Defunding the Police?

[Trausti]

Is 'Defund the Police' a massive political mistake? - CNNPolitics


Trump's latest attempt to tag Biden as a radical flops - POLITICO

Anarchy? That's the ultimate in less government -- zero government.

I wouldn't think that many old-school Democrats support defunding the police; but I suspect the new crop that do will make the Dem Convention very interesting.

Translation: The Russians and Trump's dirty ops team will use it for continued clandestine information warfare by weaponizing Sanders supporters again, among others.

Your tinfoil hat is extra shiny today.

 

[ruby sparks]

As usual, trausti misses the point. It's not about the number of officers, it's about how they act.

I would totally be ok with doubling the number of officers on a police force. As a matter of fact, once you get rid of the tanks and excessive riot gear, I imagine you can afford more officers to actually be (and this part's important) peace officers. You know, serving and protecting instead of beating and framing.

Riot gear is cheap compared to an officer's salary, it's not going to make a meaningful difference in the size of the police force. I don't know what the cost of the big stuff is.

I read that they get it cheap.

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.

It is possible that the police could do with some defunding... but it would be a delicate issue and much would depend on what precisely was entailed. Restructuring might be a better word.

Even the police getting cheap, cast-off military equipment from the US Army (which I read is what often happens) is arguably funding of a sort and this could be looked at in the context of assessing whether that sort of militarisation of police was a good thing for society as a whole. I even read that the police obtaining the equipment comes with a requirement to 'use it or lose it'. That seems.... a bit odd. Who benefits from such a supply, consume and deploy system? The manufacturers of military equipment? Does American society benefit overall?

 

[lpetrich]

Chair Bass, Senators Booker and Harris, and Chair Nadler Introduce the Justice in Policing Act of 2020 | U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee

Today, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Karen Bass (D-CA), Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-CA), and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) introduced the Justice in Policing Act of 2020,the first-ever bold, comprehensive approach to hold police accountable, change the culture of law enforcement and build trust between law enforcement and our communities.

...

• Prohibits federal, state, and local law enforcement from racial, religious and discriminatory profiling, and mandates training on racial, religious, and discriminatory profiling for all law enforcement.
• Bans chokeholds, carotid holds and no-knock warrants at the federal level and limits the transfer of military-grade equipment to state and local law enforcement.
• Mandates the use of dashboard cameras and body cameras for federal offices and requires state and local law enforcement to use existing federal funds to ensure the use of police body cameras.
• Establishes a National Police Misconduct Registry to prevent problematic officers who are fired or leave on agency from moving to another jurisdiction without any accountability.
• Amends federal criminal statute from “willfulness” to a “recklessness” standard to successfully identify and prosecute police misconduct.
• Reforms qualified immunity so that individuals are not barred from recovering damages when police violate their constitutional rights.
• Establishes public safety innovation grants for community-based organizations to create local commissions and task forces to help communities to re-imagine and develop concrete, just and equitable public safety approaches.
• Creates law enforcement development and training programs to develop best practices and requires the creation of law enforcement accreditation standard recommendations based on President Obama’s Task force on 21st Century policing.
• Requires state and local law enforcement agencies to report use of force data, disaggregated by race, sex, disability, religion, age.
• Improves the use of pattern and practice investigations at the federal level by granting the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division subpoena power and creates a grant program for state attorneys general to develop authority to conduct independent investigations into problematic police departments.
• Establishes a Department of Justice task force to coordinate the investigation, prosecution and enforcement efforts of federal, state and local governments in cases related to law enforcement misconduct.

H.R.7120 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Justice in Policing Act of 2020 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress - sponsored by Rep. Karen Bass, and with 165 cosponsors, all original at this stage (it was introduced on June 8)

 

[PyramidHead]

I am not a Bernie Sanders supporter, and I am a supporter of defunding (disarming, and disbanding) the police.

The police abolition movement, spearheaded by people of color throughout the colonized world, long predates the current moment. To say that it's a blip in the radar or a Russian psyop is ridiculously naive and shows how propagandized Americans really are.

 

[lpetrich]

AOC was curiously absent as a cosponsor of that bill. However, she has cosponsored some others that are related to it:

H.R.7085 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): To amend the Revised Statutes to remove the defense of qualified immunity in the case of any action under section 1979, and for other purposes. | Congress.gov | Library of Congress sponsored by rep. Justin Amash, with 39 cosponsors, 17 original. AOC is an original one

H.R.7100 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): To encourage greater community accountability of law enforcement agencies, and for other purposes. | Congress.gov | Library of Congress sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, with 86 cosponsors, all original.

