This is a survey by a respected polling company with an overwhelming result that goes against what is clearly the preferred narrative of most people on this site. Naturally, the most upvotes comments are people countering it with anecdotes. I thought people here we were meant to be smart enough to avoid confirmation bias?
"It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions."
Not sure what "preferred narrative" you are referring too, but most black people think America has a "police problem". Define that however you like. Bunch of other polls from the same organization for those curious enough to dig deeper. Seek Higher Things friend.
One thing to keep in mind with open ended polling questions like this is that there is that the questions can shape the response. One interesting display of this is that most Americans don't believe that we should take race into account for college admissions, but most Americans also believe that affirmative action for minorities is beneficial.
I don't know what the preferred narrative here has been on the subject, but I think it's been obvious the vast majority of black folks never wanted police protection to disappear, and the lack of assurance in our interactions with police (confirmed by polls mentioned in the article) demonstrates that reform is something that would be strongly desired.
A conclusion based on those polls for affirmative action in college is that people support the general principle of getting more minorities into college, but do not support the current methods applied under affirmative action. When specifics are outlined for respondents the support drops.
This has less to do with the style of shaping the response by what kind of questions are made, and more to do with what the question is. Support for a concept is not the same as support for a specific action. If you ask people to choose between multiple of bad choices in order to achieve a common good then the goal is likely to have a significant higher support than any of the bad choices.
Although in this case, it doesn't look like they had bad intentions and they seem to have dug at least a little below the surface and drawn what seem like sensible conclusions. I wonder if more detailed results and the full list of questions are available somewhere.
I should say that I do assume there were no bad intentions and believe the data/poll is still useful, though I don't think it describes the sentiment on "Should we reform the police and how?" between demographics very well.
> This is a survey by a respected polling company with an overwhelming result that goes against what is clearly the preferred narrative of most people on this site.
But...it doesn't do that at all. Both because the defund/dismantle/abolish narrative isn't dominant on the site, and because the framing of the survey sidesteps the structural law enforcement issues at the heart of that narrative entirely and asks merely whether people want police to spend the same, more, or less time in their neighborhoods, which isn't the issue at all.
It sounds like you're suggesting that people are making comments along the lines of "This poll must be wrong because all the black people I know think police presence should be reduced."
I scanned the first several posts and didn't see any comments like that. Someone mentioning their personal experience doesn't align with a result isn't suggesting the poll is wrong. Not everything is an argument. To me this suggests the data points could be distributed into homogeneous pockets, and a discussion of this possibility seems fair game.
Some comments raise questions about the experimental methods or muse about hidden nuance in the data, which also seem like fair discussion points for this forum.
This is fascinating because I am myself half black, lived in many communities of mixed demographics and never once heard a friend (of any race) say they want more police at all, ever.
Depending on people’s age, it would be very surprising to hear anyone advocate for more police. Police generally are seen as the folk who take the fun out of things. So until you start getting affected by their absence you don’t advocate for them.
I’ve lived in many kinds of neighborhoods, from one where there were six murders in a school year to one where there wasn’t one in living memory. At one time I was poor enough that taking the bus was a luxury and I’d rather walk and save the change. I’ve met and known lots of kinds of people.
I agree that comment uses anecdotal data. However, I don't think that it is attempting to refute the findings of the original post.
Anecdotal data isn't inherently bad; it just shouldn't be used in attempt to prove or disprove anything, which I don't think that comment does. Using anecdotal data to suggest the possibility of alternative or more-nuanced hypotheses in an informal discussion thread is a totally appropriate use of it.
Furthermore, this is only one example. Drawing conclusions about a trend from a single example is ironically what the original commenter said is not "smart."
The answer is the Black community isn't a monolith and has have swaths that support more police and others that support less. No conspiracy or cherry-picking.
And if you study a lot of opinion polling you'll notice, across all racial demographics, there tends to be a generational rift forming between the young and the old. Older generations likely remember the crime wave that took hold in the 80s and early 90s and its subsequent decline. And the younger generation lives under a larger, more aggressive police presence that was instituted since then.
> Fewer than one in five Black Americans feel very confident that the police in their area would treat them with courtesy and respect.
> It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions.
> the vast majority believe reform is needed, with upward of 90% favoring specific reforms aimed at improving police relations with the communities they serve and preventing or punishing abusive police behavior.
Seems to me like the protesters do represent the people.
If a person (not accusing you) only read the headline and not the article, they might get the wrong impression.
Here is a part that I think makes things clear:
"Bottom Line
It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions."
If we take the gallup and normalize it by social economic status then the result seems to pretty much align with a desire for more police presence at the lower end and less police presence at the higher end, which in turn reflect the crime rate at regions with higher social economics status vs low social economic status. This would unlikely surprise anyone here on HN.
But if you proxy social economic status with demographics then the result becomes political, and so people desire to find an different answer.
Of course, many people in the site see themselves as heroes because they joined the BLM protests during the pandemic. Their self awarded virtue would loose its shine if the data shows that the people they are demonstrating for aren't the victims they thought they were.
This was clear right from the outset too. Upper middle class white people in "nice" neighborhoods don't even interact with police.
I interacted with a police officer a grand total of 3 times in the last 20 years: one traffic citation, one traffic ticket (missing front plate on the car - deserved), and an officer stopped by after someone broke into our mailbox and asked if I'd press charges (I said I would, but they never found the perp).
Compare that to a bad neighborhood in e.g. Chicago or Detroit where the situation is worse than in Kabul, and without constant, heavy, aggressive police presence a lot more people will be murdered.
The belief that we do not need police and that a "social worker" is sufficient in e.g. Chicago is what someone has astutely called a "luxury belief", a modern equivalent of "let them eat cake". It comes from the tower so ivory, you can't look at it without hurting your eyes in broad daylight.
> The belief that we do not need police and that a "social worker" is sufficient
I think most people still believe that we need some policing. But that policing isn't solving the longer term problems. We know that sending people to prison has a tendency to turn people into criminals even if their original crime was minor (not everyone of course). So why is that our strategy for dealing for crime rather than tackling the underlying social and economic issues? There's good reason to think that crime levels would be reduced if half the police budget was put into social programs (specifically in the US where police budgets are ridiculous).
>You'll be literally voting for the person who sent _thousands_ of people to prison for relatively minor offenses and kept them there for slave labor, and the guy who wrote the laws under which she had done so.
Seems a little uh tangential to what he was saying given there was no talk of the presidential election, but when the alternative is a guy who would take away food stamps and was happy letting people die here because of our governor...
I'm not asking about an opinion news, I'm asking about people's opinion about it. Example you can respond: "Biden is in great mental health and doesn't seem to be deteriorating compared to Trump".
> You'll be literally voting for the person who sent _thousands_ of people to prison for relatively minor offenses and kept them there for slave labor, and the guy who wrote the laws under which she had done so.
Actually I wont, as I'm not a US citizen / don't live in the US. But I certainly think it's a valid criticism that the two party system leaves little choice in elections. I live in the UK where it's not quite so bad, but a proportional electoral system is still #1 on my list of political desires.
Nothing is perfect. Certainly in the US our two party system is creaking. But multiparty parliamentary systems have their own issues where small outlier parties can often extract disproportionate power because they are necessary to build a majority coalition.
While social workers might be useful in Detroit, we are unlike Chicago in that we don't have a very heavy handed PD, but also one with significantly less funding and man power - we could use more funding to improve our abysmal response times in many neighborhoods.
However Detroit's PD still has bad cops even if they are miles ahead of other police departments, even though we could use more police in general - I don't think more "heavy handedness" or "aggressiveness" is useful or desired.
But that's not what you're going to get, folks. Now you're going to get half as many officers, and "social workers" trying to talk sense into armed meth heads. Good luck. All because upper middle class white youth has never interacted with a police officer and thinks you don't need them. Note also that I didn't say "heavy handed". I said "heavy", meaning visible presence, patrols, monitoring.
Yes, one of them happened very close to my childhood from home, but I don't understand where there's a disagreement.
It should be noted that aggressive policing - distinct from increased police presence - has been shown to contribute to violent/major crimes rather than decrease it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5
Significant community trust has been built by police in Detroit by keeping their limited resources focused on what helps prevent violence rather than broken windows policing - I believe the community would agree and the police leadership here have voiced support for this as well.
When you define the police you get less police presence or police with less training budget.
There just isn't any good news to either the a abolitionists or the motte and Bailey argument of "we don't mean completely" argument to the future of policing or society. Violent rioters are demanding we defund our defenses against violent rioters.
I bet you don't have a single poll to prove that. I think the truth is in the middle. Most of us think the police state has gone too far and needs to dial back the military and shoot first ask questions later mentality (and learn something from other countries). The police unions need to be taken down a couple of notches as well. I know very few people who want zero cops. I consider those people radicals and extremely short sighted. They along with just thugs are the ones burning down black communities and saying "riots aren't violence!"
> I thought people here we were meant to be smart enough to avoid confirmation bias?
I think that's actually impossible. I often try to check my confirmation bias, I can make myself consciously aware of it, but I can't undo it. Like an optical illusion, you can't unsee it. Like riding the bike, you can't unlearn it.
Aside: I think you can unlearn riding a bike to some extent - or any deeply ingrained actions; but it seems you need a similar activity. If you switch the gearing so you pedal backwards, and the handle bars to move opposite, then ride that bike until it becomes second nature (years probably) .. now get on a normal bike, you'll have to learn to ride it again. You've "unlearned".
I've had this experience recently with a video game: played for a decade, switched to another game for a few months, moved back to first game - unlearned the controls (instinct is to use controls of second game). Interestingly now I've re-learned my ability seems to have improved.
I think it works with optical illusions too: sort term as well, if my kids are anything to go by (they might have misreported seeing the illusion - eg lady in hat|hag with big nose).
N=1~, but across various activities. I'm a bit older, so brain plasticity is not what it used to be.
This shouldn't be a suprise. Some people like to pretend that higher crime rates in some areas is strictly due to higher police presence, but it's clearly not the case. I remember after the protests in Baltimore from FreddIe Gray, the police were told to have a much smaller presence, and not do as much proactive policing. It wasn't long before the people who actually live in those neighborhoods were complaining about the increasing crime rate due to a smaller police presence.
Well you can't just remove police and think everything is going to be okay.
The police abolitionist movement is calling for removing untrained, armed, and oftentimes extremely racist individuals from the streets and replacing them with social programs, housing, education, healthcare.
You can't just do 10% of the ask here and then be surprised when shit doesn't magically get better.
There are many people who are apologists for the police abolition movement (or whatever it should be called).
I’m sorry but it is quite obvious that a whole lot of people carrying around ACAB (all cops are bad) and “defund the police” signs don’t go along with the this-is-what-they-actually-mean explanations. They mean to have their message taken at face value.
I saw myself spraypainted on a Minneapolis building “actually defund the police”. it is hard to reinterpret all cops are bad as anything but the obvious, and it is quite popular.
Urban Dictionary can say what it wants, I saw many signs in protests, in media coverage of protests, and on social media with All Cops Are Bad and zero with Bastards. Both in first hand experience seeing with my own eyes the messaging people who are saying it and through various means of showing someone else's message.
Everything is vastly more complex than those signs. Sure that's the effort and motivation, end goal of protesters but that isn't a plan to accomplish it. Protest leaders and linked organizations need to draft those plans and lobby local/state/federal officials to pass such legislation and create change via compromise. At some point that change will satisfy the bulk of protesters and the movement will slow until momentum is built back up.
It's a compromise and likely won't come easy or fast given current federal government setup. But other than generational change (ie old people who are heavily conservative die off so younger, more liberal people become the voting base) likely combined with removing money from Us politics (no easy fight there) I doubt it will happen soon.
>replacing them with social programs, housing, education, healthcare.
Unfortunately, this part is extremely vague and is missing a track record. So how it ends up in the real human world, is police funding gets cut and the funds get diverted into corrupt politicians' pockets. Like the Chicago mayor that successfully reduced police funding only to have a separate police detachment placed near her home.
Would it be accurate, then, to say that the "police abolitionist movement" does not want to abolish the police? If that is the case, why call it the police abolitionist movement? It seems like all that does is generate ill-will from people who are potential allies.
Re-read the person you're responding to, I think you'll see your response makes no sense. They didn't say "replacing them with nicer cops", they said: replacing them with social programs, housing, education, healthcare.
None of these require cops. Yes, you likely need some form of police force for the very, very edge case scenarios where the others won't do, but abolish police means abolish the police.
Unless you assume all cops are "untrained, armed, and oftentimes extremely racist individuals", simply removing those who are would not "abolish the police", which is why I asked.
* Dissolving existing police departments and making officers reapply as a way to eliminate the worst offenders that are currently protected by the blue line of silence.
* Re-establishing the police as a much smaller operation where their duties are limited to situations where deadly/coercive force is needed.
Things that would become police “adjacent” and would be handled by other government officials.
- detective work
- calls about the homeless
- all non-violent offenses like noise complaints, property disputes, drug possession, moving violations, shoplifting, etc.
The hope being that many people who are currently officers would actually rather be part of the non-violent operation.
You cannot replace the police with social programs. What are you going to do when somebody breaks into your house, assaults you, robs you, kills someone? Call your social worker?
