Yes, that's pretty much the plan in many states: take control of elections away from locals (especially locals who tend to vote for the other party) and give the power to the (gerrymandered) state legislature. People don't want to pay taxes, and if the anti-tax people also want local services, they have the police raise the revenue by preying on out-of-towners and people without connections.
But even without election-fixing, this kind of thing persists in some towns because the cops focus their enforcement on out-of-towners. Locals get a free lunch: services they don't have to pay for.
I go back and forth about whether a lot more stories featuring "...and then the aggrieved raided the National Guard armory..." would be a good or a bad thing, in our modern political climate. I mean, the same thing was attempted in the Tulsa massacre, by people who also thought they were the "good guys", and that whole thing was... less good.
Not if the police prevent enough (of certain) people from voting. They could simply give all the residents of certain areas the impression that they will be arrested (or blacklisted/long-term intimidation) if they show up to vote.
Also, in Alabama if you're convicted of one of the following felonies you're not allowed to vote:
"Murder, rape, sodomy, sexual abuse, sexual torture, enticing a child to enter a vehicle for immoral purposes, soliciting a child by computer, production or possession of obscene matter, parents or guardians permitting children to engage in obscene matter, possesion of child pornography with intent to distribute."
So basically just murder and criminal sexual conduct? That seems like a very short and reasonable list considering that damn near everything can be a felony if the prosecutor wants it to be.
Edit: And I would like to point out that nowhere did I say I agreed with or endorsed their enumeration of what sort of sexual conduct isn't ok.
Fourteen states still had laws criminalizing it when the laws were ruled unconstitutional in 2003. So no it's not a felony, but the law as written makes it appear to be one. Though Wikipedia says Alabama's law was officially repealed in 2019.
The test for what qualifies as "obscene" is very subjective [1], and represents one of the remaining (and oft-criticized) exceptions to the First Amendment.
I haven't read Alabama's statue or case law but I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say guess that run of the mill porn isn't what they have in mind and you're unlikely to be prosecuted in any US state for content that can be lawfully created in any other US state.
The obscene materials law affects the sale of items like vibrators or revealing clothing intended to be of a sexual nature (in addition to all porn). As of 2016 it had survived federal appeals, but hadn't made it to the supreme court yet. My county in GA has a similar law based on similar legal ground, and was blocked for being challenged by the Alabama challenges.
Not if the police prevent enough (of certain) people from voting. They could simply give all the residents of certain areas the impression that they will be arrested (or blacklisted/long-term intimidation) if they show up to vote.
That's going to be the new normal in some states. Florida's governor is setting up a unit of special armed election cops.[1] There's a broad effort in red states to make sure only the Right People get to vote.[2]
The article was misleading. I don't think they have examples of members of the electorate getting victimized. I believe it's almost entirely out-of-towners.
The linked article (the Japolnik blogspam adds nothing but removes plenty -- see the original al.com article) gives a wrong impression, but this is a classic Southern small-town policing tactic of extorting outsiders. The citizens in the town love it because all of this stuff is paid for by everyone who just happens to drive through.
This should be dealt with by higher levels of government -- it is gross, rank corruption -- however higher levels of government are drunk on civil forfeiture.
I'm in Louisiana and during an evacuation, there was a small-to-the-point-of-not-even-being-a-town had its cops pulling everyone over who went above the 25 MPH speed limit. The speed limit elsewhere was 45 to 50.
Yep. If you're looking for a musical explanation, the 1975 Hoyt Axton song "Speed Trap" explains it pretty well. It's been going on forever. The only solution is for the state government to pass laws that force ticket revenue away from the towns that employ the cops.
There are 18,000 different police agencies at all levels of federal, state, county, and municipal government with the bulk of the force distributed at the municipal & county levels, and essentially zero agreement on how to, or whether or not to reform any given one, what the end state should like, etc. Very, very wicked problem.
Easy solution: Mandate federal standards for training, staffing and use of force.
Congress could go and deal with this similarly to how the drinking age 21 was enforced - withhold federal funds for non-compliant states. Yes, this is messy as hell, but common standards for training are more important than to prevent of-age people of having a beer.
There should also be a national database for police officers to register with, maintained by the FBI (or somebody in the Justice Department). So you can't have cops that have been fired (for cause) in one jurisdiction just move somewhere else and easily get another police job.
As you’ve described re: drinking, tying it to funding is a clear, well trodden path for the feds but let’s not forget the even clearer message, motivation and inertia that was behind it in the MADD type stuff all of a few decades after the temperance movement.
What policing is, and what its standards should be was the single most divisive topic in a year we were overrun by plague though. Nationwide protests. No resolution. Every particular reform (atm, under the current systems) takes years to see through and is shackled to locality, socioeconómics, different explanations, political warfare
Very wicked problem, and that’s not even getting into anti federalism…
Be mystified no more: The USA is huge, bigger than most people can really imagine, so it's quite common for the most egregious cases of police abuse to float to the top. What you won't read on HN is stories about the thousands of normal towns with normal nonabusive police in the USA.
State constitutions should be updated to force all revenue and assets derived from fines to be distributed equally to all residents. That would distribute the benefits widely enough to remove the current incentives where fines line the pockets of local police and fund town operating budgets.
I have long thought that safety related fines should go to cover people harmed by those accidents. Hit by running a red light, receive some compensation from the red light ticket fund.
As the top parent says, it should not go to any special group, neither victims nor transit, as anything like that sets up perverse incentives. All fines should be revenue neutral, because the only thing they should accomplish is to be a disincentive for some behavior, not any other side effects.
Feedback loops are cool, but ultimately money is fungible. It might be possible to legislate around this, but normally I'd assume the sort of government that is going to essentially turn their police into highwaymen isn't above saying "well, we funded the school through tickets, so we can point all the tax money at new police cruisers."
Earmarking revenue just gets worked around. If an agency's budget is $100M from the general operating budget, and $20M earmarked revenue suddenly comes in to that agency, their share of the general operating budget will simply be reduced to $80M.
It's the same reason why lottery revenue or (in California) bond approval propositions are typically earmarked for "noble causes" (schools, firefighters, parks...). It's a cheap promise to make, and the share of general operating revenue allocated to these departments can quietly decrease as lottery or bond financing replaces it, completely working around the spirit of the earmarking.
It sounds trivial to say but control of budgeting decisions is obtained through control of budgeting decisions; earmarking constraints are just accounting games to make spending more palatable to taxpayers.
Earmarking revenue to a "noble cause" is a great way to protect the thing that is generating that revenue. It becomes a "you don't like firefighters/children/etc" argument whenever you want to remove or reform the thing that is providing that earmarked revenue.
You need fines, because some people don't care about anything else. You can set up a system of just points, with no fine, and people will just drive with revoked licenses. I don't know about you but my I am very rarely pulled over and there are several stretches of my life where you could have revoked my license for a year, or five, and I could have kept driving without a problem.
Maybe it's just your points idea that's not very good. If you were punished with traffic school and just ignored it they can still increase penalities and eventually come arrest you. Unless your plan involves hiding out in the mountains somewhere or something.
Laws aren't only for punishing people who have something to seize. How else do we deal with people who have no money but still commit minor infractions?
Either eliminate fines altogether or collect the fines and then burn the money in a furnace. Any system that derives revenue from lawbreaking has the perverse incentive of increasing lawbreaking.
Or sent directly to the IRS and subject to a Federal write-off as a sin tax: if you want to disincentivize tickets-for-dollars from conservative-leaning cops, turn them into Federal tax collectors.
I'm not sure that would help. From the picture and some other information, it seems a lot of this is to police Interstate 22, which runs past the town. My guess is the town sees fines from out-of-towners as a source of revenue, one that probably benefits the residents of the town proper.
This isn't a good thing, but it probably needs to be dealt at a state level, by passing laws preventing local officers from enforcing traffic laws on the interstate.
In my state, it is the state police that have jurisdiction over all highways. For example, if you have a car accident, Based on where it is, the 911 people will dispatch the city, county or state police.
I can't believe this practice is so ubiquitous all over the world. It is such a clear cut case of conflict of interest and should be made a textbook example that ends all discussion but here we are. An organisation that apparently has no funds to do its job, spends all its funds in employing people to gather funds so that it can continue to keep paying salary to those people gathering funds.
That depends on what you consider a conflict of interest.
Avoiding any actual names: if Charity X advertises itself as a leading way to fight hunger / homelessness / animal abuse / poverty, but 90% of X's budget goes to raising more money, I call that "a conflict of interest." (90% is not a disqualifying amount, by the way.)
As a donor, if you think you're fighting <whatever> but what you're really doing is providing salaries for friends and family of the founders, then you're actually doing something else. What would you call it?
One state (North Carolina) does do something very similar, that keeps this kind of harassment largely in check [1]. By ensuring that all fines and forfeitures paid in a county must be used for that county's public schooling, they've essentially eliminated the incentive for cops to paper as many cars as they can.
ETA: This doesn't completely solve the problem, as the federal government provides some air cover to keep screwing people over, but it does do _something_
Missouri passed a law that required assets seized by the police to go to the education budget. Police responded by calling in the feds to do the seizing, who then give a kickback to the police. The federal government's name for this program is "Equitable Sharing"
the impact of these sorts of redirections is limited. in Maryland, casino revenue ostensibly funds schools. but if casino revenue drops for some reason (eg, covid), the deficit is made up elsewhere. funding for important state organs is always somewhat fungible.
if for some reason the revenue can't be made up elsewhere and the schools come to depend on revenue from fines/seizures, that still leaves the police department with a lot of leverage.
Reading deeper on that article, you'll notice a couple of things:
- they were using the lane for passing
- the citation came _before_ taking more than 1.5 miles became illegal
which means that they ticketed her for something that wasn't illegal.
The article (almost certainly inaccurately) portrays this as the police are heavily victimizing citizens of their own town. But in actual small towns, this strategy tends to only work when the police are harming only out-of-towners that are passing through. If you unfairly fine 600 people in an area with a population of 1200...anyone who had the power to prevent this will get voted out in the next election.
Jalopnik appears to have intentionally played fast and loose with language to give the wrong impression here. Example: "Or there’s [link]another resident[/link] who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate. " That link to 'another resident' takes you to an article about Ramon Perez[0] where he's described as a "Chelsea business owner". Chelsea is 34 miles away from Brookside. Ramon is certainly a "resident" of....somewhere....but probably not Brookside.
Most likely, the police know many of the in-town vehicles and avoid pulling them over. When they do, they probably see the local address on the drivers license and let people go with a warning.
The point I'm making is that if this were as Jalopnik presents it, there is an existing remedy: the townspeople can vote out the mayor, then the new mayor would reform the 8-person police department. Instead, the people being victimized have no representation in the government that is victimizing them, so people are seeking alternative remedies (federal involvement, etc). This also probably applies when a smaller portion of a population is victimized by its government e.g. 80% of citizens unaffected, 20% experience problems.
Whats interesting about the 80/20 rule is that while classically in the US we think about racial/age/wealth divides, it also pops up in ways that aren't in people's top-3 intuition: using rarely-used government services.
- Building a house and victimized by zoning commission? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change.
- Running a business and victimized by licensing commission? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change.
- Can't get an obscure department to return your calls? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change.
I see a bit of a parallel here to accessibility for disabled people. It turns out that when we build in accessibility into our physical and digital environments, it improves the experience for fully-abled people as well. Poor quality article on that here[1] but there are better ones to find, or you can imagine your own example. The usual top-1 example is closed-captioning ... even if your hearing is fine you've probably found CC/same-language subtitles useful on occasion. Perhaps there may exist a similar effect for creating systems which allow people to escape victimization. If you build it for the "obviously disadvantaged", it will create wide benefits for the "classically advantaged" classes as well.
There's another existing remedy. New Rome, OH was literally dissolved by the State of Ohio because of their horrific corruption and predatory police presence. I don't think much of the Alabama state legislature, but it's not unprecedented.
Good take. I’m disappointed to see so many comments that basically boil down to “fuck the police”. There’s a much more interesting story here.
We have a deadlock between states underfunding their police departments, speed limits that were lowered during a gas crisis that never came back up which makes a criminal of anyone that simply keeps up with traffic, and police departments that need some sort of revenue. You can’t put all the blame on the police.
Something does need to be done about civil forfeiture and police departments that rely on traffic citations from people out of town, but I’m not sure that the problem can be solved by hoping that they’ll come to their senses. The incentives that have produced this behavior are much more interesting and much more difficult.
Indeed, good point regarding the likelihood of mainly outside travelers getting targeted. I was wondering myself why the article had so few details regarding what was being done about this problem or why the residents of this town have not voted out the mayor. Based on the point you brought up it is likely that the town residents are not opposed to this stream of town revenue.
Sounds like in the very least the Alabama state government needs to get involved. Another obvious problem is that somehow "civil forfeiture" somehow became a legitimate process in the United States, not to mention the ease with which citizens can be ticketed and fined with no legal recourse, even though according to the 7th Amendment "where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved".
There's that one song... uh, I think it was made by NWA. It had Eazy-E, MC Ren and Ice Cube. Uhhh... I just can't think of the name. Super relevant though :(
I also noticed that, and gave up reading at that point.
Maybe I'm cynical, but when people can't do the basic minimum to be understood... I don't feel any obligation to understand them.
Some notable points collected by a commenter on another site:
- "...just one of the 10 Brookside vehicles is painted with police striping, but nine others bear no emblems..."
- "...officers wear gray uniforms with no Brookside insignias."
- "The names of the officers were not listed on the tickets in secretive Brookside."
- "[the city budget] did not feature a breakout of the police department."
- "Asked in December how many officers were on staff, [the police chief] refused to say, citing “security” concerns..."
- "[The mayor and the police chief] said neither the town nor the police department relies on the revenue officers bring in. In fact, they said in November they didn’t know how that money is spent."
As others have pointed out, this sort of thing is not exactly rare, this is just a particularly egregious example of it. And this is after decades of attempts to 'reform' the police. When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community.
> "...just one of the 10 Brookside vehicles is painted with police striping, but nine others bear no emblems..."
What I'm struggling with here is that the article says they have 8 FTE officers plus additional part-time / volunteer officers... so why do they have so darn many cars? Or to put it another way - my town of 35,000 has 48 FTE positions, 5 of which weren't filled this past year. That's in line with other communities of similar size that I've observed. So it puts the size of this department in perspective - it's a vey large headcount for the size of the community, so it shouldn't be a surprise that they are taking action either out of boredom or because someone is on the take.
> When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community.
Some sure. Certainly not all. I don't even think most. If I'm wrong, then the meme itself needs better phrasing.
So you're dismissing the defund the police movement based on the phrasing and not knowing anything about it? What would be so harmful with learning about the thing you're speaking about with authority before doing so...?
> We call for a national defunding of police. We demand investment in our communities and the resources to ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive.
But what does it mean to have “resources to … survive [and] thrive”? I would argue it implies a rethinking and rebuilding of policing based on the needs of the community, like GP claims. Another leftist might think it’s the anarchical approach. It’s vague, more or less intentionally
Not exactly. Motte and Bailey is a fallacy as an argument, but memes are not arguments. You can think of it as a distributed version of Motte and Bailey: someone out there surely is trying to actually abolish policing, but if you fish the internet for arguments in favor you only get people looking to reform
The answer, like to most of these kinds of issues, is to avoid arguing against internet memes. Have a debate with a singular person on an agreed upon position, or don’t debate at all.
An arguer conflates two positions that share similarities,
one modest and easy to defend.. and one much more controversial....
The arguer advances the controversial position, but when challenged,
they insist that they are only advancing the more modest position.
Thank you for pointing out this argument fallacy. I've certainly seen it and been unable to articulate what is going on and why it feels like an argument in bad faith, and now I have a name for it.
I should think that the number of people who want to completely do away with the police is vanishingly small. Actually, it's probably about 3 people.
It seems like the right in the USA are being deliberately pedantic about the phrase "defund the police", to make it sound like those on the left are crazy.
Its a social problem, largely driven by the FPP political system in the US.
The left hold up the opinions of the far right/right lunatics and say "see? this is how insane everyone on the right is"
The right hold up the opinions of the far left/left lunatics and say "see? this is how insane everyone on the left is"
The moderate left and the moderate right have far more in common with each other than they do with the extremes at either end, yet somehow each is convinced that the other is represented most accurately by the extreme edge.
The 'moderate' right and the 'moderate' right are both pretty insane when it comes to the police, because they largely support their current status quo, and their current status quo is insane. Pants-on-head insane.
Just because you're a centrist on <an arbitrary political spectrum, that spans a single country's politics> doesn't mean that the things you believe in aren't crazy or horrifying.
I think we get different facts about the characterization of US policing. If you look at extreme cherry-picked examples one way or the other, you tend to end up at the extremes. If you accept that reality is more nuanced and the good and evil police aren’t evenly distributed (and that the trite policies offered up by extremists do much more harm than good a la the current surge in homicides), etc then you’re probably much more likely to be a moderate on the issue.
The issue isn't that particular police officers are 'good' and 'evil', the issue is that systemically, the police, the justice department, and prosecutors collude to protect gang-like behaviour in police forces.
We give them absolute power over life and death, and zero accountability. The justice system is in theory, supposed to be a leash on that dog, but in practice, it's the other way around.
Sure, there’s a certain amount of injustice in policing. 90% of Americans agree that some form of police reform is necessary. Leftists lose the rest of us when they argue for depolicing reforms rather than reforms which increase accountability while keeping policing levels.
In particular, it stands to reason that increasing spending for social services isn’t going to pay dividends for many years, but following policing reductions, crime surges immediately and significantly. So again, the rest of us are puzzled by the folks who emphasize “depolicing” rather than some more reasonable policy of “increase social spending while also maintaining a robust police element, at least for the short term”.
How do police prevent homicides? Are people really out there thinking "the police department is 10% smaller than last year (but has a larger budget), I bet I could off my neighbor and get away with it"?
They don't, they clean up after the fact, and convict someone for ~50% of them. Unless it's one of their own that's responsible, then the entire country needs to riot for a week, before anyone even thinks of pressing charges.
My understanding is that police have reduced their preventative policing activities either by policy or soft pressure. Criminals aren’t idiots—they can tell when police pressure goes up or down.
But like, what kind of preventative policing reduces homicides? Who's that person that's out murdering because they saw 10% less cop cars drive by?
A better explanation is that underlying social safety nets have been ripped out from under people for the past couple of years putting way more people in rough, quasi legal situations to get by that make them trend towards extralegal forms of dispute resolution like personal application of violence. Additionally suicides count as a homicide (it's technically a person killing a person), which has made the numbers go up over the past couple years.
> But like, what kind of preventative policing reduces homicides?
Misdemeanor arrests, searches, and foot patrols, etc. See my various other comments for more details and links.
> A better explanation is that underlying social safety nets have been ripped out from under people for the past couple of years
These effects predate the pandemic and correlate with the BLM protests in time and space (crime surges immediately after and in the vicinity of BLM protests). That said, I don’t doubt the pandemic contributed since 2020.
> Misdemeanor arrests, searches, and foot patrols, etc. See my various other comments for more details and links.
That doesn't track though. _Why_ would misdemeanor arrests result in less murders. I don't agree with Charles Fain Lehman's analysis in your post, and believe that while he thinks that because violent crime arrests when misdemeanors dropped that somehow proves that police aren't to blame I see the opposite in that data. As I argued above, that says to me that a drop in public acceptance of the role of police and the justice system leads to self directed dispute resolution, which more often turns violent. His gotcha that's supposed to be a nail in the coffin of this argument appears to me to actually be a point in favor of it.
> These effects predate the pandemic and correlate with the BLM protests in time and space (crime surges immediately after and in the vicinity of BLM protests). That said, I don’t doubt the pandemic contributed since 2020.
The idea that cities reaching a boiling point in distrust of the justice system, followed by no meaningful reform continue down the road of self directed and often violent dispute resolution is consistent with the model I've presented.
> Why_ would misdemeanor arrests result in less murders.
That's an unanswered question (crime is complicated), but there are probably many factors, not least of all that people get arrested for misdemeanors and then they're found with felony amounts of drugs or weapons and thus removed from the street.
> I don't agree with Charles Fain Lehman's analysis in your post
It's not his analysis, he's reporting on the findings of studies.
> while he thinks that because violent crime arrests when misdemeanors dropped that somehow proves that police aren't to blame I see the opposite in that data.
He doesn't profess that belief in the article.
> As I argued above, that says to me that a drop in public acceptance of the role of police and the justice system leads to self directed dispute resolution, which more often turns violent.
The article posits that as a factor as well (specifically that loss of trust in policing leads to less cooperation from the community).
> The idea that cities reaching a boiling point in distrust of the justice system, followed by no meaningful reform continue down the road of self directed and often violent dispute resolution is consistent with the model I've presented.
"Your" model also requires us to believe that the evidence of decreased proactive policing is merely a coincidence, which is hard for me to stomach. I don't doubt that the loss of trust contributed, but I only think this is the "fault" of policing as an institution to the extent that the activist and media narrative is accurate (which is to say, "not very").
> That's an unanswered question (crime is complicated), but there are probably many factors, not least of all that people get arrested for misdemeanors and then they're found with felony amounts of drugs or weapons and thus removed from the street.
Being in jail doesn't stop homicides. In fact they have more homicides than the general population.
> It's not his analysis, he's reporting on the findings of studies.
It's both. If you read the studies, while in the abstract they purport to establish a causal link, they don't back that up in their methodology. Lehman combines this into a greater analysis.
> He doesn't profess that belief in the article.
He professes a causal link between police _protests_ and increased homicides, finishing his article with "But it does give support to those who propose a relationship between 2020’s wave of anti-police protests and the ensuing homicide wave still sweeping the country—and to those who believe that continued hostility to the police will lead to more bloodshed."
> The article posits that as a factor as well (specifically that loss of trust in policing leads to less cooperation from the community).
While calling out protests specifically as being causal wrt to homicide rate.
> "Your" model also requires us to believe that the evidence of decreased proactive policing is merely a coincidence, which is hard for me to stomach. I don't doubt that the loss of trust contributed, but I only think this is the "fault" of policing as an institution to the extent that the activist and media narrative is accurate (which is to say, "not very").
No, police not doing the basics of their job while still overall increasing their budgets, and particularly arbitrarily and capriciously enforcing the law would be a major factor in loss of confidence in the justice system. I'm not saying that it's a coincidence; I'm saying that it's part of the model. If you can't rely on police to respond reported crime, then you start handling disputes person to person. Meanwhile with budgets continuing to increase _and_ police not doing their jobs, any semblance of social safety nets disappear. That's the point of "defund the police", noticing that they refuse to do the basics of their job, and in fact the goal of using them as a catchall for all sorts of social services failed, so put that portion of the budget back into more productive uses.
I would like to believe this, but legislative outcomes on things that you'd expect to be bipartisan (like dealing with the pandemic) have been fairly poor, right? If there really was this large moderate population, you'd expect us to elect moderate elected officials, who'd find each other and pass some moderate legislation, right?
The primary process is not well attended my the normal voter, only those on the extremes. So to win the primary you have to go more extreme, then to win the general you have go more moderate. So we ended up having to choose between more extreme candidates that don't reflect the majority. In fact the majority of people don't identify as republican or democrat.
The extremes always vote, many moderates only bother to vote if you can convince them the other side are totally insane/evil/stupid and life as they know it is going to be over if the other side get into/remain in power.
So politicians in particular get very good at making the other side look extremely insane, evil and stupid.
The better they are at that (lying) the better they do in elections.
So...the politicians who would be good for us tend to have integrity and strong personal beliefs about lying, and so tend to do poorly in elections.
It was originally “abolish the police” and it was a pretty widespread slogan in summer of 2020 for those of us who visited the BLM protests.
Perhaps they didn’t literally mean “do away with all police”, but no one was very explicit about what the slogan actually meant. And when the media tried to rationalize it as a metaphor (because it was so damaging to Democrats), many leftists corrected them, clarifying that they literally wanted police abolished.
In whichever case, we’re presently suffering the effects of these anti-police protests as homicides have surged to levels not seen in 30 years (whether due to official “depolicing” policies or soft pressure for police to minimize proactive policing or due to reduced cooperation from the community or so on). Whether they literally meant “no police” or some other policy, it’s pretty clear that all of this leads to more crime, and the communities who pay are predominantly poor and/or minorities.