H.R.7135 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): To amend the Insurrection Act to curtail violations against the civil liberties of the people of the United States, and for other purposes. | Congress.gov | Library of Congress sponsored by Rep. Ilhan Omar, with 14 cosponsors, all original.

H.R.7143 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): To repeal the military surplus program under title 10, United States Code. | Congress.gov | Library of Congress sponsored by Rep. Nydia Velazquez, with 7 cosponsors, all original.

Seems like she followed up on her slamming of police-department militarization.

 

[PyramidHead]

Chair Bass, Senators Booker and Harris, and Chair Nadler Introduce the Justice in Policing Act of 2020 | U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee

Today, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Karen Bass (D-CA), Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kamala Harris (D-CA), and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) introduced the Justice in Policing Act of 2020,the first-ever bold, comprehensive approach to hold police accountable, change the culture of law enforcement and build trust between law enforcement and our communities.

...

• Prohibits federal, state, and local law enforcement from racial, religious and discriminatory profiling, and mandates training on racial, religious, and discriminatory profiling for all law enforcement.
• Bans chokeholds, carotid holds and no-knock warrants at the federal level and limits the transfer of military-grade equipment to state and local law enforcement.
• Mandates the use of dashboard cameras and body cameras for federal offices and requires state and local law enforcement to use existing federal funds to ensure the use of police body cameras.
• Establishes a National Police Misconduct Registry to prevent problematic officers who are fired or leave on agency from moving to another jurisdiction without any accountability.
• Amends federal criminal statute from “willfulness” to a “recklessness” standard to successfully identify and prosecute police misconduct.
• Reforms qualified immunity so that individuals are not barred from recovering damages when police violate their constitutional rights.
• Establishes public safety innovation grants for community-based organizations to create local commissions and task forces to help communities to re-imagine and develop concrete, just and equitable public safety approaches.
• Creates law enforcement development and training programs to develop best practices and requires the creation of law enforcement accreditation standard recommendations based on President Obama’s Task force on 21st Century policing.
• Requires state and local law enforcement agencies to report use of force data, disaggregated by race, sex, disability, religion, age.
• Improves the use of pattern and practice investigations at the federal level by granting the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division subpoena power and creates a grant program for state attorneys general to develop authority to conduct independent investigations into problematic police departments.
• Establishes a Department of Justice task force to coordinate the investigation, prosecution and enforcement efforts of federal, state and local governments in cases related to law enforcement misconduct.

H.R.7120 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): Justice in Policing Act of 2020 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress - sponsored by Rep. Karen Bass, and with 165 cosponsors, all original at this stage (it was introduced on June 8)

This is boilerplate technocratic regulation that accomplishes nothing because it will never be enforced, and it's designed to fulfill that exact function: make the problem go away without actually changing things. There are already laws against murdering people indiscriminately, assaulting someone for no reason, stabbing somebody's tires as you walk by, and taking someone's eye out with a rubber-coated steel bullet because of his skin color. Cops do not care about any of these laws. They are arrested at a fraction of 1% of the rate of non-cops, and anybody who thinks "gee golly, I guess that's because the police just don't commit as many crimes" is a mark, a rube, a bootlicking apologist, and a liberal

 

[ronburgundy]

As usual, trausti misses the point. It's not about the number of officers, it's about how they act.

I would totally be ok with doubling the number of officers on a police force. As a matter of fact, once you get rid of the tanks and excessive riot gear, I imagine you can afford more officers to actually be (and this part's important) peace officers. You know, serving and protecting instead of beating and framing.

Riot gear is cheap compared to an officer's salary, it's not going to make a meaningful difference in the size of the police force. I don't know what the cost of the big stuff is.

I read that they get it cheap.

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.

It is possible that the police could do with some defunding... but it would be a delicate issue and much would depend on what precisely was entailed. Restructuring might be a better word.

Even the police getting cheap, cast-off military equipment from the US Army (which I read is what often happens) is arguably funding of a sort and this could be looked at in the context of assessing whether that sort of militarisation of police was a good thing for society as a whole. I even read that the police obtaining the equipment comes with a requirement to 'use it or lose it'. That seems.... a bit odd. Who benefits from such a supply, consume and deploy system? The manufacturers of military equipment? Does American society benefit overall?