Canada had an experiment of removing policing for just one day. It did not go well at all.
> Police were motivated to strike because of difficult working conditions caused by disarming FLQ-planted bombs
Montreal in 1969 was on the brink of civil war. The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) was basically the Canadian version of the IRA. Having police on the streets wasn't enough. The situation continued to escalate until the Canadian Armed Forces were deployed to police Montreal in 1970.
I don't think that time and place is representative of any Canadian city today. As such, it's rather hard to draw any conclusions from your example.
What are the police going to do? You’re already robbed/dead.
Police abolition is asking for a change to the socioeconomic systems that lead people to rob in the first place. The threat of police locking you up surely isn’t doing it.
Maybe. Yet this crime still happened, in spite of all the perps got arrested before.
> Or maybe they will get to you in time
Unlikely.
> Because the criminals keep getting released, especially for political reasons.
Like most states, NY, IL, and WA have each eliminated parole for violent offenders, so that’s not it.
You’re going to have to be more specific with your stats. Crime rates continue to decrease in those cities - even in Chicago. The 2016 spike in homicides is an interesting topic if you care learn the driving forces behind it. There wasn’t a mass release of criminals as you suggest, but there was a series of gun laws invalidated by the courts.
Strange that in all those NYC/Chicago links, none of the police quoted blamed the surge on the release of criminals from prison, a lack of policing, or a lack of police resources.
Crime rates across the board have dropped by huge amounts in the past 30 years. The recent uptick hasn't gotten us anywhere near the crime rate of the 90s. It's difficult to attribute any particular program as having been helpful or not but we know that a lot of fundamental issues like health care and wages are still very problematic. Most anti-poverty programs are means-tested and go to more white citizens than minority. It's hard to say why crime gas dropped precipitously in NYC but not as much in Chicago. But we do know that aggressive police tactics like Stop and Frisk have been proven to not be part of that success.
The thing is they need more support for enforcement. The complaints you get from police are that a big chunk of the job is just racing from one call to the next, and flat out ignoring calls that don’t seem important enough because they’re forced to triage.
This is fascinating because I am myself half black, lived in many communities of mixed demographics and never once heard a friend (of any race) say they want more police at all, ever.
I guess I also don't know anybody who has done a gallup poll or anybody that knows anybody who has ever done a gallup poll in their lives so who knows?
Edit: I don't know how or where these are conducted, or their exact phrasing of their questions, but I'm very curious about that.
Because, some rural areas in America have a "posse" system where volunteers get to ride around armed, sometimes outfitted (by taxpayer money) with bulletproof vests and big stickers for their cars showing their semi-official affiliation with the police (or sheriff's department). On the record, they're only supposed to observe or report yet in practice I'd question why it's crucial in some places to outfit posses with bulletproof through taxpayer money in that case, especially in places that have a very low crime rate?
I only bring this up because if I wanted to tilt a poll, I'd ask folks in areas where this is a possibility, where asking about a reduction in police force implies an increase in these somewhat-sanctioned vigilantes. You wouldn't even have to include it in the question, you'd just have to ask somebody standing in the right spot.
From the article, the question asked was "Would you rather the police spend more time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently spend in your area?", and was "administered by web in English and conducted as part of the newly launched Gallup Center on Black Voices". There's more information on how Gallup conducts polls more generally here: https://www.gallup.com/174158/gallup-panel-methodology.aspx.
Having spent a lot of time in poor areas with heavy gang presence, the people I know tend to not be gleeful or chummy about the police, but they understand they serve a purpose and want to keep the peace in their neighborhoods. When you have police helicopters going over your house at night on a regular basis and every window on every house has bars, you have a very real, visceral connection with wanting to be safe. They understand that some young people get mixed up in gangs, and want to help them. Part of that is in keeping the peace. Especially when you have rival gangs shooting innocent people randomly in the streets just because of the color of their skin; the color of the skin of the rival gang. I can see how people in those areas would be hesitant about abolishing the police, or even drastically reducing numbers. You just want to raise your kids in peace.
I've taken the approach to anything with political implications that everything is more complicated than it seems, even after digging into the issue.
In this case, "Defund the Police" can mean a hundred different policy approaches from as simple as cut funding/staff/resources to as complex as redistributing that funding and resources to non-police support structures like social workers, mental health professionals, and the other roles that an omnibus police department handles.
In that sense, I don't support straight defunding of police. I do support redistributing funding/resources to new or expanded public health departments with a push for mental health and drug abuse support. But that needs to happen as part of a larger approach to decriminalization of drug possession/use (not selling/distributing, just possession/use), criminal justice reform where those convicted of such nonviolent crimes are released and record scrubbed, plus support for those to gain an education or employment without stigma. Ideally we can establish programs and tools to tackle the problems that led to a life of crime or drug abuse, focusing on reform.
That should also include immigration reform and the elimination of 'illegal' terms by expanding quotas and simplifying the process for citizenship. Cheaper education, child care, and medical care/prescriptions are also needed to reduce the burden on most working Americans so they can educate themselves, find better employment, and better care for themselves and their family. Ending food insecurity (which, by the way, it's insane the US even has) would be a solid start. People join gangs because they solve problems they face like wanting to belong, physical/financial security, etc. By working to resolve those issues for anyone in the states, immigrant or citizen, we can address the root cause not the symptoms.
Much more complicated that it seems, and that's not even getting into the various departments/programs/bills/etc required to progress that. This is also a heavily opinionated comment that clearly leans liberal and would face plenty of challenges from the current conservative side of US politics. But it would also be progress toward solving a series of issues that undermine freedom and peaceful society.
I don't think it's race related. I've moved to neighborhood that's relatively dangerous in Bay Area. It's close to really dangerous ones. I wouldn't mind 2-3x amount of police that currently is here. I don't think that others would mind it either just because they have darker skin color.
That sounds pretty awful. About a decade ago I spent some time in The Tenderloin in San Francisco (Turk and Hyde) and they had the most astounding open air drug market. It was constantly full of police but my friends were always able to purchase drugs. And violence was common. Unavoidable, even as perceived by those that spent more time there than I did.
Maybe the police cruising down the street two or three times more often might've changed that. That's an interesting point.
Edit: To clarify, no person I've ever met that lived in that area ever expressed a desire for more police. It was mostly things about housing and mental health care with that particular issue. I am specifically talking about my experience in the Tenderloin in this case.
> It was constantly full of police but my friends were always able to purchase drugs.
Personal anecdote. A while ago I was mugged while I was walking at 2am in Manhattan (around Union Square). I thought it was particularly safe as I always saw many cops everywhere (even just before I was mugged, and right after).
Not saying police are useless, but retrospectively, I realize that seeing many cops doesn't mean a place is safe but rather the opposite.
Hidden under the counterintuitive headline is this tidbit: most Americans, especially Black Americans are not very confident police will treat them with courtesy and respect.
I don't see that as counterintuitive. People wouldn't call for or desire for more police so they could have more encounters with more courtesy or more respect — they'd want more police because they feel it increases their level of safety and the level of safety of the community.
A LEO can be incredibly discourteous to you while still keeping you safe, and you might reasonably accept the former to gain a greater sense of the latter.
I don't see anything counterintuitive - I don't call the cops for respectful conversation, and if my actions have got them called in, I don't expect respectful treatment.
Harsh maybe, but also true. Ideally they would be polite, but my interactions with police (here in Aus) are exclusively when something has gone wrong.
" never once heard a friend (of any race) say they want more police at all, ever."
I have never in my life heard anyone talk about having 'more or less police' - so why is it surprising that you haven't heard about it.
The polls is not about 'what someone was saying unsolicited' - it was about 'what they actually think'.
There's nothing surprising or funny about it.
"Because, some rural areas in America have a "posse" system where volunteers get to ride around armed, sometimes outfitted (by taxpayer money) with bulletproof vests and big stickers for their cars showing their semi-official affiliation with the police"
This has nothing to do with anything.
People want more or less police for the obvious reasons - also - despite the rhetoric, most Black communities are actually under policed, not over policed.
>I have never in my life heard anyone talk about having 'more or less police'
I've personally known quite a few homeless people (and been one!) that had been repeatedly displaced by police that spoke at length about how they'd prefer fewer police, since the demolition of homeless camps are often perceived as being for show or just something that happened because officers were bored and simply had nothing to do that day.
They perceived it as being for show since they'd often be able to reconstruct the camp the very next day and largely be left alone for weeks or even months afterward.
I also know a woman that had a seriously dangerous stalker that had friends in the local police that somehow had the clout to send officers to her home on a whim. She's been arrested multiple times without ever being convicted of anything, usually not even charged at all. One time, she was 5150'd (mandatory 72 hour psychiatric evaluation) while in the middle of serving cake at her son's birthday because the stalker (who was about 300 miles away on that day) called his buddies and said she'd threatened suicide. She was able to produce proof on the scene that she hadn't contacted him at all, but was taken in anyway.
She has personally expressed on many occasions that she wished the police stuck to a more strictly defined set of duties so that there would be less opportunity for an abuser to use his connections to use them as his own personal harassment squad, which includes a reduction in total numbers of police presence.
I suppose we just know different people!
Re: My thought about posses.
>This has nothing to do with anything.
I felt as though I explained the connection in the next paragraph, but I'm more than happy to explain in more detail how a person could in some situation prefer the presence of trained police than state-funded posses that have considerably less oversight and accountability. If you could clarify why you think this is incorrect, I am more than happy to discuss this further.
> most Black communities are actually under policed, not over policed.
Can you expand on this? I'd love more data on this point. If you're referencing the poll itself, you'll see that I already am skeptical about how it should be interpreted.
" since the demolition of homeless camps are often perceived as being for show or just something that happened because officers were bored and simply had nothing to do that day."
???
Someone doing something illegal, facing the 'force' of the police (who are acting in the interests of the rest of the community) is obviously going to want 'less police'.
So yes, 'Bank Robbers' also probably want 'less police'.
Ad-Hoc homeless camps are not removed because 'cops are bored' - they are illegal for good reason, they spread and metastasise.
There is a medical clinic across the street from where I live - and on a monthly basis, when the 'welfare check' day is, in the evening, they convene, smoke crack and 'camp out'. They generally linger in a small, makeshift 'camp' until eventually - and thankfully - the police come to break it up. It's a monthly cycle.
Whatever the 'underlying causes' - the solution is not 'makeshift camps'. FYI - these guys are eligible for welfare, which is about $1K in Quebec, there are tons of rentals around here for $400, meaning, there is no reason for most of them to be 'homeless' (though obviously there are serious mental issues with some of them). Free healthcare and a ton of other free services. I'm not saying living on welfare is easy, rather, there are 'just enough' services there to enable someone who is 'socially coherent' to be able to not be homeless.
As for 'more police' here is far-left Vox on the issue, specifically Matthew Iglesias. [1]
Thanks for asking! I maybe should have mentioned that I am speaking from a place of personal experience and also the experiences I've had relayed to me by my neighbors.
I've also heard normal terrible stories about the police everywhere I've lived, but this posse thing is relatively new to me so I thought it prudent to highlight as one example.
I currently live in a rural area where the sheriff's office provides bullet-proof vests using county funds, and has vowed to expand the program in the coming year. I am not aware of any training necessary to volunteer for the posse (the sheriff's office doesn't publish any clear guidelines about this.) All that I am aware of is that there are roughly ~30 officers total on this half of the county, and over 380 posse members according to published numbers.
I have heard of a few cases of posse volunteers following people around in an intimidating fashion (Despite no wrongdoing occurring on the part of the of those followed. Every bit of weird behavior on their part was focused on Hispanic people and young women.) There was no news of anyone being reprimanded or ejected from the posse.
As for community policing goes, I think that term may mean different things to different people. If by community policing you mean "possibly untrained, armed and armored people doing patrols with opaque rules and structure with limited accountability to the community, all on the taxpayer dime" it sounds somewhat similar to regular policing without having to pay salaries or pensions.
I do not find that to be a meaningful difference (aside from the significant savings) , and not something that I would endorse.
Honestly, unless you can present some evidence, something difficult to fake... this is fake news.
Anybody on the internet could say this.
I'd like to see an article from your local paper, a link to your sheriff's website with details on the program? How do you know it is taxpayer-funded? Where are those published numbers... published?
I don't know that fewer or more police either one is the answer. Better police, demilitarized, with better screening, better training, and a better focus on police work is what we need. Most of the things police are doing do not require police, and definitely don't require high-tension interactions between armed police and the public. We need social workers, clinical psychologists, trauma counselors, food security plans, and such. The police should be a last resort, not a first interaction with people struggling with a difficult situation.
I hated the police when I was younger and thought we'd be better with fewer police.
I don't believe that anymore. The emergence of body cameras are amazing because they show just how bad we're constantly being lied to. YouTubers like Donut Operator really opened my eyes.
I think back to my younger years and all the ways I've seen police go out of their way to do things they didn't need to. I've seem some do really shitty things too ... but overall, I think we need to remember they're human beings.
We're all just human beings, and most people join the police because they want to do the right thing. If many of these problem cities, police forces are composed of a large number of minorities too.
Especially during this time, let's try to remember we're all humans here.
