Defunding the Police?

[ruby sparks]

Imo defunding is not a good way to go. The word itself is going to put too many people off. Those seeking change should probably stick to advocating for other reforms.

Not only that, but it would be a disaster. We don't need less police, we need better police. Look at Camden for what we should be looking at.

I agree, especially having read more about Camden.

 

[lpetrich]

George Floyd protests have made police reform the consensus position - CNNPolitics

Something extraordinary is happening in America: 14 days of protests from coast to coast against police brutality and racism have produced a wave of change in public opinion on police reform.

The gruesome video of George Floyd's killing at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer has prompted the kind of soul searching about the role of police in society and the systemic racism in the criminal justice system that many advocates have been pushing for decades. And in Washington and in cities and states across the country, political leaders are beginning to listen.

Not just Democrats, but also Republicans.

On Monday, Democrats unveiled a sweeping police reform bill in response to protests. And by Tuesday, congressional Republicans in the House and Senate said they planned to introduce their own reform proposals.

G.O.P. Scrambles to Respond to Public Demands for Police Overhaul - The New York Times - "Republicans have been startled by the extent to which public opinion has shifted in recent days after the killings of unarmed black Americans by the police and the protests that have followed."

Adding to their challenge, President Trump has offered only an incendiary response, repeatedly invoking “law and order,” calling for military and police crackdowns on protesters, promoting conspiracy theories, and returning time and again to the false claim that Democrats agitating for change are simply bent on defunding police departments.

On Tuesday, Republicans on Capitol Hill rushed to distance themselves from that approach, publicly making clear that they would lay out their own legislation and refraining from attacking a sweeping Democratic bill unveiled this week aimed at combating racial bias and excessive use of force by the police.

...
But privately, Republican lawmakers and aides conceded they had few proposals ready to offer and were instead racing to reach a consensus about how to proceed.

Good that they have lost the initiative here.

The dilemma for Republicans is urgent. For decades, their party has been built on the legacy of the “Southern strategy,” in which candidates sought to win over onetime Democrats by portraying themselves as tough on crime and disorder.

...
Mr. Trump has sought to stir up white grievance as well, calling immigrants criminals, berating professional African-American football players for kneeling during the national anthem, and calling protesters of police brutality against black Americans “thugs.” But polls now show that huge majorities of the country, including whites, believe that policing must change.

Then this tidbit:

The prospect of a messy intraparty split is one reason that Mr. McConnell generally refuses to bring up legislation that has not been preapproved by Mr. Trump, but Republicans appear to see more potential risk in waiting around for the White House to move than in crossing the president.

“We are on a separate track from the White House,” Mr. Scott told reporters, a few hours before meeting on Capitol Hill with Mr. Meadows and Mr. Kushner.

How convenient. So Republican Congresspeople, like MMC himself, enable President Anthony Fremont to avoid provoking him and being sent to the political cornfield. Even if it makes them seem hopelessly cowardly.

Republicans are also feeling pressure from a newly confident Democratic Party, which believes it has finally reclaimed ground when it comes to public trust around law and safety. Many of them fear that Democrats will brand any compromise that Republicans would be willing to accept as insufficient, and use the issue instead to score political points in an election year that appears increasingly promising for them.

They don't seem like very good losers.

 

[SimpleDon]

What list are you referring to? You certainly did not include a link here.

You are quite right to question me. What I said was not correct apparently. I withdraw the statement. To be correct you have to include ICE which the FBI doesn't count as a law enforcement agency. If it was considered to be a law enforcement agency it would be the largest in the US.

I will give you the high number of police departments, including jurisdictions where primary policing is done by sheriff's departments. That goes hand in hand with generally high number of local governments in the US. In the Atlanta metro area it is currently en vogue for every pissant unincorporated area to seek to become an incorporated city.
View attachment 28158
That particular one failed.

This brings up another sore point. The number of small suburban towns that surround every city in the US. In most developed countries when a small town is engulfed by a spreading city it's made a part of the city, made a district inside the city. Otherwise the many small towns surrounding the large city get a free ride, they have the advantages of the city without having to pay the higher property taxes of the city.

I live in Atlanta, by the way, in Norcross.

And don't get me started on the quasi-government taxing districts for water, etc.

Surely it is the lower classes that have to coupon clip. Or are you saying that the upper classes are so careful with their money that they must save that 15 cents on orange juice while the middle and lower classes waste money on overpriced baller Nikes, iPhone 11s and such status symbols?

