and just intimidate and sometimes kill people you don't like without facing any consequences would attract people suitable for being a police officer. When you offer sociopath-candy, you attract sociopaths.
I think that 2020s protests might've gone very differently if, after the previous 18 complaints against Chauvin for racially-motivated excessive use of force, his department had said "Yes, this is a problem. He is no longer with the force" rather than continuing to employ him until somebody died. Most police officers I know have been decent people, with some bad apples. But unfortunately the bad apples are protected and ruin the trust in the police force for everyone.
And in fact, they had no clue what a police force or a democracy were supposed to look like.
That last one "Rebuild police" has not been tried. Many PDs need that. From the ground up. One applicant at a time. Carefully screened and lavishly trained.
Here’s a simple example. Portland, OR has had extremely high gun violence this year, like many cities. The public perception is that the police are doing a very poor job handling that, either with bringing people to justice or preventing crime. Now, just a month ago, there was a manhunt near where I live. It seemed like half the force showed up for it, and the reason was that someone allegedly shot at police. It is very difficult to take this in a positive light when it seems the police are only turning up in force when they are threatened, rather than when the public feels unsafe.
I’m not trying to make a claim about what they should or shouldn’t be doing really, I’m just pointing out the severe PR problem the police have created for themselves. And it seems like they continue digging themselves into a hole.
I also think this has less to do with individuals, but it’s clear that the system of policing in place just isn’t working for the community. I don’t think the community will or even has to be experts on what the system should look like. We’re just people who want to feel safe in our city!
But everything about policing seems set up to primarily protect the police (qualified immunity, asset seizure, police unions, lack of accountability from top to bottom, extreme focus on violence as a solution), rather than the public. That’s very concerning.
Anyways, my point is that when average people see a system that isn’t working for them, and don’t really get the “good” that the system may also be doing, of course the reaction is going to be very negative. It just makes sense. And since if you have a very negative view of a system, why would you want to deal with it at all?
And there aren’t clear solutions to the problem! I’d say getting rid of qualified immunity and asset seizure (to an extent) is a start, but that probably requires constitutional changes. And that’s unlikely to get anywhere anytime soon. And police unions seem to prevent local changes as well. If the police aren’t willing to reform themselves despite the very obvious need, it’s no wonder the public is not reacting in a “constructive” way.
Separately, the article links to this source[0] when talking about how progressives are "ruining cities", arguing that progressives have successfully pushed for decreases police budgets despite violent crime increases. But the article linked shows increases in police budgets by percentage of the overall budget. There are real instances of yoy "cuts" but they seem to occur with disproportionately larger cuts elsewhere across the budget, which does not support the hypothesis that progressives are defending the police; it shows that when cutting budgets we still prioritize policing. [0] https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-the-crime-wave-hits-yo...
Obviously crime is Oakland is too high, what happened to the author shouldn't happen anywhere. These experienced incidents are an important barometer on whether or not what we measure statistically is working to describe reality. We need good metrics prescribe the cure. However, it doesn't follow to me that the issue was caused by lower police budgets looking at how police budgets changed, and I am not convinced that there a progressive voting block to blame yet.. Maybe the morale issue is related, but the budget seems like a red herring.
Try to rob me or hurt my family - be carried away in a body bag.
Yet that goes against some politicians narrative.
If the criminal expects you to be armed, they'll just shoot first, before you even have the chance to reach your weapons. Remember they have the surprise on their side. This expectation should by itself increase violent crime and turn violent crimes that wouldn't be.
If wanabe robbers expect citizens to be armed and legally able to protect themselves and their loved ones - they will think twice if it worth dying for $100.
If they enter your house when your family is in, they are prepared for it. You are not.
Remember, it's a violent criminal we are talking about. Were it not a violent criminal, they'd stalk your house and wait for it to be empty. And still it'd be wise for them to expect whoever they find inside to be armed.
Armed citizens are not worth fooling with.
Think quickly, your and your family’s life depends on your decision.
If criminals expect people to be armed - they'll move on to easier targets.
That’s objectively wrong and goes against every single study on the subject.
The best overall strategy for survival is to be cooperative and not surprise the attacker. Armed victims have a lower chance of survival because, again, they are not expecting the attack. If the victim starts a reaction, they usually get shot.
When every single citizen CAN be carrying a gun - the criminal WILL think twice before engaging in stupidity. If not the victim, then the random bystander or nearby family member can make a colander out of criminal engaging in active crime.