It comes down to the fact that Camden did not "defund" the police by any remotely valid use of that term. What they did was use a slight of hand to bust and eliminate the corrupt union that was preventing real police reform. They simply renamed the "city" police force as a "county" police force that only actually operates within the city. This allowed them to lay off all officers and force them to re-apply to a "new" department that had no union. Besides protecting the bad officers (as all cop unions do), the union also had built up so many perks and benefits that it consumed much of the budget. W/o that union the same budget allowed for hiring double the officers and adding more training, etc.. Plus, they could implement new behavioral approaches and policies w/o any union interference. Also, they could implement much stricter and in-depth screening criteria for rehiring the old cops and hiring new ones.

The lesson of Camden is that police unions are one if not THE biggest obstacle to reforming police departments to fix all policing problems from wasted $ and incompetence to corruption and police brutality. Clearly, the racist and violent authoritarians who seem drawn to the police profession are the root of the problem, but reforming that problem is blocked by the unions.

The reforms of who is allowed to be and remain an officer along with the reforms in police behavior (including requiring the officers go into neighborhoods and put on cookouts), likely are part of the positive outcome. However, the doubling in number of patrol officers (especially on bike/foot) is also a huge part of it. Despite propaganda from radical voices, the more methodologically sound research shows that increasing the number of officers on the street reduces crime, and not by increasing arrests, but reducing attempts at criminal behavior.

This Vox article summarizes those studies. In one they took advantage of the 5 fold increase in Fed grants to hire more officers give to local police departments from 2004 to 2009. Some cities got the grants and some did not. So, they could compare crime report rates in each city pre-post grant compared to the changes in crime rates over that time in cities that didn't get the grants. They also controlled for other variables that might differ between the cities. On average, cities with grants increased their number of officers by 3.2% which was followed by a 3.5% reduction in crimes reported.
Also, note that prior to this move by Camden, they had cut 1/3 of their prior police force for lack of $ and saw an immediate spike in crime.

"Defund the police" is a terrible campaign destined to loose votes, even though some of the specific efforts advocated under that misleadingly extremist label have merit. A poll just last week in the height of the protests and riots showed that only 16% of Dems and 17% of "Independents" even supporting "cutting the budgets of police departments". This is despite 75% of those Dems saying the police are not held accountable and only 11% saying the have "a great deal" of trust in the police. And those "Independents" were mostly left-leaning, evidenced by majority disapproval of the police and of everything Trump is saying and doing about the police and COVID. Plus, only 33% of black respondents supported cutting police budgets. The message should be one of radical reform not "defunding", even if replacing an existing department with another to bust the union. And obstacle will be getting those who most want reform and change to admit that police unions are their greatest obstacle and they will need to "bust" the unions like Camden did.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

I am not a Bernie Sanders supporter

Wut?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I read that they get it cheap.

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.

It is possible that the police could do with some defunding... but it would be a delicate issue and much would depend on what precisely was entailed. Restructuring might be a better word.

Even the police getting cheap, cast-off military equipment from the US Army (which I read is what often happens) is arguably funding of a sort and this could be looked at in the context of assessing whether that sort of militarisation of police was a good thing for society as a whole. I even read that the police obtaining the equipment comes with a requirement to 'use it or lose it'. That seems.... a bit odd. Who benefits from such a supply, consume and deploy system? The manufacturers of military equipment? Does American society benefit overall?

It comes down to the fact that Camden did not "defund" the police by any remotely valid use of that term. What they did was use a slight of hand to bust and eliminate the corrupt union that was preventing real police reform. They simply renamed the "city" police force as a "county" police force that only actually operates within the city. This allowed them to lay off all officers and force them to re-apply to a "new" department that had no union. Besides protecting the bad officers (as all cop unions do), the union also had built up so many perks and benefits that it consumed much of the budget. W/o that union the same budget allowed for hiring double the officers and adding more training, etc.. Plus, they could implement new behavioral approaches and policies w/o any union interference. Also, they could implement much stricter and in-depth screening criteria for rehiring the old cops and hiring new ones.

The lesson of Camden is that police unions are one if not THE biggest obstacle to reforming police departments to fix all policing problems from wasted $ and incompetence to corruption and police brutality. Clearly, the racist and violent authoritarians who seem drawn to the police profession are the root of the problem, but reforming that problem is blocked by the unions.