I am showing my age. The coupons that the term is referring to were attached to bonds in olden days. To get the interest payment for the bond you had to cut the coupon off the bond and redeem it with the bond's agent, usually a bank. It became a general term, once again, in olden times, for anyone who depended on unearned income, that is income gained without working for it.

I have to stop using that term, obviously.

See, the solutions are simple. You just have to think outside of the neoliberal box that we have been in for fifty years or so.

Wasn't it Mencken who said "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong"?
Complex problems usually require complex solutions.

I was being a little facetious. With our current state of neoliberal governance these are not possible. Conservatives have made an issue about crime, for example, Trump declared himself to be a law and order president recently, sounding like  George Wallace in 1968, and yet again I am showing my age.

George Wallace taught the Republicans how to use racism to obtain the votes of white males by asserting that the government was putting the interests of blacks ahead of them. The single largest reason that we have the tragically incompetent as President right now. Racism being used as it has always been used, to divide the workers against themselves.

But even parts that may be solved relatively simply will instead probably be controversial. Take for example sex work. No reason to keep it illegal.
And thousands of police (and court) manhours could be saved if police would not persecute sex workers and their customers and instead focused more narrowly on

Public safety is not helped one iota if police officers pretend to be a hookers /customers to bust customers/hookers who are not harming anyone.

But of course, legalizing sex work is extremely controversial and opposed by illiberal authoritarians on both right and left (Toni on this forum is a particularly vocal specimen of the latter variety).

The same argument can be and is made for legalizing marijuana and gambling.

I have to admit that I am somewhat uncomfortable about legalizing these two things, but it is because I don't know how legalization would impact society. I can't come up with any logical reason that they are now illegal except that about 2% of the people will harm themselves by abusing the freedom.

The obvious exception to this is sex work where it harms people because it is illegal. People are forced into sex work to meet the demand. The supply of sex workers is limited because it is illegal.

I am a life long atheist and am reluctant to have the government put in the position of enforcing moral codes that some believe are dictated by their 3000 year old book. It is a short step then to instituting a state religion.

 

[lpetrich]

Here is how one subculture has handled the security problem, though it was with private security guards, not city police officers.

Dorsai Irregulars - WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia

They were founded as an organization in 1974 by writer Robert Asprin in response to a need for security at science fiction conventions. Before the DI, security at conventions was normally handled by hiring outside security, which resulted in some friction between them and the con-goers since the former did not have much knowledge of the science fiction fandom.

Dorsai Irregulars - Fanlore

At Torcon 2, the 31st World Science Fiction Convention (or "WorldCon"), held in 1973 in Toronto, the only security force was hired security guards. There was friction between the guards and the fans. The guards did not understand the fannish milieu. One miscreant fan stole one of noted illustrator Kelly Freas's paintings from the Art Show... The story goes that he showed the rental guard at the door a receipt for a piece of much lower value. The guard didn't know any better and let him through.

However it happened, it left a lot of people upset and worried about what was happening in the science fiction fan community.

Some science-fiction fans then formed a volunteer security force, and they called themselves the Dorsai Irregulars, after the Dorsai military force in Gordon R. Dickson's SF novels.

They have a Star Trek counterpart, the Klingon Diplomatic Corps.

 

[ronburgundy]

There are many places to get the money required to redirect money from the ineffective policing to programs that would actually reduce crime.

Once again, the US is a veritable police state compared to other highly developed countries, with over 800,000 sworn officers, twice the number of police per capita than Germany. #2 on the list. Reduce the number of the police and use the money saved.



The police in the US are poorly organized into no less than 18,000 different agencies. This is highly inefficient. Everything that the police are concerned with, personnel, procedures, training, recruiting, detention, health care, etc. have to be duplicated 18,000 times. Untold time is wasted in jurisdictional questions. Reorganize the nation's police agencies into national or statewide police forces and use the savings from the reorganization.

.

Where are you getting your numbers? The wiki that relies on UN data shows that the US is ranked #112 out of 144 countries in police per capita, below Germany, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, Australia, Japan, Belgium, Netherlands and many others. With 209 officers per 10,000 people, the US is just a bit higher than Canada and Nordic countries who are around 190.

And Chicago has close to the same cop/pop ratio as London and Paris. What is notably bigger in Chicago is the annual budget, which is $140,000 per sworn officer vs. about $80,000 in London and Paris.