I'm sure that if I killed someone while at work I would face criminal charges. And yet I still do this job. I think the key thing here is to not kill people, and definitely don't make it somebody's job to kill people.
They have the right to opt out of any given encounter, but the gist of law enforcement is intervening as you well know. Anyway, word lawyering is dreadfully boring and it seems that’s all you have to offer so I’m ducking out.
I'm sorry, but the point you're trying to make here is just bad. If some is running around with a knife stabbing everyone and the police just watched because 'they don't want to have to kill anyone's do you think that'd be ok?
That is the kind of thing the police force was designed to handle. Sometimes killing someone is the right thing to do when your job is dealing with situations like that.
> Both studies not only identify a decline in police activity and an increase in homicide after a high-profile incident but also argue that the nature of the decline in activity supports a “public scrutiny” mechanism for the effect. In particular, a drop in police activity for minor offenses drives the overall policing pullback. This fact supports a theory (as articulated by Premkumar) whereby officers reduce arrests that they deem “less important” in order to minimize public contact. That differs from a competing theory under which a loss of police “legitimacy”—which, in turn, reduces community engagement with the cops—drives the Ferguson Effect. If the competing theory were borne out, the study should have found reductions in arrests for offenses of all kinds.
"In fiscal 2020-2021, the Austin police budget was $292.9 million, down from $434.5 million the previous year. The City Council slashed $31.5 million directly from the police budget last year.
It also put $121.7 million in a reserve fund that was intended to 'decouple or reimagine some public-safety functions' from the police department but which ended up funding police operations, says Alicia Dean, a spokesperson for the city. The City Council also canceled three cadet classes and cut 150 officers from the budget last year, says City Councilor Mackenzie Kelly, an outspoken supporter of the police."
The homicide rate went from 4.7 to 6.2. Yes, I know that doesn't prove causation. But if the homicide rate is going up 32% year over year I want more cops on the street not fewer.
Since virtually no police departments were "defunded" in any sense to any significant extent, it's not clear to me at all how that slogan or those protests contributed to any rising violence.
I refer you to the parenthetical in my third paragraph.
> whether due to official “depolicing” policies or soft pressure for police to minimize proactive policing or due to reduced cooperation from the community or so on
Note these findings regarding the St. Louis police department following the shooting of Michael Brown:
> In the immediate aftermath of Brown’s death, self-initiated arrests fell 62 percent. Similar declines are seen across nine out of 11 categories of self-initiated activities, including foot patrol (down 82 percent) and pedestrian checks (76 percent). Notably, the decline in arrests is concentrated among misdemeanor arrests (more discretionary than felonies) and among arrests of blacks (rather than whites). This reduction in police activity persisted for at least the next two years. In the same period, the city experienced a significant rise in homicide and aggravated assault.
Again I don't see how you're making the connection that any of these things are "due to" any others.
Crime does rise and fall over time and the reasons are notoriously complex and difficult to understand as it's happening. The police are certainly confident that anti-police sentiment leads to rising crime, but I don't have any reason to accept that evaluation right now.
My recollection is that there have been almost no depolicing policies actually made in effect. Not even the Minneapolis complete dissolution of the police by whatever whatever time. Several big cities even increased their police funding. The argument that homicides have surged because of depolicing first needs to prove that depolicing actually happened.
I would instead argue that an increase in homicides might be caused by an decrease in the general wellbeing of people when dealing with a pandemic. We're getting to the point where many people either know someone who has died or knows someone who knows someone who has died.
> In the immediate aftermath of Brown’s death, self-initiated arrests fell 62 percent. Similar declines are seen across nine out of 11 categories of self-initiated activities, including foot patrol (down 82 percent) and pedestrian checks (76 percent). Notably, the decline in arrests is concentrated among misdemeanor arrests (more discretionary than felonies) and among arrests of blacks (rather than whites). This reduction in police activity persisted for at least the next two years. In the same period, the city experienced a significant rise in homicide and aggravated assault.
> The multicity analysis shows a similar pattern. Cheng and Long assume that a Ferguson Effect will be more common in cities with higher black population shares, so they compare those in the top quartile of black population against the other cities as a control. They identify the same phenomenon as in St. Louis: the blackest cities saw larger declines in arrests relative to those with smaller black populations, driven by a decline in misdemeanor arrests, and a simultaneous large (10 percent) increase in homicide.
> Both studies not only identify a decline in police activity and an increase in homicide after a high-profile incident but also argue that the nature of the decline in activity supports a “public scrutiny” mechanism for the effect. In particular, a drop in police activity for minor offenses drives the overall policing pullback. This fact supports a theory (as articulated by Premkumar) whereby officers reduce arrests that they deem “less important” in order to minimize public contact. That differs from a competing theory under which a loss of police “legitimacy”—which, in turn, reduces community engagement with the cops—drives the Ferguson Effect. If the competing theory were borne out, the study should have found reductions in arrests for offenses of all kinds.
But I just pointed out there's no evidence that policies are in effect. Your provided study is alarming but not at all supporting the specific language of your claim. Potentially the intention, but not the language.
My claim was about a combination of policies, pressure, and loss of trust, not policies alone. I don't purport to know the coefficients, but the cited studies do support my claim. I suspect the most damaging policies are unofficial--top down pressure from politicians to avoid an embarrassing incident and district attorneys who don't prosecute (why should officers risk a confrontation with a dangerous criminal if they can't trust prosecutors to keep them off the streets?).
Some of the protestors are/were openly anarchists, and eliminating police is central to what they want. There are certainly more than 3 anarchists around.
I think it's more than that. I've seen at multiple people on national television advocating for exactly that.
I'll concede that it's a small minority, though.
The problem is that it's a really stupid slogan. A natural, unbiased reading of it says something that 95% of the supporters don't mean. That's not the fault of the people interpreting it, it's the fault of those saying it.
I should think that the number of people who want to completely do away with the police is vanishingly small. Actually, it's probably about 3 people.
Importantly, and I do think this is worth pointing out, those people have zero political power & zero input on any budgets, legislation, etc. Situations like those described in the article are actually happening.
It seems like the right in the USA are being deliberately pedantic about the phrase "defund the police", to make it sound like those on the left are crazy.
Conservatives have been gaslighting the electorate for as long as I've been a voter. This is no different.
In June of 2020, as I'm sure you recall, The New York Times published an opinion piece titled "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police".
Why do you think the New York Times was publishing opinions that you believe were only held by 3 people?
You of course also remember that when the New York Times published the opinion piece titled "Tom Cotton: Send In the Troops" arguing that the military should be sent in to stop riots and looting, there was a massive backlash and the editor for the opinion page resigned. This even though the opinion expressed by Tom Cotton was fairly popular.
I would think if the New York Times was publishing opinions that had no popular support at all, there would have been a backlash about that, wouldn't you?
One of these things is of doubtful constitutionality, the other is not. If Cotton suggested suspending habeas corpus would you want the Times to print that too?
"For instance, during the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson called out the military to disperse mobs that prevented school desegregation or threatened innocent lives and property. This happened in my own state. Gov. Orval Faubus, a racist Democrat, mobilized our National Guard in 1957 to obstruct desegregation at Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower federalized the Guard and called in the 101st Airborne in response. The failure to do so, he said, 'would be tantamount to acquiescence in anarchy.'
More recently, President George H.W. Bush ordered the Army’s Seventh Infantry and 1,500 Marines to protect Los Angeles during race riots in 1992."
What Cotton suggested is expressly permitted by an act of Congress and that act has been invoked many times over more than two centuries. It's been used half a dozen times to suppress riots since the 1960's. Not one of those actions has ever been found to be unconstitutional.
Second, if Tom Cotton and only two other people in the entire US want habeas corpus suspended, than no, I would not want the Times to print an opinion column suggesting that. A poll had 52% of Americans agreeing with sending in troops to stop the riots. If Tom Cotton and 52% of Americans want habeas corpus suspended, then I think a paper that calls itself the "paper of record" is exactly where that case should be made.
Just as it would have been appropriate to make the case in those opinion pages for why we would send the 101st Airborne into Little Rock and Detroit, the 197th Infantry into Baltimore, the 1st Marines Division into Los Angeles, and military police to the Virgin Islands.
It's so weird we talk about it like this, to say an entire swath of social research and theorists are "crazy," because they have the audacity to think a less-than-150-year state institution is maybe not perfect.
Like, do any research at all into the history of criminal justice, you will find we live in a very contingent situation now, one that has other options.
Like, do you all really think that police have been around forever? Do you really all think we would be violent state-of-nature monsters without them? That civilization is assured by them? Are we really so historically shortsighted that we see the existence of police as exactly corollary to law and order?
Can we imagine for a second that just because something is sufficient doesn't mean that it is necessary? Can we think about this rationally at all?
And then look at cost of the status quo... I don't know, its just so sad this is how we talk about it: the police (specifically, its unions/fraternities) truly have won the cultural battle. Doesn't even matter if there are some radicals out there, because the only way we can talk about these things means they will always win.
Call those people naive if you like, but "crazy" is just disheartening to hear for people who are mostly just angry and wanting it to stop.
I mean, it is nothing short of crazy to think that solutions that worked 150 years ago would work better than the system that has evolved along side our society now. It is also crazy to think that we should throw out something that mostly works in favor of something entirely different when the ramifications of the new thing not working are very very serious.
Also, you're throwing up a lot of extreme straw man arguments like that's what is being said.
> Like, do you all really think that police have been around forever?
I believe in dinosaurs, so no.
> Do you really all think we would be violent state-of-nature monsters without them?
No. I think more people would be without them than with them. Even if the difference between the two is 1%, that's a pretty serious change for the worse.
> That civilization is assured by them?
No, it's assured by faith in the system. Much like money. If everyone decided the law didn't matter there is very little the police force could do about that.
> Are we really so historically shortsighted that we see the existence of police as exactly corollary to law and order?
No. I certainly don't believe that. It's a component, but a small piece of the pie.
> Can we imagine for a second that just because something is sufficient doesn't mean that it is necessary?
Sure. Totally on board for that. It is sufficient to drive a monster truck to get where I want to go, but certainly not necessary. Not really a hard thing to imagine.
I can run counter to basically every argument you lay and still believe that a police force is necessary without there being any logical inconsistency in my beliefs...
> And then look at cost of the status quo
Look at the cost of social security. Look at the cost of public school. There is so much tangible and intangible value locked up on those institutions that if anyone said "we can do better" you'd be hesitant to throw them out whether or not you agreed.
> the police (specifically, its unions/fraternities) truly have won the cultural battle
it's not a culture battle. We're in an equilibrium, and people are rightfully hesitant to leave it behind for promises of utopian glory. It's fine to think there is a better way, and it's fine to test that out. Looking at the places running such tests, the 'better ways' so far proposed are far short of actually better.
> Call those people naive if you like
It's a good term for how I see it.
> but "crazy" is just disheartening to hear for people who are mostly just angry and wanting it to stop.
It's subjective. If I saw someone saw off their own foot, I'd call them crazy. If I see someone do something, or advocate doing something, that I think would be extremely damaging, I call that crazy.
It's not crazy to want to do better, it's not crazy to be upset that things aren't getting better fast enough. Only another set of crazies are calling that crazy.
No, abolishing the police means getting rid of the police. You don’t get to redefine words with this sort of Doublespeak.
You wanted to capitalize on the thrill of saying something as bold as “Abolish the police” and then backpedal when it became convenient to take a more reasonable approach. It’s dishonest and it’s becoming a pattern after “Black Lives Matter” was called out for being similarly problematic. This isn’t limited to the left either. “Read my lips: no new taxes”, “Lock her up”, and “Build the wall” were likewise dishonest.
They might not get to “redefine words” but neither do you get to just change them to fit your point. The slogan used “defund” not ‘abolish”. “Defund” is somewhat ambiguous, indeed. That the initial slogan with “abolish” didn’t catch on actually helps to show that abolishment was not the intended meaning.
The parent poster used "abolish" which is why I used it. Also, that's the phrase I've most seen in the media. I respect that you may have seen "defund" used more frequently.
"Defund" isn't exactly ambiguous either. If you defund a police department, you've abolished it because police officers aren't going to work for free and the police buildings and vehicles will deteriorate from not being maintained. It is not possible to have a police force without funding.
It's like if I said "we should fire bullets at JimBob", and then after that happened acting surprised that JimBob died. "Whoa whoa whoa I just said to fire bullets at him, not kill him!" really shouldn't be fooling anyone.
HW absolutely meant "No new taxes" when he said it. That doesn't make it dishonest, but it does illustrate why boxing yourself into dogmatic ideological stances is a bad move from a policy standpoint.
Sorry to say but who ever decided that the phrase "defund the police" is good or smart made a huge mistake. Or they may have deliberately picked a phrase that would upset and confuse a large number of people. It has split the political discord right down the middle and you will never get proper reform.
The phrase that should have been used is "reform the police" because it would get almost every one aboard even the police themselves. Nothing is perfect in this world and almost every one can think of a way to improve something.
This decade of attempt to reform the police most people didn't know or care about. This new movement could have brought it to light and get something done that everyone can agree on. Instead it turned into a left vs right shit show.
(Disclaimer: I don't fully agree with the position but I felt it there is context collapse[0] happening that I want to push back against because I think context collapse is deeply poisonous to intelligent conversation.)
My understanding is "defund the police" is actually within the context that efforts to reform policing as an institution in america have broadly failed, so the only solution to try and make less-shitty police is to burn the institution to the ground and rebuild anew. In that context, "defund the police" makes total sense from the perspective of an activist who is agitating for a better system of community safety.
The problem is, "reform" is an extremely vague term that can be stretched from "rebuild completely" to "issue receipts to every subject of a police stop so that PoC can prove discrimination".
"Defund"/"Abolish" are crystal clear in their meaning.
But who wants to abolish the police? People these days read only headlines and you can not get people to vote for your movement when the title reads "abolish the police" and a few paragraphs down it says that you aren't for no police but a new police that is better etc.
Minneapolis city council members were absolutely on board with abolishing the police department. They tried to get the police department removed entirely from the city charter, replaced with a "safety" department that could optionally hire police staff, if they felt it was necessary.
They have since backed off (and several were voted out of office). They also used "abolish" and "defund" interchangably, because defunding and abolishing the police department was the goal.
Edit: I also just noticed several comments in this thread explicitely calling for abolishing as the commenters believe reform is impossible.
People need to stop with this gaslighting "No one ever meant abolish, it was always about lessening funding." It's not true and only hurts your cause when you don't acknowledge there are actual significant views more radical than your leanings.
Of course you can. With the despicable state some police departments are in, completely disbanding them without replacement would be the better alternative.
They had been trying to "reform" the Minneapolis police (where George Floyd was killed) for years, but the police union had successfully blocked even the most moderate changes. There are similar stories everywhere.
"Defund the police" is a good slogan because it makes it clear that you have to pick a side - the police have made it clear that "reform" is not going to be possible through cooperation. This isn't to say that there aren't plenty of individual officers who would support, or at least not obstruct, reform, but without destroying the existing institutions (police unions, primarily) that perpetuate the status quo, and disempowering the individuals who are committed to it, nothing is going to change.
People who don't live in areas of police corruption don't know this and will "vote" for the other side because they don't know what is meant with defund the police.
That is literally incorrect. You can google "defund" and the first definition is "prevent from continuing to receive funds". And it's common usage, as well - anytime a government passes a bill to "defund" a bill or a department, it means they are basically without money.
Saying I'm "literally incorrect" just makes me wonder what "figuratively incorrect" would mean in this situation.
You've made multiple comments under this article about how "defund" can only possibly mean removing 100% of funding. Sometimes other people use words differently from the way you do personally. You need to adapt your interpretation to their usage, not the other way around.
No I have not. I've made multiple comments about how "defund" is often, and reasonably (see definition and common usage), interpreted as such. Just expecting people to adapt their interpretation in the figurative way you want is not reasonable, and is not a winning political strategy either.
why do you consider "the police" a single unified group (aside from some "individual officers")? "the police" are not a federalized entity (yet(??)), so it seems at the very least disingenuous, but also possibly dangerous, to lump tens of thousands of people from disparate cities and counties and states into a single amorphous group, and then generate a slogan that "makes it clear you have to pick a side" on how you feel about them.
has anything good come from this pattern of overgeneralizing and then generating purposefully disingenuous propagandistic terms to force people to "pick a side"?
the police see themselves as a single unified group. this is actualized through culture (thin blue line, sheepdogs), organization (80% unionized, literally the state), and informal local agreements (gangs, corruption, coverups)
Because every police department is organized in the same general way and has the same incentives. It's not at all about the individual officers - it's that organizing the police in this way has a corrupting influence. (Or, at best, it attracts people who wish to abuse power in various ways.)
As mentioned upthread, this story of the small town that has turned into a front organization for a police force that, were they not operating under the label "police," would be a gang of highwaymen, is a pattern that repeats itself a lot! When you see something that happens repeatedly from many different individuals who all happen to be in the same circumstance, Occam's Razor demands you at least consider investigating the circumstance and not the people.
There are almost certainly a large number of genuinely good and kindhearted and well-intentioned people in the employ of various police departments. They should leave their jobs, lest they stop being good and kindhearted and well-intentioned and become dangerous to society. Ideally, they would do that of their own free will; alternatively, we can defund their payroll. I have no problem with the individual former police officer merely by virtue of their former employment, and I am more than happy to judge them as an individual on their own merits.
might it be possible that entire police/county sheriff departments are actually generally good people who don't do anything wrong? when you frame things as "'the police' are bad, except for some individuals," you are implicitly discounting this possibility, instead choosing to make broad sweeping statements about tens of thousands of people spread across millions of square miles, in wildly differing settings, with wildly differing local circumstances.
(I will refrain from commenting on your last paragraph so as to not get into an ideological flamewar.)
Well, I am not actually framing things as "'the police' are bad, except for some individuals." Sorry if that was unclear.
I really don't think it is either well-defined or relevant whether the individuals are "good" or "bad." As an analogy that is hopefully clear at the risk of being a little inflammatory: almost all of the 18-year-old conscripts of any random country you might be at war with have absolutely zero influence over the political direction of that country. But that doesn't change the fact that people handed them a gun and told them (even, perhaps, forced them) to shoot at you. They can be utterly kind and friendly individuals (see e.g. the World War I Christmas truce), but if they're about to shoot at you, that's a problem regardless of whether they're kind. When someone says "The XYZ army is about to invade us," it makes no sense to say "Well most of the XYZ soldiers are good people!"
And no, the distinction is not whether they're actually shooting at you. If they're lined up on the border ready to invade, if they're in training camps practicing shooting, if they're not assigned to be a footsoldier but they are assigned to build infrastructure and implement logistics for the invasion, etc., they're contributing to the invasion, and you'd still say that the entire invading army needs to be stopped. Saying that most of the invading army hasn't seen active combat yet and therefore isn't personally culpable is also nonsensical.
Or put another way - in gang-ridden territories or in post-war countries ruled by warlords, it's often the case that gang members or soldiers will do things to genuinely benefit the people who live there, running essential food and medicines across blockades, keeping people safe from other gangs or warlords, etc. That hardly justifies the gang or the warlord as a good government, though!
Every single person who works for a police department, without exception, works for an organization that is doing bad things. If, somehow, the specific things they do as individuals are good, when they do them on behalf of the organization, it serves to increase the legitimacy of that organization to gain more power and do more bad things in the future. If they are good people who haven't incurred personal moral culpability for doing anything wrong, great! I'm not in the business of judging souls for heaven or hell. I'm in the business of having opinions, as a citizen of a republic, about how that republic should be constituted.
There are in fact multiple political movements, from all sorts of perspectives, that refuse to vote because they don't want to grant legitimacy to an organization they have problems with! This is certainly a position I've seen on the American far left about our elections, but you also see it from entire political parties (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_boycott), and there's the more interesting position where Sinn Fein to this day gets elected to Parliament and refuses to participate or vote on things (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstentionism).
So, yes, I think that's a defensible position, and if you wanted to characterize my decision to vote as evidence that I believe that my government as an institution is salvageable and not inherently hopeless the way I believe the police as an institution are, I don't think you'd be wrong.
The other thing is that you wouldn't really do away with elections, you'd do away with the whole organization (the government) that you're electing people to. Which is, in fact, the anarchist position, and I think that position is also defensible.
> Every single person who works for a police department, without exception, works for an organization that is doing bad things.
I find this assertion, combined with the final paragraph from your previous post, interesting—given the very loose and broad criteria of "doing bad things" here, could you not replace "police department" with "government"? if so, then should your previous post's third paragraph not also apply to all employees of city, county, state, and federal governments as well?
if this is your end goal: uh, do you know anyone who's hiring?
This argument is hopelessly generalizable. Who in the world would does it not apply to!? Literally ever organization does “bad things” sometimes. That’s just the nature of groups of people. You are throwing out the baby with the bath water if you disregard kind, degree, personal involvement, etc.
> why do you consider "the police" a single unified group
Police unions are strong in this country. The police are definitely on an organized and unified front in regards to this. Saying "the police" referring to a "single unified group" is normal in every-day conversation in this country.
> "the police" are not a federalized entity (yet(??))
We have police that are federal in this country. "Federal police officer" is an actual term.
> it seems at the very least disingenuous [...] to lump [...] thousands of people [...] into a single amorphous group, and then generate a slogan that "makes it clear you have to pick a side" on how you feel about them.
The police are an organized force in this country protected and backed by local and federal governments. I feel like it's a weird and reductionist to say we can't address systemic issues with police as a group. I think we should both address the individualistic issues happening, as well as address the systemic issues that police are facing as an organized group.
Also - who cares if someone picks a side? In regards to the police I have been held at gunpoint for holding my wallet up in a dark car to see if I had my bank card. They thought it was a weapon I was brandishing toward them - it was not. My point here is that if/when the police suspect you of wrongdoing they will immediately be "picking a side" so why shouldn't I be able to pick a side?
> We have police that are federal in this country.
of course we have federal officers, but "the police" are not federalized, and hopefully that distinction and the reason for making it are clear. there is a huge difference between the current state of affairs vs. a world where our nation's police force was actually federalized & centrally managed. we don't live in that world, and pretending that we do, when we don't, but we easily could, isn't a very good idea.
> I feel like it's a weird and reductionist to say we can't address systemic issues with police as a group.
I never said that. where did I say that?
> Also - who cares if someone picks a side?
the problem isn't so much picking a side as it is in presenting any sort of political rhetoric in black-and-white, zero-or-one, left-or-right binaries—especially when distortionary, obfuscating memes/slogans are used to do so. this is literally the single biggest problem in contemporary politics. all nuanced discussion on an issue is lost when you frame things in terms of, "pick a side, you're either with us, or you're with the Nazis/etc. etc." ("well actually I take issue with this one aspect of what you're saying." "you would, Nazi! I knew you weren't really on Our Side.")
overgeneralizing issues and using propagandistic slogans literally designed to inflame and polarize, specifically in order to bifurcate the perception of reality among the general populace, has yet to be proven to actually solve anything—it really just seems like it makes people feel good for joining Team A or Team B, feeling righteous about being on The Correct Side Of The Issue, and vitriolic toward The Other Side. it's a great way to lead a country into a downward spiral nosedive toward destruction, and it's been highly effective so far—maybe we should stop and take notice of this phenomenon and take steps to rectify it!
> of course we have federal officers, but "the police" are not federalized
Huge swaths of police officers in this country are federal police officers - that was my only point. You made a claim that made it seem like police officers were not "federalized" yet and I rebutted that federal police are absolutely a thing.
I don't want to go off on a hypothetical tangent about a centrally managed police force.
---
> me: I feel like it's a weird and reductionist to say we can't address systemic issues with police as a group.
> you: I never said that. where did I say that?
The comment I responded to is as-follows (your words):
1. why do you consider "the police" a single unified group (aside from some "individual officers")?
2. "the police" are not a federalized entity (yet(??))
3. it seems at the very least disingenuous, but also possibly dangerous, to lump tens of thousands of people from disparate cities and counties and states into a single amorphous group
You are making a very clear argument against addressing police as a group, to the point of calling it "disingenuous" and "possibly dangerous." You make a very direct argument here and I think it's disingenuous to claim that you "never said that."
And with that specific bit - I'm done reading your post, and I'm done conversing with you on this topic.