The reforms of who is allowed to be and remain an officer along with the reforms in police behavior (including requiring the officers go into neighborhoods and put on cookouts), likely are part of the positive outcome. However, the doubling in number of patrol officers (especially on bike/foot) is also a huge part of it. Despite propaganda from radical voices, the more methodologically sound research shows that increasing the number of officers on the street reduces crime, and not by increasing arrests, but reducing attempts at criminal behavior.

This Vox article summarizes those studies. In one they took advantage of the 5 fold increase in Fed grants to hire more officers give to local police departments from 2004 to 2009. Some cities got the grants and some did not. So, they could compare crime report rates in each city pre-post grant compared to the changes in crime rates over that time in cities that didn't get the grants. They also controlled for other variables that might differ between the cities. On average, cities with grants increased their number of officers by 3.2% which was followed by a 3.5% reduction in crimes reported.
Also, note that prior to this move by Camden, they had cut 1/3 of their prior police force for lack of $ and saw an immediate spike in crime.

"Defund the police" is a terrible campaign destined to loose votes, even though some of the specific efforts advocated under that misleadingly extremist label have merit. A poll just last week in the height of the protests and riots showed that only 16% of Dems and 17% of "Independents" even supporting "cutting the budgets of police departments". This is despite 75% of those Dems saying the police are not held accountable and only 11% saying the have "a great deal" of trust in the police. And those "Independents" were mostly left-leaning, evidenced by majority disapproval of the police and of everything Trump is saying and doing about the police and COVID. Plus, only 33% of black respondents supported cutting police budgets. The message should be one of radical reform not "defunding", even if replacing an existing department with another to bust the union. And obstacle will be getting those who most want reform and change to admit that police unions are their greatest obstacle and they will need to "bust" the unions like Camden did.

It's going to sound weird for persons not familiar with militant unionized working environments but unionized employees actually work far less than their non-unionized brethren. So even if the salaries and perks were the same you would get much more actual productivity out of a non-unionize work force because there would not be all kinds of stifling work rules to abide by. I'm certain this is happening in Camden. The non-unionized employees are not worked to death by any stretch. They simply can't sit around and tell their superiors "That's not my job" and get away with it. So productivity and quality go up.

Of course it depends greatly on how the situation is managed, but that is based on my experience working in all kinds of shops as management, union, non-union, etc.

 

[SimpleDon]

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.

Criminality in the US is concentrated in the poor and the upper class. The most honest is the middle class. So increase the wages of the poor which will increase the middle class while reducing profits and the incomes of the unearned income, coupon clipping upper class, moving some into the middle class. This solves many of our current problems besides policing.

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.

 

[repoman]

Let it be

 

[Derec]

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.

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

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.

That particular one failed.

Criminality in the US is concentrated in the poor and the upper class. The most honest is the middle class. So increase the wages of the poor which will increase the middle class while reducing profits and the incomes of the unearned income, coupon clipping upper class, moving some into the middle class. This solves many of our current problems besides policing.

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?

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.
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).

 

[Derec]

I am not a Bernie Sanders supporter

Wut?

Old Bernie is probably WAY too right for him.

 

[Derec]

I am not a Bernie Sanders supporter, and I am a supporter of defunding (disarming, and disbanding) the police.

So how would you imagine the society to function without a police force? Even your Eastern European communist countries had police forces, except they renamed them to some variation of the word  Militsiya. Maybe People's Republic of Minneapolis can create "Minneapolis People's Militia" or something like that. MPM instead of capitalist and fascist MPD.

The police abolition movement, spearheaded by people of color throughout the colonized world, long predates the current moment.

Just because some movement has existed a while doesn't mean their ideas aren't completely bonkers.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

As usual, trausti misses the point. It's not about the number of officers, it's about how they act.

I would totally be ok with doubling the number of officers on a police force. As a matter of fact, once you get rid of the tanks and excessive riot gear, I imagine you can afford more officers to actually be (and this part's important) peace officers. You know, serving and protecting instead of beating and framing.

Riot gear is cheap compared to an officer's salary, it's not going to make a meaningful difference in the size of the police force. I don't know what the cost of the big stuff is.

I read that they get it cheap.