“We're all just human beings, and most people join the police because they want to do the right thing.”
I think in theory this is the idea, but I think in reality it isn’t. I know four people I grew up with who became police and all four were not people I’d want to run into. One, in high school, stated that being a cop is the only job you can have where you are paid to beat people up (I argued boxing, not realizing he’d later be a cop). Another was the middle school bully. Another was a high school drug dealer — who I’m not sure ever stopped. And the one black guy I knew who became a cop was just a jerk.
Maybe coincidence, but I have a feeling that the profession attracts exactly the mindset you don’t want as a cop. But people who don’t have that mindset probably don’t want to be cops.
I can’t imagine it’s the most attractive job. Most people with options are going to do something else.
The pay is generally ok in a lot of places but it’s a job where you’re going to work bad hours early on and for the most part you’re dealing with the uglier side of society. Your whole world view is going to be shifted negatively as you encounter so many people with drug issues, mental issues, violent people, etc.
Who would want that? Who would want to spend their life interacting with this part of society day in and day out? I can only assume for many that take that job that it’s the best they can do.
I interact with thoughtful, nice people every day to the point where I take it for granted. I’m not exposed to the desperate, degenerate, or depraved part of society. And I wouldn’t want to be.
To take this further, all available stats show that the average tenure of a police officer is <5 years. This is no surprise -- the hours are rough, the work can be exceptionally dangerous or stressful at times, pay is middling (generally 50-70k a year, tho often much lower in poorer counties), and there is an entire class of US society that is blatantly "fuck the police". Why get into fist-fights with crackheads at 4am when I can get an A+ and Network+ and answer tickets all day? Slightly less degrading and no one will try to shoot me.
The result is that smart, qualified people rightly fuck-off to better paying or less stressful gigs.
Additionally, there is no lateral move into higher levels of police leadership (unless you're transferring from another PD). So your mid-to-senior leadership is often whoever manages to stick around.
Some people become cops because they want to help people, Some because they want power.
Cops that are good have a tendency to end up dehumanizing members of the public whom they are meant to be helping due to a number of factors(ie. continuous exposure to negative elements).
Currently the zeitgeist is defund the police, by either abolishing them or making the job lower paying and using those funds for social workers.
I do not see the current proposed solutions fixing any of the problems.
The solutions being taken up by moderates in both of the American political parties has been about removing liability protections in police actions and/or creating national standards for police oversight. I think those are the solutions that currently have widespread support and people have been discussing qualified immunity and body cameras at length on twitter and elsewhere.
I suggest to read Franklin Zimring's 2017 book, When Police Kill.
We are focused on problem cops but not problem departments.
Not 1 person mentions the failure of local chain of command for setting bad/no policy to deal with police encounters.
Immunity should be removed also from chain of command AND deparments for not producing directives that troops can follow.
Why is it not codified to not shoot when a suspect is running? The ruelbook on proper rules of engagement is surprisingly weak at precinct level and above. Then we go about blaming cops for not having clear limitations on what they can or cannot do.
Leadership loves the lack of accountability. They prefer to sacrificial troop lambs rather than themselves to roast.
I can see that helping in the sense of holding police responsible once they have taken bad actions but I am not sure if that will help with power seeking actions.
As an aside, we should remove liability protections for all government officials not just police.
Making bad actions visible can better inform voters and increase accountability (even if it doesn't remove bad actors themselves from the system). Qualified immunity is useful and helpful for the justice system in theory, but it is increasingly clear it causes more harm than good.
At the same time, if you look at the police-involved deaths per capita, our neighbors are countries like Iraq and Mali. Other nations in the developed world (and even many who are not) have rates that are far, far lower. The US clearly has something tragically wrong with its policing system.
Can we stick to nations that are at least likely to report real numbers? You can say China has fewer police shootings and it might be true or it might not. It's literally impossible to tell when it comes out of a nation with a freedom of speech that exists in their constitution and not in reality.
In the documentary "Iraq: No End in Sight" the original US team that did reconstruction said Baghdad had < 11 people in the morgue each year. After the 2003 invasion, it grew to over 11 per day.
I'm confused. Wouldn't the likelihood of lying mean that the real numbers in Iraq are much worse, supporting the criticism of AlotOfReading more rather than less?
What are you trying to say in that second paragraph?
It sounds like "when USA took charge the number of deaths that needed investigating increased >300-fold" but that doesn't fit with the rest of your comment.
Starting with a lot of guns. Police don't have a lot of time to make decisions when situations escalate. It seems like shoot first and ask questions later in many cases.
I'm not sure if this is the point you're making, but I think the problem starts with the United States having a lot of guns in general, not just in the hands of police. The United States in the only country in the world with more guns than people.
I'm not saying US police aren't too trigger-happy, but comparing gun use by the police in the US to other developed countries that have a fraction of the guns per capita (in England, for example, there are .04 guns per capita), isn't apples-to-apples.
It's guns in general, exactly as you suggest. It turns even simple encounters like a traffic stop into potential life-or-death situations.
This is not the only issue with American policing (by far), but if the starting assumption is that people on both sides of encounters are in fear for their lives it's not surprising that we see a lot of bad decisions.
I'm fairly pro-gun but even I'll concede this is a big BIG reason why police shoot first.
A bunch of US police studies found that if the suspect looks like s/he is pulling a gun, then you pull first and shoot first. And this being the US, that's not a crazy or unlikely situation (compared to somewhere like Japan or the UK).
Generally the studies backed that the winner of the gunfight is 1) who pulls a gun first, 2) who shoots first, 3) who scores a disabling hit within the first three (3) shots.
The downside of teaching all of your officers this means that they see someone sneeze or move their hand incorrectly and they assume s/he's reaching for it and goes for a killshot with 3+ rounds. The drunk (white) guy who got shot by the cop when he tried to pull his pants come to mind[1].
I somewhat agree with you. If both parties have guns, then it is only question of who shoots first. Even small error in judgement, can end up shooting and tragedy. We seriously need to look into gun control.
I agree with you completely, except I think gun control is a lost cause, and attempting anything significant here is a disastrous waste of political capital.
The degree of gun control required to change this dynamic (that police need to anticipate a gun in every pocket and under every car seat) will not fly in this country in my lifetime.
And IMO will not fly before 3d printers capable of manufacturing reliable guns become widely available, which will render the whole thing moot. (since at that point you'll never be able to get rid of enough guns to make the police stop anticipating them)
Given the current political situation with a president "joking" about 12 more years at his party's convention, mass protests in Belarus being put down by force, I am firmly against gun control now more than ever.
While I agree that the availability of guns is definitely a problem, a lot of the videos that end up in the news show that police are often acting extremely amateur-ish and escalate situations themselves instead of trying to deescalate.
Most people, even criminals, most likely do not want to shoot a police officer because that essentially means that you're screwed for life; one shred of DNA, a photo, a name; that's all it takes to make life miserable, even if you get away with it initially.
So the only reason people actually pull the trigger is when acting extremely irrational (drawing a weapon against a police officer is already irrational per the above), and that's exactly what happens in so many of the videos that we see lately.
Why is he being shot? He poses almost no threat whatsoever, what is he going to do, pull out an AK in his car and shoot the officers in broad daylight in front of witnesses? The officers with their weapons drawn and their shouting only increase the stress levels of everyone involved; it's amateur-ish on so many levels. As a Swiss (another country with high availability of guns), this is absolutely unimaginable here; an officer drawing a weapon on someone will result immediately in an investigation whether it was justified (at least that's my understanding but I might be wrong, at least that seems to always happen when something ends up in the news); I have witnessed some nasty arrests in person where the person to be arrested resisted but never, ever did any officer draw their weapon. And I would be surprised if even the thought of doing so crossed their mind; they certainly were trained not to.
I do think that the USA has a gun problem, and I do think that it plays a role in why so many people are shot by the police, but I also think that, at least from what I see in the media (and might thus be heavily biased), that the police seem to be badly trained, especially when it comes to deescalation techniques, and that there is not enough accountability for their actions and bad behavior.
>>>He poses almost no threat whatsoever, what is he going to do, pull out an AK in his car and shoot the officers in broad daylight in front of witnesses?
But I agree with most of your post: the US has an over-abundance of undisciplined, poorly-trained police who are VERY quick to escalate a situation to their firearm.
You can’t just train people and expect behavior to change. There’s no correlation there. First you have to make people want to change. Only then can training help people change in the way they already want to change.
The Czech Republic is in the processes of amending their constitution to include the right to self-defense with a weapon. The Czech Republic also is shall issue for carry permits and their are around 250k people with one.
The US has a much higher homicide rate than its peers, which almost certainly means police face more dangerous situations in the US than in those other countries.
Often, the issue with policing is aggravated by exactly those other factors: food insecurity, housing insecurity, income insecurity, healthcare insecurity, a culture of stimulant abuse and praising material wealth in a vastly unequal society, lack of mental and emotional support, whole swathes of communities with substandard schools and little chance for upward mobility by legal means...
Social welfare spending in the US increased an average of 4.8% per year between 1972 and 2011. Government spending in total increased from around 25% of GDP in the 1950s, to around 40% of GDP today, with a shift from infrastructure and military spending, to social welfare spending.
So I disagree this has to do with what you're implying - society not taxing enough to fund social programs. To give a concrete example that demonstrates that: Harlem in the 1950s, when there was much less social support available through government programs, was a relatively safe neighbourhood. The situation eroded in the late 1960s and 1970s, with the rise of the Counter-Culture, along with numerous social programs as part of LBJ's Great Society campaign.
Gunshot wounds are overwhelmingly the leading cause of death at the hands of the American Police.
American Police are broadly authorised to use lethal force "to protect their life or the life of another innocent party", or to "prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others" - https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938226/police-sho...
The American rules on the use of lethal force are similar to many other countries. For instance, in the UK guidance is "To prevent an immediate threat to life by shooting to stop the subject from carrying out their intended or threatened course of action. In most circumstances this is achieved by aiming to strike the central body mass (i.e. the torso)." - https://theconversation.com/heres-when-british-police-are-le...
So why are American Police shooting more people? Why are they afraid for theirs, and others lives? Is it really because the "System" turns them into nervous, trigger-happy bad people? Or, is the problem that that's what happens when a society is awash with guns?
Rural white folks per capita own way more guns than inner-city POC. Perhaps the rampant insecurity in food, shelter, healthcare, proper education, and chance to climb out of social and economic holes combines with a system where a heavy patrol of armed police are first responders to things better handled by trauma counselors, psychologits, addiction counselors, employment specialists, social workers, and other professions makes a perfect storm for violent interactions.
> We're all just human beings, and most people join the police because they want to do the right thing
Many people join the police because the pay very well, they're some of the highest paid government employees, and often make more than software developers do. They'll also get a full pension with benefits after working for only 20 years.
I've never seen an EMT or a social worker destroy homeless people's belongings, but I've seen cops do it. People who want to do the right thing typically go into other fields than law enforcement.
> Many people join the police because the pay very well, they're some of the highest paid government employees, and often make more than software developers do. They'll also get a full pension with benefits after working for only 20 years.
You have to consider risk factor also.
> I've never seen an EMT or a social worker destroy homeless people's belongings, but I've seen cops do it. People who want to do the right thing typically go into other fields than law enforcement.
This is very general statement. I have seen social-workers taking bribes. You can't characterise whole force based on
some incidents. This applies to everything religion, race, gender, region etc. There are good and bad people. But please don't assume whole system is currupt. We need to encourage good things and shun bad things.
If we're considering risk, then Amazon and pizza delivery drivers, garbagemen, landscapers, fishermen, construction workers, and farmers all have higher risks on the job than cops do.
According to the BLS, the biggest risk to a cop on the job is their own driving and parking, followed by heart attacks from not eating healthily or getting enough exercise.
> This is very general statement. I have seen social-workers taking bribes
In general, social workers don't take bribes. Making life difficult for homeless people is literally the cops' job because being homeless is criminalized in most of the US.
I agree we are all humans. But as humans, we are strongly influenced by our environment, and I think the current system of policing has a number of fundamental issues that makes the flaws we share as humans worse.
1.) Positions of power can attract people who have a longing for power, who may not be well-adjusted, emotionally-healthy individuals.
2.) Policing is a dangerous job, and constant personal danger can lead to regression away from the ideals we hold as a society. Something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When one of the basic needs (personal safety) is compromised, everything above it on the pyramid becomes less stable.
3.) Policing is an adversarial job. This leads to a us vs them mentality and also contributes to the next problem
4.) Racism. Racism has been part of our culture for a long time. This means...
a.) some officers certainly will be coming into the force with racial biases to varying degrees, and
b.) the fact that the jobs pits them as adversaries against certain races of people more than others will makes these biases worse.
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/12/876293261/the-link-between-di...
This Story makes a solid argument that police unions are a huge part of the problem. The unions’ protect bad cops, negotiate work rules, influence Elections, effect training programs and oppose reform.
Maybe its time to look at getting rid of public employee unions altogether.
I think these are complicated issues, and I am not sure what the best path forward is. Changes to oversight and immunity policies would likely improve outcomes. I think solving the issues that lead to inequity and crime would indirectly have a positive impact on police behavior.