> Huge swaths of police officers in this country are federal police officers - that was my only point.
right which is why "defund the police" is once again such a ridiculously overgeneralized thing to say! there's 17985 police agencies in the country, which includes federal, state, county, and city officers. each one of these things is wildly different from the other, and you're just throwing them all together and saying "defund 'em all," as though that could possibly be a solution to such a complex problem.
here's where the miscommunication lies, I believe:
put aside for a second why "reform the police" isn't a great slogan to get anything done (I agree btw)—let's say the idea of reforming police corruption had never been floated before, and then when "defund the police" came about, instead the slogan was "reform the police." in this hypothetical world, I would have much, much less of an issue with the idea of collecting all the police from all the disparate parts of the country and lumping them together. the reason for this is that if you live in a small town with a small local police department that is well-liked and good and fair and all that, then the locals could very easily agree that "the police," in general, should be reformed, but that the local cops are doing fine as is. you wouldn't be choosing them to "pick a side" ("for the police" or "against the police"), you're merely asking people to acknowledge that, in many places in the country, the police are not as just and good as your local cops, and as long as we can all agree that that's the case, then we can maybe start to work together to make things better for everyone.
instead, when you say "defund the police," you're alienating these same people who don't have a problem at all with their local police, especially in smaller towns and cities, because you're essentially instilling cognitive dissonance upon them, asking them to hold both "all police should be defunded" and "but idk I think my local cops are alright" in their heads at the same time. cognitive dissonance in values like this leads to political/ideological zealotry which doesn't accomplish anything other than dividing people and making everyone feel worse, while nothing really changes because your movement's explicitly stated goals (even if you don't actually mean "defund," it's what you're saying) are beyond the pale for many, many people. this is how you bifurcate and demoralize a population, and it's working fantastically.
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response to below comment:
> This is textbook moving the goalpost. Your original point was that we shouldn't make general statements about police, which is clearly nonsense. If you have other problems with "defund the police" as a slogan that's a separate issue.
how are any goalposts being moved when my initial post ended with
> has anything good come from this pattern of overgeneralizing and then generating purposefully disingenuous propagandistic terms to force people to "pick a side"?
it's called establishing a position and then building it up over the course of debate, I thought I made my overarching position here pretty clear: propagandistic overgeneralizations and slogans specifically designed to inflame and divide rather than unite are the single biggest threat we face as a nation today, and are quite rapidly bringing about the decline of the Republic as our perception of reality splits roughly in two.
This is textbook moving the goalpost. Your original point was that we shouldn't make general statements about police, which is clearly nonsense. If you have other problems with "defund the police" as a slogan that's a separate issue.
“Defund the police” is one of the most shockingly terrible slogans I’ve heard in my life. I know a lot of life long Midwestern Democrats that gasped in utter dismay when they heard this term and saw that yup, this is in fact what our party is going with.
It inspired some of the most insane and vile hatred I have ever witnessed.
Not being able to see that really just means you are out of touch with huge swaths of Americans of every political persuasion.
"Defund the police" is not a slogan. It's a policy demand.
It's not designed to appeal to Midwestern life-long democrats. It's designed to fix a problem.
The activists promoting the demand are out of touch with huge swaths of Americans, but by symmetry, that means huge swaths of Americans are out of touch with the activists who, through their activism, research, and personal experience, know the nature of policing in America is closer to Brookside, Alabama than to what their Elementary school teachers told them about the police.
> "Defund the police" is not a slogan. It's a policy demand ... designed to fix a problem
The "police" in this article are not a cost center, but rather a profit center. So, problem fixed?
I agree that the cancerous police budgets consuming municipal budgets is a problem, but the even deeper problem is that they're not bound by the law they purport to uphold. "Defund" does nothing to advocate for legal accountability, which is the primary problem.
There is no shortage of people all over the political spectrum who absolutely abhor the status quo of law enforcement in the US. You could have had the problem fixed already if you a) didn't go off half cocked with a stupid slogan that appeals to pretty much nobody b) thrown the conservatives a bone by abolishing the ATF or something.
Videos of unarmed people constantly being murdered by police had no effect on the public after activists shouted "defund the police". Silly.
I'm more inclined to believe corporate media convinced people the phrase was an issue.... most people dont have a problem with it, they were just given an opinion to parrot.
I like to contrast it with "black lives matter" by asking, if you literally succeeded, what would be the new reality. With "black lives matter" you'd be in a reality where everyone agreed that black lives matter. Which is great! With "defund the police" you'd be in a reality without any police forces. Not so great.
Locally we have an organization called "stop having kids". It's so dumb. If they succeeded literally, humanity would die out. They say it's a great slogan because it gets people talking. That's a lousy defense.
If you're trying to win elections, it's probably a bad battle to pick. But if you actually want to reform the police, it's a battle you are going to have to fight. I'll leave it to the galaxy brains to determine what the appropriate balance between the two is.
It’s not necessarily a good slogan if you live in a high crime area, where better or more policing might be highly desired. At least in the press, people calling for the defunding of the police were often co-located with some of the more violent riots of the last few years. I can appreciate that there are arguments to suggest that this is a false comparison. However, it must be admitted that the slogan was confusing and divisive, whereas not all issues around policing were nearly as divisive. (For example, there was broad support, and rightly so, for the jury verdict in the George Floyd case. )
I have lived in NYC and Bay area. Both times safe places in those areas. And sure I have never seen a crime happen.
But very close to me (like 15 min of walking), there are major armed crimes happening. There are enough guns and people willing to use them in this country that it is just not safe without the police.
There are many reasons for this, I probably agree with most of them, but until they are all solved we need the police.
I grew up in Norway, did not feel like this there at all. Of course crime does still exist, but I would not care how far it was to my local police station.
Also lived in the UK, felt very safe compared to the US.
A feeling of safety comes from within. Establishing a brutal traumatizing system that isn't oriented toward healing doesn't create a culture of safety, but of emotional codependence on violence.
"A feeling of safety comes from within." --- This is an actively counterproductive statement. Just look at the impetus behind "defund the police": the real police violence causes people of color to feel unsafe. On the flipside, crime often involves real violence that makes people feel unsafe. You can argue that policing isn't the answer to crime, but real danger is the root of feeling unsafe, even if (like everything) it is mediated by perception. A "culture of safety" must be rooted in a reality of safety.
That is exactly why it is stupid, if you force people to pick sides they will pick the police. I don't really love them, but I also don't want them gone and would not feel safe with no police.
I am super left wing, but if you force me to pick a side I am choosing the police without much thinking.
I understand not everyone thinks like this, but if you want to win elections in a two party system you need a broad coalition. You will not find a broad coalition that is willing to pick the side you want here.
You are making life choices without much thinking, by your own admission. You're allowed to do that.
Some of us choose more thoughtful paths and recognize 2-party systems as inherently abusive because they're out of alignment with reality, which is inherently nonbinary.
You are making life choices without much consideration of political and electoral reality, by your own admission. You're allowed to do that. Some of us choose more pragmatic paths and recognize that our individual dislike for 2-party systems does ~nothing to change the fact that we actually physically currently live in a 2-party system which is inherently binary.
If you want to win elections, build coalitions. If you want to rant about how abusive the current system is, you can do that, but don't expect to actually win anything.
I don't allow existing systems to limit my thinking like that. Optimizing a part or feature of a system that doesn't need to exist is an element of dumb design. Pragmatism demands exploring ideas beyond the existing systems, otherwise we'll remain trapped in them.
That's definitely disempowerment talking. There's nothing stopping anyone from creating an alternative government that meets more needs and is more fun to interact with. If it accomplishes that and people are willing to implement it and it doesn't violate laws by existing, then how does any preexisting system prevent people from switching over to it, aside from locking up people who use the new system?
I don't even understand what you are talking about. Will this new government control the military/police/taxation? If not then it is just another burden for me. And the old government will still be around so you achieved nothing.
I am all for disruption but I really don't know what your plan is. And please understand that disruption is not always good for everyone. A lot of people depend on our current government to survive.
I'm trying to point out the system can be changed from the outside. That's it. I'm not trying to tell you how to do it. I'm simply pointing out it's possible.
Thinking on this more this conversation reminds me of the new programmer who joins the team and then starts advocating we rewrite everything in Rust, when we need to ship in two weeks. Yes, there might be a perfect system. No, we do not live in or possess this perfect system. Any reform, any positive change, needs to be based on where we actually are. Saying this is how things should be does approximately nothing to get us there. Refusing to engage with the current system does nothing to get us there. disparaging the current system does nothing to get us there. The only thing that actually moves the needle is sitting down and fixing things one little bug at a time. It isn't fun or glamorous and there certainly isn't a divisive slogan for it, but that is reality as I know it.
You should instead actually consider the side being offered here instead of seemingly rejecting it over a slogan.
Police duties are expensive and stretched pretty thing, and thus they get funding for things that should not be within the purview of policing. A classic example is police response to mental health crises, and the frankly bizarre and spurious justification that creates for outlawing suicide. Far too often, people need help but are sent a militarized police response instead.
A retort to this is frequently around the suicidal person being armed and therefore needing armed police, but that seems to me like exactly what you should expect when sending heavily armed wannabe-soldiers to bust down the door of someone who needs a doctor or a therapist. Predictable fear responses are used as justification to continue or even escalate the problem rather than address it systemically.
Hold on so if someone is intending to kill themselves with a gun, so cops that come have guns, the only reason a person has a gun suddenly becomes to defend themselves from the police? What happened to the original gun? Am I just parsing this wrong?
The original gun probably wasn’t going to be fired at all. A trained responder could talk then down. But throw in a hostile force and you’ve increased the likelihood of a shootout.
Also it may not even have been a gun. The police will also treat a knife or a motor vehicle as a deadly weapon and respond with lethal force.
I don't think so, if there is a gun the police is coming with guns. That is true even in Norway. Once you start waving around a gun or something that looks like a gun with some threats as well you will be taken seriously. With one very possible consequence that you will be shot.
Defund the police is not solving this situation. It could solve a lot of situations more calmly but not this one.
Wouldn't this result in increased polarization? For one side it would have the literal meaning and for the other it would have the sanewashed figurative meaning.
There are essentially 3 ways to get rid of qualified immunity:
1. constitutional amendment (3/4 of the states)
2. supreme court entirely throws it out (5 supreme court justices)
3. prosecutors (DAs, AGs & US Attorneys) chip away at it bit by bit
When a case comes before the supreme court they can essentially create a new set of circumstances that will no longer be qualified going forward. The problem with even making slow, incremental progress is that most prosecutors just don't seem to ever prosecute cops.
The problem is that you cannot expect an organization to effectively police itself. That's just a simple fact of life. Organizations will protect their own and refuse to admit wrongdoing until they are forced to by outside means. This is human nature. Prosecutors can't prosecute cops because they are part of the same system. The only way you hold the justice system accountable for miscarriage of justice is to have a completely separate body act as the check.
Might as well extend that to the other branches as well. Create a 4th branch of government who's only purpose and power is to jail members of the other branches who break the law since they can't be expected to police themselves and power corrupts all.
Kind of like how members of the military are subject to UCMJ courts. Civilian members of government should be subject to a court as well.
I think at this point you need a national change and force new regulations down from the top. But the movement has turned into a left vs right issue and there will be no change from this government stalemate.
> The phrase that should have been used is "reform the police" because it would get almost every one aboard even the police themselves.
Yeah, that's the problem with "reform", it is so meaningless that the very police that need to be reformed are all for it!
This is not a system that can be fixed, a ludicrous percentage, maybe as high as 95%, of current police will need to find a new line of work for policing to be fixed in the US.
> it's not likely to ever expect the cops to get on the side of checks notes taking funding and job security away from themselves
Then align the incentives.
Harsher penalties for turning them off/disabling them/tampering with their wear protocol in any way.
Weave into the salary a financial bonus for long periods of time without incidents.
And since this is HN: Add some AI bullshit that reviews the tapes to make sure the cameras are not being covered or whatever with a secondary manual review by an outside entity to rule out false positives, make sure every police officer is aware of the automated review, and even if that system doesn't work perfectly I'm sure even a shitty government contractor can make it made good enough to put enough fear into enough corrupt cops so that camera shutdowns don't become routine.
I'm just going to go ahead and say that police unions wield outsized political power, which is why people who own the "abolish/defund the police" slogan think "reform" isn't enough. The reforms may get passed (or we might have another, more "important" political cause that sucks momentum away) but if the cops themselves are hostile to the reforms, they have plenty of ways to pull the teeth out of the regulations, or just get them overturned/taken out of the next CBA.
Police "unions" are exceedingly well-funded, well-networked groups that can apply a TON of political and electoral pressure. They also provide (very good/expensive) lawyers for any cop found guilty of an infraction. On top of that, the very act of prosecuting cops is essentially biting the hand that feeds you for a DA/AG.
The cops will always opposing things that make the job of being a cop harder. The same way a software developer does. You can't make the incentives align if the people who currently are police are the people you feel should not, under any circumstances, be the ones in charge of public safety. The number of low-grade thugs in the US police forces is pretty apparent when you look at the domestic violence numbers.1 Either abusive people are self-selecting into being cops, or being a cop makes you abusive.
TL;dr- You want "reform" because you think there's inherent value created by the current system, and I don't because I think the value is an byproduct and not the goal.
The phrase I would use, myself, is "abolish the police". "Defund the police" also adequately captures my view: "reform the police" does not. I do not want "proper reform."
There is clearly a need for some governmental mechanism for public safety: it's also clear that the police, as we know it are the wrong starting point, and if at all the existence of the police prevents crime, it's by coincidence.
(I also have no problem being partisan about my political views. They're political views! If you could get everyone of every political view to agree on something, it's probably ineffective. Standing up for specific strong viewpoints is a good thing.)
Exactly how I feel - any softer language would be forgotten and swept aside. I've heard the "police reform" drum being banged on my entire life with little to no effect - I don't blame them for trying a new slogan that cuts deeper.
The middle class, the main power center in America, rarely interfaces with the police. When they do the police are very nice and polite to them and provide a sense of safety, help, and support. They are viewed as super heros.
The lower classes are not treated like this in any way, shape, or form. My family spent many years being targeted and harassed by local small town police in various jurisdictions. Driving a car that is more than ten years old is a great way to attract police attention. Driving a new F-150, they just smile and at you and hollar "Nice truck!".
It did cause me to get very aquianted with my civil rights though. At the end we were pretty good at thwarting the harassment using a variety of methods to assert our rights.
When I was 18 I ran over two brothers on purpose and skipped town. They were on drugs and beating someone in my passenger seat to death. Their sister blocked the front of my car so I threw it in reverse and floored the gas. They were inside the passenger door that was open, sweeping them under the car (a Ford Thunderbird).
Anyway, when the police caught up with me at work the officer saw that I was a clean cut white boy with a new car and decided on the spot that I had already been punished enough (after confirming I was there to buy/sell drugs). My car door was wasted. He just chuckled and left after mentioning the brothers were still in the hospital in really bad condition.
I thought for sure I was going to prison. I have more stories like this.
> The middle class, the main power center in America…
I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
The power in America is at the very top with wealth and favors. The middle class has no real say in anything. I’m pretty sure most people would agree that they have no pull with their congress people after voting. But ultra wealthy people sure do.
> Exactly how I feel - any softer language would be forgotten and swept aside
It's not as if they only had this one horrible slogan and everything else is "softer language" or exactly the same. Yes, a new slogan that has some bite was a good idea, the one they went with was a horrible mistake that only made it harder for them to accomplish their goals.
Many many people want changes to the way police operate, no one wants a police force that doesn't have any funding.
It's almost like slogans aren't politics, but just a way of summing up something you don't want to think too hard about...
"Make America Great Again" means literally nothing. At least defund the police states a concrete goal. Don't even get me started on how bastardized "Critical Race Theory" has become.
> At least defund the police states a concrete goal.
A goal that no one wants. Every one wants police to exist. That means they want police to be funded. The minute that slogan reached the public conservatives started with "If they are successful you won't have police when you are in danger because they will have no funds to help you". The slogan has done more to hurt the changes of meaningful change than to help it.
Not that audience. They already felt that depending only on police for protection was stupid. They buy guns so they can protect themselves and their families. They still depend on police though.
Conservatives are fearful by nature. They always suspect that some group of "others" is out there just waiting to take everything they love from them. Many of them live in rural/remote areas where "others" aren't as prevalent and police response times are poor. They still love police though, in part because they want to feel safe and protected, but also because they like to see "others" being punished. They really love punishment. They're convinced that fear of punishment is the only thing standing between order and chaos. The harsher the punishment, the more peaceful the world. Police represent order, safety, and help keep the "others" in control. Defunding them is not an option for these people.
Without any police how would you suggest people in a city deal with a murder? Who would investigate it? Who would arrest the person responsible? Who would enforce contracts? What would stop anyone from taking anything they could take by force? Not wanting police publicly funded (“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” style) is absurd enough, but to think that policing as a whole doesn't need to exist at all is a new take I hadn't seen before. What's the alternative?
I appreciate the responsive, but that's a very poorly thought out piece. It gives a very small number of very specific cases where police (supposedly) aren't needed at all, and others where they could be replaced but fails to say what they'd replace them with beyond "civilian services". The police are a "civilian service". Police officers are civilians.
It also fails to address what the difference is between police and "civilian services" that perform exactly the same function, what will stop the new service providers from becoming exactly what the current one has become, or how breaking up the current organizational structure into multiple entirely separate organizations tasked with extremely limited roles would produce greater efficiencies and effectiveness.
I agree that police are poorly suited for mental health work and I think we would be much better off getting mental health professionals in that role to help the person in crisis, probably along with police backup (for safety). Police do a very poor job of both helping people with mental illness and keeping people safe while responding to mental health crisis, but with oversight and accountability they could do one of those things very well.
I agree that traffic cops don't need to be armed to the teeth to pull over speeders and that they shouldn't use unmarked cars, but I think it's pretty useful that when they pull someone over they can see if they are a wanted criminal, determine if the car they are driving has been stolen, and arrest people who are intoxicated. They can do those things because they are working under a single organization. The cop pulling over speeders has access to criminal databases updated by other police officers in other departments (like the ones dealing with homicide, missing persons, and stolen cars) and can take dangerous people to a jail cell to be watched over by jailers who are also other police officers. Having all those different types of officers under one umbrella organization means that hiring practices, training, and polices can be consistent between them, that inter-departmental communications can flow easily, and that oversight can be simplified and consolidated. Imagine how much more work it would take to get multiple different "civilian" organizations to work together, handle passing around access to highly sensitive information securely, and to monitor them all individually.
They entirely hand-wave police preventing and stopping violence by saying that "In most incidents of violent crime, police are responding to a crime that has already taken place." which is great for "most incidents" but none of the rest of them. They say police are "ill-equipped" to investigate crime, ignoring the fact that every crime that has ever been investigated and justice was served happened because they did their job. Yes, there are problems, but no alternative organization has ever done a better job and they say nothing about why or how their "specialized service" would.
Ultimately their plan to replace police with "New Police but somehow also not connected to an institution of policing" isn't compelling. All of the fundamental problems with oversight and regulation are still unsolved. All of the problems with police unions and the relationship between law enforcement and the court system are still unsolved. It's "New Police", but less organized, and less capable.
It's a whole lot easier to reform and manage one system, than try to reform and manage countless separate unaffiliated systems trying to do the exact same job in different ways. Change is needed, and not all of their ideas are terrible, but there's no reason we couldn't accomplish them without making the problem larger and harder to manage and there's no indication on that website as to why that wouldn't be case with hundreds of totally separate New Police forces doing the same essential job of policing.
That pretty much sums up what I've seen so far. A lot of differing ideas about what defending the police means where the most extreme voices (abolish the police for example) offer zero explanations on how a society can get by without any law enforcement or why their alternatives would fair any better while more moderate takes deal solidly with reforming the system that we have.
I do get the frustrations expressed by those taking the more extreme view, but it comes off as more of an emotional outburst than a path forward. It's understandable to be frustrated and outraged enough to want to abolish policing entirely at this point, but it's also not constructive or helpful.
The good thing is that everybody is pretty clear on what the problems are, but I fear that those seeking radical/counterproductive changes to society like getting rid of police entirely will hold back the rest of us either by rejecting anything that doesn't burn the justice system to the ground, or by convincing others that there's no hope in reformation of what we have today while offering no actual solutions leading people to feel helpless and defeated at a time when the message people need is "Change is possible and necessary, we just need to insist on it and work to make it happen"
Just because we're here talking about how terrible it is doesn't mean that it isn't also hurting the actual cause. The cause isn't to get people to repeat or discuss a slogan, but to make dramatic reforms to police. The slogan hurts that effort by turning people who'd otherwise agree to reforms against supporting the movement. It's a horrible slogan that has made it harder to accomplish the actual aim of police reform.
When I hear the phrase, to me it's more about shifting resources from punishment based (policing), to community development in historically underserved minority communities. The effects of redlining mean we still have many highly racially segregated cities. It's directly acknowledging and confronting that history, which is uncomfortable for a lot of white people.
One can support both public safety and community development, and it's win-win if helping raise people up out of poverty reduces the need for police presence.
> When I hear the phrase, to me it's more about shifting resources from punishment based (policing), to community development
Nothing in the phrase "defund the police" says anything about any of that. It is the goal, but the slogan doesn't reflect that anywhere in any way. When you hear it, you think about the intended meaning, while the vast majority hears only what it actually says which is "remove funding from the police" and no one wants that.
Conservatives are fearful people and those against police reform took the opportunity handed to them and reinforced that very message: "If you let these liberals have their way they will make it impossible for police to protect you by defunding them". It's too bad because lots of people who would support reforms to police want nothing to do with any effort under the "defund the police" banner. No one wants a police force that doesn't have any funds.
> while the vast majority hears only what it actually says which is "remove funding from the police" and no one wants that.
The vast majority of white people? It's okay to be angry about state executions at the hands of police, and about the legacy of slavery. The wording reflects that anger. If it makes white people uncomfortable that's their problem. (This is coming from a white person who does not self-identify as "liberal")
I've long suspected that the "defund" moniker was maliciously attached by the other side, as a way of shaping the narrative. "Rebuild" or "reform" would sound entirely too reasonable. If you just repeat the inflammatory term loud enough and often enough, it becomes the de facto name for something even if it's almost entirely wrong. And then you spend the rest of your career tearing down the strawman that you built. It's very profitable.
The thing is, for most police reform activists, defunding the police is the key method by which reform takes place. I agree it’s bad branding, but it’s pretty obvious we won’t see substantial police reform unless we defund them. More police is not always the answer to more crime, sometimes it makes more sense to fund other civil services instead.
> The thing is, for most police reform activists, defunding the police is the key method by which reform takes place
“Defund” advocates distinguish themselves from “reform” advocates because they see the police reform movement as having made the problem worse by sucking money out of other local services into police budgets in the name of supporting reforms (leading to police role expansion as there are fewer other tools to handle local issues.)
They literally see “police reform” as a major source of current problems, not the solution.
(They can accurately be described as local government reform activists, but the central specific reform they support is reducing the resources and role of the local centralized paramilitary law enforcement entities, and distributing both resources and responsibilities elsewhere.)
> sometimes it makes more sense to fund other civil services instead
Such as? The US invests an absurd amount of money into education and a sizable amount on welfare. Both of which also seemingly suffer from efficiency issues.
Reform is really the only option when money stops being efficient. Over time, systems accumulate crusts of leeches who live off the system offering little in return, stealing resources from others who are more honest, by merely knowing what the weaknesses of the system are. It's at that point where reviewing and heavily reforming your rules until these people are screaming bloody murder becomes the only fix.
> but it’s pretty obvious we won’t see substantial police reform unless we defund them.
I disagree. While we can't just throw money at a problem and expect it to get better, we're going to have to invest in police far more than we have done to get real change. No one wants to live somewhere where police don't have the funds to do their job correctly. We all just want police to do their jobs correctly. That requires oversight and that requires funding.
We have to buy body cams for every officer and build/maintain the backend systems to support them, we have to pay for better training in deescalation tactics, we have to pay for better tracking of incidents and reporting, we have to pay for new hires to replace problem officers, we have to pay for independent oversight boards and community programs. There is a lot of work to do and all of it is going to require extensive funding.
Accountability is the key to reformation, not defunding. That means removing the police's ability to police themselves (something they've failed at) and having independent review boards handle minor issues while district attorneys and judges throw police behind bars for major ones. Changes are needed throughout the justice system to make this happen.