I know they got some of it cheap but with expensive strings. For the most part it's not stuff they have any proper use for, either. The only thing I see a use for is light armor for getting in and out under fire. When there's an injured person under the guns of barricaded suspects you can get in with an MRAP and scoop-and-scoot. It's not something you need to do very often, though.

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.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I am not a Bernie Sanders supporter, and I am a supporter of defunding (disarming, and disbanding) the police.

The police abolition movement, spearheaded by people of color throughout the colonized world, long predates the current moment. To say that it's a blip in the radar or a Russian psyop is ridiculously naive and shows how propagandized Americans really are.

Russia has been doing psyops for a long time.

It's amazing how often the positions of the left align with something useful to Moscow but which will not actually benefit those who argue for it.

 

[Derec]

[*]Prohibits federal, state, and local law enforcement from racial, religious and discriminatory profiling, and mandates training on racial, religious, and discriminatory profiling for all law enforcement.

So would that law have prohibited taking a look at Muslim communities in the wake of 911, including using informants to infiltrate extremists Muslim groups?
And what if a bank is robbed and police know the description of the perps, including their skin color? Would this law prohibit police using that information as "profiling"?

[*]Bans chokeholds, carotid holds and no-knock warrants at the federal level and limits the transfer of military-grade equipment to state and local law enforcement.

Define "military grade equipment"? Would for example Bearcats be prohibited?

[*]Establishes a National Police Misconduct Registry to prevent problematic officers who are fired or leave on agency from moving to another jurisdiction without any accountability.

As long as it only counts those officers found guilty and does not presume guilt just because there is some complaint.

[*]Amends federal criminal statute from “willfulness” to a “recklessness” standard to successfully identify and prosecute police misconduct.

I find it problematic that anti-police activists want to criminally punish non-willful conduct. Disciplinary measures should be enough for merely "reckless" conduct.

[*]Reforms qualified immunity so that individuals are not barred from recovering damages when police violate their constitutional rights.

Families of perps and their shysters are already getting millions from idiot juries and hapless cities afraid of juries awarding even more ridiculous amounts (see the justified shooting of shotgun wielding sovereign citizen nutcase Korryn Gaines). It should be more difficult to recover obscene amounts for justified police killings, not made even easier!

[*]Establishes public safety innovation grants for community-based organizations to create local commissions and task forces to help communities to re-imagine and develop concrete, just and equitable public safety approaches.

Talk about wasting money ...

[*]Requires state and local law enforcement agencies to report use of force data, disaggregated by race, sex, disability, religion, age.

And it should be normalized by total of police interactions, not raw population shares.

[*]Improves the use of pattern and practice investigations at the federal level by granting the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division subpoena power and creates a grant program for state attorneys general to develop authority to conduct independent investigations into problematic police departments.

And how would they define "problematic police departments"?

[*]Establishes a Department of Justice task force to coordinate the investigation, prosecution and enforcement efforts of federal, state and local governments in cases related to law enforcement misconduct.

As long as it true police misconduct and police are not crucified for doing their jobs. Most police officers attacked by #BLM did nothing wrong.


Not everything on this list is shit, but most of it is.

 

[Derec]

"Black lives matter" is a good slogan - short, catchy - and it isn't as horrible as "Abolish ICE" or "Defund the police". About both of those two, I ask what must replace them, and how to keep them from doing the same troublesome things.

It might have been a good slogan had it not been ruined by its activists who chose to support thugs like Michael Brown and Mario Woods and also participated in violent riots.
They should have focused on actual police misconduct, and not called every police shooting of a black perp "murder" just because of the perp's skin color.

 

[Derec]

This city disbanded its police department 7 years ago. Here's what happened next

Last week, Minneapolis officials confirmed they were considering a fairly rare course of action: disbanding the city police department.

It's not the first locale to break up a department, but no cities as populous have ever attempted it. Minneapolis City Council members haven't specified what or who will replace it if the department disbands.

Camden, New Jersey, may be the closest thing to a case study they can get.

The city, home to a population about 17% of Minneapolis' size, dissolved its police department in 2012 and replaced it with an entirely new one after corruption rendered the existing agency unfixable.

Woops, I see Worldtraveller beat me to it.

When that actually happened, the Left was FAR less supportive of the move. And note that the move was for the county to take over policing. Is the City Council of the People's Republic of Minneapolis ready to give away policing powers to Hennepin County?