Diverting some police responsibilities to social workers seems like a good idea in general. I don't know if it would be effective in preventing the tragedies we see constantly across our country. These all generally happen in the process of an arrest, which seems like a responsibility that would need to be retained by officers in a system where the responsibilies are split.
I’m curious about this social worker idea. My mother was one and her job had her working mainly in poor neighborhoods. She was tasked with going into homes, speaking with people, and determining if the children there were in a safe environment. If it was judged it wasn’t safe, then they would remove the children.
As you can imagine this was a fairly dangerous job at times. Almost every time they had to make a removal the police would need to be called to assist. Even getting into the homes they’d need police sometimes as they’d be threatened and intimidated.
She eventually left that role to work with elderly people in need.
> 3.) Policing is an adversarial job. This leads to a us vs them mentality and also contributes to the next problem
This has another point: America's desire for ... extremely long and, from an European POV, frankly ridiculous prison sentences.
In most of Europe, even someone carrying a car load worth of meth earns only a couple years of prison time in decent conditions (don't get me wrong, our prisons are not perfect, but generally mental and physical healthcare are given, food is decent and gangs/prison rape is nowhere near the widespread problem as it is in the US) if caught. There is no incentive to shoot a cop, in fact there is an incentive to be cooperative and friendly with cops at e.g. traffic stops (so that they don't search the car in the first place).
In America however? A drug runner often has to choose between either not shooting the cop and definitely earn decades of prison time in overcrowded prisons with inhumane conditions or shooting the cop and possibly getting away. This is why US cops are so trigger happy and assuming every person they interact with is out to shoot them, plus the ... extremely widespread availability of guns.
A huge part of solving the police violence problem will be gun control, sentencing reforms and prison reforms, as unintuitively as it sounds.
This a great point, but there is a counter-argument that reducing punishments for drug-related offenses may make the opioid epidemic in the US worse. This is a huge problem and roughly 70k Americans die per year from OD, which is much more than the number of police killings. I personally lost a cousin to drug OD a couple years ago.
One extreme solution that might work is making all drugs legal for adults (21+), and have extremely strict punishments on providing drugs to minors.
This sort of policy change might have saved my cousin because:
1.) It would put dealers out of business which I think would make it harder for teenagers to acquire hard drugs. When I was in HS in California, it was way easier to get marijuana than to get alcohol because there was a system of distributors for it. Acquiring alcohol meant asking someone's older sibling or friend, or getting a fake id and hoping the liquor store clerk doesn't confront you, or sneaking some out of parents' pantry. None of these were great options, and none of these methods would work for hard drugs like heroin which nearly the entire adult population has a severe negative perspective, unlike alcohol.
2.) If adult users bought from regulated sources, it would at the very least ensure the drugs aren't cut with fentanyl and that doses are intentional.
Overdoses is far more of a problem of poorly regulated supply than use. You don't see the heroin users with a clean, stable supply that they can afford very often because they're mostly functioning members of society who hold down jobs, and they rarely OD or are on the streets any more than you see alcohol users as typical wrecks - you see the small portion of the worst of the worst. The popular image of a heroin addict is a complete fabrication that only works because so few people are aware of heroin use among people they know.
Heroin is by no means a good drug to get dependent on, but it is vastly more dangerous when users don't have a stable, clean supply. And a typical heroin addict could satisfy their addiction for $10-$20/day with medical grade heroin. We know this because the UK NHS buys heroin both for addiction management and for post-op pain management in some hospitals as an alternative to morphine.
So your "extreme" solution isn't extreme at all, in fact, and it's a massive shame that politicians still rarely dare address this.
Heroin prescription to addicts tends to not just improve their quality of life massively, but also reduce crime substantially, because it frees addicts from having to try to finance their addiction.
As for the opioid epidemic in the US, blame Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, and the Sackler Family who owned it and leached it dry before the company was forced to settle claims over OxyContin and went into bankruptcy. Basically they're some of the biggest drug lords in the world.
Purdue Pharma extensively misrepresented how to prescribe OxyContin to make more money, in a way that left people dependent. That's a far bigger reason for the opioid epidemic than illegal drug sales. The rise in illegal opioid use is a consequence, not a cause.
The rise in heroin use in the US is largely because heroin is cheaper than black-market oxycodone a lot of places, and so people who have had their OxyContin prescriptions cut, which idiotically often happen when they exhibit signs of dependency, instead of helping them off it, often end up transitioning to heroin.
> Purdue Pharma extensively misrepresented how to prescribe OxyContin to make more money, in a way that left people dependent. That's a far bigger reason for the opioid epidemic than illegal drug sales. The rise in illegal opioid use is a consequence, not a cause.
Additionally, it's not "just" Purdue and others (like the pill mills) at fault, they are just enablers following a demand.
There would be no supply without massive massive demand and let's be honest the majority of addicts didn't start out in hospitals with legit pain management. They search self-medication for issues caused by a lack of mental health care, physical health care and basic social safety networks.
A lot of the issues the US faces at the moment boils down to this as a root cause (and to condense it more, one ends up at systemic historical racism and massive wealth inequalities). Nothing can be solved alone, the US needs sweeping general reforms across the board.
It's not just Purdue, but Purdue lied to doctors and had doctors prescribe the pills in completely inappropriate manners that significantly raised the chance of ongoing addiction.
Those lies created a massive surge in demand. This was not a matter of just giving in to pre-existing addicts, but creating new ones.
There's a reason they've been sued into bankruptcy.
> This is a huge problem and roughly 70k Americans die per year from OD, which is much more than the number of police killings. I personally lost a cousin to drug OD a couple years ago.
I am sorry for your loss, but I would not blame a "lax" drug enforcement on the general opioid crisis. Even the death penalty doesn't prevent drug smuggling, all it incentivizes is higher prices and cutting!
The real reason behind large parts of the US opioid epidemic is that the US lacks a modern welfare system:
- physical healthcare and paid sick time for all. People are too often "pushing through" pain by abusing painkillers and then getting dependent on them (as they cannot afford fixing the cause of the pain), people can't afford to miss work too much so they'll ask for (and get) strong stuff after operations so they can work instead of having the proper time for recovery.
- mental healthcare. Many people, especially the homeless, are "self-medicating" with drugs, and there is next to zero support systems for people going through individual crisis (divorces, death of a family member and job loss are the most common start point of drug careers).
- related to the above point: government assistance for the unemployed, especially in areas going through rapid de-industrialization. It is no coincidence that the areas affected by the opioid crisis the most are those where the effects of unchecked rabid capitalism and globalization have wrecked entire communities.
No matter of "law and order" will help there, people will still try to self-medicate the effects from the lack of these three points - with all the side effects that come with it, including kids like your cousin ending up with people shooting H in school.
And regarding age... when I grew up (admittedly in Germany, where beer is legal at the age of 16!) honestly we all knew one or two crackheads too - but in the entire school. The wide, wide majority was happy enough with beer, wine and some schnaps for parties, a decent lot were stoners, and that's it. We never had the need to resort to hardcore illegal drugs, and the pot dealers were all guys who did some side dealing to finance their own stoning.
They’re human beings who happen to have gleefully committed Hundreds of violent crimes against citizens they’re supposed to protect, and they’re basically given free reign to do so.
Take the following - think about every single one of the human beings taking turns beating a completely subdued, incapacitated and probably unconscious person:
I could've picked from a few hundred similar clips, there's so many. And yet nothing will come of this. This conflict won’t ever be resolved until the police take responsibility for this sort of brutality. And they won’t, so it’ll periodically die down and simmer until another atrocity is committed and it’ll boil over again and again ad infinitum.
We can empathise with the police all we want, but this will just keep happening until someone steps in and puts an end to it. I have NO idea what that would look like, I know that when Georgia (i.e. former USSR country) had problems with their police they completely disbanded it and set it up again. Hopefully there's a less disruptive route than that but I honestly do not know.
> I don't believe that anymore. The emergence of body cameras are amazing because they show just how bad we're constantly being lied to. YouTubers like Donut Operator really opened my eyes.
Definitely agree that body cameras can help to clarify a lot.
Would you mind sharing a bit about what sorts of lies you may've been referencing? Or how "Donut Operator" on YouTube may've been helpful?
I'm not sure if I fully understood what you were trying to say, but it sounds like you may have some neat perspective on the topic.
Well, the leaked George Floyd bodycam video shed a whole different light on the incident. The guy was complaining he couldn't breathe while sitting in the back seat of the police car and insisted on getting out and lying on the ground.
I'm not calling the original video shot by a bystander a 'lie', but it wasn't the whole story by any means.
There's no way those police officers will be found guilty of murder, and there'll be absolute carnage when that happens.
If he complained about not being able to breathe beforehand, and they responded the way they did instead of calling an ambulance, that makes it worse, not better.
You didn't watch the FULL bodycam video did you? At one point the officer asks for the ETA on the ambulance. At another point Chavez says, "You need to calm down, you're going to give yourself a heart attack." He even offers to open the window for Floyd.
Watch the entire thing; both of the released bodycam videos in entirety. They're very different than what we've been fed.
That they did call an ambulance was established from the start. Nothing I said contradicts that. The issue is when they called it, and the fact one of them knelt on his neck.
Kneeling on his neck alone is sufficient to make how they acted awful, irrespective of anything else. There is nothing that will make that an acceptable way to restrain someone.
So unless you're telling me the video proves nobody knelt on his neck, it's not going to improve things.
If the full video as claimed above shows that he complained about breathing before getting out of the car, then that suggests they waited longer to call an ambulance than what I thought they did, and so my impression of their behaviour is now significantly worse.
He ended up with someones knee on his neck for 8 minutes. According to you after having already complained about breathing difficulties before getting out of the car.
To me, if your description is correct (and no, I haven't seen it), that unambiguously makes the choice of putting a knee on his neck far worse. There's no excuse for doing something that any rational human should understand is likely to make breathing worse to someone who has already complained of breathing problems.
The result of that experiment seems to imply even random people being "promoted" to have power over others with little demonstrable accountability is a recipe for disaster.
From the dim recesses of my memory what I took away from Plato's Republic is that you never want those who seek power to receive it and only those who don't care about it "deserve" it. (Clearly a bit of an oxymoron)
> On this view, philosophers are the last people who should or would want to rule. The Republic turns this claim upside down, arguing that it is precisely the fact that philosophers are the last people who would want to rule that qualifies them to do so. Only those who do not wish for political power can be trusted with it.
> Thus, the key to the notion of the “philosopher king” is that the philosopher is the only person who can be trusted to rule well. Philosophers are both morally and intellectually suited to rule: morally because it is in their nature to love truth and learning so much that they are free from the greed and lust that tempts others to abuse power and intellectually because they alone can gain full knowledge of reality, which in Books V through VII of the Republic is argued to culminate in knowledge of the forms of Virtue, Beauty, and, above all, the Good. The city can foster such knowledge by putting aspiring philosophers through a demanding education, and the philosophers will use their knowledge of goodness and virtue to help other citizens achieve these so far as possible.
I am a fairly optimistic person and believe people are mostly good. I agree some and perhaps many people that become police officers do it because they wish to do good. However, at a minimum I think the job attracts a lot of bullies and people that enjoy having power over others. And I think there is such a code of support of the "thin blue line" that ostensibly "good cops" can't be good cops because they allow "bad cop" behavior by their inaction.
I'd fix it all tomorrow by making a law that all wrongful violence/death/etc. judgements come out of the police pension and fraternal order of police funds instead of a city's budget. I bet that code of "omerta" would end in a heartbeat.
The police execute public policy. I've seen a friend arrested for trying to simply delivery a letter to their representative calmly (amid a protest, but a calm one). Police can sometimes be individually bad, but often they are bad because they are part of a system that makes it so. If you are a "good" cop, you need to protect the bad cops or you get your ass handed to you and your career prospects cut. If you are a "good" cop and you are forced to kick people out of homes for being poor, lock up some dude forever for stealing a candy bar because of a three strikes law, or some such you're part of a system that values property and the safety of the well off over human dignity.
We do need some kind of forces for dealing with the occasional insane situation, but those happen rarely and public policy can be tailored to prevent many problems instead of being merely reactive and punitive. For example, poverty and lack of options cause social conflict, what if we did something about that instead of punishing people?
I'd like to see how this cuts by age. A lot of older folks I talk to see police very differently, and often say "You just don't know how things used to be before the police", which I think really misses what people are asking for ie: redistribution of grossly overbudgeted police departments to preventative measures like better schooling, community centers, and more subtle reactive measures like un-armed "police" (or whatever you want to call this new role).
I also wonder if the question were phrased differently (and more accurately representing what is actually being asked for), more like "Would you support an N% cut to police budgets, which would come from X part of the police budget, to support preventative measures like social services?", if we'd see a different response.
It’s hard to blame people for misunderstanding slogans that supposedly don’t mean what the plain meaning would suggest. Perhaps the young activists should say what they mean and mean what they say and then all those “older folks” might not miss the point.
"They" are many people. I suspect that many of them don't understand that it's a motte and bailey argument. But I suspect that some of them do understand, and are doing it deliberately.
> It’s hard to blame people for misunderstanding slogans that supposedly don’t mean what the plain meaning would suggest.