You have to invest in something to repair it, not starve it. Some reforms, like investing in mental health services, restricting civil asset forfeiture, and demilitarization will mean that some departments can get by with fewer officers and might shrink their budgets, but I suspect we'll just be spending much of what we save on oversight and training.
"Defund the police" was born out of the anger within the Black activist community post the events of the George Floyd shooting. It wasn't something that was run through a PR firm and focus group tested, it was very much a primal scream of "fuck the system and burn it to the ground" against the establishment in its entirety.
Obviously, it became problematic once it was assimilated by the very machine it was raging against, but it was never meant to be palatable to the mainstream or politically correct.
I think you've articulated what the problems are -- that people are speaking out of anger, not carefully and thoughtfully.
Classical activists like Rosa Parks, MLK, and Frederick Douglass were careful, articulate, and thoughtful -- and they had far more of a positive influence because of it.
That's not to say that we should close our ears to people's political expressions, but advocating untenable policy never achieves much good, no matter how much feeling is behind it. We have to move beyond the primal screams and feelings toward thoughtful, articulate, actionable policy that makes good sense and has a net effect of building up society into something good instead of merely tearing it down. It's much harder and more important to build well than to tear down.
This is where good education becomes an absolute necessity. Instead of lowering standards and making school easier, we should focus on making it more accessible while keeping standards high. We need articulate, thoughtful, well-read people if we are to achieve a better society; I'm not talking about STEM -- while it's important, STEM helps people do, not think. How many of these modern activists have read Milton, Locke, Hegel, Descartes, or Aristotle?
So I see these problems (people talking about "tearing it all down") as primarily a symptom of a lack of good education.
> Classical activists like Rosa Parks, MLK, and Frederick Douglass were careful, articulate, and thoughtful -- and they had far more of a positive influence because of it.
If we’re being honest about history it’s because these are the people that some choose to celebrate and elevate. They are certainly worthy of praise and remembrance, but especially with regards to the civil rights movement it was not all of even mostly pretty. Even then some people choose to ignore words from the “articulate” people mentioned that make them feel uncomfortable.
I think it’s pretty rich to deny good education and then complain when the neglected don’t speak in the preferred manner. There are plenty of educated and articulate people who have been making the same point for years and nobody listened.
> Even then some people choose to ignore words from the “articulate” people mentioned that make them feel uncomfortable.
If you're making good points that contradict what people believe, they'll ridicule or at least ignore you -- that's par for the course. We celebrate people like this because they persevered in doing good in the face of intense opposition.
> I think it’s pretty rich to deny good education and then complain when the neglected don’t speak in the preferred manner.
I'm not sure what your point is. I am promoting good education - I think the system as-is has to be reformed. People need good education, especially people trying to promote societal reform.
> There are plenty of educated and articulate people who have been making the same point for years and nobody listened.
For people who are promoting good causes, let's support them and encourage them to persevere despite how difficult it is to continue being ignored and/or persecuted. The truth will prevail in the end: "For nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light." (Luke 8:17)
> If you're making good points that contradict what people believe, they'll ridicule or at least ignore you -- that's par for the course.
I think GP is saying people still ignore the point of those very people they're praising.
In particular, Republicans (and politicians in general) love quoting MLK, but weirdly, they never seem to remember the "white moderate" quote:
> I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
You're making the point that MLK was beloved and effective because he was thoughtful and articulate, but there wasn't a single day in his life that he wasn't disliked by the majority of white americans: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/17/mlk-is...
What made King popular was dying.
So, yes, wagging the finger at people shouting "defund the police!" and pointing to MLK as an alternative is pretty rich.
This is definitely one of the less-fun emergent phenomena of the internet and social media.
Personally this is why I believe in building better social media bubbles, as much as most people disagree with the concept of a social media bubble I think it’s the only way to stay sane
Good lord yes. The second I heard the phrase "defund the police" I immediately had a vision of the conservative attack ads:
Open on an elderly woman, sitting quietly at home knitting. Suddenly we hear a window smash, and we see a burgler, in a ski mask and everything, attacking her window with an axe. She lets out a scream and runs for her landline. She dials 911, breathing heavily, and says "Hello, I need help-". But an automated voice on the other line cuts her off "we're sorry, due to recent funding changes, the operating hours of emergency services has been reduced. To leave a message, please stay on the line". As the voice drones on, we zoom in on the phone, hear a muffled scream, and the phone drops dramatically onto the floor. Fade to black, brought to you my Americans for a more American America.
... I mean seriously, the attack ad writes itself. I would honestly donate money every month to a nonprofit who's sole job was to find progressive activists, and run whatever shit they are saying through a focus group. I'm in favor of police reform and everything those activists are saying, but they need to get their shit together.
The phrase I would have used is "pass the Obama police reforms." "Reform the police" is perhaps too vague - reform means different things to different people and status quo keepers are often celebrated as "reformers". On the other hand, Obama wrote a list of seven explicit reforms that police departments should make. They really aren't that controversial. And, Obama was going through a popularity surge (as Trump was going through an unpopularity surge).
I think such a slogan would have captured a solid 60-70% of the electorate, which the current "defund" rhetoric hovers around the high 30s.
>Sorry to say but who ever decided that the phrase "defund the police" is good or smart made a huge mistake. Or they may have deliberately picked a phrase that would upset and confuse a large number of people.
I believe it was Black Lives Matter (an organisation whose name is literally a divisive statement) that coined that phrase, or at least popularised it.
To be honest with you, if you look at their actions, I'm not sure if the goal is to actually end police violence/abuse of power. If that did happen, all of these influential activists would suddenly be out of a "job".
You had a lot of interesting pieces and then diluted the impact of your statement by tying in "defunding the police" which is an overly fraught almost meaningless phrase at this point since it means almost something completely different to every person who hears it - which loses all its value.
I think most reasonable people can agree with your previous points that this is in fact a corrupted system. That was where you had the most power of your comment.
> When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community.
All too often arguments against this interpret 'defund' at the farthest possible extreme, but no one is calling for an end of law enforcement.
The reality is that providing constant budget increases for better weapons, faster cars, additional staff, etc. is causing the police to become more militarized. The Military are a defense against enemies. As police become more militarized their enemy becomes the civilians who they are meant to protect and serve.
The actual idea is to defund police departments as they are structured today, and allocate that money instead to social and mental health programs as well as law enforcement with a foundation in de-escalation and transparency.
Of course there would still be law enforcement to maintain peace and safety, and it would be based on transparency and accountability.
> no one is calling for an end of law enforcement.
There are several comments in this discussion calling for abolishing the police. Whenever this topic gets brought up, it usually seems like half the people are defending "Defund the Police" by saying that no one wants to get rid of the police, and the other half are defending "Defund the Police" by telling people why the police should be abolished.
And people with political power are calling for the abolishing them as well. This is Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from last April:
> No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can't be reformed.
I'm not sure why people who want reform are so set on tying themselves to this slogan. If I starting chanting "Defund Public Schools!", I wouldn't expect anyone to interpret that as "remove bloat from school budgets and use the money to fund social services for the kids in order to lessen the burden on teachers and make public schools function better."
I used the term 'law enforcement' and not the term 'police' intentionally as law enforcement is an umbrella while police are a specific group within it.
The way I see it the police subgroup could be defunded with new approaches deployed to maintain peace and safety, without needing to cease law enforcement as a whole.
When you drive down into what's happening here, it looks pretty clearly like the town is operating a "speed trap" on a section of Interstate that goes through the city limits. It's overwhelmingly likely that a majority of these stops are technically legitimate, even if the article is able to come up with a handful of sensational-sounding cases. Traffic violations are routine. You could sit a cop on just about any stretch of road in the town where I live and pull people over all day every day for totally legitimate violations, if that's what you wanted to do.
Hell, there's a school speed-zone camera right outside my window. I could sit here and watch its flash light-up violators' license plates all day -- on a stretch of road that's clearly marked as a school zone with a speed camera!
The status quo is that a significant percentage of drivers violate the law every time they get behind the wheel and a lot of Americans more or less think it's no big deal, despite overwhelming evidence for the problems it causes.
Alas, as this article demonstrates, if you hold these drivers accountable, then most Americans will perceive them to be innocent victims of out-of-control police.
>Sandra Jo Harris, a 52-year-old grandmother, claims in a lawsuit she pulled off I-22 at Cherry Avenue on Jan. 8, 2020, as she often did when she went to visit her daughter. It was nearing dusk, and as she drove into the neighborhood she didn’t think much about the unmarked black SUV with tinted windows on the side of the road. She turned on her lights, according to her lawsuit, because of the approaching darkness.
>But when she did, the unmarked SUV pulled into the street, crossed the center line and sped toward her car, blue lights flashing. She was not speeding, or breaking the law, she argued in the suit. She pulled to the side of the road as the SUV pulled behind her, and a wrecker simultaneously parked nearby. It frightened her, and led to more trouble.
> Officers, dressed completely in dark, unmarked uniforms approached her, and one accused her of flickering her lights to warn others of their presence, her suit alleges. Unsure what was happening, Harris dialed 911. But an officer grabbed the phone and threw it to the ground, breaking it, the lawsuit says. Police put her in a patrol car and searched her vehicle for drugs.
>Harris’ lawyers contend she was taken to the Brookside jail, strip-searched, and told she could be jailed up to two days. She had an asthma attack and a panic attack, but when she knocked on the door to alert a guard, a jailer said if she continued to knock she would be charged with attempting to escape. Eventually she was given an inhaler and treated by paramedics.
>Police charged Harris with flickering her lights – or “nuisance of casting lights from motor vehicle on real property at night,” which she argues did not happen and eventually was dropped. She was also charged with resisting arrest. A report quoted in the suit claimed she “tighten (sic) arm muscles from getting handcuff (sic).”
>In addition, the police charged her with making a false 911 call, obstructing government operations by refusing to give proper papers, and disorderly conduct for yelling for others to come out of their homes. They let her out of jail at midnight, long after her family had made bond.
Let's recap. A group of unmarked men in an unmarked vehicle pulled over a woman for using her lights at night, destroyed her property, denied her medical assistance, strip searched her, accused her of drug possession, threatened to charge her with escaping jail, charged her with resisting arrest for tightening her arms, and released her way past posting bond. AND, this is one of the luckier, wealthier victims who had legal recourses to file lawsuit.
In another instance, an officer was literally inventing law on the fly -- this is more than a speedtrap.
I'm annoyed by this story before the first sentence is even complete. Who cares that she's a grandmother? What an absolutely irrelevant detail designed to preload sympathy for her before we even know any of the details.
But assuming the events unfolded as she describes, this particular case is clearly egregious. There's no evidence that this is the modal case. We're mostly talking about legitimate (if relentless) ticketing of traffic violations.
To the extent that an increase in the number of police interactions is going to result in an increase in the prevalence of bad interactions (which I think is true), the answer is much more automated enforcement.
A town this abusive is certain to have all their technicalities in line. Here, it's that unattended vessels be towed off of public roadways or property. They're unattended because of frivolous detainments.
PSA: when getting pulled over, you should, after appearing controlled and predictable to the police, find private property to pull onto and call a friend or family to be ready to retrieve your car to prevent this particular abuse.
Aside from the other response to you, showing what is clearly not routine policing:
>The status quo is that a significant percentage of drivers violate the law every time they get behind the wheel and a lot of Americans more or less think it's no big deal...
This is pretty damning evidence of negligent road design. The roads are built for speeds so far above the posted limit that police officers are then required to enforce limits that are, compared to the road's design speed, pernicious and arbitrary.
Traffic engineers like to pretend that speeds can be limited only by enforcement, in glaring contradiction to the fact that all of the design process centers around a (fast) design speed.
There's an engineer in Minnesota who is trying to sue the pants off of egregious offenders to send a message, and it's the most inspiring use of litigation I've ever heard.[0]
Yes, this is right. Enforcement should be third, behind better road design and automation within the vehicle (i.e. speed governors and geofencing).
There’s some skepticism in left-leaning circles about the fairness or utility of automated enforcement, but I hope articles like this one demonstrate why it’s so much better.
(In this particular case we're mostly talking about Interstate traffic, it seems, which, to be frank, I'm far less concerned about. If anything is wrong with their relentless ticketing it's that it's focused in the wrong place.)
There is also automated enforcement outside the vehicles. It seems like this works to great effect in Europe although they seem to have political systems that don't result in, say, quietly changing yellow light timings to get more revenue.
Looking at the map, I'm surprised that Google Maps/etc don't route around such abuse. For people that have no choice but to go through there, fine, but this seems like the kind of thing that would be worth driving an extra half hour to avoid. They already have "avoid toll roads", and this is worse.
I mean, ideally I'd like to be able to define my own don't-go-there areas, such as near airports or areas that smell bad, but having defaults that route traffic around areas like this seems good.
Legislating that traffic/etc fines go to a _state_ budget instead of local town budgets might solve this, but I imagine that would be very hard to pass, let alone survive lawsuits.
The closest thing I can think of that they did was with Google Flights "basic economy" and similar fares (no carryon, etc) had a big red warning icon, most airlines ditched those types of fares within like a year.
If we're looking to technological solutions, what about crowdsourcing some drones to drop Molotov cocktails on these criminals' houses? They could even be adorned with a Punisher logo to ironically take back the symbol. Pay off the underfunded fire department to just watch them burn. Cryptocurrency was supposed to be good for something, right?
> Or there’s another resident who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate.
"Simply using the left lane" is illegal unless you're actively passing someone. In my state it's one mile. If you haven't passed someone in the last mile, you need to be in the right lane. I know in some states it's a quarter mile, which at 65-75 seems a bit aggressive (basically saying you have to be going 15-20+ faster than the person you're passing just to safely get over in time).
But seriously, hanging out in the left lane is stupid and unsafe, regardless of your speed.
It really depends on the state laws [0]. It also really depends on the traffic patterns. In places like California where there are 7+ lane wide roads, the left lane is not so special (unless it's a HOV lane). If you've only got two lanes, it's more important to keep the left lane for passing, but when things are bumper to bumper, that doesn't make any sense.
Seems like it would be the opposite to me: If there are only 2 lanes, you need both for travel. But if you have 7 you can reserve some for speeders.
And in all my driving, I've yet to be overtaken legally on the left - they always speed in order to do it, which is illegal. So I'm not clear why "it's more important to keep the left lane for passing".
Just make the left lane "speed limit" lane, and the right lane slow lane. Meaning if you are going the speed limit you can stay in the left lane.
(This is a hot topic, I'm sure I'll get downvotes, I don't care about that, but I would appreciate replies more. Specifically about what's wrong with staying in the left lane if you are going the maximum legal speed.)
My friends who are left lane hoggers say this all the time. My response is "show me your badge." Because unless you have one, you're not authorized to enforce speed limits. If you want to call 911 and report the speeder in the left lane, fine. But if you want to drive in the left lane just because you like it over there, you're forcing people to pass you on the right (which is dangerous) and you're disrupting the normal flow of traffic (also dangerous). If you think it should be your job to hog the left lane to slow down speeders, join your local police department. Otherwise move to the right unless you're passing.
So then where is your badge? Are you not doing the exact same thing, by making it your job to tell people to move out of the left lane?
> pass you on the right (which is dangerous)
What's dangerous about it? And don't say "the left lane is for slow cars", because speeders are WAY more dangerous, yet you are not criticizing them.
> you're disrupting the normal flow of traffic (also dangerous)
I don't see any disruption to the normal flow. Set your cruise control to the speed limit, and just drive smoothly. There is zero reason to constantly weave in and out of traffic as speeding "pass on the left" drivers do.
Speeders disrupt the normal flow though, so why are you OK with them?
There seems to be large lack of symmetry in your arguments. (Although I do appreciate you at least answering, I've heard these answers before, and yet I never gotten a reply when I bring up the lack of symmetry in the answer.)
Orderly traffic flow (passing on the left, traveling on the right) at speed x is safer than disorderly traffic flow (weaving in and out to avoid the jerk going the limit in the left lane) at speed x-y.
> Speeders disrupt the normal flow though
When it's one guy going 100 and everyone else is 80, yes. No argument from me. But when everyone is going 80 and there's someone in the left going 65 because that's the limit, the people going 80 aren't the problem.
I make no attempt to physically enforce "slower traffic keep right." But I often see friends driving the speed limit in the far left lane, and they won't switch lanes when somebody comes up behind them because they are "trying to slow down the speeders." That's the part that needs a badge. Anybody can express an opinion. It's when you physically try to force people to behave differently that you need a badge.
By "normal flow" I'm referring to highway conventions that expect the average traffic speed of a leftward lane to be higher than the lane immediately to its right. That's a safer flow than having every lane with a random average speed. Germany enforces this on the Autobahn. Some US states enforce it; most have signs promoting the idea. With "slower traffic keep right" you get something close to laminar flow (with shear) if you treat cars as gas molecules. With "every lane can do whatever it wants" you have turbulent flow, more lane changes, and more collisions.
Your internal rules are optimized for optimally set speed limits (85th-90th percentile speed when no speed limit exists, then narrow minimums and maximums strictly enforced.) Most speed limits in the US are set artificially low for the quality of the road. This creates dangerous differences in speed among drivers. Enforcing left lane passing mitigates the risk by keeping passing orderly. Drivers enforcing the maximum speed limit in the left lane prevent orderly passing.
On top of the behavioral issue, there are legitimate reasons for non-emergency vehicles to overtake vehicles. I don’t expect you to agree with this, but it is a majority view so preventing it is anti-social (though not as much as blocking driving on the shoulder, which is extreme behavior committed for reasons similar to principled left-lane occupation.)
Roads with fewer lanes require more adherence to social customs than wide roads to keep them safe and effective. Most don’t require an elaborate explanation as they can intuitively sense the benefit of staying in the right lane when not passing, as they gain experience with a wider variety of traffic situations.
This is paternalistic nonsense. It's "I'm right, you're wrong, you need to change what you're doing even though I am so far in the minority they're literally making what I'm doing illegal." I distinctly remember a time when I was a passenger with a friend's mother, who was going the speed limit in the left lane. Wide open in front of her, a line of 15+ cars behind her. She actually said "I'm going fast enough, you all can wait." The level of self-importance in such a statement, when it would cost you nothing just to get over and let people be on their way, is absolutely staggering.
And for what it's worth, there are several states where there are explicit exceptions to briefly exceed the speed limit for the purposes of passing vehicles in the right lane - some specify they have to be going under the speed limit, but not all.
this is one of the few traffic laws that i wish were enforced vigorously everywhere (turn signals being another). it'd improve the flow of traffic, and to boot, keep people focused on driving rather than their phones.
I wish “if you are getting passed on the right, speed up or get the hell out of the left lane” were a law.
Seriously though, I think it is illegal in California, but as I understand it is something that will get a count added to your ticket, but not something you will necessarily get pulled over for (as opposed to speeding)
I've passed on the right and I've been passed on the right. You can certainly be too aggressive about it, but the vast majority of the time, and I mean 95%+, if you're being passed on the right you're the one in the wrong.
I wish these laws were enforced where I live. Every day I deal with ridiculous situations like motorcyclists passing me on the left and right at the same time. If they crash into my car, the justice system will blame me for it because "cars are bigger and the bigger vehicle is responsible for the smaller vehicle". Makes absolutely no sense and it's so demoralizing.
it should be illegal, but per TFA, was not at the time.
"She argued that she only drove in the left lane to pass other vehicles, and her ticket – on May 26, 2019 – came five months before Alabama’s Anti-Road Rage Act, a law making it illegal to drive in the left lane of an interstate for more than a mile and a half, went into effect."
I find it ironic but unsurprising that something called the Anti-Road Rage Act legislates against lane hoggers. Whilst I find lane hoggers annoying I think the responsibility for road rage is with the raging party, so I'd prefer an act that focused on those committing the road rage, not triggering it. What they've done here is victim blaming and naming a bill based on PR, not policy (also no surprise).
the name is absurd, but it's not really victim blaming when the "victim" is actually doing something wrong to begin with. vaguely similar to the concept of "fighting words".
Road rage is never acceptable, regardless of what the other vehicle is doing. Making Lane hogging illegal and calling that anti-road rage seems to accept that road rage is a legitimate response to an action by someone else, which it never is.
no, it isn't. whenever you have more than one lane per direction on a limited access highway, the left lane is for passing only. it's not for people who find dealing with onramp traffic annoying.
Policing for profit is in theory a good thing. Every time they enforced a good law the society profits. Every time they enforce a bad law the society should change the law.
The alternative is having bad laws that are enforced just sometimes, at the discretion and personal biases of the not-for profit police.
Why exactly is this problem? I personally see a problem with having laws that we enforce only if the offender is black, or a similar discretion or bias of the policeman.
> Every time they enforced a good law the society profits.
Some of these departments have used these "profits" for BBQs for the police, or flat screen TVs, or for personal vehicles for officers.
And in some of the cases where such "misuse" of funds has been taken to court, oftentimes the court has ruled that the PD has the perfect right to do so.
> The alternative is having bad laws that are enforced just sometimes, at the discretion and personal biases of the not-for profit police.
This happens whether policing is "for profit" or not. Do you think they'll give the mayor or the police chief's spouse a speeding ticket if it means $100 extra in the department budget? These powers are always used selectively. The police just have to avoid using the "bad laws" against a core group of people with political power, and maybe share some of the spoils of enforcement with that group.
The difference is this: if police misuses bad laws selectively - like predominantly only against the black community - then the majority won't give a fcuk. But once "honest citizens" are targeted by excessive policing, the laws will sooner or later change.
There is zero notion of duty or honor in your worldview. The only decision loop that exists in your worldview is "(if (profitable? action) (action) (not action)". It's disgusting.
Police have a duty to justice. These police, if the reporting is correct, have ignored duty and used their office for pecuniary gain.
There IS a website [1] listing all the speed traps in Alabama, and Brookside is on it.
Speed traps have been around for decades. "Fleece the out-of-towners" has always been a great revenue source for tiny towns. How likely are you to go back to East Jesus, MS to fight your ticket?
In the town I live in, the police has decided to not to respond to nonemergency calls. They put the blame on their budget being cut and #defundthepolice movement. As it turns out some smart reporters looked up numbers and the budget was reduced in 2020 but it was increased back significantly in 2021.
Anecdotally, I see a constable car hiding near a stop sign close to my home almost everyday and ticketing people who do a rolling stop. How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.
It’s interesting that the cities who wanted to fire all cops and then ran them out of town with pitchforks are suddenly upset cops aren’t policing as much as they used to.
De-policing was the goal and that goal has been partly achieved. Now we all get to live with it until trust is restored.
I'd be interested if can you supply a good body of evidence to support the claim that significant, widespread de-policing has occurred in the US and it's effects. Mostly I've just seen opinion pieces that cherry pick numbers.
Seattle, as an example, lost 1 out of 5 cops between 2020 and 2021. Crime, including violent crimes like murder, are all up. Closed cases are down. There are new lists of crimes that are “deprioritized” every few months. This last month it was a laundry list of crimes related to traffic safety, like expired tabs or missing license plates.
A local businessperson that posted memes in 2020 about defunding the police just had his business ransacked again a few weeks ago. He then took to social media to complain about how Seattle is no longer safe and he may leave the city. It’s like people have completely lost grip with reality.
> The U.S. murder rate rose 30% between 2019 and 2020 – the largest single-year increase in more than a century, according to data published this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Where’s the link to reduced policing? Crime rates are most definitely not as simple an equation as more police = less crime. There’s a myriad of factors at work and taking any simple assumption of a single cause and effect is bound to be wrong.
I have a few friends in Seattle and policing is definitely broken, particularly dealing with crime related to the homeless encampments dotted all over. No question about that.
Ahh buisness. The econonmic driver that keeps on driving, looking for tax breaks where-ever they can get them. Big buisness, you made your bed, now sleep in it.
You missed the bit about 50+yrs of racism and class war fare that has created the America you live in today. Not a policy change from last year my friend. You are living in a sickness, just because you now are starting to to turn the tide, does not mean you will not have to deal with ongoing side-effects while the transition happens.
At one point, we need to realise that this IS Capitalism. This IS the SYSTEM. This IS the product. Haves, and have nots. At some point, the have nots will not respect the system that entrenches them in servatude. That is why the Romans weaponised religious practices, fear of death is the only thing that overrides all...