Also, despite recent rhetoric, the sound research I described in my prior post shows that crime goes up with fewer patrol officers. The great success of Camden, NJ has as much to do with doubling their officers as with the radical changes in training, deployment, and adding citizen liaisons.
I agree that officers are used very inefficiently, but better policing that reduces violent confrontations requires the cops to spend more time engaged in friendly, cooperative, and informative interacting with communities, and on foot when possible. That can't be done with major reductions in personnel.

 

[ZiprHead]

Congressman Livid After Report That Chicago Police 'Lounged' in His Campaign Office While Neighborhood Was Looted

But another break-in during the protests has gone largely unpublicized.
Chicago Congressman Bobby Rush (D-IL) discovered on Thursday that as protests and looting occurred throughout the city, 13 police officers broke into his office, where they began eating his food and sleeping.

Rush and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot were outraged that the officers would break into a congressional office for use as a recreation room while chaos ensued in Chicago.

 

[Trausti]

Defund the anthropomorphic police, too!

 

[Trausti]

Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police

I’ve been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power — whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent — here’s an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people.

Yes. Recent history shows that when the police pull back homicide rates drop. Oh, wait.

What about rape? The current approach hasn’t ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police officers themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of police misconduct. In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days.

Not crazy at all.

 

[lpetrich]

Ashley on Twitter: ".@AOC's answer to "what does defund the police look like?" was "a suburb" and that is totally gonna be my answer from now on https://t.co/JIlIfngMCv" / Twitter
I'll quote it in full:

The good news is that it actually doesn't take ton of imagination.

It looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to fund youth, health, housing, etc more than they fund police. These communities have lower crime rates not because they have more police, but bc they have more resources to support healthy society in way that reduces crime.

When a teenager or preteen does something harmful in a suburb (I say teen bc this is often where lifelong carceral cycles begin for Black and Brown communities) White communities bend over backwards to find alternatives to incarceration for their loved ones to "protect their future" like community service or rehab or restorative measures. Why don't we treat Black and Brown people the same way? Why doesn't the criminal system care about Black teens' futures the way they care for White teens' futures? Why doesn't the news use Black people's graduation or family photos in stories they way they do when they cover White people (eg Brock Turner) who commit harmful crimes? Affluent White suburbs also design their own lives so that they walk through the world without having much interruption or interaction with police at all aside from community events and speeding tickets (and many of these communities try to reduce those, too!)

Just starting THERE would be a dramatically and radically different world than what we are experiencing now.

I can't wait for the resident right-wingers to make excuses for this squishy softness on crime.

 

[lpetrich]

Opinion | Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police - The New York Times by Mariame Kaba, an "organizer against criminalization". She has been an activist for a long time, and she recently collaborated with AOC on setting up mutual-aid networks.

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.

Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.

She addresses the question of what most cops do.

The first thing to point out is that police officers don’t do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues. We’ve been taught to think they “catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers,” said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is “a big myth,” he said. “The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, they’re cop of the month.”

Then

Second, a “safe” world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.

She then got into a history of investigations into police misconduct, going back to the late 19th cy., and also into proposed reforms.

The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what has happened over the past few weeks — police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters. These officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garner’s death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would back him up and he was right. He stayed on the job for five more years.

What does she propose?

We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.

...
We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained “community care workers” could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.

Then she gets into rape and how policing has failed to curb it. She also points out that that is a common form of police misconduct. She doesn't get into alternatives for that and other serious crimes.

Also, cops are useful as a deterrent. But even then, cops have to have good relations with the people that they work among.

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement — and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldn’t happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

Seems overoptimistic and utopian.

 

[ruby sparks]

Yep, it does. Possibly more than a bit.

But you know what they say; aim for the stars and you might hit the moon.

In other words, if there is open discussion of and calls for defunding, disbandment and abolishing, then more reasonable reforms that would otherwise be labelled drastic will not seem (or indeed be) so drastic and maybe stand a better chance of actually being implemented.

In other words: realpolitiks and bargaining.

To my mind reforms are needed, and it seems to me that in the past they have been blocked. As such, if calls for unrealistic or too much change lead to more modest reforms that help to dislodge the blockages that’s a good thing.

Its like if you go to your boss and you ask for a pay rise. Boss says no way can I afford to pay you what you’re asking but......I’ll give you a lesser pay rise. It can be a sort of win win if handled well by all sides. Compromise in other words.