I find it very easy to blame people who are not willing to spend 10 seconds researching what a movement stands for. We can't say that it's okay to read three words on a sign, interpret it in your own context, and then blame the movement when you don't "understand" it. It's a slogan! What do you expect for a less-than-five-word sentence that people can unite under?
At a minimum, I'd hope that if you asked 5 people who were uniting under that less-than-five word slogan what that slogan meant, in terms of desired policy, that at least 3 of those 5 people would agree with one another.
All the supporters I have talked to are in favor of "reform", yes. The specifics of what exactly it means to "defund" the police varies pretty significantly between supporters though -- some say "obviously we still need police but maybe try sending in a social worker for the homeless guy who is lying unconscious onthe ground" and others say "defund means entirely defund, as in abolish, I mean what I say" (I'm assuming that is the slogan in question, but not entirely positive because the post I was replying to was vagueposting).
I’ve heard hundreds of supporters speak and the message is fairly uniform: reduce the operational scope and budget of police significantly and use those resources on programs - proven to work elsewhere - which help people and communities in ways that are more appropriate to the specific problem and more efficient in reducing crime. The degree in which the scope/budget varies, but of course some people are arguing for what they think is realistically achievable and others are arguing their ideal; both are valid debate strategies and don’t necessarily mean that they aren’t aligned.
The few people I’ve heard say “remove police entirely,” when asked to elaborate, meant that the entire organization/concept of policing should be rebuilt from the ground up, not that there should be no one in society available to respond to crimes occurring.
I'd expect something that's not so much more extreme than the idea it's trying to communicate. If people march around saying "tear down the bridges", tagging bridges with little Xs where the demolitions should start, I'm not gonna stick around to hear that they actually mean rural highways should be better funded.
I'm willing to invest time, but I start from the assumption that the slogans and symbols of the marchers are honest attempts to explain what they're marching for.
> I find it very easy to blame people who are not willing to spend 10 seconds researching what a movement stands for.
Then you suffer from a profound lack of empathy.
I invested your "10 seconds". Google took me to a site called Defund the Police[1].
Reading this site, it seems that they want to... defund the police. As in, take the majority of their funding away, and put it somewhere else (nominally into social programs).
Not making a value judgement here, but I'm pretty sure this thing does what it says on the tin.
> I invested your "10 seconds". Google took me to a site called Defund the Police[1].
Weird. That page is not even at page 1 for me. Wikipedia comes up first for me and would generally be my go-to source for these topics.
> Reading this site, it seems that they want to... defund the police. As in, take the majority of their funding away, and put it somewhere else (nominally into social programs).
> Not making a value judgement here, but I'm pretty sure this thing does what it says on the tin.
Yes? This is correctly what the movement is about. The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.
It's as straightforward as it sounds: Instead of funding a police department, a sizable chunk of a city's budget is invested in communities, especially marginalized ones where much of the policing occurs.
Wikipedia states
"Defund the police" is a slogan that supports divesting funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full defunding as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services.
> The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.
You'd think conservatives would be all for that - smaller state, lower taxes
> You'd think conservatives would be all for that - smaller state, lower taxes.
I think conservatives might get behind defunding the police if those funds were routed back to the taxpayer, rather than to expanding social programs -- or any government program, for that matter.
Moving money from a strongly conservative part of the government to a strongly leftist part of the government looks too much like a power grab to gain traction with conservatives.
You'd also get conservative buy-in if it came with a pro-gun stance.
If citizens are going to police their own communities, then they need to have the option to carry and employ arms as necessary for the task.
I think there's a lot of opportunity for give-and-take in criminal justice reform -- prisons and drug policy should also be on the table! -- but it requires both sides putting things of equal value on the fire, and I don't see that happening.
> The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.
Pretty sure people understood that part.
Edit: I am also seeing downvotes on my above comment, which seems to indicate that a fair number of people disagree with the assessment that "defund the police" means "defund the police".
I would expect a slogan that is not so insane that that it constantly has be explained and interpreted by apologists. Lets cut the crap. Defund the police means defund the police.
NYC tried unarmed “police” to handle minor moving violations and parking. It was a disaster. People bullied them, assaulted them, and/or ignored them.
The sad truth is that people respect police not because of the badge but because of the gun, and because of the threat of violence.
Many of the reform ideas being thrown around lately are ideas that places across the US have already tried.
I think people are saying photos and videos from Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Kenosha, WI. They’re thinking they’ll take their chances with the police than with arsonists and rioters.
> In some countries including Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland excepted), Maldives, the police do not carry firearms unless the situation is expected to merit it.
Where the hell are unarmed police the norm other than the UK and NZ? I lived in NZ for three years and the police still had guns, just locked in the boot of their cars. Australian cops (lived there for 1 year) had firearms.
Unarmed police are pretty rare on this planet. Even Japanese cops carry guns.
Germany has a force separate from the police to handle parking infractions and things of that sort (Ordnungsamt), and they're not armed. I think this is somewhat common in Europe.
That specific thing is common in the US, too. Parking enforcement, at least in places populous enough to warrant dedicated parking enforcement personnel, usually don't arm their meter maids.
> Where the hell are unarmed police the norm other than the UK and NZ?
Here's a sampling. I think not every country is considered in these lists though. Or at least, given there can be multiple police forces in a jurisdiction with only some of them armed, it's not always a clear-cut answer.
> In some countries including Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland excepted), Maldives, the police do not carry firearms unless the situation is expected to merit it.
I always get a chuckle when UK and US media bash the Japanese justice system. English speakers are lucky they don't have to hear the devastating retorts the Japanese would be able to make back - they must be falling off their chairs laughing at the kind of reporting the BBC and Vox make on them.
> It's a pretty sad realization that perhaps the reason we have such violent police is, in part, because we have such a violent society.
In terms of violent crime overall the US isn't an outlier, it is located at the median of the OECD in terms of violent crime. The outlier for the US is murder, overwhelmingly due to the mass proliferation of illegal gun possession.
This has been written about for decades and remains true today.
"America doesn’t have more crime than other rich countries. It just has more guns."
"The seminal work here is a 1999 book by Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, called Crime Is Not the Problem. Zimring and Hawkins set out to examine what was, at the time, the conventional wisdom: that America had a uniquely terrible crime problem, one without any parallel in other developed democracies.
"They found, pretty definitively, that the conventional wisdom was wrong. "Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher," they write."
... "A landmark 1997 study actually tried to answer this question. Its findings — which scholars say still hold up — are that America doesn't really have a significantly higher rate of crime compared to similar countries. But that crime is much likelier to be lethal: American criminals just kill more people than do their counterparts in other developed countries. And guns appear to be a big part of what makes this difference."
> The outlier for the US is murder, overwhelmingly due to the mass proliferation of illegal gun possession.
Emphasis mine.
Most people miss that part and just blame people having guns in general, when law-abiding citizens with legally registered guns is not part of the overall problem.
Each of the three factions has a blindspot that it taboos and finds impossible to understand. Each faction is held in the thrall. I'll describe a Left wing version where their hero lives in Right wing world and a Liberal version.
So - our Society in caricature.
Left
Suppose you were studying economics or sociology and everybody had a odd paradox they couldn't solve. There were these different groups of people. Some lead long healthy lives and have most quality of life indicators in their favour. The other group has dire outcomes - nasty brutish and short. Nobody can figure it out. The same pattern plays out in different countries and in different centuries. Everybody would like for the people suffering not to suffer but we're perplexed and the newspapers report on a regular basis the status of these people, great people and intellectuals write books about it, classes are held in universities all over the country in the search for the solution.
Then one day some autistic figures it out. It's because some are poor and others are rich. It can be confirmed by checking bank balances. Surprisingly this person does not receive a round of applause and confetti in the streets - he is promptly fired from his job, his friends avert their eyes. Soon he is homeless and is found proclaiming his Truth under a bridge - to find him just turn Left on James Damore St.
Liberal
The Liberals believe in Robots, AGI and similar ideas for artificial humans - have so for centuries. Their fable is the Android - the dream of the artificial human that coincidentally replaces all forms of blue collar labour. The root of the word Robot literally means slave. Their nemesis is the Computer - the information processing machine that works best at replacing their own human generated information processing. Of course they try to use this machine to replace blue collar labour instead. They invest incredible energies here but ignore that each of their schemes for technological and economic improvement is based on some type of forced transfer or even slavery. While technologies not based on theft or slavery exist - these are ignored. They are mostly preoccupied with schemes to move groups of people around the surface of the planet to disrupt their foreign and domestic competitors in the name of social improvement - which it is for them.
I can pass the idealogical Turing test - can't say the same of the people who inhabit Reddit, Metafilter and HN - and I think most of the Right's intellectual firepower remains subtext in our society unless you read old books to find plot holes or the exchange between other civilizations and ours opens up in a way that cannot be censored by the information organs of the West.
Is there a source for this? If I search up "NYPD unarmed officer", I get a bunch of results regarding police violence on unarmed civilians, and if I search up "new york unarmed officer", I get a bunch of results relating to security guards.
I don't mean all the officers. If you "disarmed" 50% of the officers, you'd expect officer shootings to drop by 40% (random estimate), but I doubt people would alter their behavior knowing that there's still 50% chance they can get shot.
Of course there isn't, hence why instead of providing you a source, OP just tells you to look up some vague thing. (Hilariously, you are now the top result for 'nypd brownies unarmed')
I'm many days late, so I don't expect an actual response, but there's literally not a single article on the front page of that search that says anything that matches your original claim?
There's an article from the NY Post, which is literally a tabloid, that claims the "only thing keeping them safe" is people mistaking them for cops, but not that they were explicitly disarmed and attacked as a result?
This just sounds mad coming from a British person. Almost all of our police are unarmed and do a decent job, the only place police routinely carry guns are airports for obvious reasons and Northern Ireland which literally had a decades-long sectarian insurgency happen there. At least nominally, the British police operate under Peel's idea of "policing by consent" where police officers are merely citizens in uniform charged with keeping order rather than the more Continental (at the time) model of armed enforcers of royal/state power.
It's hard to genuinely respect someone when there's a gun-related power dynamic forcing you to. That's not respect, that's just the threat of force. It's probably too late for America to adopt Peel's principles of policing but it's not done us much harm.
Fear and respect are two completely different things though. Under the Peelite model of policing, it's impossible to create genuine community police officers when there's a huge power differential (IE a tool that can easily end a life) between police and public.
> “You just don't know how things used to be before the police", which I think really misses what people are asking for ie: redistribution of grossly overbudgeted police departments to preventative
Or more likely they don’t think preventative measures work as well as you think they do.
Edit: Once you have seen acts of senseless violence - real cruel stuff - it is hard to believe that some people can be reliably rehabilitated.
Maybe that cruelty could have been nipped in the bud if they had received better care in the past - but that’s not a risk I would take with my community.
I think it'd also be productive to have community education on your rights and responsibilities with police.
You have rights, you don't have to do anything outside the law. But you do have to comply with lawful orders. If everybody understood these things, there would be much less trouble, fear, and violence.
Agreed! We should start by teaching police what lawful orders they're actually able to give, prevent them from lying about their powers and individuals' rights, and putting the ones who do intimidate people into relinquishing their rights in prison.
I think this falls into better education of the public, many times these incidents arise because people try to argue their case with the officer but the officer is not the judge nor the jury. Trying to argue your case with a belligerent officer is only going to serve their purpose. Whereas if people know that have an absolute right to remain silent and exercise that right, they will be better served, especially if the officer is issuing unlawful orders / abusing power. If the officer thinks you are guilty, you cannot talk your way out of jail, but you can certainly give them more ammo to charge you with. e.g Resisting, Obstruction charges.
Other than undercover cops being able to lie to cover their background, the fact that police can -- legally! ruled so by the supreme court! -- lie to citizens is a real problem.
How are citizens supposed to trust police that can freely lie to them without consequence?
and putting the ones who do intimidate people into relinquishing their rights in prison
Are you saying if a cop is interrogating someone and says "I know you did this, if you don't talk you're going to prison for a long time", we should send that cop to prison?
That would be intimidating a person into relinquishing their rights.
Often they're referring to New York in the 60s/70s. Of course, there were absolutely police back then. But they largely attribute the increase in their feeling of personal safety with a larger investment in police.
Murders peaked 1990 and not a lot of murders goes unreported. Then in just a few years NYC went from being one of the most murderous cities in USA to one of the least murderous cities.
My town just had the sheriff for example. The sheriff had a small crew of 1-2 deputies and a secretary. When something really rough would happen, the sheriff would round up a crew. It was a really light group of people. Lots of differences between that, a militia, community policing, etc. Even today some rural communities are “policed” very differently. Now that same town has a standing police force of 40 officers, a K-9 unit, and they have fancy military vehicles. This is with a change from 5000->10000 in population.
This was all up until pretty recently (1940s-1950s) too.
The whole "defund the police" movement feels very much in line with the "Luxury beliefs" [1] idea that has been floating around for the past year or so.
> The whole "defund the police" movement feels very much in line with the "Luxury beliefs"
Why do you believe this? It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
> It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
While that sounds great on paper, nothing the schools do is going to make a difference if the family support at home isn't there. You can't just throw money at the problem to make it better.