It's not actual de-policing, as in "firing cops". It's a sea change in what cops are willing to do while on duty. They have watched the televised trials of cops who have--for whatever reason, just or unjust--been prosecuted for crimes committed while performing the jobs.
In 2022, every cop looks at a call through the lens of "will I go to prison if I respond to this?". So now, we have criminals committing all sorts of crimes on the street (violent and not) and a police force that is unwilling to pursue these criminals for fear of the bad guy pulling a knife, or a gun, or having a heart attack while being arrested. The cop gets a felony charge, gets doxxed by the media and Twitter, and gets a spectacle trial, sometimes with the President of the United States weighing in, and usually ends up completely f'ed, even if found not guilty.
It's much easier for them to just drive on by and let the crime happen and tell dispatch that they couldn't find the guy.
> In 2022, every cop looks at a call through the lens of "will I go to prison if I respond to this?"
Good.
Why wouldn't we want police accountability? Even more, an officer is a public servant and must be held to a higher standard than petty criminals. The fact that some people would think otherwise is mind boggling.
That’s not how accountability works. Clearly you’ve never been in this sort of situation where the prescribed action is very close to what will get you sued or killed.
Until people stop with “all cops” and stop painting all criminals as down-on-their-luck saints, we will stay this way.
This is no different than saying “all men are rapists” or “all women are gold diggers”.
> Clearly you’ve never been in this sort of situation where the prescribed action is very close to what will get you sued or killed.
Clearly not, but why would that matter? I recognise three things. First, the purpose of police departments should be to protect citizens, not abuse them. Second, officers should be trained to de-escalate, not to shoot first and ask later. And third, the US clearly has issues with the use of force by their police.
> This is no different than saying “all men are rapists” or “all women are gold diggers
Is it customary among men and women to excuse and enable immoral or even criminal behaviours?
It is not. But the same cannot be said about police departments and unions.
I mean people should think about that about anything they do. The fact that it's new to police is telling. It's because until now they see themselves as above the law, because they have been.
The only cops I've seen get prosecuted are the egregious crimes. Anything anywhere close to borderline gets a pass, including killing unarmed people.
Look at the cops who beat up that demented 73 year old lady in Colorado. They got a pass from every supervisor in their department and would still be employed if the lady's family didn't file a federal lawsuit and the news caught wind of it. Their supervisors should also face charges for covering it up, including that SOB police chief. If any police department should have everyone fired and rebuilt from the ground up, this is a perfect example. The video of her arrest exists, but don't watch it unless you wanna get really, and I mean really mad.
Yes, good cops exist, but if I was a good cop and I found myself working at a department like this, I would find my morals extremely strained every day. I don't know how long I could work for them and sleep at night.
Oh and fuck that Walmart employee and his/her supervisor for calling the animal cops too. And fuck Walmart the company for calling cops on demented old ladies.
Schielke has noted that the department failed to take any action against the officer until media reports publicized Garner's violent arrest. This inaction was despite the fact that several other officers as well as supervisors were aware of what had happened. Only after reports did officials seek to launch an investigation into the incident resulting in Wednesday's charges, she said.
Seems like a bunch of people throwing a tamper tantrum to me. "I can't get away with all the shit that I used to get away with, so I'm going to throw a fit".
That's a very crass thing to say when you're not the one out on the street at night, tasked to deal with violent, sometimes psychotic sociopaths, who are often under the influence of methamphetamine [0] fentanyl.
[0] see recent Atlantic article posted here on the "new meth"
Firstly, that's their job. It's not like a surprise for them to be dealing with criminals, mentally disturbed individuals etc. Secondly, that's not justification to use excessive, some times lethal force unnecessarily. Nor is it a reason to not hold cops that abuse their power accountable.
What do you suggest? Let them do whatever they want because they have to deal with violent individuals some times?
> De-policing was the goal and that goal has been partly achieved. Now we all get to live with it until trust is restored.
I call this progress. There are many people who do not think the police are effective at their jobs, or even a net good to society. I say this as a white male who has never had a positive interaction with the police in his life. I hear about the "good" cops but I never meet them, and I've met a lot of terrible cops.
What I want is for the police to be held accountable to the public they are supposedly serving. Until we have that I am happy to see fewer of them because I do not believe they are serving the public, but are instead serving themselves (on the taxpayer's dime, no less).
This is a pretty typical opinion for progressive white men, who don't fear sexual violence the same way women often do, and often don't live in high-crime neighborhoods. When the violence reaches your front door, it'll be harder to be so privileged to think the answer is to get rid of all policing.
I once lived in one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, where murder was pretty common (there were at least 3 murders within 5 blocks of where I lived, and probably more I didn't know about). And my girlfriends have all been pretty terrified of the police, often moreso than of other people. I'm not sure whether or not it matters, but they've all been raped, and they feel the police do not help at all.
So I've seen the violence up close and I've listened to the vulnerable women, and I think the police are still part of the problem. One of my exes basically described them as legal thugs, and was terrified the police would rape her as well. You should look up statistics for police beating their wives, they're not exactly known for defending women against violence.
I don't think I actually made my stance clear before - the police are the people I'm scared of. They are the criminals I fear. And they regularly get away with murder, and essentially all of them help cover up crimes. I have no idea how you can defend them unless you are willfully ignorant.
The vast majority of sexual violence is from people they know, mostly in situations where you wouldn’t call the police on the spot.
Victims of street crimes are usually men.
So which is it- is whiteness the problem because white women are also very susceptible to sexual assault, or is maleness the problem because men are the primary victims?
Their budgets are still bigger than ever. De-policing hasn't been achieved because most of the goal was to better utilize those resources. Police refusing to do the basics of their job and increasing their budget isn't a point in favor of their positions.
City council approved an increase in taxes, and used part of it to raise the APD budget [1]. This didn't translate into a more effective force, and the perception among citizens is that police has given up on misdemeanors or infractions.
Incidentally, one of my neighbours is an officer, and his major complaints are the lack of new recruits, which is odd since that is ultimately the department responsibility, and the inability to charge people with possession of weed, since the city has effectively decriminalise it.
Denver, too. DPD budget is higher than ever before, and they can't be bothered to respond to calls like:
- non-lethal car accidents
- disturbances of the peace
- illegal drug selling/use in public spaces
- car thefts
- break-ins
Let alone deal with predatory towing, which has really taken off in town, too. With crime skyrocketing and housing costs higher than they've ever been, I really don't understand why anyone would want to live here any more.
Why is your neighbor complaining about not being able to charge people with possession of weed? If anything, you'd think that would make their job easier. I don't know about you, but I certainly appreciate anything that makes my job easier, all else remaining equal.
That sounds an awful lot like the "broken windows" theory, which has multiple issues, including very mixed evidence regarding its effectiveness in preventing bigger crimes.
Cops can't always prove a suspect has committed the crime they actually care about, and in such cases will look for other crimes the suspect has committed that might be easier to prove. The most famous example is that Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion.
Marijuana possession is both very common and easy to prove, so it works well for that purpose. If a cop happens to come across it on a "good" person, they can always look the other way.
(not endorsing this approach, just speculating as to how police may view the situation)
Yes, it's the whole "criminalize everything but protect the in-group and use the laws as a cudgel against the outgroup" approach to governing, sometimes called "rule by law".
> How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.
To be honest, we all know it's because traffic fines are risk-free income, while chasing actual criminals is an expense. The invisible hand of the Free Market(tm) optimizes for income instead of effectiveness, because police departments don't have competition.
The competition turns inward when you have a monopoly. Instead of different companies vying for market dominance you have middle managers trying to post the biggest numbers to get that coveted promotion.
Actually, that happens in a Free Market too, but companies have more incentive to tamp down on inefficient behavior if it makes them less competitive. In a monopoly the inefficiency is much harder to prevent.
The word "free" just implies a minimal amount of regulation. Monopolies can and do form in free markets. There's even such a term as "natural monopolies," which are things like utility providers, where it would make little sense to have multiple companies servicing the same market. For example, it would not make a lot of sense municipal water systems servicing the same area, due to infrastructure difficulties.
The term you're looking for is "competitive market." In a perfectly competitive market, monopolies don't form, but, there is also no long term economic profit to be had. That is, the sum of "accounting profit" (what you'd typically think of as the "bottom line" of a company's P&L statement) minus opportunity costs tends to 0 in the long term.
Of course this also misses the entire point of #defundthepolice.
Back in the 80s social services were heavily cut under the Reagan administration, on the assumption that the police could serve that purpose instead. But the police are trained to deal with potentially violent criminals and applying those techniques to the homeless or mentally ill only makes the problem worse and leads to tragedy.
So the idea is you claw back the extra money the police departments need to handle cases like that (poorly) and greatly increase the funding for social workers and state mental health institutions.
In reality the second part is a huge amount of work to set up and few if any governments have really tried to take it seriously. Most have not even freed up the money from police departments, and a few that have ended up giving it right back when they realized how much extra work it was going to make for them.
The underlying theory is that if you fix the social safety nets then you won't need much of a police force, and in fact the social support programs are much cheaper than police and jails in the long run. But they are also "socialism" so we can't have that in this country.
How is it that in the US the police is such a deregulated entity? Almost anywhere I’ve been in the world the police worked the same nation or state wide, maybe the local police department of town A works a little different from that of town B but the core rules are many and the same for all of them.
Which historical, legal and cultural reasons bring to this situation where a small town can shape a police department so freely?
Because the united states is designed politically and legally to be decentralized, giving large discretion to localities and states over how they run their rules and business.
For example, most people in jail are not in federal jail. Most people are served by local police. Rules on taxes vary county to county as needs vary county to county.
That's true but largely irrelevant to this story - traffic laws are the same through the state.
The main thing in this is law enforcement discretion. There's no way the population would vote these malicious leaders in if the tickets were being given to residents. They are mostly hitting non-residents. This is very common near military bases. The law is the same, but they choose not to apply it to residents (and apparently make up violations too).
Hopefully people have dashcams, and record interactions on their phones. It sounds like they will end up losing much more in lawsuits than they are bringing in. Perhaps the FBI and DOJ will get involved due to rights and color of law violations.
Yeah this is something I know and understand, I also appreciate this line of thought.
What I don’t understand is about police in particular, if police is “law enforcement”. I’d expect some laws to be national, then some laws to be state, then going down and down until we reach a single small town where something might be different from the next one but they should share many things… how is it that the enforcement part of those same laws is so subjective?
IMHO the law has two sides: the normative one, what it actually is, and the enforcement one, how it is applied to society. If the enforcement part is highly subjective we are distorting the law. It should be desirable to minimize the differences of enforcing the same law.
Is it something really appreciated by the population over there that the same law is applied very differently in the next town over simply because it decides to enforce it in a different manner?
The actual laws are just as decentralized as the law enforcement. Speed limits are a state/local law. While many of them are similar, enforcement varies greatly, and there is a propensity for corruption, as we see in the article.
I remember a few decades ago, AAA (large US auto club) recommended against using certain stretches of highway in Florida because the local town loved to ticket out-of-state drivers (heading from the northern border to Disney World in Orlando, IIRC).
And because enforcement is decentralized, so is enforcement of police procedures. "Thin Blue Line" is the term used to describe cops backing cops, even when they do illegal things. Like planting evidence in Baltimore (a few news worthy cases over the past several years).
Basically, policing in the US is completely broken. And the Supreme Court has decided (not recently) that police have zero obligation to actually help and protect citizens. So, if a crime is occurring, the police aren't obligated to help. They just wait until the beatings and rapes finish, then maybe arrest suspects, if they can be bothered (ie, did the crime make headlines and is a politician pressuring them to do so).
These discrepancies in law enforcement practices don't just arise out of the subjectivity inherent in enforcing rules. In the US, Black people and Black communities have long been policed differently than White people and White communities. There is a culture of systemic anti-Blackness in many if not most police departments. It is seen by many on the left to be so entrenched in the US system of policing and police culture that reform is not possible, hence the defund the police movement.
The reality in the United States is that the only national law in situations where you don't explicitly deal with the federal government is the Consitution, and even then the Constitution is interpreted differently by different states.
The states are more or less free to ignore (refuse to enforce) federal law. How do you think certain states legalised weed, illegal immigration and refuse to enforce the NFA in certain situations?
> The states are more or less free to ignore (refuse to enforce) federal law.
I guess this is what I’m missing, it is really peculiar from my point of view that a smaller entity can ignore a “higher” law.
From what I’m used to the higher law always wins, so during disputes: national > state > county > town.
What you are saying is that in the US a smaller entity is free to say “fuck you, come and get me” to a higher entity and get along with it, and the only way for a higher entity to step in is using force? (not literal force but force nonetheless)
Maybe it’s a combination of: common law (instead of civil law), most towns are relatively recent, sheer size of the country, isolation of some communities and a strong sense of local autonomy.
> What you are saying is that in the US a smaller entity is free to say “fuck you, come and get me” to a higher entity and get along with it, and the only way for a higher entity to step in is using force? (not literal force but force nonetheless)
Yes. And the feds would have to use literal force to get someone for smoking weed in say, Colorado.
Your friendly neighbourhood FBI or DEA agent can still arrest you for smoking weed in Colorado, it’s just that the local and state police don’t care and they won’t transfer you to federal custody.
Obviously this is not how federal law enforcement works. They don’t do patrols, and they are extremely reliant on state law enforcement to transfer the cases that fall under their jurisdiction to them, except when they are doing the investigation themselves.
Harbouring illegal aliens is illegal under federal law, but what are you going to do, if California doesn’t care and straight up refuses to cooperate with the ICE? ICE has the authority to enforce federal law within California, it’s just that they have to put the boots on the ground themselves now, for which no federal law enforcement agency has the resources.
This was by design. States are sovereign entities.
The state part is something I quite got already from popular culture, but is there something similar also inside a state? I mean, counties can do the same “fuck you” with the state and towns can do the same with the county?
> The state part is something I quite got already from popular culture, but is there something similar also inside a state? I mean, counties can do the same “fuck you” with the state and towns can do the same with the county?
Generally no, because the state is the sovereign. Counties/towns/any other local communities aren't.
So how is it that we read articles like this one? Shouldn’t the state intervene to keep counties and towns at bay?
For what I read around it is unusual, and mostly when something really bad happens and/or hit the news. If the state is sovereign, why is it not enforcing its own law inside its borders?
This WaPo article has some good background, it puts the number of local police and sheriff depts at over 15,000, with 90% having less than 50 officers.
In the US there are multiple levels of law enforcement that generally have their own jurisdictions. At the national level, there is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to handle crimes that occur across state lines or large crime webs, like the Mafia. Then there are state-wide police, some states call them highway patrol, others state police. Probably the most famous are the Texas Rangers. These have the jurisdiction of the entire state.
Next down the line is the county Sheriff, typically for enforcing county-wide laws. In many areas that don't have a local police force, the county sheriff are the most local police force they have.
Finally there are city police like Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) or New York Police Department (NYPD). These departments handle crime and law enforcement within a city's limits. These range from very large like the above examples to small departments like this article.
Generally if a crime occurs within a city it's that city police that will investigate, if it is outside the city within a county it may be the county sheriff or state police, and across state lines, the federal government gets involved. Obviously this can cause some confusion or fighting over jurisdictions. On the flip-side a local police department can help the needs of the community specifically. For example, where I live we have a small police department that responds immediately if there is a problem when you call them. They often help elderly residents that are having trouble, will drive by your house when you're on vacation, etc. Depending on states and cities local laws, sheriffs and police chiefs may be hired or elected.
Culturally, the United States has been oriented towards local control and biased against federal control. The states traditionally have been very independent of the federal government. For example most state constitutions are very long compared to our relatively short national constitution. In the western part of the united states, as communities were developed and grew, the need for local law enforcement grew with those communities, often before they were really a part of a state or the federal government had any control. So the legacies of those localized police and law enforcement entities has lived on.
I'm less familiar with how Europe's or other countries' police came to be, but typically those countries are far smaller than the United States and generally have more centralized federal power, which means having a centralized police force makes more sense.
And also even more local police departments such as campus police (on university campuses), or stuff like the BART police in the Bay Area (BART being the local commuter rail network).
Anyway I feel there is something missing and I cannot exactly say what it is. Maybe it is simply something cultural that is not so easily graspable from those living somewhere else, it always feels so strange to me that a small town has so much freedom to shape its law enforcement so freely… for me a shared law across the state is the basis for equality, and to have a shared law you need to enforce it similarly.
What is "missing" is that the police apparently can do whatever they like, because they cannot be held accountable. They're untouchable. If you criticise a police officer, you criticise the police as a whole, and that is not acceptable to them and to society at large. It is un-American to do so. They represent the law, and they themselves are above the law.
What you are missing is that Americans a very against centralized anything, they want everything to be local, and then flow upward from there.
In general Republicans are more against central control, and Democrats more for it (but not as much as Europeans).
So for example that voting rights fight going on right now is not about voting rights, it's about the Federal government setting rules (Republicans are against that) vs. the State setting rules (Democrats are against that).
There's arguments both ways for which is better, I don't want to go into that, but this should help explain what you are missing.
This same argument shapes things like Health care - which is currently local, not federal, and actually a HUGE amount of political stuff boils down to local vs federal.
Another thing is that personal determination is equated with local control (i.e. person decides what's best for themselves), while federal control is equated with social services (since some central authority decides what services to render).
Keep in mind the way the country was created was "united states", with the main authority being the state, and the federal government given only limited power. Also keep in mind a US state is similar in size to a European country.
I understand what you say, but a tiny Alabama town is just… a tiny Alabama town. I totally get that things change from state to state, that some states are huge. But from tiny town to tiny town?
For the most part each "grouping" is left to govern itself, but the state will step in if they feel there is abuse. I remember reading basically the same story as this one: Police abusing their power to pull people over in a nearby interstate, and the state came in and completely disbanded the police force.
Different laws are set at different levels, and historically policing was always at the city level. Also building codes are often at the city level.
Voting is typically at the county level (which is a group of cities, or one very large city).
Etc, etc. There are customs for most of these laws, and which level of entity is in charge of them. And the "higher" level entity can step in if necessary, but usually does not.
Also typically a "sheriff" is a voted position, while police is appointed by the mayor. So ultimately they answer to the voters, either directly or through the mayor.
Reminds me of my grandmother’s small Alabama town. They have a population of around 1500 and the city spent a large chunk of relief funds after some bad tornado damage building a huge “city hall” police station. Last time I was there they had multiple military vehicles parked outside. Meanwhile parts of the city haven’t even been cleaned up and the roads are in terrible shape.
I think "defundthepolice" slogan has caused too much harm from the start by polarizing people and it will be used to cause more harm going forward being used by bad actors to justify their actions.
It should be changed to something that most people can agree on - something like "reformthepolice".
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
But even without election-fixing, this kind of thing persists in some towns because the cops focus their enforcement on out-of-towners. Locals get a free lunch: services they don't have to pay for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)
Also, in Alabama if you're convicted of one of the following felonies you're not allowed to vote:
"Murder, rape, sodomy, sexual abuse, sexual torture, enticing a child to enter a vehicle for immoral purposes, soliciting a child by computer, production or possession of obscene matter, parents or guardians permitting children to engage in obscene matter, possesion of child pornography with intent to distribute."
Edit: And I would like to point out that nowhere did I say I agreed with or endorsed their enumeration of what sort of sexual conduct isn't ok.
IIUC, "sodomy" is penetrative sex that isn't penile/vaginal[0].
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sodomy
> production or possession of obscene matter
The test for what qualifies as "obscene" is very subjective [1], and represents one of the remaining (and oft-criticized) exceptions to the First Amendment.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_test
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Obscenity_Enforcement_Act
https://patch.com/georgia/sandysprings/sex-toy-ban-upheld-sa...
That's going to be the new normal in some states. Florida's governor is setting up a unit of special armed election cops.[1] There's a broad effort in red states to make sure only the Right People get to vote.[2]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/19/politics/ron-desantis-pushes-...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/28/politics/voter-suppression-re...
Doubt the next election will change anything.
This should be dealt with by higher levels of government -- it is gross, rank corruption -- however higher levels of government are drunk on civil forfeiture.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRnXgcutfz0
Congress could go and deal with this similarly to how the drinking age 21 was enforced - withhold federal funds for non-compliant states. Yes, this is messy as hell, but common standards for training are more important than to prevent of-age people of having a beer.
As you’ve described re: drinking, tying it to funding is a clear, well trodden path for the feds but let’s not forget the even clearer message, motivation and inertia that was behind it in the MADD type stuff all of a few decades after the temperance movement.
What policing is, and what its standards should be was the single most divisive topic in a year we were overrun by plague though. Nationwide protests. No resolution. Every particular reform (atm, under the current systems) takes years to see through and is shackled to locality, socioeconómics, different explanations, political warfare
Very wicked problem, and that’s not even getting into anti federalism…
Classic sociopath behavior.
Certainly that's where parking tickets should go, and probably drunk driving fines. At the very least.
It's the same reason why lottery revenue or (in California) bond approval propositions are typically earmarked for "noble causes" (schools, firefighters, parks...). It's a cheap promise to make, and the share of general operating revenue allocated to these departments can quietly decrease as lottery or bond financing replaces it, completely working around the spirit of the earmarking.
It sounds trivial to say but control of budgeting decisions is obtained through control of budgeting decisions; earmarking constraints are just accounting games to make spending more palatable to taxpayers.
Laws aren't only for punishing people who have something to seize. How else do we deal with people who have no money but still commit minor infractions?
This isn't a good thing, but it probably needs to be dealt at a state level, by passing laws preventing local officers from enforcing traffic laws on the interstate.
They're probably financing a lot of the rest of the town, too.
Avoiding any actual names: if Charity X advertises itself as a leading way to fight hunger / homelessness / animal abuse / poverty, but 90% of X's budget goes to raising more money, I call that "a conflict of interest." (90% is not a disqualifying amount, by the way.)
As a donor, if you think you're fighting <whatever> but what you're really doing is providing salaries for friends and family of the founders, then you're actually doing something else. What would you call it?
[1] https://jeremymarkovich.substack.com/p/why-north-carolina-do...
ETA: This doesn't completely solve the problem, as the federal government provides some air cover to keep screwing people over, but it does do _something_
Guide to Equitable Sharing for State, Local, and Tribal Law Enforcement: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-afmls/file/794696/download
St. Charles, Missouri police have been coercing drivers into signing over millions of dollars of their assets without convictions or even charges:
https://reason.com/2019/12/30/missouri-cops-used-federal-loo...
if for some reason the revenue can't be made up elsewhere and the schools come to depend on revenue from fines/seizures, that still leaves the police department with a lot of leverage.
Hell yes, stay out of the left lane unless you are passing. Everything else is a bit much though.
which means that they ticketed her for something that wasn't illegal.
Jalopnik appears to have intentionally played fast and loose with language to give the wrong impression here. Example: "Or there’s [link]another resident[/link] who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate. " That link to 'another resident' takes you to an article about Ramon Perez[0] where he's described as a "Chelsea business owner". Chelsea is 34 miles away from Brookside. Ramon is certainly a "resident" of....somewhere....but probably not Brookside.
Most likely, the police know many of the in-town vehicles and avoid pulling them over. When they do, they probably see the local address on the drivers license and let people go with a warning.
The point I'm making is that if this were as Jalopnik presents it, there is an existing remedy: the townspeople can vote out the mayor, then the new mayor would reform the 8-person police department. Instead, the people being victimized have no representation in the government that is victimizing them, so people are seeking alternative remedies (federal involvement, etc). This also probably applies when a smaller portion of a population is victimized by its government e.g. 80% of citizens unaffected, 20% experience problems.
Whats interesting about the 80/20 rule is that while classically in the US we think about racial/age/wealth divides, it also pops up in ways that aren't in people's top-3 intuition: using rarely-used government services.
- Building a house and victimized by zoning commission? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change.
- Running a business and victimized by licensing commission? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change.
- Can't get an obscure department to return your calls? 95% of the town doesn't identify with your experience and won't vote for change.
I see a bit of a parallel here to accessibility for disabled people. It turns out that when we build in accessibility into our physical and digital environments, it improves the experience for fully-abled people as well. Poor quality article on that here[1] but there are better ones to find, or you can imagine your own example. The usual top-1 example is closed-captioning ... even if your hearing is fine you've probably found CC/same-language subtitles useful on occasion. Perhaps there may exist a similar effect for creating systems which allow people to escape victimization. If you build it for the "obviously disadvantaged", it will create wide benefits for the "classically advantaged" classes as well.