Here is an article about the change from 2013:
Apocalypse, New Jersey: A Dispatch From America’s Most Desperate Town

The city for decades hadn’t been able to pay even for its own cops, so it funded most of its operating budget from state subsidies. But once Christie assumed office, he announced that “the taxpayers of New Jersey aren’t going to pay any more for Camden’s excesses.” In a sweeping, statewide budget massacre, he cut municipal state aid by $445 million. The new line was, people who paid the taxes were cutting off the people who didn’t. In other words: your crime, your problem.

It wasn't the city deciding to disband police because of some anti-police wave like we are experiencing now, it was due to rank mismanagement by the city which could not afford its police force.

Then, this year, after two years of chaos, Christie and local leaders instituted a new reform, breaking the unions of the old municipal police force and reconstituting a new Metro police department under county control. The old city cops were all cut loose and had to reapply for work with the county, under new contracts that tightened up those collective-bargaining “excesses.” The new contracts chopped away at everything from overtime to uniform allowances to severance pay, cutting the average cost per officer from $182,168 under the city force to $99,605 in the county force. As “the transfer” from a municipal police force to a county model went into effect last May, state money began flowing again, albeit more modestly. Christie promised $10 million in funding for the city and the county to help the new cops. Police began building up their numbers to old levels.

Predictably, the new Camden County-run police began to turn crime stats in the right direction with a combination of beefed-up numbers, significant investments in technology, and a cheaper and at least temporarily de-unionized membership. Whether the entire thing was done out of economic necessity or careful political calculation, Christie got what he wanted – county-controlled police forces seemed to be his plan from the start for places like Camden.

I somehow doubt "beefed-up numbers" and "significant investments in technology" is what those in the Minneapolis Soviet have in mind for the police ...

No matter what side of the argument you’re on, the upshot of the dramatic change was that Camden would essentially no longer be policing itself, but instead be policed by a force run by its wealthier and whiter neighbors, i.e., the more affluent towns like Cherry Hill and Haddonfield that surround Camden in the county. The reconstituted force included a lot of rehires from the old city force (many of whom had to accept cuts and/or demotions in order to stay employed), but it also attracted a wave of new young hires from across the state, many of them white and from smaller, less adrenaline-filled suburban jurisdictions to the north and east.

OMG!!!!!!!!1!!!one, those icky white people! I doubt Minneapolis City Soviet has anything like that in mind either.

And whereas the old city police had a rep for not wanting to get out of the car in certain bad neighborhoods, the new force is beginning to acquire an opposite rep for overzealousness. “These new guys,” complains local junkie Mark Mercado, “not only will they get out of the car, they’ll haul you in just for practice.”

Actually arresting people? Don't you know that's evil?

Energized county officials say they have a plan now for retaking Camden’s streets one impenetrable neighborhood at a time, using old-school techniques like foot patrols and simple get-to-know-you community interactions (new officers stop and talk to residents as a matter of strategy and policy). But the plan also involves the use of space-age cameras and military-style surveillance, which ironically will turn this crumbling dead-poor dopescape of barred row homes and deserted factories into a high-end proving ground for futuristic crowd-control technology.

Surveillance cameras? Could have identified more Minneapolis looters and arsonists for later arrest and actually prosecute them. Even those who looted businesses like Target that the far left thinks are Nazis. So that's probably a big fat no form the powers that be in Minneapolis too.

Beginning in 2011, when the city first installed a new $4.5 million command center – it has since been taken over by the county – police here have gained a series of what they call “force multipliers.” One hundred and twenty-one cameras cover virtually every inch of sidewalk here, cameras that can spot a stash in a discarded pack of Newports from blocks away. Police have a giant 30-foot mobile crane called SkyPatrol they can park in a neighborhood and essentially throw a net over six square blocks; the ungainly Japanese-robot-style device can read the heat signature of a dealer with a gun sitting in total darkness. There are 35 microphones planted around the city that can instantly detect the exact location of a gunshot down to a few meters (and just as instantly train cameras on escape routes). Planted on the backs of a fleet of new cruisers are Minority Report-style scanners that read license plates and automatically generate warning letters to send to your mom in the suburbs if you’ve been spotted taking the Volvo registered in her name to score a bag of Black Magic on 7th and Vine.

Not bad for 2011!