Anecdotal, but my sister used to work as a teacher & reading specialist in poorer areas. Per my last conversation with her on this topic, she said maybe 20% of the kids have a solid backing from family for education. The rest she had interacted with for one reason or another were a mix of parents who told her it was her job to teach and they wouldn't do that at home; another group of parents that were too drunk/drugged out to even answer the phone or call back; and another that would just swear at her for bothering them at home. All of her co-workers had similar accounts of this happening.
Kids that did want to learn in class were bullied for "acting white" and there were physical fights occurring weekly. She didn't teach high school, she taught 4/5th grade.
For us to make any progress with poorer schools there needs to be a community focus on education, having respect for each other, and having respect for the law. If you grow up for 18 years in an environment without those then nothing matters long term and we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.
It is sad to see this downvoted, I know several people who were outcasts for "acting white" by trying hard in school (their words, not mine).
The issue really isn't about race though, it is about poverty and culture. I know a kindergarten teacher from a very rural, very white, very poor school district who was cussed out by one of her 5 year old students. The parents don't care, and it shows in the students' progression through school and young adulthood. If parents show up at all, it is to yell at teachers for giving their children bad grades or any sort of discipline.
Of course, putting any sort of onus on the parents gets talked down, as it undermines the argument that things will magically get better if only we threw more money at the problem... because the problem isn't the school or the teachers at all.
What responsibility do we have as a nation to reconcile our past actions that caused unmeasurable suffering for untold millions of people? Have we no courage, no sense of moral obligation to make things right?
The culture of black communities dealing with poverty and crime that you refer to didn't come from nowhere. It was not simply imported from 17th century Africa, in the way that the apple pie was brought over from England. It is a product of a people who were bravely struggling and striving to cope in the worst possible circumstances.
Brutally enslaved for more than 200 years, their literal chains finally removed, they continued to be viciously abused and systematically and savagely oppressed throughout the following century. They weren't event treated as fully human by the federal law until 2 generations ago. Only two generations! Many states had incredibly racist and oppressive laws even more recently than that. The most cursory research reveals an utterly depraved history. One simple and terrible example is redlining, which unfortunately was occurring even after the civil rights act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining).
We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused. It is impossible to fully mend what we have broken, but we damn well better try.
> We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused.
25% percent of the US’s population as a nation is 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, a substantial portion of which arrived after 1965 because desegregation and immigration reforms coincide. [1] Whatever “we” you might be thinking, it risks running an egocentric fallacy to assume it expands to the entirety of the US population.
Most people who come to US are escaping horrid conditions of their home countries (a good portion of which is not unrelated to US foreign policy).
Most immigration is not a luxurious, touristic affair but comes out of necessity. There are even people who would consider immigrations as voluntarily getting themselves colonized, coming here for the country to extract their resources in exchange of a promise of better life circumstances. We certainly extract more out of immigrants economically, academically, psychologically, who were raised and educated elsewhere, who are incentivized to work very hard or go back, who also suffer mentally from this process.
Requiring them to pitch in assuming they had perfect information and made a completely free preference is at best ignorant. Of course it is the honorable thing to answer the suffering of fellow humans, but that goes both ways, and thinking that that problem is always the one and only problem of this world is plain, pure narcissism.
Also you say this as though the US is the only country that had slaves. Chattel slavery was (unfortunately) the predominate form of labor in the entire world for centuries. The US was the 3rd to last country in the Americas to abolish it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
Other societies in the world have largely decided that we’re better off just burying the hatchet.
That’s rather presumptuous of you. I never said the solution is reparations. I’m not sure what the solution is. I have some ideas, but obviously it is a non-trivial problem.
We aren’t talking about other countries. I’m familiar with history. I know many terrible things have happened.
You're right — s/reparations/<responsibility [...] to reconcile our past actions that caused unmeasurable suffering for untold millions of people? >.
Whatever it may be, I want no part of it. To assume that all immigrants, who today represent 25% of Americans, are willing to sign onto policy positions that are focused on correcting (distant) past wrongs as opposed to solving the problems we have TODAY — is what I'm calling presumptuous.
I think we are still miscommunicating. I don’t want to ignore present day problems and solely focus on some sort of atonement for past wrongs. We should fix current day problems with a proper understanding of how they can be, taking ownership of our failures as a nation.
Radical delegitimization of the nuclear family in the late 60’s and early 70’s got intertwined with the black power movement which essentially argued that single mother’s are better off than married. They have more agency and the nuclear family is a patriarchal tool of male supremacy. Then taken further into the black power movement with aid of that eras new feminism, it was argued that the nuclear family is a white European ideal and a tool of oppression.
So then the problem became one of the state not doing enough to fund the single mother family. Not only accepting this but making it an ideal.
Read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s research from the early 1960’s that could have been a corner stone of the civil rights movement. But then it wasn’t.
Anyways this rejection of the traditional family structure is essentially what triggered the family values movement on the right in the late 70’s and early 1980’s.
Interestingly as the legitimization of single mothers became more and more mainstream we continued to see black kids grow up in entrenched poverty as dropout rates and criminal activity climbed year over year for these kids compared to previous generations.
So now the solution is “reparations”. Of course it wasn’t the radical ideas of middle class radicals being experimented on black people that has caused this inescapable spiral. It’s that we need to give money to single mothers and we are here because we simply haven’t given enough.
Some misguided people will say blacks did better before the Civil Rights Act. But they are wrong not in that the Civil Rights Act was bad - it is good - mandatory to be sure. It’s that during this same era we rejected rigorous research and science for so called theories that claimed the 2-parent family was a tool of oppression. This got interlaced into the black power movement and we saw the destruction of the black family and the resulting mess we are in today.
It goes all the way back to The Communist Manifesto. These are old ideas that have just been recast through a new lens. Conflict Theory just takes on new forms from one based on class (made sense at the time) to one based on so called “identity” which makes sense in a multicultural country.
In the end these ideas are illiberal and it is my hope they wither away after enough people are able to look past the facade and the tyrannical machinery is exposed. And then maybe some of these orgs can grow into something that’s actually useful.
We can argue about the marginal benefit of investing in late-stage interventions, but it's certainly doing more than cops buying Humvees and LARPING as tacticool warriors.
Generally armored vehicles police get as surplus are sold at basically the price of gas / transportation to get them to their destination. The feds just want them off their books. That compared to the price of a new Lenco Bearcat is hundreds of thousands of dollars less for a more capable vehicle.
I have never once seen those vehicles used in regular law enforcement duties such as traffic stops.
They are used in exceptional cases like active shooter situations, hostage / barricaded / swat scenarios, natural disasters like flooding due to their high clearance, and the occasional parade or community day to let kids play in the big truck. In all, they are a defensive vehicle with no weapons that costs the department very little and has a wide range of uses if the shit hits the fan.
I really don't get the outrage of them other than the optics of it "being from the military" and idiots calling them "tanks". If there are specific bad uses of police force those are great to call out, but the utility of the vehicle which is basically free for a real world need is a no brainer.
My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.
They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things. People standing around chanting. Then they wait until curfew is over, maybe declare the assembly unlawful, and start using chemical weapons and intimidation on the crowd.
> rock-throwing protesters versus police officers wearing body armor and gas masks, carrying ballistic shields and lobbing flash grenades.
So regular riot control equipment in 95% of the world...
The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.
> My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.
How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization? I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose. They also still use fire hoses in many other countries which we stopped doing in the 60s due to the bad optics of them during the racial tension.
> They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things.
Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so. Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too. But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
> So regular riot control equipment in 95% of the world...
Yes, militarization of the police is normalized in many countries. That doesn't make it acceptable. They're trigger-happy and violent. It's part of the culture.
> The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.
Do you believe that there needs to be a line of officers wielding rifles behind a line of riot cops with flashbangs and tear gas launchers (used liberally and indiscriminately) behind a line of shielded riot cops grabbing things from protesters and generally trying to provoke a reaction? These things all work in tandem, in this context. That line of cops is part of their show of force, as they take anti-cop protests very personally. It's a form of intimidation and escalation.
> How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization?
Half of that is literally military equipment and US police departments are frequently under a "warrior" mindset. It's been heavily exported to various different PDs. They treat confrontations as a fight between them and the "bad guys", not public safety or law enforcement. Having a bunch of military or tacticool gear is part of that mindset.
> I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose.
Normalization is not the same as moral or acceptable. Plus, this isn't quite a consistent take when it comes to these kinds of things. When Soviet bloc countries used far less serious responses to color revolutions, they were decried as totalitarian, antidemocratic monsters. But we do worse here and it's just normal business as usual.
And those "crowd control" agents are chemical weapons, explosives, and "less lethal" weapons causing permanent disability and injury. I watched a woman get shot with a grenade (either flashbang or teargas) and she went into cardiac arrest, only living because medics rushed her to the hospital. She was forward but still 30 feet from any officers. She was shot straight in the chest. She was just standing there and yelling.
> Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so.
They absolutely are not. It's a form of escalation and the cops have frequently provoked these responses with theses "shows of force".
> Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too.
The cops aren't trying to stop people from burning down communities. They don't actually do that, they don't deescalate, they don't actually even defend the private property (which is usually much of their function) so much as blast through and hurt people indiscriminately.
> But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
I'm very familiar with their tactics, they used them against me.
Are you familiar with the Rodney King riots, or the national wave in the late 60s? You seem to be presuming that large groups of angry protesters will never start trying to kill people, that this isn't even a problem the police need to plan for. And I'm just not sure that's true.
I would add that the LA Bank Shootout provided a lot of justification for effective firepower. Two men pretty much pinned down several law enforcement organizations due to superior firepower.
You don't need to militarize the police in order to have a riot response. The warrior mentality is toxic and actually exacerbates the problem.
In every protest I went to where things escalated, it was the police doing the primary escalation. Bull rushing the crowd. Trying to grab things from the crowd. Shooting teargas and OC gas and flashbangs into the crowd prior to even making any announcements. Bicycle cops hitting passersby with their bicycles. A kid got maced.
None of this requires the straw man that protests never turn into riots.
But that's the goal! When the police are worried the crowd might escalate, they preemptive action to end the situation before it can happen, because crowd-initiated escalations are much more destructive and deadly. Once protesters are shooting at people it's too late to step in.
This is incoherent. Beating peaceful protesters doesn't serve the goal of deescalation. Every single time, it resulted in more anger and frustration. Water bottles being thrown.
> When the police are worried the crowd might escalate, they preemptive action to end the situation before it can happen, because crowd-initiated escalations are much more destructive and deadly.
End the situation? It escalated every single time, exactly how you'd expect. Cops becoming aggressive and violent against protesters is not going to cool any heads. They teargassed kids, you know. In what world is that considered a way to "end the situation"?
> Once protesters are shooting at people it's too late to step in.
This is part of that dangerous warrior mentality, treating every group like an immediate existential threat that must be neutralized with violence based on nothing but speculation.
If you're justifying police violence and aggression based on what you imagine might happen, you're part of the problem.
We've just circled back around. You seem to be saying that groups of protesters are never threats, and I don't agree; it seems to me that once they start breaking random things, there's a serious and unacceptable risk they'll start killing people.
Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.
> We've just circled back around. You seem to be saying that groups of protesters are never threats
I've never said this.
> and I don't agree; it seems to me that once they start breaking random things, there's a serious and unacceptable risk they'll start killing people.
That is absurd. Damaging property is nothing like hurting people. In fact, alleging that the two are comparable is somewhat dehumanizing, as it's used to justify hurting people over damage to things. Things* should not have any level of parity with human life, particularly things like broken windows.
> Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.
Last time, you said the police could preemptively assume a protest will hurt people and start engaging in the violence we've been talking about. Now there's the good protester / bad rioter dichotomy, something often decried by civil rights leaders because it was the rallying cry of segregationists. That and outside agitators.
I was gassed and flashbanged in a protest where we were holding our hands up and chanting, "hands up, don't shoot".
If you are going to post an article to support your argument, you might want to make sure it actually supports your argument.
Police don't pay for surplus military gear, the DoD offers it for free. Police only have to pay for shipping. It has been this way since the program was created in 1988.
The police often pay for shipping, maintenance, and kitting out the equipment. They might receive a free stripped-down M16, but they still use their own budgets to make it tacticool. Just an optic and light run $1k or so.
Look into studies that evaluate self-reported crimes or violence, etc. Not police stats. Police stats are highly unreliable for drawing these kinds of conclusions a lot of reasons before you even consider malevolence or corruption.
Nearly all crimes that are policed are crimes of poverty. Rather than focusing so thoroughly on punitive measures, it is far better for everyone to focus on the root causes.
>...we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.
Poverty. That's the root issue. But it's cheaper to blame the poverty on bad additudes and poor choices rather than acknowledge the causality goes in the other direction and pony up the cash for programs to break the cycle of poverty.
Not only is that a copout and demonstrably false, but giving people money makes poverty worse, not better. It’s counterintuitive, and unfortunately proponents of hand-outs act out of emotion and (naive) intuition, not data. They often harm those they intend to help as a result.
If the movement were "Demilitarize the police", then yes, that is absolutely something I could be in favor of.