0: https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-...
1: https://blog.ai-media.tv/blog/why-designing-for-accessibilit...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio
Something does need to be done about civil forfeiture and police departments that rely on traffic citations from people out of town, but I’m not sure that the problem can be solved by hoping that they’ll come to their senses. The incentives that have produced this behavior are much more interesting and much more difficult.
Sounds like in the very least the Alabama state government needs to get involved. Another obvious problem is that somehow "civil forfeiture" somehow became a legitimate process in the United States, not to mention the ease with which citizens can be ticketed and fined with no legal recourse, even though according to the 7th Amendment "where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved".
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iZyqwOOmETI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wjhTt9fqYY
Some notable points collected by a commenter on another site:
- "...just one of the 10 Brookside vehicles is painted with police striping, but nine others bear no emblems..."
- "...officers wear gray uniforms with no Brookside insignias."
- "The names of the officers were not listed on the tickets in secretive Brookside."
- "[the city budget] did not feature a breakout of the police department."
- "Asked in December how many officers were on staff, [the police chief] refused to say, citing “security” concerns..."
- "[The mayor and the police chief] said neither the town nor the police department relies on the revenue officers bring in. In fact, they said in November they didn’t know how that money is spent."
As others have pointed out, this sort of thing is not exactly rare, this is just a particularly egregious example of it. And this is after decades of attempts to 'reform' the police. When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community.
What I'm struggling with here is that the article says they have 8 FTE officers plus additional part-time / volunteer officers... so why do they have so darn many cars? Or to put it another way - my town of 35,000 has 48 FTE positions, 5 of which weren't filled this past year. That's in line with other communities of similar size that I've observed. So it puts the size of this department in perspective - it's a vey large headcount for the size of the community, so it shouldn't be a surprise that they are taking action either out of boredom or because someone is on the take.
So each FTE gets to use a top-of-the-line new SUV as a take-home vehicle.
Some sure. Certainly not all. I don't even think most. If I'm wrong, then the meme itself needs better phrasing.
The meme lives in the gray space of non-specifism, where every person for or against imposes their preferred meaning
If you go to a somewhat authoritative source such as https://blacklivesmatter.com/defundthepolice/ then you get
> We call for a national defunding of police. We demand investment in our communities and the resources to ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive.
But what does it mean to have “resources to … survive [and] thrive”? I would argue it implies a rethinking and rebuilding of policing based on the needs of the community, like GP claims. Another leftist might think it’s the anarchical approach. It’s vague, more or less intentionally
The answer, like to most of these kinds of issues, is to avoid arguing against internet memes. Have a debate with a singular person on an agreed upon position, or don’t debate at all.
It seems like the right in the USA are being deliberately pedantic about the phrase "defund the police", to make it sound like those on the left are crazy.
The left hold up the opinions of the far right/right lunatics and say "see? this is how insane everyone on the right is"
The right hold up the opinions of the far left/left lunatics and say "see? this is how insane everyone on the left is"
The moderate left and the moderate right have far more in common with each other than they do with the extremes at either end, yet somehow each is convinced that the other is represented most accurately by the extreme edge.
Just because you're a centrist on <an arbitrary political spectrum, that spans a single country's politics> doesn't mean that the things you believe in aren't crazy or horrifying.
We give them absolute power over life and death, and zero accountability. The justice system is in theory, supposed to be a leash on that dog, but in practice, it's the other way around.
In particular, it stands to reason that increasing spending for social services isn’t going to pay dividends for many years, but following policing reductions, crime surges immediately and significantly. So again, the rest of us are puzzled by the folks who emphasize “depolicing” rather than some more reasonable policy of “increase social spending while also maintaining a robust police element, at least for the short term”.
How do police prevent homicides? Are people really out there thinking "the police department is 10% smaller than last year (but has a larger budget), I bet I could off my neighbor and get away with it"?
They don't, they clean up after the fact, and convict someone for ~50% of them. Unless it's one of their own that's responsible, then the entire country needs to riot for a week, before anyone even thinks of pressing charges.
A better explanation is that underlying social safety nets have been ripped out from under people for the past couple of years putting way more people in rough, quasi legal situations to get by that make them trend towards extralegal forms of dispute resolution like personal application of violence. Additionally suicides count as a homicide (it's technically a person killing a person), which has made the numbers go up over the past couple years.
Misdemeanor arrests, searches, and foot patrols, etc. See my various other comments for more details and links.
> A better explanation is that underlying social safety nets have been ripped out from under people for the past couple of years
These effects predate the pandemic and correlate with the BLM protests in time and space (crime surges immediately after and in the vicinity of BLM protests). That said, I don’t doubt the pandemic contributed since 2020.
That doesn't track though. _Why_ would misdemeanor arrests result in less murders. I don't agree with Charles Fain Lehman's analysis in your post, and believe that while he thinks that because violent crime arrests when misdemeanors dropped that somehow proves that police aren't to blame I see the opposite in that data. As I argued above, that says to me that a drop in public acceptance of the role of police and the justice system leads to self directed dispute resolution, which more often turns violent. His gotcha that's supposed to be a nail in the coffin of this argument appears to me to actually be a point in favor of it.
> These effects predate the pandemic and correlate with the BLM protests in time and space (crime surges immediately after and in the vicinity of BLM protests). That said, I don’t doubt the pandemic contributed since 2020.
The idea that cities reaching a boiling point in distrust of the justice system, followed by no meaningful reform continue down the road of self directed and often violent dispute resolution is consistent with the model I've presented.
That's an unanswered question (crime is complicated), but there are probably many factors, not least of all that people get arrested for misdemeanors and then they're found with felony amounts of drugs or weapons and thus removed from the street.
> I don't agree with Charles Fain Lehman's analysis in your post
It's not his analysis, he's reporting on the findings of studies.
> while he thinks that because violent crime arrests when misdemeanors dropped that somehow proves that police aren't to blame I see the opposite in that data.
He doesn't profess that belief in the article.
> As I argued above, that says to me that a drop in public acceptance of the role of police and the justice system leads to self directed dispute resolution, which more often turns violent.
The article posits that as a factor as well (specifically that loss of trust in policing leads to less cooperation from the community).
> The idea that cities reaching a boiling point in distrust of the justice system, followed by no meaningful reform continue down the road of self directed and often violent dispute resolution is consistent with the model I've presented.
"Your" model also requires us to believe that the evidence of decreased proactive policing is merely a coincidence, which is hard for me to stomach. I don't doubt that the loss of trust contributed, but I only think this is the "fault" of policing as an institution to the extent that the activist and media narrative is accurate (which is to say, "not very").
Being in jail doesn't stop homicides. In fact they have more homicides than the general population.
> It's not his analysis, he's reporting on the findings of studies.
It's both. If you read the studies, while in the abstract they purport to establish a causal link, they don't back that up in their methodology. Lehman combines this into a greater analysis.
> He doesn't profess that belief in the article.
He professes a causal link between police _protests_ and increased homicides, finishing his article with "But it does give support to those who propose a relationship between 2020’s wave of anti-police protests and the ensuing homicide wave still sweeping the country—and to those who believe that continued hostility to the police will lead to more bloodshed."
> The article posits that as a factor as well (specifically that loss of trust in policing leads to less cooperation from the community).
While calling out protests specifically as being causal wrt to homicide rate.
> "Your" model also requires us to believe that the evidence of decreased proactive policing is merely a coincidence, which is hard for me to stomach. I don't doubt that the loss of trust contributed, but I only think this is the "fault" of policing as an institution to the extent that the activist and media narrative is accurate (which is to say, "not very").
No, police not doing the basics of their job while still overall increasing their budgets, and particularly arbitrarily and capriciously enforcing the law would be a major factor in loss of confidence in the justice system. I'm not saying that it's a coincidence; I'm saying that it's part of the model. If you can't rely on police to respond reported crime, then you start handling disputes person to person. Meanwhile with budgets continuing to increase _and_ police not doing their jobs, any semblance of social safety nets disappear. That's the point of "defund the police", noticing that they refuse to do the basics of their job, and in fact the goal of using them as a catchall for all sorts of social services failed, so put that portion of the budget back into more productive uses.
So politicians in particular get very good at making the other side look extremely insane, evil and stupid.
The better they are at that (lying) the better they do in elections.
So...the politicians who would be good for us tend to have integrity and strong personal beliefs about lying, and so tend to do poorly in elections.
Which leaves us with everyone else.
Perhaps they didn’t literally mean “do away with all police”, but no one was very explicit about what the slogan actually meant. And when the media tried to rationalize it as a metaphor (because it was so damaging to Democrats), many leftists corrected them, clarifying that they literally wanted police abolished.
In whichever case, we’re presently suffering the effects of these anti-police protests as homicides have surged to levels not seen in 30 years (whether due to official “depolicing” policies or soft pressure for police to minimize proactive policing or due to reduced cooperation from the community or so on). Whether they literally meant “no police” or some other policy, it’s pretty clear that all of this leads to more crime, and the communities who pay are predominantly poor and/or minorities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
They are under no such requirement as shown by the citation.
Your original full claim
> Unless your job requires you to forcibly intervene between armed, violent offenders and their victims, I don’t see how this is relevant.
doesn't hold water when police are also not required to forcibly intervene between armed, violent offenders and their victims.
That is the kind of thing the police force was designed to handle. Sometimes killing someone is the right thing to do when your job is dealing with situations like that.
https://www.city-journal.org/new-evidence-connects-police-pr...
"In fiscal 2020-2021, the Austin police budget was $292.9 million, down from $434.5 million the previous year. The City Council slashed $31.5 million directly from the police budget last year.
It also put $121.7 million in a reserve fund that was intended to 'decouple or reimagine some public-safety functions' from the police department but which ended up funding police operations, says Alicia Dean, a spokesperson for the city. The City Council also canceled three cadet classes and cut 150 officers from the budget last year, says City Councilor Mackenzie Kelly, an outspoken supporter of the police."
- https://www.wsj.com/articles/austin-texas-defund-the-police-...
The homicide rate went from 4.7 to 6.2. Yes, I know that doesn't prove causation. But if the homicide rate is going up 32% year over year I want more cops on the street not fewer.
> whether due to official “depolicing” policies or soft pressure for police to minimize proactive policing or due to reduced cooperation from the community or so on
Note these findings regarding the St. Louis police department following the shooting of Michael Brown:
> In the immediate aftermath of Brown’s death, self-initiated arrests fell 62 percent. Similar declines are seen across nine out of 11 categories of self-initiated activities, including foot patrol (down 82 percent) and pedestrian checks (76 percent). Notably, the decline in arrests is concentrated among misdemeanor arrests (more discretionary than felonies) and among arrests of blacks (rather than whites). This reduction in police activity persisted for at least the next two years. In the same period, the city experienced a significant rise in homicide and aggravated assault.
https://www.city-journal.org/new-evidence-connects-police-pr...
Crime does rise and fall over time and the reasons are notoriously complex and difficult to understand as it's happening. The police are certainly confident that anti-police sentiment leads to rising crime, but I don't have any reason to accept that evaluation right now.
1. Crime rarely surges so dramatically as it has in the last 6 years. Note that before 2014, crime had been trending down consistently for decades.
2. Homicides spiked all over the country following major BLM protests.
3. The counties with the largest BLM activity saw the largest decreases in proactive policing and commensurate increases in homicides.
How much more evidence is required (and how many additional thousands need to die) before we get folks on board to reverse these trends?
My recollection is that there have been almost no depolicing policies actually made in effect. Not even the Minneapolis complete dissolution of the police by whatever whatever time. Several big cities even increased their police funding. The argument that homicides have surged because of depolicing first needs to prove that depolicing actually happened.
I would instead argue that an increase in homicides might be caused by an decrease in the general wellbeing of people when dealing with a pandemic. We're getting to the point where many people either know someone who has died or knows someone who knows someone who has died.
> In the immediate aftermath of Brown’s death, self-initiated arrests fell 62 percent. Similar declines are seen across nine out of 11 categories of self-initiated activities, including foot patrol (down 82 percent) and pedestrian checks (76 percent). Notably, the decline in arrests is concentrated among misdemeanor arrests (more discretionary than felonies) and among arrests of blacks (rather than whites). This reduction in police activity persisted for at least the next two years. In the same period, the city experienced a significant rise in homicide and aggravated assault.
> The multicity analysis shows a similar pattern. Cheng and Long assume that a Ferguson Effect will be more common in cities with higher black population shares, so they compare those in the top quartile of black population against the other cities as a control. They identify the same phenomenon as in St. Louis: the blackest cities saw larger declines in arrests relative to those with smaller black populations, driven by a decline in misdemeanor arrests, and a simultaneous large (10 percent) increase in homicide.
> Both studies not only identify a decline in police activity and an increase in homicide after a high-profile incident but also argue that the nature of the decline in activity supports a “public scrutiny” mechanism for the effect. In particular, a drop in police activity for minor offenses drives the overall policing pullback. This fact supports a theory (as articulated by Premkumar) whereby officers reduce arrests that they deem “less important” in order to minimize public contact. That differs from a competing theory under which a loss of police “legitimacy”—which, in turn, reduces community engagement with the cops—drives the Ferguson Effect. If the competing theory were borne out, the study should have found reductions in arrests for offenses of all kinds.
https://www.city-journal.org/new-evidence-connects-police-pr...
I'll concede that it's a small minority, though.
The problem is that it's a really stupid slogan. A natural, unbiased reading of it says something that 95% of the supporters don't mean. That's not the fault of the people interpreting it, it's the fault of those saying it.
Importantly, and I do think this is worth pointing out, those people have zero political power & zero input on any budgets, legislation, etc. Situations like those described in the article are actually happening.
It seems like the right in the USA are being deliberately pedantic about the phrase "defund the police", to make it sound like those on the left are crazy.
Conservatives have been gaslighting the electorate for as long as I've been a voter. This is no different.
Why do you think the New York Times was publishing opinions that you believe were only held by 3 people?
You of course also remember that when the New York Times published the opinion piece titled "Tom Cotton: Send In the Troops" arguing that the military should be sent in to stop riots and looting, there was a massive backlash and the editor for the opinion page resigned. This even though the opinion expressed by Tom Cotton was fairly popular.
I would think if the New York Times was publishing opinions that had no popular support at all, there would have been a backlash about that, wouldn't you?
"For instance, during the 1950s and 1960s, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson called out the military to disperse mobs that prevented school desegregation or threatened innocent lives and property. This happened in my own state. Gov. Orval Faubus, a racist Democrat, mobilized our National Guard in 1957 to obstruct desegregation at Little Rock Central High School. President Eisenhower federalized the Guard and called in the 101st Airborne in response. The failure to do so, he said, 'would be tantamount to acquiescence in anarchy.'
More recently, President George H.W. Bush ordered the Army’s Seventh Infantry and 1,500 Marines to protect Los Angeles during race riots in 1992."
What Cotton suggested is expressly permitted by an act of Congress and that act has been invoked many times over more than two centuries. It's been used half a dozen times to suppress riots since the 1960's. Not one of those actions has ever been found to be unconstitutional.
Second, if Tom Cotton and only two other people in the entire US want habeas corpus suspended, than no, I would not want the Times to print an opinion column suggesting that. A poll had 52% of Americans agreeing with sending in troops to stop the riots. If Tom Cotton and 52% of Americans want habeas corpus suspended, then I think a paper that calls itself the "paper of record" is exactly where that case should be made.
Just as it would have been appropriate to make the case in those opinion pages for why we would send the 101st Airborne into Little Rock and Detroit, the 197th Infantry into Baltimore, the 1st Marines Division into Los Angeles, and military police to the Virgin Islands.
Like, do any research at all into the history of criminal justice, you will find we live in a very contingent situation now, one that has other options.
Like, do you all really think that police have been around forever? Do you really all think we would be violent state-of-nature monsters without them? That civilization is assured by them? Are we really so historically shortsighted that we see the existence of police as exactly corollary to law and order?
Can we imagine for a second that just because something is sufficient doesn't mean that it is necessary? Can we think about this rationally at all?
And then look at cost of the status quo... I don't know, its just so sad this is how we talk about it: the police (specifically, its unions/fraternities) truly have won the cultural battle. Doesn't even matter if there are some radicals out there, because the only way we can talk about these things means they will always win.
Call those people naive if you like, but "crazy" is just disheartening to hear for people who are mostly just angry and wanting it to stop.
Also, you're throwing up a lot of extreme straw man arguments like that's what is being said.
> Like, do you all really think that police have been around forever?
I believe in dinosaurs, so no.
> Do you really all think we would be violent state-of-nature monsters without them?
No. I think more people would be without them than with them. Even if the difference between the two is 1%, that's a pretty serious change for the worse.
> That civilization is assured by them?
No, it's assured by faith in the system. Much like money. If everyone decided the law didn't matter there is very little the police force could do about that.
> Are we really so historically shortsighted that we see the existence of police as exactly corollary to law and order?
No. I certainly don't believe that. It's a component, but a small piece of the pie.
> Can we imagine for a second that just because something is sufficient doesn't mean that it is necessary?
Sure. Totally on board for that. It is sufficient to drive a monster truck to get where I want to go, but certainly not necessary. Not really a hard thing to imagine.
I can run counter to basically every argument you lay and still believe that a police force is necessary without there being any logical inconsistency in my beliefs...
> And then look at cost of the status quo
Look at the cost of social security. Look at the cost of public school. There is so much tangible and intangible value locked up on those institutions that if anyone said "we can do better" you'd be hesitant to throw them out whether or not you agreed.
> the police (specifically, its unions/fraternities) truly have won the cultural battle
it's not a culture battle. We're in an equilibrium, and people are rightfully hesitant to leave it behind for promises of utopian glory. It's fine to think there is a better way, and it's fine to test that out. Looking at the places running such tests, the 'better ways' so far proposed are far short of actually better.
> Call those people naive if you like
It's a good term for how I see it.
> but "crazy" is just disheartening to hear for people who are mostly just angry and wanting it to stop.
It's subjective. If I saw someone saw off their own foot, I'd call them crazy. If I see someone do something, or advocate doing something, that I think would be extremely damaging, I call that crazy. It's not crazy to want to do better, it's not crazy to be upset that things aren't getting better fast enough. Only another set of crazies are calling that crazy.
You wanted to capitalize on the thrill of saying something as bold as “Abolish the police” and then backpedal when it became convenient to take a more reasonable approach. It’s dishonest and it’s becoming a pattern after “Black Lives Matter” was called out for being similarly problematic. This isn’t limited to the left either. “Read my lips: no new taxes”, “Lock her up”, and “Build the wall” were likewise dishonest.
"Defund" isn't exactly ambiguous either. If you defund a police department, you've abolished it because police officers aren't going to work for free and the police buildings and vehicles will deteriorate from not being maintained. It is not possible to have a police force without funding.
It's like if I said "we should fire bullets at JimBob", and then after that happened acting surprised that JimBob died. "Whoa whoa whoa I just said to fire bullets at him, not kill him!" really shouldn't be fooling anyone.
The phrase that should have been used is "reform the police" because it would get almost every one aboard even the police themselves. Nothing is perfect in this world and almost every one can think of a way to improve something.
This decade of attempt to reform the police most people didn't know or care about. This new movement could have brought it to light and get something done that everyone can agree on. Instead it turned into a left vs right shit show.
My understanding is "defund the police" is actually within the context that efforts to reform policing as an institution in america have broadly failed, so the only solution to try and make less-shitty police is to burn the institution to the ground and rebuild anew. In that context, "defund the police" makes total sense from the perspective of an activist who is agitating for a better system of community safety.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
"Defund"/"Abolish" are crystal clear in their meaning.
They have since backed off (and several were voted out of office). They also used "abolish" and "defund" interchangably, because defunding and abolishing the police department was the goal.
Edit: I also just noticed several comments in this thread explicitely calling for abolishing as the commenters believe reform is impossible.
and the NYT running pieces like: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
People need to stop with this gaslighting "No one ever meant abolish, it was always about lessening funding." It's not true and only hurts your cause when you don't acknowledge there are actual significant views more radical than your leanings.
"Defund the police" is a good slogan because it makes it clear that you have to pick a side - the police have made it clear that "reform" is not going to be possible through cooperation. This isn't to say that there aren't plenty of individual officers who would support, or at least not obstruct, reform, but without destroying the existing institutions (police unions, primarily) that perpetuate the status quo, and disempowering the individuals who are committed to it, nothing is going to change.
You've made multiple comments under this article about how "defund" can only possibly mean removing 100% of funding. Sometimes other people use words differently from the way you do personally. You need to adapt your interpretation to their usage, not the other way around.
has anything good come from this pattern of overgeneralizing and then generating purposefully disingenuous propagandistic terms to force people to "pick a side"?
As mentioned upthread, this story of the small town that has turned into a front organization for a police force that, were they not operating under the label "police," would be a gang of highwaymen, is a pattern that repeats itself a lot! When you see something that happens repeatedly from many different individuals who all happen to be in the same circumstance, Occam's Razor demands you at least consider investigating the circumstance and not the people.
There are almost certainly a large number of genuinely good and kindhearted and well-intentioned people in the employ of various police departments. They should leave their jobs, lest they stop being good and kindhearted and well-intentioned and become dangerous to society. Ideally, they would do that of their own free will; alternatively, we can defund their payroll. I have no problem with the individual former police officer merely by virtue of their former employment, and I am more than happy to judge them as an individual on their own merits.
(I will refrain from commenting on your last paragraph so as to not get into an ideological flamewar.)
I really don't think it is either well-defined or relevant whether the individuals are "good" or "bad." As an analogy that is hopefully clear at the risk of being a little inflammatory: almost all of the 18-year-old conscripts of any random country you might be at war with have absolutely zero influence over the political direction of that country. But that doesn't change the fact that people handed them a gun and told them (even, perhaps, forced them) to shoot at you. They can be utterly kind and friendly individuals (see e.g. the World War I Christmas truce), but if they're about to shoot at you, that's a problem regardless of whether they're kind. When someone says "The XYZ army is about to invade us," it makes no sense to say "Well most of the XYZ soldiers are good people!"
And no, the distinction is not whether they're actually shooting at you. If they're lined up on the border ready to invade, if they're in training camps practicing shooting, if they're not assigned to be a footsoldier but they are assigned to build infrastructure and implement logistics for the invasion, etc., they're contributing to the invasion, and you'd still say that the entire invading army needs to be stopped. Saying that most of the invading army hasn't seen active combat yet and therefore isn't personally culpable is also nonsensical.
Or put another way - in gang-ridden territories or in post-war countries ruled by warlords, it's often the case that gang members or soldiers will do things to genuinely benefit the people who live there, running essential food and medicines across blockades, keeping people safe from other gangs or warlords, etc. That hardly justifies the gang or the warlord as a good government, though!
Every single person who works for a police department, without exception, works for an organization that is doing bad things. If, somehow, the specific things they do as individuals are good, when they do them on behalf of the organization, it serves to increase the legitimacy of that organization to gain more power and do more bad things in the future. If they are good people who haven't incurred personal moral culpability for doing anything wrong, great! I'm not in the business of judging souls for heaven or hell. I'm in the business of having opinions, as a citizen of a republic, about how that republic should be constituted.
The simplest thing to do to solve this problem is just do away with elections, no?
So, yes, I think that's a defensible position, and if you wanted to characterize my decision to vote as evidence that I believe that my government as an institution is salvageable and not inherently hopeless the way I believe the police as an institution are, I don't think you'd be wrong.
The other thing is that you wouldn't really do away with elections, you'd do away with the whole organization (the government) that you're electing people to. Which is, in fact, the anarchist position, and I think that position is also defensible.
I find this assertion, combined with the final paragraph from your previous post, interesting—given the very loose and broad criteria of "doing bad things" here, could you not replace "police department" with "government"? if so, then should your previous post's third paragraph not also apply to all employees of city, county, state, and federal governments as well?
if this is your end goal: uh, do you know anyone who's hiring?
Police unions are strong in this country. The police are definitely on an organized and unified front in regards to this. Saying "the police" referring to a "single unified group" is normal in every-day conversation in this country.
> "the police" are not a federalized entity (yet(??))
We have police that are federal in this country. "Federal police officer" is an actual term.