 

[J842P]

Yep, it does. Possibly more than a bit.

But you know what they say; aim for the stars and you might hit the moon.

In other words, if there is open discussion of and calls for defunding, disbandment and abolishing, then reforms that would otherwise be labelled drastic will not seem (or indeed be) so drastic and maybe stand a better chance of being implemented.

In other words: realpolitiks and bargaining.

This is a good point. The left in the United States constantly tries to negotiate starting from the bare minimum the left-base would even want - if that. Take the ACA, i.e. "Obamacare". It was modeled on a state system famous for being enacted by a Republican, Mitt Romney, which in turn was based on a plan developed at the Heritage Foundation, a far-right "think tank". Not the greatest place to start negotiating.

I do fear though that it will play into the hands of the Republicans. Law and order is a tried and true electoral strategy in the US.

 

[ruby sparks]

I do fear though that it will play into the hands of the Republicans. Law and order is a tried and true electoral strategy in the US.

Yeah. There is that ‘traditional’ risk.

However, if there was widespread, enduring (rather than merely passing) popular support, I think there would be scope for at least some more reform ‘than usual’. And in fact republican politicians might need to adjust to such opinion among the electorate, assuming it is indeed the case that recent events are more than just a temporary blip.

In other words has something actually shifted, or not?

I think it might have. There are aspects of this which are unprecedented.

 

[ruby sparks]

Basically, if there isn’t reduced support for Trump after this (and other stuff) including among Republican politicians, it would be a bit shocking and things in the USA might just not be going to get better.

The idea of him getting re-elected is almost too much to bear.

 

[ruby sparks]

Or to put it another way, if the Democrats can’t cash in on this big time, they must be fools.

 

[J842P]

I do fear though that it will play into the hands of the Republicans. Law and order is a tried and true electoral strategy in the US.

Yeah. There is that ‘traditional’ risk.

However, if there was widespread, enduring (rather than merely passing) popular support, I think there would be scope for at least some more reform. And in fact republican politicians might need to adjust to such opinion among the electorate, assuming it is indeed the case that recent events are more than just a temporary blip.

I think there is widespread support of "reducing the prison population" and to some extent "reforming the police." The support for that is fairly bipartisan, enough to effectively legislate. However, if it comes to be understood to mean abolishing the police, then I think it would be very bad for the Democrats. Like, bad enough to re-elect Trump (which would be a classic Democratic move, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with a slogan like "defund the police").

It would lack significant support even among Democrats, pretty much for any demographic group except maybe people that identify as maoists.

 

[ruby sparks]

I do fear though that it will play into the hands of the Republicans. Law and order is a tried and true electoral strategy in the US.

Yeah. There is that ‘traditional’ risk.

However, if there was widespread, enduring (rather than merely passing) popular support, I think there would be scope for at least some more reform. And in fact republican politicians might need to adjust to such opinion among the electorate, assuming it is indeed the case that recent events are more than just a temporary blip.

I think there is widespread support of "reducing the prison population" and to some extent "reforming the police." The support for that is fairly bipartisan, enough to effectively legislate. However, if it comes to be understood to mean abolishing the police, then I think it would be very bad for the Democrats. Like, bad enough to re-elect Trump (which would be a classic Democratic move, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with a slogan like "defund the police").

It would lack significant support even among Democrats, pretty much across any demographic group except for may people that identify as maoists and the like.

Yes. The Dems should not endorse such extreme suggestions. At most they should allow others to do it (so that it’s out there as a hypothetical option/bargaining position) and either stay silent or better still, openly disagree with them. They won’t win a presidency in America by supporting extremists on the left. Or if you prefer, idealists.

 

[fromderinside]

Law and order is a tried and true electoral strategy in the US.

Broken has replaced L&O. So going are statues and military base names.

How to fix a broken heart? Stop giving flowers.

 

[Derec]

Or to put it another way, if the Democrats can’t cash in on this big time, they must be fools. ������

Have you seen the present-day Democratic Party? "Ship of fools" comes to mind, with Joe Biden at the helm ...

 

[Derec]

I do fear though that it will play into the hands of the Republicans. Law and order is a tried and true electoral strategy in the US.

And for a good reason. Most people do not want to see Wendy's restaurants torched and Interstates blocked every time some idiot attacks the police and gets shot.