As it stands, "Defund the police" is to me a weasel word version of "Abolish the police" and I honestly do think people are just being coy when they claim not to see that.
Most people using the word "defund" mean to reduce the level of funding for police and spend more on other social services. One argument is that police are not well equipped to provide services to people who are having a mental health, relationship, or substance abuse crisis and not actively doing violence. A mental health nurse or social worker might be a more appropriate first responder in situations that are not primarily characterized by violence.
There are a small but significant number of people in the current protests calling for policing as we know it to be abolished; they don't beat around the bush about it. The phrase "abolish the police" has 2.5 million google hits, a NYT op-ed, and a Wikipedia article.
Maybe they should carry signs that read “Fund social services” instead. The entire country has been through a traumatic event, coming at the heals of a massive opioid epidemic, I’m pretty sure it would be a unifying message that every American would support unequivocally.
Notably these funds don’t need to come at the expense of police funding.
We just dumped something like $5 trillion into a fire pit called COVID. There’s no lack of emergency funding for these programs if people demanded it.
Defund also means balkanization of police duties. The police spend about 5% of their time on violent crime. They're also highly resistant to reforms and oversight. If we reduced police budgets by 80%, restricting their duties to those we consider necessary police work, they would be much smaller and easier to manage. The excess budget could go both to funding social services and to paying social workers, etc to do the other jobs that police currently do (and do badly).
There is a real risk in politics that people mean literally what they are saying.
There is a situation where a group of people have together under the slogan "defund the police". There is a very high risk that if they get the power to do something they will, literally and only, defund the police.
Not many people are reading policy documents. The point of unity in politics is usually the literal meaning of the words being used. Secret signals of "really we meant this other thing" tend not to work.
Defund can easily mean abolish; there isn't really a feasible way to run a police force if they can't pay salaries. It is a literal reading of the phrase and in line with what some (hopefully a tiny minority) of protesters have been asking for.
Why fret so much over the language though, that's what I don't understand. I think most people, of any POV, would agree it's not the best phrase given that without explanation it means what a small minority wants. Move past it, to the issue.
They've achieved many, though far from all, of their goals in various municipalities.
Why do you believe that a PR campaign is the only protest of value?
> The way you phrased it, the protests are nothing more than tantrums by oversized children.
That is in no way implied from how I phrased it. Pain and weariness from racialized murders and intimidation by cops is not a childish tantrum and I hope you never have to endure that pain yourself. I do hope that you find the empathy to consider their position.
You say the protests have achieved their goals. To me, that means they are an organized campaign of some sort.
The fact is, BLM is a national organization with nearly universal name recognition at this point. They have funding. They have PR teams. They are directing messaging.
And the fact remains that I think "Defund the Police" is terrible messaging.
> Please treat them like people.
As I said at the beginning, I think we're talking past each other.
I never meant to dehumanize the protesters.
The main point I am trying to make is that as someone with no horse in this race (i.e. I am neither pro-BLM nor pro-police) if I were forced to pick a side on the issue based on my current view of what is and has happened over the past couple months, I would come down on the side of the police. I'd rather just stay out of it.
All this said, as much as I think our politics differ, I really do respect the way you've responded to people in this thread, and I hope there are more people like you among the protesters because then maybe you've got an actual shot at achieving your goals.
> You say the protests have achieved their goals. To me, that means they are an organized campaign of some sort.
As in there are various demands by various groups and you can identify the core where they overlap.
> The fact is, BLM is a national organization with nearly universal name recognition at this point. They have funding. They have PR teams. They are directing messaging.
BLM is decentralized. They don't have most of that.
> And the fact remains that I think "Defund the Police" is terrible messaging.
Okay. But it's not PR. It's not some campaign crafted by an overpaid consultant. It's a decentralized protest movement. I don't want it to be that, either. That's part of the problem in politics - caring far too much about this kind of thing. Focus on the realities, the people dying. The violent and aggressive and frequently racist police.
> > Please treat them like people.
> As I said at the beginning, I think we're talking past each other.
I think the attempt to infantilize was nearly dehumanizing.
> I never meant to dehumanize the protesters.
Then stop calling protests in response to murders by police a tantrum by oversized children.
> The main point I am trying to make is that as someone with no horse in this race (i.e. I am neither pro-BLM nor pro-police)
We all have a horse in this race. We live together in a society that has some level of control over things like policing, equity, violence, crime, poverty. The "neutral" position is implicit support for the status quo, much as being a "moderate" in politics indicates the same.
> if I were forced to pick a side on the issue based on my current view of what is and has happened over the past couple months, I would come down on the side of the police. I'd rather just stay out of it.
As I said before, ha.
> All this said, as much as I think our politics differ, I really do respect the way you've responded to people in this thread, and I hope there are more people like you among the protesters because then maybe you've got an actual shot at achieving your goals.
The vast majority of people in the protests are like me. You should go to one.
The point of disbanding the Minneapolis Police Department (your 3rd link) is to work around police protections like minimum force size and union protections that are codified in the city's charter. The plan is to remove and replace, not just remove [0].
As for the other two - two is not a "non trivial number" regardless of who gives them a platform. This YouGov poll [1] shows 11% support (and ~20% support among blacks and hispanics) for abolishing the police as of June, which is a non trivial number. But framing it as a yes/no question loses a lot of granularity - I bet most of those people would advocate replacing the current police force with something that materially resembles a (more community-based, less militarized) police force.
Sure, I don't disagree. The implication though was that this was a story mainly/entirely coming out of so-called conservative media, so I posted a small sampling of links from other places.
Perception is all that matters, and a large chunk of the country follows conservative media.
Unfortunately the country is doing a great job of lining up behind their preferred propaganda outlets rather than looking for truth. This is true for both Liberals and Conservatives.
You were the one who brought it up to support your argument. Your argument doesn't seem to rest on what the public preception is but in what is actually happening.
So yes i would say the veracity of the statement is relavent here.
The net effect of people hearing "Black Lives Matter protesters clashed with police again last night" on the news for an entire summer is going to be a giant step backwards for whatever BLM is actually trying to achieve.
That is true whether or not the riots have actually been geographically widespread.
It's dragged on to the point that I fully expect support to start dropping precipitously. Especially as the protests have become continuously more destructive riots.
That usually means that the police used fairly extreme violence and chemical weapons on protesters and received maybe a handful of water bottles thrown at them after doing so.
Your news sources have an agenda and tend to get these things wrong. Go to a protest and see for yourself if you want to viscerally watch them lie in real time.
I'm an American and have only seen the police rioting. Defunding the police is the most reasonable option I have heard in my lifetime. Seems like the perfect solution, there is nothing bad to say about it, it's opponents are left to make up "widespread rioting".
> I'm an American and have only seen the police rioting
I'm an American. I can't believe you can say that with a straight face. As soon as you say that ONLY the police are doing something wrong means you have an understanding of the situation that no facts will fix.
I mean I was targeted. By personally I meant that I had that personal experience. It was as part of a group - the cops tend to use "collective punishment" when it comes to protests, after all.
The use of tear gas is the use of a chemical weapon and a war crime, but when you turn it against civilians in your own country we give it a pass.
So you weren't personally targeted. In what way were you targeted? Were you doing nothing to arouse police attention? I think most first world countries have a gas they can use for riot control. Are you insisting that most first world countries are regularly engaging in what you would call war crimes... that are worse than other countries?
You are misunderstanding what they meant by "personally." They don't mean they were singled out. They mean it was a first-hand experience. As in "I thanked him personally for the gift." This is the primary definition of personally
your own definition relies on a 1 to 1 communication between people. so you're wrong right? I don't personally thank Rotary International for all their hard work.
"I personally cursed the cop for pepper spraying me"
Just that one cop huh? They're literally saying all the cops targeted them.
My definition doesn't imply communication between people or any interaction at all. It just means literally physically present for something.
"After a long solo hike, the researcher was able to personally see the inside of a volcano." There is only one person in that story. No 1:1 communication. It just means the person was there for the thing. This is how personally was used in the comment.
"Personal in this sense clearly means 1:1." Why is that clear? The commenter said they meant the other definition. Wouldn't they know what they meant better than you do?
1. In the sense that I used the term, I had the personal experience of being targeted. Attempting to browbeat me with your misapprehension is not going to work.
2. You're now editorializing my experience of which you have no knowledge, calling it a mob. Oh my. Please refrain from using your imagination regarding my experiences.
I don't think you really understand the meaning of the words "I had the personal experience of being targeted." Mostly because you seem to ignore the words you use. Especially the word "targeted." Also because you could eliminate the word "personally" and you'd be more correct. But really, you can't just be in the middle of a protesting mob and then they get tear gassed and then say "HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN TO ME AND ONLY ME?!"
>2. You're now editorializing my experience of which you have no knowledge, calling it a mob. Oh my. Please refrain from using your imagination regarding my experiences.
I think that's a lesson you could learn from regarding other people as well. It seems like a right you reserve just for you.
How is that better? In what world is police officers dosing large groups of protestors acceptable?
Give it enough years, and people will talk about the brave protestors of 2020. But like all "brave protests" of the past, today they should be supported, and are not.
In the perfectly reasonable world where the protest was escalated by rioters, anarchists, and arsonists (you know, like every protest in portland, since ever) and the police issue a dispersal order as a response to buildings on fire and violent attacks. Then they issue 5 more. Then they announce it on twitter. There is NO other way to deal with a riot. The police are vastly outnumbered and have very few tools to do their job. Well there is another way, but it’s far worse.
Nothing about these “protests” after dark is brave. It’s shameful and cowardly. So is the response from politicians.
In SEA, that's not how it's worked. The police violence has come before the announcements. Before any serious property damage (not that property damage justifies collective punishment or chemical weapons).
Have you been to the protests in PDX? Seen the cops hurting people for standing in a protest?
Absolute nonsense. I was there, repeatedly. They shot first and either then made an announcement or never made one.
Example: they announced a curfew via text a few minutes before it went into effect. Many didn't get this because they didn't have their phones with them. Tear gas and flashbangs had already been deployed with zero warnings from police.
It is not helpful or okay to assert such falsehoods with confidence.
You were in both portland and seattle? have you considered your correlation to madness? Is it a 100% correlation? I'm sorry, but are you saying protesters didn't have their phones on them? As opposed to literally every other protester who is filming every unfortunate human interaction at every protest?
I think I've clarified what I meant. I was targeted. I can't specify the exact degree to which anyone was skipped over to get to me.
> In what way were you targeted?
First time, it was indiscriminate use of teargas. Second time, indiscriminate use of teargas and a flashbang shot at my feet.
> Were you doing nothing to arouse police attention?
I was standing in a protest.
> I think most first world countries have a gas they can use for riot control. Are you insisting that most first world countries are regularly engaging in what you would call war crimes... that are worse than other countries?
It would be a war crime if it were a foreign military force using it against the exact same crowd, but not if it's cops. War crimes have a way of being selectively (un)enforced when it comes to those in power, in any case.
Police are fairly atrocious in most countries, so I don't think there's much point in trying to figure out exactly where I'd rank the police in the US. It wouldn't make it right if it were average or not.
You've done it poorly. You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected. And you've given two examples of them shooting indiscriminately. So no, they didn't personally target you.
The other commenter seemed to understand well enough. Maybe instead of playing a blame game you could accept my clarification and move on?
> You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected.
And I never claimed to.
> And you've given two examples of them shooting indiscriminately. So no, they didn't personally target you.
The second example was closer to me than anyone else and I was at the rear of the crowd.
I don't know how productive it is for me to keep telling you what I mean by saying I was personally targeted. But okay, I'll try again with the same substitution: I had a first-hand experience being targeted by police with chemical and explosive weapons.
I'm really still missing your clarification... I'm not really sure what game blame you think I'm playing?
> You can't specify the degree to which you think you were personally selected.
> And I never claimed to.
AND YET 2 SENTENCES LATER......
>I don't know how productive it is for me to keep telling you what I mean by saying I was personally targeted. But okay, I'll try again with the same substitution: I had a first-hand experience being targeted by police with chemical and explosive weapons.
The scare words really kill your credibility. It’s tear gas and pepper spray, not mustard gas. Stop trying to manufacture an oppressed victim narrative. We can call a water cannon a chemical weapon too.
> The scare words really kill your credibility. It’s tear gas and pepper spray, not mustard gas.
If it were a foreign military doing the exact same action to the exact same people, it would be a war crime. There are serious impacts from using tear gas, including poorly-understood hormonal impacts to women, particularly pregnant women.
> Stop trying to manufacture an oppressed victim narrative.
I haven't manufactured anything, these are things that have been happening for three months via aggressive, proactive police action. You can go see it for yourself by attending a protest at a major city. Or you can review the countless videos. Or you can listen to people (like me) who were there.
> We can call a water cannon a chemical weapon too.
No we can't. Water cannons are also unacceptable in these situations, however. People like to act like these weapons are relatively harmless, but people have been disabled, nearly killed, or straight-up killed with them.
That list includes deaths caused by law enforcement and death of rioters killed by people trying to protect themselves from the rioters as well.
There are some additional deaths by the rioters that are not in the list though but that does provide a decent synopsis of some of the deaths.