> it seems at the very least disingenuous [...] to lump [...] thousands of people [...] into a single amorphous group, and then generate a slogan that "makes it clear you have to pick a side" on how you feel about them.
The police are an organized force in this country protected and backed by local and federal governments. I feel like it's a weird and reductionist to say we can't address systemic issues with police as a group. I think we should both address the individualistic issues happening, as well as address the systemic issues that police are facing as an organized group.
Also - who cares if someone picks a side? In regards to the police I have been held at gunpoint for holding my wallet up in a dark car to see if I had my bank card. They thought it was a weapon I was brandishing toward them - it was not. My point here is that if/when the police suspect you of wrongdoing they will immediately be "picking a side" so why shouldn't I be able to pick a side?
of course we have federal officers, but "the police" are not federalized, and hopefully that distinction and the reason for making it are clear. there is a huge difference between the current state of affairs vs. a world where our nation's police force was actually federalized & centrally managed. we don't live in that world, and pretending that we do, when we don't, but we easily could, isn't a very good idea.
> I feel like it's a weird and reductionist to say we can't address systemic issues with police as a group.
I never said that. where did I say that?
> Also - who cares if someone picks a side?
the problem isn't so much picking a side as it is in presenting any sort of political rhetoric in black-and-white, zero-or-one, left-or-right binaries—especially when distortionary, obfuscating memes/slogans are used to do so. this is literally the single biggest problem in contemporary politics. all nuanced discussion on an issue is lost when you frame things in terms of, "pick a side, you're either with us, or you're with the Nazis/etc. etc." ("well actually I take issue with this one aspect of what you're saying." "you would, Nazi! I knew you weren't really on Our Side.")
overgeneralizing issues and using propagandistic slogans literally designed to inflame and polarize, specifically in order to bifurcate the perception of reality among the general populace, has yet to be proven to actually solve anything—it really just seems like it makes people feel good for joining Team A or Team B, feeling righteous about being on The Correct Side Of The Issue, and vitriolic toward The Other Side. it's a great way to lead a country into a downward spiral nosedive toward destruction, and it's been highly effective so far—maybe we should stop and take notice of this phenomenon and take steps to rectify it!
Huge swaths of police officers in this country are federal police officers - that was my only point. You made a claim that made it seem like police officers were not "federalized" yet and I rebutted that federal police are absolutely a thing.
I don't want to go off on a hypothetical tangent about a centrally managed police force.
---
> me: I feel like it's a weird and reductionist to say we can't address systemic issues with police as a group.
> you: I never said that. where did I say that?
The comment I responded to is as-follows (your words):
1. why do you consider "the police" a single unified group (aside from some "individual officers")?
2. "the police" are not a federalized entity (yet(??))
3. it seems at the very least disingenuous, but also possibly dangerous, to lump tens of thousands of people from disparate cities and counties and states into a single amorphous group
You are making a very clear argument against addressing police as a group, to the point of calling it "disingenuous" and "possibly dangerous." You make a very direct argument here and I think it's disingenuous to claim that you "never said that."
And with that specific bit - I'm done reading your post, and I'm done conversing with you on this topic.
right which is why "defund the police" is once again such a ridiculously overgeneralized thing to say! there's 17985 police agencies in the country, which includes federal, state, county, and city officers. each one of these things is wildly different from the other, and you're just throwing them all together and saying "defund 'em all," as though that could possibly be a solution to such a complex problem.
here's where the miscommunication lies, I believe:
put aside for a second why "reform the police" isn't a great slogan to get anything done (I agree btw)—let's say the idea of reforming police corruption had never been floated before, and then when "defund the police" came about, instead the slogan was "reform the police." in this hypothetical world, I would have much, much less of an issue with the idea of collecting all the police from all the disparate parts of the country and lumping them together. the reason for this is that if you live in a small town with a small local police department that is well-liked and good and fair and all that, then the locals could very easily agree that "the police," in general, should be reformed, but that the local cops are doing fine as is. you wouldn't be choosing them to "pick a side" ("for the police" or "against the police"), you're merely asking people to acknowledge that, in many places in the country, the police are not as just and good as your local cops, and as long as we can all agree that that's the case, then we can maybe start to work together to make things better for everyone.
instead, when you say "defund the police," you're alienating these same people who don't have a problem at all with their local police, especially in smaller towns and cities, because you're essentially instilling cognitive dissonance upon them, asking them to hold both "all police should be defunded" and "but idk I think my local cops are alright" in their heads at the same time. cognitive dissonance in values like this leads to political/ideological zealotry which doesn't accomplish anything other than dividing people and making everyone feel worse, while nothing really changes because your movement's explicitly stated goals (even if you don't actually mean "defund," it's what you're saying) are beyond the pale for many, many people. this is how you bifurcate and demoralize a population, and it's working fantastically.
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response to below comment:
> This is textbook moving the goalpost. Your original point was that we shouldn't make general statements about police, which is clearly nonsense. If you have other problems with "defund the police" as a slogan that's a separate issue.
how are any goalposts being moved when my initial post ended with
> has anything good come from this pattern of overgeneralizing and then generating purposefully disingenuous propagandistic terms to force people to "pick a side"?
it's called establishing a position and then building it up over the course of debate, I thought I made my overarching position here pretty clear: propagandistic overgeneralizations and slogans specifically designed to inflame and divide rather than unite are the single biggest threat we face as a nation today, and are quite rapidly bringing about the decline of the Republic as our perception of reality splits roughly in two.
It inspired some of the most insane and vile hatred I have ever witnessed.
Not being able to see that really just means you are out of touch with huge swaths of Americans of every political persuasion.
It's not designed to appeal to Midwestern life-long democrats. It's designed to fix a problem.
The activists promoting the demand are out of touch with huge swaths of Americans, but by symmetry, that means huge swaths of Americans are out of touch with the activists who, through their activism, research, and personal experience, know the nature of policing in America is closer to Brookside, Alabama than to what their Elementary school teachers told them about the police.
The "police" in this article are not a cost center, but rather a profit center. So, problem fixed?
I agree that the cancerous police budgets consuming municipal budgets is a problem, but the even deeper problem is that they're not bound by the law they purport to uphold. "Defund" does nothing to advocate for legal accountability, which is the primary problem.
I'm more inclined to believe corporate media convinced people the phrase was an issue.... most people dont have a problem with it, they were just given an opinion to parrot.
Locally we have an organization called "stop having kids". It's so dumb. If they succeeded literally, humanity would die out. They say it's a great slogan because it gets people talking. That's a lousy defense.
But very close to me (like 15 min of walking), there are major armed crimes happening. There are enough guns and people willing to use them in this country that it is just not safe without the police.
There are many reasons for this, I probably agree with most of them, but until they are all solved we need the police.
I grew up in Norway, did not feel like this there at all. Of course crime does still exist, but I would not care how far it was to my local police station.
Also lived in the UK, felt very safe compared to the US.
I am super left wing, but if you force me to pick a side I am choosing the police without much thinking.
I understand not everyone thinks like this, but if you want to win elections in a two party system you need a broad coalition. You will not find a broad coalition that is willing to pick the side you want here.
Some of us choose more thoughtful paths and recognize 2-party systems as inherently abusive because they're out of alignment with reality, which is inherently nonbinary.
If you want to win elections, build coalitions. If you want to rant about how abusive the current system is, you can do that, but don't expect to actually win anything.
Disruption isn't just for companies.
I am all for disruption but I really don't know what your plan is. And please understand that disruption is not always good for everyone. A lot of people depend on our current government to survive.
Iterative, incremental design is one way change can happen, not the only way.
Police duties are expensive and stretched pretty thing, and thus they get funding for things that should not be within the purview of policing. A classic example is police response to mental health crises, and the frankly bizarre and spurious justification that creates for outlawing suicide. Far too often, people need help but are sent a militarized police response instead.
A retort to this is frequently around the suicidal person being armed and therefore needing armed police, but that seems to me like exactly what you should expect when sending heavily armed wannabe-soldiers to bust down the door of someone who needs a doctor or a therapist. Predictable fear responses are used as justification to continue or even escalate the problem rather than address it systemically.
Also it may not even have been a gun. The police will also treat a knife or a motor vehicle as a deadly weapon and respond with lethal force.
Defund the police is not solving this situation. It could solve a lot of situations more calmly but not this one.
In reality, the single issue should have been around qualified immunity. Get rid of that and the ducks will fall into line.
1. constitutional amendment (3/4 of the states)
2. supreme court entirely throws it out (5 supreme court justices)
3. prosecutors (DAs, AGs & US Attorneys) chip away at it bit by bit
When a case comes before the supreme court they can essentially create a new set of circumstances that will no longer be qualified going forward. The problem with even making slow, incremental progress is that most prosecutors just don't seem to ever prosecute cops.
Might as well extend that to the other branches as well. Create a 4th branch of government who's only purpose and power is to jail members of the other branches who break the law since they can't be expected to police themselves and power corrupts all.
Kind of like how members of the military are subject to UCMJ courts. Civilian members of government should be subject to a court as well.
Colorado, Connecticut, and New Mexico have done it --- e.g. https://lawandcrime.com/live-trials/live-trials-current/geor...
Yeah, that's the problem with "reform", it is so meaningless that the very police that need to be reformed are all for it!
This is not a system that can be fixed, a ludicrous percentage, maybe as high as 95%, of current police will need to find a new line of work for policing to be fixed in the US.
Okay, we gave them hundreds of millions of dollars for body cams!
body cam footage not available, officer turned off prior to incident
For a pretty solid breakdown on why it's not likely to ever expect the cops to get on the side of checks notes taking funding and job security away from themselves: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/police-unions-minneapo...
> it's not likely to ever expect the cops to get on the side of checks notes taking funding and job security away from themselves
Then align the incentives.
Harsher penalties for turning them off/disabling them/tampering with their wear protocol in any way.
Weave into the salary a financial bonus for long periods of time without incidents.
And since this is HN: Add some AI bullshit that reviews the tapes to make sure the cameras are not being covered or whatever with a secondary manual review by an outside entity to rule out false positives, make sure every police officer is aware of the automated review, and even if that system doesn't work perfectly I'm sure even a shitty government contractor can make it made good enough to put enough fear into enough corrupt cops so that camera shutdowns don't become routine.
Police "unions" are exceedingly well-funded, well-networked groups that can apply a TON of political and electoral pressure. They also provide (very good/expensive) lawyers for any cop found guilty of an infraction. On top of that, the very act of prosecuting cops is essentially biting the hand that feeds you for a DA/AG.
The cops will always opposing things that make the job of being a cop harder. The same way a software developer does. You can't make the incentives align if the people who currently are police are the people you feel should not, under any circumstances, be the ones in charge of public safety. The number of low-grade thugs in the US police forces is pretty apparent when you look at the domestic violence numbers.1 Either abusive people are self-selecting into being cops, or being a cop makes you abusive.
TL;dr- You want "reform" because you think there's inherent value created by the current system, and I don't because I think the value is an byproduct and not the goal.
1-https://sites.temple.edu/klugman/2020/07/20/do-40-of-police-...
There is clearly a need for some governmental mechanism for public safety: it's also clear that the police, as we know it are the wrong starting point, and if at all the existence of the police prevents crime, it's by coincidence.
(I also have no problem being partisan about my political views. They're political views! If you could get everyone of every political view to agree on something, it's probably ineffective. Standing up for specific strong viewpoints is a good thing.)
Yet we're here talking about it, repeating the phrase. So I disagree.
The lower classes are not treated like this in any way, shape, or form. My family spent many years being targeted and harassed by local small town police in various jurisdictions. Driving a car that is more than ten years old is a great way to attract police attention. Driving a new F-150, they just smile and at you and hollar "Nice truck!".
It did cause me to get very aquianted with my civil rights though. At the end we were pretty good at thwarting the harassment using a variety of methods to assert our rights.
When I was 18 I ran over two brothers on purpose and skipped town. They were on drugs and beating someone in my passenger seat to death. Their sister blocked the front of my car so I threw it in reverse and floored the gas. They were inside the passenger door that was open, sweeping them under the car (a Ford Thunderbird).
Anyway, when the police caught up with me at work the officer saw that I was a clean cut white boy with a new car and decided on the spot that I had already been punished enough (after confirming I was there to buy/sell drugs). My car door was wasted. He just chuckled and left after mentioning the brothers were still in the hospital in really bad condition.
I thought for sure I was going to prison. I have more stories like this.
I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
The power in America is at the very top with wealth and favors. The middle class has no real say in anything. I’m pretty sure most people would agree that they have no pull with their congress people after voting. But ultra wealthy people sure do.
Edit: I left out corporations and lobbyists.
It's not as if they only had this one horrible slogan and everything else is "softer language" or exactly the same. Yes, a new slogan that has some bite was a good idea, the one they went with was a horrible mistake that only made it harder for them to accomplish their goals.
Many many people want changes to the way police operate, no one wants a police force that doesn't have any funding.
"Make America Great Again" means literally nothing. At least defund the police states a concrete goal. Don't even get me started on how bastardized "Critical Race Theory" has become.
A goal that no one wants. Every one wants police to exist. That means they want police to be funded. The minute that slogan reached the public conservatives started with "If they are successful you won't have police when you are in danger because they will have no funds to help you". The slogan has done more to hurt the changes of meaningful change than to help it.
Conservatives are fearful by nature. They always suspect that some group of "others" is out there just waiting to take everything they love from them. Many of them live in rural/remote areas where "others" aren't as prevalent and police response times are poor. They still love police though, in part because they want to feel safe and protected, but also because they like to see "others" being punished. They really love punishment. They're convinced that fear of punishment is the only thing standing between order and chaos. The harsher the punishment, the more peaceful the world. Police represent order, safety, and help keep the "others" in control. Defunding them is not an option for these people.
The slogan is not the problem. People wanting police in its current form are the problem.
It also fails to address what the difference is between police and "civilian services" that perform exactly the same function, what will stop the new service providers from becoming exactly what the current one has become, or how breaking up the current organizational structure into multiple entirely separate organizations tasked with extremely limited roles would produce greater efficiencies and effectiveness.
I agree that police are poorly suited for mental health work and I think we would be much better off getting mental health professionals in that role to help the person in crisis, probably along with police backup (for safety). Police do a very poor job of both helping people with mental illness and keeping people safe while responding to mental health crisis, but with oversight and accountability they could do one of those things very well.
I agree that traffic cops don't need to be armed to the teeth to pull over speeders and that they shouldn't use unmarked cars, but I think it's pretty useful that when they pull someone over they can see if they are a wanted criminal, determine if the car they are driving has been stolen, and arrest people who are intoxicated. They can do those things because they are working under a single organization. The cop pulling over speeders has access to criminal databases updated by other police officers in other departments (like the ones dealing with homicide, missing persons, and stolen cars) and can take dangerous people to a jail cell to be watched over by jailers who are also other police officers. Having all those different types of officers under one umbrella organization means that hiring practices, training, and polices can be consistent between them, that inter-departmental communications can flow easily, and that oversight can be simplified and consolidated. Imagine how much more work it would take to get multiple different "civilian" organizations to work together, handle passing around access to highly sensitive information securely, and to monitor them all individually.
They entirely hand-wave police preventing and stopping violence by saying that "In most incidents of violent crime, police are responding to a crime that has already taken place." which is great for "most incidents" but none of the rest of them. They say police are "ill-equipped" to investigate crime, ignoring the fact that every crime that has ever been investigated and justice was served happened because they did their job. Yes, there are problems, but no alternative organization has ever done a better job and they say nothing about why or how their "specialized service" would.
Ultimately their plan to replace police with "New Police but somehow also not connected to an institution of policing" isn't compelling. All of the fundamental problems with oversight and regulation are still unsolved. All of the problems with police unions and the relationship between law enforcement and the court system are still unsolved. It's "New Police", but less organized, and less capable.
It's a whole lot easier to reform and manage one system, than try to reform and manage countless separate unaffiliated systems trying to do the exact same job in different ways. Change is needed, and not all of their ideas are terrible, but there's no reason we couldn't accomplish them without making the problem larger and harder to manage and there's no indication on that website as to why that wouldn't be case with hundreds of totally separate New Police forces doing the same essential job of policing.
https://www.8toabolition.com/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/05/30/bad-ap...
https://www.livescience.com/evidence-police-brutality-reform...
I do get the frustrations expressed by those taking the more extreme view, but it comes off as more of an emotional outburst than a path forward. It's understandable to be frustrated and outraged enough to want to abolish policing entirely at this point, but it's also not constructive or helpful.
The good thing is that everybody is pretty clear on what the problems are, but I fear that those seeking radical/counterproductive changes to society like getting rid of police entirely will hold back the rest of us either by rejecting anything that doesn't burn the justice system to the ground, or by convincing others that there's no hope in reformation of what we have today while offering no actual solutions leading people to feel helpless and defeated at a time when the message people need is "Change is possible and necessary, we just need to insist on it and work to make it happen"
One can support both public safety and community development, and it's win-win if helping raise people up out of poverty reduces the need for police presence.
Nothing in the phrase "defund the police" says anything about any of that. It is the goal, but the slogan doesn't reflect that anywhere in any way. When you hear it, you think about the intended meaning, while the vast majority hears only what it actually says which is "remove funding from the police" and no one wants that.
Conservatives are fearful people and those against police reform took the opportunity handed to them and reinforced that very message: "If you let these liberals have their way they will make it impossible for police to protect you by defunding them". It's too bad because lots of people who would support reforms to police want nothing to do with any effort under the "defund the police" banner. No one wants a police force that doesn't have any funds.
The vast majority of white people? It's okay to be angry about state executions at the hands of police, and about the legacy of slavery. The wording reflects that anger. If it makes white people uncomfortable that's their problem. (This is coming from a white person who does not self-identify as "liberal")
“Defund” advocates distinguish themselves from “reform” advocates because they see the police reform movement as having made the problem worse by sucking money out of other local services into police budgets in the name of supporting reforms (leading to police role expansion as there are fewer other tools to handle local issues.)
They literally see “police reform” as a major source of current problems, not the solution.
(They can accurately be described as local government reform activists, but the central specific reform they support is reducing the resources and role of the local centralized paramilitary law enforcement entities, and distributing both resources and responsibilities elsewhere.)
Such as? The US invests an absurd amount of money into education and a sizable amount on welfare. Both of which also seemingly suffer from efficiency issues.
Reform is really the only option when money stops being efficient. Over time, systems accumulate crusts of leeches who live off the system offering little in return, stealing resources from others who are more honest, by merely knowing what the weaknesses of the system are. It's at that point where reviewing and heavily reforming your rules until these people are screaming bloody murder becomes the only fix.
I disagree. While we can't just throw money at a problem and expect it to get better, we're going to have to invest in police far more than we have done to get real change. No one wants to live somewhere where police don't have the funds to do their job correctly. We all just want police to do their jobs correctly. That requires oversight and that requires funding.
We have to buy body cams for every officer and build/maintain the backend systems to support them, we have to pay for better training in deescalation tactics, we have to pay for better tracking of incidents and reporting, we have to pay for new hires to replace problem officers, we have to pay for independent oversight boards and community programs. There is a lot of work to do and all of it is going to require extensive funding.
Accountability is the key to reformation, not defunding. That means removing the police's ability to police themselves (something they've failed at) and having independent review boards handle minor issues while district attorneys and judges throw police behind bars for major ones. Changes are needed throughout the justice system to make this happen.
You have to invest in something to repair it, not starve it. Some reforms, like investing in mental health services, restricting civil asset forfeiture, and demilitarization will mean that some departments can get by with fewer officers and might shrink their budgets, but I suspect we'll just be spending much of what we save on oversight and training.
Obviously, it became problematic once it was assimilated by the very machine it was raging against, but it was never meant to be palatable to the mainstream or politically correct.
Classical activists like Rosa Parks, MLK, and Frederick Douglass were careful, articulate, and thoughtful -- and they had far more of a positive influence because of it.
That's not to say that we should close our ears to people's political expressions, but advocating untenable policy never achieves much good, no matter how much feeling is behind it. We have to move beyond the primal screams and feelings toward thoughtful, articulate, actionable policy that makes good sense and has a net effect of building up society into something good instead of merely tearing it down. It's much harder and more important to build well than to tear down.
This is where good education becomes an absolute necessity. Instead of lowering standards and making school easier, we should focus on making it more accessible while keeping standards high. We need articulate, thoughtful, well-read people if we are to achieve a better society; I'm not talking about STEM -- while it's important, STEM helps people do, not think. How many of these modern activists have read Milton, Locke, Hegel, Descartes, or Aristotle?
So I see these problems (people talking about "tearing it all down") as primarily a symptom of a lack of good education.
If we’re being honest about history it’s because these are the people that some choose to celebrate and elevate. They are certainly worthy of praise and remembrance, but especially with regards to the civil rights movement it was not all of even mostly pretty. Even then some people choose to ignore words from the “articulate” people mentioned that make them feel uncomfortable.
I think it’s pretty rich to deny good education and then complain when the neglected don’t speak in the preferred manner. There are plenty of educated and articulate people who have been making the same point for years and nobody listened.
If you're making good points that contradict what people believe, they'll ridicule or at least ignore you -- that's par for the course. We celebrate people like this because they persevered in doing good in the face of intense opposition.
> I think it’s pretty rich to deny good education and then complain when the neglected don’t speak in the preferred manner.
I'm not sure what your point is. I am promoting good education - I think the system as-is has to be reformed. People need good education, especially people trying to promote societal reform.
> There are plenty of educated and articulate people who have been making the same point for years and nobody listened.
For people who are promoting good causes, let's support them and encourage them to persevere despite how difficult it is to continue being ignored and/or persecuted. The truth will prevail in the end: "For nothing is secret that will not be revealed, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light." (Luke 8:17)
I think GP is saying people still ignore the point of those very people they're praising.
In particular, Republicans (and politicians in general) love quoting MLK, but weirdly, they never seem to remember the "white moderate" quote:
> I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.”
You're making the point that MLK was beloved and effective because he was thoughtful and articulate, but there wasn't a single day in his life that he wasn't disliked by the majority of white americans: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/17/mlk-is...
What made King popular was dying.
So, yes, wagging the finger at people shouting "defund the police!" and pointing to MLK as an alternative is pretty rich.
That's a rather cynical view on a man whose influence during his life was incalculable.
Do you have any sources for that statement?
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
Personally this is why I believe in building better social media bubbles, as much as most people disagree with the concept of a social media bubble I think it’s the only way to stay sane
Open on an elderly woman, sitting quietly at home knitting. Suddenly we hear a window smash, and we see a burgler, in a ski mask and everything, attacking her window with an axe. She lets out a scream and runs for her landline. She dials 911, breathing heavily, and says "Hello, I need help-". But an automated voice on the other line cuts her off "we're sorry, due to recent funding changes, the operating hours of emergency services has been reduced. To leave a message, please stay on the line". As the voice drones on, we zoom in on the phone, hear a muffled scream, and the phone drops dramatically onto the floor. Fade to black, brought to you my Americans for a more American America.
... I mean seriously, the attack ad writes itself. I would honestly donate money every month to a nonprofit who's sole job was to find progressive activists, and run whatever shit they are saying through a focus group. I'm in favor of police reform and everything those activists are saying, but they need to get their shit together.
I think such a slogan would have captured a solid 60-70% of the electorate, which the current "defund" rhetoric hovers around the high 30s.
I believe it was Black Lives Matter (an organisation whose name is literally a divisive statement) that coined that phrase, or at least popularised it.
To be honest with you, if you look at their actions, I'm not sure if the goal is to actually end police violence/abuse of power. If that did happen, all of these influential activists would suddenly be out of a "job".
I think most reasonable people can agree with your previous points that this is in fact a corrupted system. That was where you had the most power of your comment.
All too often arguments against this interpret 'defund' at the farthest possible extreme, but no one is calling for an end of law enforcement.
The reality is that providing constant budget increases for better weapons, faster cars, additional staff, etc. is causing the police to become more militarized. The Military are a defense against enemies. As police become more militarized their enemy becomes the civilians who they are meant to protect and serve.
The actual idea is to defund police departments as they are structured today, and allocate that money instead to social and mental health programs as well as law enforcement with a foundation in de-escalation and transparency.
Of course there would still be law enforcement to maintain peace and safety, and it would be based on transparency and accountability.