The two rookies ended up catching the suspect on foot and were trying to get him cuffed when Martinez started to sense a problem. A crowd of about a hundred formed in the blink of an eye and started pelting the cops with bottles and rocks. Martinez ended up chasing onto a porch a teenager who’d thrown a bottle.

Next thing Martinez knew, he was jumped by “women, older women, men, kids. . . . As soon as I grabbed the kid, everybody started trying to forcibly take him from me. They’re punching me in the back, on the side of the head. . . 

That's more like what people like comrades Lisa Bender and Jeremiah Ellison would like to see.

Nobody in North Camden calls the police. When the county installed the new “ShotSpotter” technology that pinpoints the locations of gunshots, they discovered that 30 percent of all shootings in the city go unreported, many of them from North Camden.

That's exactly what I was saying about that flawed study that supposedly found that less proactive policing reduced crime because number of reported crimes went down. Can't really go by that in those neighborhoods.

Matt Taibbi is a big leftist, so the content of the rest of the article is what you would expect, but the parts dealing with the police department change are clear enough that Camden has nothing to do with what Minneapolis is proposing here.

 

[ruby sparks]

I read that they get it cheap.

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.

It is possible that the police could do with some defunding... but it would be a delicate issue and much would depend on what precisely was entailed. Restructuring might be a better word.

Even the police getting cheap, cast-off military equipment from the US Army (which I read is what often happens) is arguably funding of a sort and this could be looked at in the context of assessing whether that sort of militarisation of police was a good thing for society as a whole. I even read that the police obtaining the equipment comes with a requirement to 'use it or lose it'. That seems.... a bit odd. Who benefits from such a supply, consume and deploy system? The manufacturers of military equipment? Does American society benefit overall?

It comes down to the fact that Camden did not "defund" the police by any remotely valid use of that term. What they did was use a slight of hand to bust and eliminate the corrupt union that was preventing real police reform. They simply renamed the "city" police force as a "county" police force that only actually operates within the city. This allowed them to lay off all officers and force them to re-apply to a "new" department that had no union. Besides protecting the bad officers (as all cop unions do), the union also had built up so many perks and benefits that it consumed much of the budget. W/o that union the same budget allowed for hiring double the officers and adding more training, etc.. Plus, they could implement new behavioral approaches and policies w/o any union interference. Also, they could implement much stricter and in-depth screening criteria for rehiring the old cops and hiring new ones.

The lesson of Camden is that police unions are one if not THE biggest obstacle to reforming police departments to fix all policing problems from wasted $ and incompetence to corruption and police brutality. Clearly, the racist and violent authoritarians who seem drawn to the police profession are the root of the problem, but reforming that problem is blocked by the unions.

The reforms of who is allowed to be and remain an officer along with the reforms in police behavior (including requiring the officers go into neighborhoods and put on cookouts), likely are part of the positive outcome. However, the doubling in number of patrol officers (especially on bike/foot) is also a huge part of it. Despite propaganda from radical voices, the more methodologically sound research shows that increasing the number of officers on the street reduces crime, and not by increasing arrests, but reducing attempts at criminal behavior.

This Vox article summarizes those studies. In one they took advantage of the 5 fold increase in Fed grants to hire more officers give to local police departments from 2004 to 2009. Some cities got the grants and some did not. So, they could compare crime report rates in each city pre-post grant compared to the changes in crime rates over that time in cities that didn't get the grants. They also controlled for other variables that might differ between the cities. On average, cities with grants increased their number of officers by 3.2% which was followed by a 3.5% reduction in crimes reported.
Also, note that prior to this move by Camden, they had cut 1/3 of their prior police force for lack of $ and saw an immediate spike in crime.

"Defund the police" is a terrible campaign destined to loose votes, even though some of the specific efforts advocated under that misleadingly extremist label have merit. A poll just last week in the height of the protests and riots showed that only 16% of Dems and 17% of "Independents" even supporting "cutting the budgets of police departments". This is despite 75% of those Dems saying the police are not held accountable and only 11% saying the have "a great deal" of trust in the police. And those "Independents" were mostly left-leaning, evidenced by majority disapproval of the police and of everything Trump is saying and doing about the police and COVID. Plus, only 33% of black respondents supported cutting police budgets. The message should be one of radical reform not "defunding", even if replacing an existing department with another to bust the union. And obstacle will be getting those who most want reform and change to admit that police unions are their greatest obstacle and they will need to "bust" the unions like Camden did.

Thanks. That all makes sense.