When possibility of this is present and political and legal system is supportive to keep our streets clean - the crime will cease or be reduced to minimal levels.
[1] 2014 California Proposition 47: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47
[2] It’s Time for Californians to Recognize that Prop. 47 Criminal Justice Reform Failed: https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2021/06/16/its-time-for-...
If police-civilian interactions really decreased 80% (as quoted in the article), and in exchange violent crime only raised 5.6% [0], personally that shows even dramatic reductions in police presence don't lead to complete "anarchy".
I fear, given the increasing discussion around this crime """wave""", that some disastrous "tough on crime" policies are going to be (re)introduced in the coming years.
[0]https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...
You don't have to try very hard to find data that supports a massive uptick in violent crime in 2021. Dozens of cities have reported all-time-high murder rates. Even cities like Philedelphia, which was already pretty high to begin with.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/27/us-murder-ra...
I don't think it is due to defunding the police, however. As has been pointed out, murder rates are up in large cities, and small towns, both Red and Blue.
There is a simple explanation: Nobody is getting incarcerated, because of COVID requirements in jails.
In my hometown, which is not a major metro area, a friend of mine (who lives inside city limits) even had a cow stolen. When discussing this with the police officer, the officer's remark was "crime is up over a thousand percent" because "they can't incarcerate anyone" because of covid. They would book people, but the jails are at max capacity, so they don't even do time. They get "booked and released".
https://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-the-covid-19-crisis-str...
I call bullshit if you're meaning actual cities aka 500k+ people and using rate to mean rate.
We're not even remotely close to the 90s.
The population of Portland has increased by 92% since 1987, but the murders just passed the 1987 level.
All that said, murder *rates* across the U.S. have jumped significantly vs 2019. Though they're not yet to their highs from the early 90s.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/12-major-us-cities-top-annual-homi...
What exactly would police have done in any of these situations to prevent them from happening?
> They claim that, by taking money from police and putting it toward social programs, they can eliminate the need for heavy-handed policing in the first place. But the social programs are an afterthought. What matters most to these activists is tearing down the cops, not building up the tattered neighborhoods those cops are charged with protecting.
Progressives in the US want an increased federal minimum wage and guaranteed healthcare for everyone. Studies seemed to show mixed results on whether or not this will result in a decrease in overall crime, but now seems like the time to try.
They would have arrested and imprisoned the perpetrators, who are more than likely to have long criminal histories, after their first offence. People don't often go from zero to armed home invasion.
> Progressives in the US want...
I'm not sure any of this will work if there's insufficient order as to prevent smash-and-grab robberies and shootings from being a daily occurence. I don't suppose these people are stealing to eat or pay for healthcare. Dollars are best spent incarcerating violent people a la Japan, rather than paying them and hoping they behave themselves. Living in a peaceful society is a right afforded only to those who remain nonviolent.
Police were able to catch the murderer when he (literally) shot himself in the foot shortly thereafter… during a second home invasion in the Hollywood Hills [2].
> What exactly would police have done in any of these situations to prevent them from happening?
What if threatening would-be criminals with prison wasn’t an effective deterrent anymore? Singapore employs corporal punishment [3] in addition to prison, and I’d be interested in reviewing any studies examining whether swift corporal punishment delivered early in life for minor offenses (e.g. bullying) could be shown to prevent future criminality.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-01/jacqueli...
[2]: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-06/murder-c...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_in_Singapore
I am unaware of any evidence that early, swift violence is an effective long- or short-term deterrent for crime.
I don't know how you are supposed to take a writer seriously when they write things like this.
> Even in the absence of a viable alternative, they demand that existing law enforcement structures be torn down.
And this actually just isn't true. The author has time to read academic papers on policing issues but he doesn't seem to have read any of the material that police abolitionists have written.
He also references Michael Shellenberger frequently, a man who has also written "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All" and "Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalist". I think Shellenberger had to put aside his 'liberal' credentials a long time ago.
> Today, with few exceptions, there is no more involuntary treatment for serious mental disease or drug addiction. But nor is there a humane alternative. There is only jail or the streets.
Maybe this has something to do with public funding for mental health being slashed almost everywhere and also linked to drug laws. So people who are on the streets and self-medicating because they couldn't get treatment can't be placed in the few available options because of their drug intake.
The entire article is a gloss over the issues without any real look at it.
San Fran is indeed a messed up city. So is Oakland. But I really don't have time for white people complaining about a situation that never affects them. He is complaining about his nanny having to move. Not him. His nanny. How does that compare to the police killing your friends and relatives for no reason?