There are several comments in this discussion calling for abolishing the police. Whenever this topic gets brought up, it usually seems like half the people are defending "Defund the Police" by saying that no one wants to get rid of the police, and the other half are defending "Defund the Police" by telling people why the police should be abolished.
And people with political power are calling for the abolishing them as well. This is Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from last April:
> No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can't be reformed.
I'm not sure why people who want reform are so set on tying themselves to this slogan. If I starting chanting "Defund Public Schools!", I wouldn't expect anyone to interpret that as "remove bloat from school budgets and use the money to fund social services for the kids in order to lessen the burden on teachers and make public schools function better."
[1] https://twitter.com/rashidatlaib/status/1381745303997534216?...
The way I see it the police subgroup could be defunded with new approaches deployed to maintain peace and safety, without needing to cease law enforcement as a whole.
I mean, don't we have a right to face our accuser in court? Can't do that if their name is not on the ticket.
When you drive down into what's happening here, it looks pretty clearly like the town is operating a "speed trap" on a section of Interstate that goes through the city limits. It's overwhelmingly likely that a majority of these stops are technically legitimate, even if the article is able to come up with a handful of sensational-sounding cases. Traffic violations are routine. You could sit a cop on just about any stretch of road in the town where I live and pull people over all day every day for totally legitimate violations, if that's what you wanted to do.
Hell, there's a school speed-zone camera right outside my window. I could sit here and watch its flash light-up violators' license plates all day -- on a stretch of road that's clearly marked as a school zone with a speed camera!
The status quo is that a significant percentage of drivers violate the law every time they get behind the wheel and a lot of Americans more or less think it's no big deal, despite overwhelming evidence for the problems it causes.
Alas, as this article demonstrates, if you hold these drivers accountable, then most Americans will perceive them to be innocent victims of out-of-control police.
>But when she did, the unmarked SUV pulled into the street, crossed the center line and sped toward her car, blue lights flashing. She was not speeding, or breaking the law, she argued in the suit. She pulled to the side of the road as the SUV pulled behind her, and a wrecker simultaneously parked nearby. It frightened her, and led to more trouble.
> Officers, dressed completely in dark, unmarked uniforms approached her, and one accused her of flickering her lights to warn others of their presence, her suit alleges. Unsure what was happening, Harris dialed 911. But an officer grabbed the phone and threw it to the ground, breaking it, the lawsuit says. Police put her in a patrol car and searched her vehicle for drugs.
>Harris’ lawyers contend she was taken to the Brookside jail, strip-searched, and told she could be jailed up to two days. She had an asthma attack and a panic attack, but when she knocked on the door to alert a guard, a jailer said if she continued to knock she would be charged with attempting to escape. Eventually she was given an inhaler and treated by paramedics.
>Police charged Harris with flickering her lights – or “nuisance of casting lights from motor vehicle on real property at night,” which she argues did not happen and eventually was dropped. She was also charged with resisting arrest. A report quoted in the suit claimed she “tighten (sic) arm muscles from getting handcuff (sic).”
>In addition, the police charged her with making a false 911 call, obstructing government operations by refusing to give proper papers, and disorderly conduct for yelling for others to come out of their homes. They let her out of jail at midnight, long after her family had made bond.
Let's recap. A group of unmarked men in an unmarked vehicle pulled over a woman for using her lights at night, destroyed her property, denied her medical assistance, strip searched her, accused her of drug possession, threatened to charge her with escaping jail, charged her with resisting arrest for tightening her arms, and released her way past posting bond. AND, this is one of the luckier, wealthier victims who had legal recourses to file lawsuit.
In another instance, an officer was literally inventing law on the fly -- this is more than a speedtrap.
But assuming the events unfolded as she describes, this particular case is clearly egregious. There's no evidence that this is the modal case. We're mostly talking about legitimate (if relentless) ticketing of traffic violations.
To the extent that an increase in the number of police interactions is going to result in an increase in the prevalence of bad interactions (which I think is true), the answer is much more automated enforcement.
I agree that whether she has grandchildren or not doesn't matter much, but people say grandma to be more polite than saying old lady.
PSA: when getting pulled over, you should, after appearing controlled and predictable to the police, find private property to pull onto and call a friend or family to be ready to retrieve your car to prevent this particular abuse.
>The status quo is that a significant percentage of drivers violate the law every time they get behind the wheel and a lot of Americans more or less think it's no big deal...
This is pretty damning evidence of negligent road design. The roads are built for speeds so far above the posted limit that police officers are then required to enforce limits that are, compared to the road's design speed, pernicious and arbitrary.
Traffic engineers like to pretend that speeds can be limited only by enforcement, in glaring contradiction to the fact that all of the design process centers around a (fast) design speed.
There's an engineer in Minnesota who is trying to sue the pants off of egregious offenders to send a message, and it's the most inspiring use of litigation I've ever heard.[0]
[0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/5/29/an-open-letter...
There’s some skepticism in left-leaning circles about the fairness or utility of automated enforcement, but I hope articles like this one demonstrate why it’s so much better.
(In this particular case we're mostly talking about Interstate traffic, it seems, which, to be frank, I'm far less concerned about. If anything is wrong with their relentless ticketing it's that it's focused in the wrong place.)
Legislating that traffic/etc fines go to a _state_ budget instead of local town budgets might solve this, but I imagine that would be very hard to pass, let alone survive lawsuits.
"Simply using the left lane" is illegal unless you're actively passing someone. In my state it's one mile. If you haven't passed someone in the last mile, you need to be in the right lane. I know in some states it's a quarter mile, which at 65-75 seems a bit aggressive (basically saying you have to be going 15-20+ faster than the person you're passing just to safely get over in time).
But seriously, hanging out in the left lane is stupid and unsafe, regardless of your speed.
[0] https://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
And in all my driving, I've yet to be overtaken legally on the left - they always speed in order to do it, which is illegal. So I'm not clear why "it's more important to keep the left lane for passing".
Just make the left lane "speed limit" lane, and the right lane slow lane. Meaning if you are going the speed limit you can stay in the left lane.
(This is a hot topic, I'm sure I'll get downvotes, I don't care about that, but I would appreciate replies more. Specifically about what's wrong with staying in the left lane if you are going the maximum legal speed.)
> pass you on the right (which is dangerous)
What's dangerous about it? And don't say "the left lane is for slow cars", because speeders are WAY more dangerous, yet you are not criticizing them.
> you're disrupting the normal flow of traffic (also dangerous)
I don't see any disruption to the normal flow. Set your cruise control to the speed limit, and just drive smoothly. There is zero reason to constantly weave in and out of traffic as speeding "pass on the left" drivers do.
Speeders disrupt the normal flow though, so why are you OK with them?
There seems to be large lack of symmetry in your arguments. (Although I do appreciate you at least answering, I've heard these answers before, and yet I never gotten a reply when I bring up the lack of symmetry in the answer.)
> Speeders disrupt the normal flow though
When it's one guy going 100 and everyone else is 80, yes. No argument from me. But when everyone is going 80 and there's someone in the left going 65 because that's the limit, the people going 80 aren't the problem.
By "normal flow" I'm referring to highway conventions that expect the average traffic speed of a leftward lane to be higher than the lane immediately to its right. That's a safer flow than having every lane with a random average speed. Germany enforces this on the Autobahn. Some US states enforce it; most have signs promoting the idea. With "slower traffic keep right" you get something close to laminar flow (with shear) if you treat cars as gas molecules. With "every lane can do whatever it wants" you have turbulent flow, more lane changes, and more collisions.
On top of the behavioral issue, there are legitimate reasons for non-emergency vehicles to overtake vehicles. I don’t expect you to agree with this, but it is a majority view so preventing it is anti-social (though not as much as blocking driving on the shoulder, which is extreme behavior committed for reasons similar to principled left-lane occupation.)
Roads with fewer lanes require more adherence to social customs than wide roads to keep them safe and effective. Most don’t require an elaborate explanation as they can intuitively sense the benefit of staying in the right lane when not passing, as they gain experience with a wider variety of traffic situations.
And for what it's worth, there are several states where there are explicit exceptions to briefly exceed the speed limit for the purposes of passing vehicles in the right lane - some specify they have to be going under the speed limit, but not all.
Seriously though, I think it is illegal in California, but as I understand it is something that will get a count added to your ticket, but not something you will necessarily get pulled over for (as opposed to speeding)
"She argued that she only drove in the left lane to pass other vehicles, and her ticket – on May 26, 2019 – came five months before Alabama’s Anti-Road Rage Act, a law making it illegal to drive in the left lane of an interstate for more than a mile and a half, went into effect."
Emphasis my own
But live in a suburb where the local beltway has 6 lanes in each direction - the left lane is basically just another lane.
Policing for profit is in theory a good thing. Every time they enforced a good law the society profits. Every time they enforce a bad law the society should change the law.
The alternative is having bad laws that are enforced just sometimes, at the discretion and personal biases of the not-for profit police.
Some of these departments have used these "profits" for BBQs for the police, or flat screen TVs, or for personal vehicles for officers.
And in some of the cases where such "misuse" of funds has been taken to court, oftentimes the court has ruled that the PD has the perfect right to do so.
Not sure how this is a societal profit.
This happens whether policing is "for profit" or not. Do you think they'll give the mayor or the police chief's spouse a speeding ticket if it means $100 extra in the department budget? These powers are always used selectively. The police just have to avoid using the "bad laws" against a core group of people with political power, and maybe share some of the spoils of enforcement with that group.
There is zero notion of duty or honor in your worldview. The only decision loop that exists in your worldview is "(if (profitable? action) (action) (not action)". It's disgusting.
Police have a duty to justice. These police, if the reporting is correct, have ignored duty and used their office for pecuniary gain.
> Police have a duty to justice
How did duty to justice and honour worked for the black communities deliberately. targeted by law enforcement over the last 100 years (in the US)?
Speed traps have been around for decades. "Fleece the out-of-towners" has always been a great revenue source for tiny towns. How likely are you to go back to East Jesus, MS to fight your ticket?
[1] https://www.speedtrap.org/alabama-speed-trap-cities/
Anecdotally, I see a constable car hiding near a stop sign close to my home almost everyday and ticketing people who do a rolling stop. How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.
Exactly, with negligible exceptions every police force in the country has always had their budget increase.
De-policing was the goal and that goal has been partly achieved. Now we all get to live with it until trust is restored.
A local businessperson that posted memes in 2020 about defunding the police just had his business ransacked again a few weeks ago. He then took to social media to complain about how Seattle is no longer safe and he may leave the city. It’s like people have completely lost grip with reality.
At any rate, de-prioritizing expired tabs and missing plates seems like a nothingburger.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/06/health/us-homicide-rate-incre...
Do you have a good link that lays out the numbers?
Per capita?
I'm looking at the crime stats in Seattle. For a city with a population growth of 2.2%, it doesn't seem that crime has gone up significantly.
If anything, this proves that police does not prevent crimes.
2020 was up 50%. And 2021 is outpacing 2020.
There were less homicides in 2021 than in 2020. In total, there were less crimes in 2021 than in 2018, with a 2.2% population increase.
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls
"Homicide" is a fungible term, one that is gamed by city officials and prosecutors that want to show lower violence levels in their city.
Gun violence totals are much harder to game. And those continue to rise in the US.
I don't think I get your point, though. This seems to point more towards gun control, than increasing police budgets.
You missed the bit about 50+yrs of racism and class war fare that has created the America you live in today. Not a policy change from last year my friend. You are living in a sickness, just because you now are starting to to turn the tide, does not mean you will not have to deal with ongoing side-effects while the transition happens.
At one point, we need to realise that this IS Capitalism. This IS the SYSTEM. This IS the product. Haves, and have nots. At some point, the have nots will not respect the system that entrenches them in servatude. That is why the Romans weaponised religious practices, fear of death is the only thing that overrides all...
In 2022, every cop looks at a call through the lens of "will I go to prison if I respond to this?". So now, we have criminals committing all sorts of crimes on the street (violent and not) and a police force that is unwilling to pursue these criminals for fear of the bad guy pulling a knife, or a gun, or having a heart attack while being arrested. The cop gets a felony charge, gets doxxed by the media and Twitter, and gets a spectacle trial, sometimes with the President of the United States weighing in, and usually ends up completely f'ed, even if found not guilty. It's much easier for them to just drive on by and let the crime happen and tell dispatch that they couldn't find the guy.
Good.
Why wouldn't we want police accountability? Even more, an officer is a public servant and must be held to a higher standard than petty criminals. The fact that some people would think otherwise is mind boggling.
Until people stop with “all cops” and stop painting all criminals as down-on-their-luck saints, we will stay this way.
This is no different than saying “all men are rapists” or “all women are gold diggers”.
> Clearly you’ve never been in this sort of situation where the prescribed action is very close to what will get you sued or killed.
Clearly not, but why would that matter? I recognise three things. First, the purpose of police departments should be to protect citizens, not abuse them. Second, officers should be trained to de-escalate, not to shoot first and ask later. And third, the US clearly has issues with the use of force by their police.
> This is no different than saying “all men are rapists” or “all women are gold diggers
Is it customary among men and women to excuse and enable immoral or even criminal behaviours?
It is not. But the same cannot be said about police departments and unions.
I mean people should think about that about anything they do. The fact that it's new to police is telling. It's because until now they see themselves as above the law, because they have been.
The only cops I've seen get prosecuted are the egregious crimes. Anything anywhere close to borderline gets a pass, including killing unarmed people.
Look at the cops who beat up that demented 73 year old lady in Colorado. They got a pass from every supervisor in their department and would still be employed if the lady's family didn't file a federal lawsuit and the news caught wind of it. Their supervisors should also face charges for covering it up, including that SOB police chief. If any police department should have everyone fired and rebuilt from the ground up, this is a perfect example. The video of her arrest exists, but don't watch it unless you wanna get really, and I mean really mad.
Yes, good cops exist, but if I was a good cop and I found myself working at a department like this, I would find my morals extremely strained every day. I don't know how long I could work for them and sleep at night.
Oh and fuck that Walmart employee and his/her supervisor for calling the animal cops too. And fuck Walmart the company for calling cops on demented old ladies.
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/19/998433764/former-colorado-off...
Schielke has noted that the department failed to take any action against the officer until media reports publicized Garner's violent arrest. This inaction was despite the fact that several other officers as well as supervisors were aware of what had happened. Only after reports did officials seek to launch an investigation into the incident resulting in Wednesday's charges, she said.
/end rant
[0] see recent Atlantic article posted here on the "new meth"
What do you suggest? Let them do whatever they want because they have to deal with violent individuals some times?
I call this progress. There are many people who do not think the police are effective at their jobs, or even a net good to society. I say this as a white male who has never had a positive interaction with the police in his life. I hear about the "good" cops but I never meet them, and I've met a lot of terrible cops.
What I want is for the police to be held accountable to the public they are supposedly serving. Until we have that I am happy to see fewer of them because I do not believe they are serving the public, but are instead serving themselves (on the taxpayer's dime, no less).
So I've seen the violence up close and I've listened to the vulnerable women, and I think the police are still part of the problem. One of my exes basically described them as legal thugs, and was terrified the police would rape her as well. You should look up statistics for police beating their wives, they're not exactly known for defending women against violence.
Victims of street crimes are usually men.
So which is it- is whiteness the problem because white women are also very susceptible to sexual assault, or is maleness the problem because men are the primary victims?
You don’t have a monopoly on victimization.
City council approved an increase in taxes, and used part of it to raise the APD budget [1]. This didn't translate into a more effective force, and the perception among citizens is that police has given up on misdemeanors or infractions.
Incidentally, one of my neighbours is an officer, and his major complaints are the lack of new recruits, which is odd since that is ultimately the department responsibility, and the inability to charge people with possession of weed, since the city has effectively decriminalise it.
[1] https://www.kut.org/austin/2021-08-12/austin-passes-4-5-bill...
- non-lethal car accidents - disturbances of the peace - illegal drug selling/use in public spaces - car thefts - break-ins
Let alone deal with predatory towing, which has really taken off in town, too. With crime skyrocketing and housing costs higher than they've ever been, I really don't understand why anyone would want to live here any more.
I think it may just be a talking point in the police force.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
Marijuana possession is both very common and easy to prove, so it works well for that purpose. If a cop happens to come across it on a "good" person, they can always look the other way.
(not endorsing this approach, just speculating as to how police may view the situation)
To be honest, we all know it's because traffic fines are risk-free income, while chasing actual criminals is an expense. The invisible hand of the Free Market(tm) optimizes for income instead of effectiveness, because police departments don't have competition.
Actually, that happens in a Free Market too, but companies have more incentive to tamp down on inefficient behavior if it makes them less competitive. In a monopoly the inefficiency is much harder to prevent.
The term you're looking for is "competitive market." In a perfectly competitive market, monopolies don't form, but, there is also no long term economic profit to be had. That is, the sum of "accounting profit" (what you'd typically think of as the "bottom line" of a company's P&L statement) minus opportunity costs tends to 0 in the long term.
Perfect competition is a highly idealized model that can't happen in practice, but is instructive to analyze in theory. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
Back in the 80s social services were heavily cut under the Reagan administration, on the assumption that the police could serve that purpose instead. But the police are trained to deal with potentially violent criminals and applying those techniques to the homeless or mentally ill only makes the problem worse and leads to tragedy.
So the idea is you claw back the extra money the police departments need to handle cases like that (poorly) and greatly increase the funding for social workers and state mental health institutions.
In reality the second part is a huge amount of work to set up and few if any governments have really tried to take it seriously. Most have not even freed up the money from police departments, and a few that have ended up giving it right back when they realized how much extra work it was going to make for them.
The underlying theory is that if you fix the social safety nets then you won't need much of a police force, and in fact the social support programs are much cheaper than police and jails in the long run. But they are also "socialism" so we can't have that in this country.
Revenue.
They've got my vote!
How is it that in the US the police is such a deregulated entity? Almost anywhere I’ve been in the world the police worked the same nation or state wide, maybe the local police department of town A works a little different from that of town B but the core rules are many and the same for all of them.
Which historical, legal and cultural reasons bring to this situation where a small town can shape a police department so freely?
For example, most people in jail are not in federal jail. Most people are served by local police. Rules on taxes vary county to county as needs vary county to county.
This is good and bad
The main thing in this is law enforcement discretion. There's no way the population would vote these malicious leaders in if the tickets were being given to residents. They are mostly hitting non-residents. This is very common near military bases. The law is the same, but they choose not to apply it to residents (and apparently make up violations too).
Hopefully people have dashcams, and record interactions on their phones. It sounds like they will end up losing much more in lawsuits than they are bringing in. Perhaps the FBI and DOJ will get involved due to rights and color of law violations.
What I don’t understand is about police in particular, if police is “law enforcement”. I’d expect some laws to be national, then some laws to be state, then going down and down until we reach a single small town where something might be different from the next one but they should share many things… how is it that the enforcement part of those same laws is so subjective?
IMHO the law has two sides: the normative one, what it actually is, and the enforcement one, how it is applied to society. If the enforcement part is highly subjective we are distorting the law. It should be desirable to minimize the differences of enforcing the same law.
Is it something really appreciated by the population over there that the same law is applied very differently in the next town over simply because it decides to enforce it in a different manner?
I remember a few decades ago, AAA (large US auto club) recommended against using certain stretches of highway in Florida because the local town loved to ticket out-of-state drivers (heading from the northern border to Disney World in Orlando, IIRC).
And because enforcement is decentralized, so is enforcement of police procedures. "Thin Blue Line" is the term used to describe cops backing cops, even when they do illegal things. Like planting evidence in Baltimore (a few news worthy cases over the past several years).
Basically, policing in the US is completely broken. And the Supreme Court has decided (not recently) that police have zero obligation to actually help and protect citizens. So, if a crime is occurring, the police aren't obligated to help. They just wait until the beatings and rapes finish, then maybe arrest suspects, if they can be bothered (ie, did the crime make headlines and is a politician pressuring them to do so).
The reality in the United States is that the only national law in situations where you don't explicitly deal with the federal government is the Consitution, and even then the Constitution is interpreted differently by different states.
The states are more or less free to ignore (refuse to enforce) federal law. How do you think certain states legalised weed, illegal immigration and refuse to enforce the NFA in certain situations?
I guess this is what I’m missing, it is really peculiar from my point of view that a smaller entity can ignore a “higher” law.
From what I’m used to the higher law always wins, so during disputes: national > state > county > town.
What you are saying is that in the US a smaller entity is free to say “fuck you, come and get me” to a higher entity and get along with it, and the only way for a higher entity to step in is using force? (not literal force but force nonetheless)
Maybe it’s a combination of: common law (instead of civil law), most towns are relatively recent, sheer size of the country, isolation of some communities and a strong sense of local autonomy.
Yes. And the feds would have to use literal force to get someone for smoking weed in say, Colorado.
Your friendly neighbourhood FBI or DEA agent can still arrest you for smoking weed in Colorado, it’s just that the local and state police don’t care and they won’t transfer you to federal custody.
Obviously this is not how federal law enforcement works. They don’t do patrols, and they are extremely reliant on state law enforcement to transfer the cases that fall under their jurisdiction to them, except when they are doing the investigation themselves.
Harbouring illegal aliens is illegal under federal law, but what are you going to do, if California doesn’t care and straight up refuses to cooperate with the ICE? ICE has the authority to enforce federal law within California, it’s just that they have to put the boots on the ground themselves now, for which no federal law enforcement agency has the resources.
This was by design. States are sovereign entities.
The state part is something I quite got already from popular culture, but is there something similar also inside a state? I mean, counties can do the same “fuck you” with the state and towns can do the same with the county?
Generally no, because the state is the sovereign. Counties/towns/any other local communities aren't.
For what I read around it is unusual, and mostly when something really bad happens and/or hit the news. If the state is sovereign, why is it not enforcing its own law inside its borders?
(thanks again BTW)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/08/most-police...
Generally if a crime occurs within a city it's that city police that will investigate, if it is outside the city within a county it may be the county sheriff or state police, and across state lines, the federal government gets involved. Obviously this can cause some confusion or fighting over jurisdictions. On the flip-side a local police department can help the needs of the community specifically. For example, where I live we have a small police department that responds immediately if there is a problem when you call them. They often help elderly residents that are having trouble, will drive by your house when you're on vacation, etc. Depending on states and cities local laws, sheriffs and police chiefs may be hired or elected.
Culturally, the United States has been oriented towards local control and biased against federal control. The states traditionally have been very independent of the federal government. For example most state constitutions are very long compared to our relatively short national constitution. In the western part of the united states, as communities were developed and grew, the need for local law enforcement grew with those communities, often before they were really a part of a state or the federal government had any control. So the legacies of those localized police and law enforcement entities has lived on.
I'm less familiar with how Europe's or other countries' police came to be, but typically those countries are far smaller than the United States and generally have more centralized federal power, which means having a centralized police force makes more sense.
Just blows my mind.
Anyway I feel there is something missing and I cannot exactly say what it is. Maybe it is simply something cultural that is not so easily graspable from those living somewhere else, it always feels so strange to me that a small town has so much freedom to shape its law enforcement so freely… for me a shared law across the state is the basis for equality, and to have a shared law you need to enforce it similarly.
Thanks again :)
Accountability, that is missing!
In general Republicans are more against central control, and Democrats more for it (but not as much as Europeans).
So for example that voting rights fight going on right now is not about voting rights, it's about the Federal government setting rules (Republicans are against that) vs. the State setting rules (Democrats are against that).
There's arguments both ways for which is better, I don't want to go into that, but this should help explain what you are missing.
This same argument shapes things like Health care - which is currently local, not federal, and actually a HUGE amount of political stuff boils down to local vs federal.
Another thing is that personal determination is equated with local control (i.e. person decides what's best for themselves), while federal control is equated with social services (since some central authority decides what services to render).
Keep in mind the way the country was created was "united states", with the main authority being the state, and the federal government given only limited power. Also keep in mind a US state is similar in size to a European country.
Different laws are set at different levels, and historically policing was always at the city level. Also building codes are often at the city level.
Voting is typically at the county level (which is a group of cities, or one very large city).
Etc, etc. There are customs for most of these laws, and which level of entity is in charge of them. And the "higher" level entity can step in if necessary, but usually does not.
Also typically a "sheriff" is a voted position, while police is appointed by the mayor. So ultimately they answer to the voters, either directly or through the mayor.