I'm just trying to put GP's dubious numbers in their proper context. Of those 1000, how many would you estimate are killed without reasonable cause? Could it be 30? 300? 970? We shouldn't turn off our brains just because somebody said someone died. USA society is fine with the carnage on the highway and throughout the Middle East; I think we can deal with a tiny amount of carnage in order to improve.
> A non trivial number of the protesters are advocating for complete elimination of the police though.
This categorically isn't defunding police, this is police abolition, and getting them confused is likely why you think it's a luxury belief because I fail to see what's luxurious about getting tear gassed every Friday/Saturday night or having the cops stand aside letting groups like the Proud Boys brutalize protestors and journalists. There's nothing luxurious about getting tear gassed for 3 months straight, it's a genuine struggle.
It looks like your account has been using HN primarily for political battle. That's not allowed here, regardless of which specific politics you support or abhor. If you'd like to understand why, there are extensive past explanations at these links. (If you or anyone reads those explanations and still has a question that isn't answered there, I'd like to know what it is.)
SPD routinely started firing into crowds prior to making any such announcements, including the first time I was hit. The second time, they announced it and then immediately started firing at the crowd.
Announcing an unlawful assembly is not carte blanche to dole out collective punishment or violence, either.
There's already lawsuits ongoing. They won't go anywhere in terms of reforms because individual cops are virtually always indemnified, difficult to identify in these situations (many covered their badge numbers and nametags with tape), and the city will absorb the cost without the department taking any real hits.
It isn’t, it only shows you know absolutely nothing about police budgets, and your well intentioned but incredibly naive attempt at social engineering using completely untested ideas will get more people killed.
This is tosh. If the idea is to defund the surplus, then the police will effectively maintain the exact same level of presence as already displayed.
Basically, with your suggestion, nothing will change, other than police garages. That's clearly not what the protestors want, and as such, we can immediately discard your assertion.
Why do you believe that? Isn't it possible that in high crime areas it would make more sense to focus on the police first, so that everybody, including school counselors, is not too afraid to go to work?
Wow, what an amazing article. I never thought of it this way. But it matches what I've noted in many people.
Super interesting concept. Thanks for this mental mode of seeing this phenomena. I'm going to really think it over. Even if I end up rejecting it in favor of some other mental mode, it's still an amazingly interesting lens for looking at recent events.
> Another luxury belief is that religion is irrational or harmful. Members of the upper class are most likely to be atheists or non-religious. But they have the resources and access to thrive without the unifying social edifice of religion. Places of worship are often essential for the social fabric of poor communities. Denigrating the importance of religion harms the poor.
Since when is human rationality “luxury”? This article just shot itself in the foot.
I'm not so sure it did. The social fabric point is something that even comes up in HN discussions. Religion and religious activities are things that connect strangers and communities. That helps build social trust. With religion gone there isn't much positive that tends to replace it among poor purple.
I wonder if this is 81% of black Americans, or "81% of black Americans who had both the time and inclination to fill out a targeted web survey/ answer a landline phone call related to policing"
I know polls claim to correct for this, but if even the census, mandated by the constitution and backed by federal law and billions of dollars, can significantly under-count black and Latino Americans, I'd be curious to see how well Gallup can do.
All this said, I DO think the majority of people (regardless of their relative melanin levels) would like to see more police in their neighborhoods, with the giant caveat that it's more than simple numbers in most people's minds.
Be wary on conflating a general desire for more police with specific acceptance of current policing.
> 81% of black Americans who had both the time and inclination to fill out a targeted web survey/ answer a landline phone call
Well, yes, that's basically how every poll works. The pollsters come up with what they think is a representative sample population, they send out surveys, some people respond, some don't.
Notably, saying yes to more police does not imply being happy with the police. It implies merely seeing more police as at least marginally less likely to do harm than the criminals they'd displace.
Unfortunately, The whole defund the police movement is going to backfire on the Democrats. Safety is pretty important in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If Democrats get branded as the anti-police party they are going to lose move votes then they are going to gain by the vocal minority opinion.
No question - trump is the absolute worst republican you could run it seems. Short run I don't think republicans have a chance.
But feeling / being safe is CRITICAL to folks - they will accept dictatorships to gain safety. The whole abolish ICE / defund the police type platform seems a loser long run for the dems. I'm surprised Biden didn't make a stronger statement distancing himself form this. The violence is really toxic.
I'm a reliable dem voter and significant dem donor this cycle, but if you actually live or have lived in "tough" neighborhoods with higher crime (ie, have had your car broken into multiple times, stolen, experienced violence) then you really do start to prioritize safety.
Yes, safety is important. George Floyd should have been able to feel safe. Breonna Taylor should have been safe in her bed. Who's violence are we talking about here? What does high crime neighborhoods have to do with police not killing people wantonly?
Statistically, the "strong police force" side cares more about black lives. Anecdotally, maybe not.
1. The vast majority of murdered black people are murdered by non-cops, even if you categorize any time someone gets killed by a cop a "murder", regardless of context.
2. This number will go up, not down, if you abolish/defund police forces.
There really isn't much more to it than that. The biggest threat to a black person's life is another black person, not a cop. Would it be better if cops didn't murder unarmed people? Absolutely and emphatically YES. But that means better training, which in turn means more funding, not less.
Most people who don't live in high-crime neighborhoods very much desire for their neighborhood not to become one. If we tell them the choice is between overly aggressive police and no police, they'll pick the aggressive police, no matter what tragedies overaggressive policing has caused.
Absolutely! There's no reason the police couldn't just be respectful and nonviolent. Many police forces in the country already manage it. That's why I think "defund the police" is self-defeating messaging; many people understand it to mean that reform is impossible and the only way to reduce police violence is to reduce police presence.
If you follow the instructions of the police officers you have little reason to not feel safe. If you fight, resist, run etc. you've given up your rights to safety.
here's a man who was laying down on the ground, hands in the air, talking calmly. cop still shot him:
> When the 2016 incident occurred, Soto had fled his group home with a shiny silver toy truck. Kinsey, a behavioral therapist, lay down on the ground, put his hands in the air and tried to explain to officers that both he and Soto were unarmed, according to video of the incident taken by a witness.
> Aledda then fired his rifle at Soto, striking Kinsey in the leg, as radio communication clarified the toy Soto held wasn't a gun
> [the police officer] did not serve any prison time and instead was sentenced to probation and asked to write a 2,500 word essay on policing.
Essentially - you should follow all orders given by police officers, whether they are justified or not. If you don't, you forfeit all rights to be alive.
How on earth can you possibly say that? Not following the orders of some jacked up power trip officer means you've given up all your rights to be alive?
This has to be the worst take in the entire thread.
Very easy to say from a distance, not so easy to not resist when someones pointing a gun at you or gripping you so tightly you're being strangled to death.
There are, at minimum, 50 million police-citizen encounters in the USA annually. Fewer than 1200 individuals are killed by police in a given year, on average. The odds of an unarmed American who does not pose a direct threat being shot by the police are fewer than one-in-a-million.
It always annoys me when some random unelected, unselected person or people purport to speak on behalf of a community. Half the time the self appointed spokesperson isn’t even in the relevant community.
To improve police presence and interactions wouldn't you actually want to fund the police and make sure they go through proper training to ensure they can handle difficult situations? A lack of funding would probably result in a worse trained police force, no?
I think the "defund the police" movement has a very unfortunate name. Many (hopefully most) people don't want to pull _all_ funding from the police. They want to appropriately redistribute funds. That means stopping spend on surplus military weapons and tanks, and instead put more money towards the proper training you mentioned.
This is not based in reality. How much money do you think police are spending on “surplus military weapons”? It is minimal and most of the purchase of surplus military items are mundane. They aren’t acquiring carriers and missiles. You mentioned tanks - are you literally claiming that local police departments are purchasing M1 Abrams battle tanks? Because that’s not happening.
Keep in mind the total transfer of military surplus equipment to police departments is just $5.1B over the entire lifetime of the program, since 1997 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Support_Offi...). The scale of this program has been completely blown out of proportion by activists.
There's no irony there and it was not a "screaming mob". I'm concerned about your sources of information.
Chief Best stepped down after constantly lying about the police actions and the protesters for months. Best was hired against the recommendations of the federal consent decree that SPD is under because of repeated excessive force and racial profiling issues, hand-picked by the mayor. The reasons given for her stepping down are relatively boring and unlikely to be the real reason, which probably involves political calculus and the mayor.
No, she didn’t lie, and yes, it was a screaming mob. A mob that literally showed up on city council members doorsteps, among others. I see you’re siding with the anarchists though, so this won’t be a productive conversation.
Accusing a black woman of racial profiling. Good lord. You people are more racist than anyone.
The consent decree did not recommend against hiring her (I just read it). It’s also over 8 years old, long before her time, and they have since found them compliant.
The data says they use force in only 0.3% of encounters, and significant force likely to cause injury is only a small fraction of that:
Further, the use of serious levels of force – force that causes or may be reasonably expected to cause substantial bodily injury – remained extraordinarily low, occurring in 21 of nearly 870,000 (0.0024% - or less than one quarter of one hundredth of a percent) of officer dispatches.
Considering how unwilling many perps are, 21 out of 870,000 is shockingly low. Well done on the reform!
There may be evidence of racism, but probably not the kind you think you are protesting. 42% of this force was used against white people, including 2 officer involved shootings, while 28% was against black people, including 0 officer involved shootings.
I watched her lie about something of which I have personal direct knowledge. Her claims have also been repeatedly contradicted by video evidence.
> and yes, it was a screaming mob. A mob that literally showed up on city council members doorsteps, among others.
Ah, the charged language. What's the difference between a "mob" and a protest making demands? This language reveals the sources you've been using for such information and they ain't great.
> I see you’re siding with the anarchists though, so this won’t be a productive conversation.
I would be curious to know what you think anarchists are.
> Accusing a black woman of racial profiling.
1. If this seems impossible to you, you should check out the actions of black cops. Profiling doesn't require the individual to be a white supremacist, e.g.
2. I didn't even claim that. I referred to the department.
> Good lord. You people are more racist than anyone.
In what way is anything I said racist?
> The consent decree did not recommend against hiring her (I just read it).
Ah, I misremembered which group it ran afoul of. Best's hiring was a mess. There was supposed to be a process: search committee finds options, Mayor makes a suggestion / selection, council confirms. What actually happened: search committee finds options, suggests hiring outside the department as the whole point was to institute reforms, and an outside hire would have no baggage in the department. The police union raises a ruckus about Best not being in the final 3 (she was already at SPD), this becomes news, and Durkan personally puts her on the finalist list, then selects her and council confirms.
> It’s also over 8 years old, long before her time, and they have since found them compliant.
The consent decree is a very low bar and the civilian oversight board has repeatedly stated that SPD is not following their recommendations or ready for end the consent decree. Despite this, Durkan and Best had applied for release from the consent decree in April. Part of that decree were issues regarding excessive force. As a reminder, SPD has been routinely beating protesters and indiscriminately teargassing protesters for nearly three months.
> The data says they use force in only 0.3% of encounters, and significant force likely to cause injury is only a small fraction of that:
> Further, the use of serious levels of force – force that causes or may be reasonably expected to cause substantial bodily injury – remained extraordinarily low, occurring in 21 of nearly 870,000 (0.0024% - or less than one quarter of one hundredth of a percent) of officer dispatches.
Based on police reporting. And remember, the vast majority of situations police are deployed to are in no way violent nor involve an arrest.
> Considering how unwilling many perps are, 21 out of 870,000 is shockingly low. Well done on the reform!
Uncritically accepting police number is going to lead you astray.
> There may be evidence of racism, but probably not the kind you think you are protesting. 42% of this force was used against white people, including 2 officer involved shootings, while 28% was against black people, including 0 officer involved shootings.
Those numbers imply a disproportionate racial impact already. Look at Seattle's demographics.
Unfortunately after all the lies and vitriol from activists, I don’t blame her for stepping down and quietly collecting her pension. Here, there have been weeks of mobs showing up at the homes of the mayor, city council, and the police chief, committing violence, destroying property, and threatening neighbors. Take a look at this account of what happened at the police chief’s neighborhood (https://lynnwoodtimes.com/2020/08/02/hundreds-of-blm-support...):
> A crowd of about 200 persons, mostly white men and women in their twenties, were dressed in black with masks and black hoods and carried signs that read “Black Lives Matter.” Black Lives Matter protestors shouted profanity and insults at neighbors, took license plate information on vehicles, took pictures of homes, and asked little kids who lived in the neighborhood what schools they attended.
You should look at how much of the budget the police dept takes of an average town. In my med-small town they're 50% of the city budget. Police depts are shockingly well funded compared to the problems they actually end up solving.
My town may have something atypicial about its finances at 50%, if you look at the budget of San Jose it seems about $400m for city services and $200m for police and fire. I didn't pick it apart further between police/fire, but IIRC fire tends to have much smaller budgets than police depts. But I would say that's still shockingly large vs the budget for other city services.. (that's setting aside some large chunks for airports etc..., I was also a bit surprised SJ had a $4B budget and how much was for airport services).
Edit: I guess looking at Oakland/Chicago, it's 50% or close to it too though.
"Oakland PD receives nearly half of the city's discretionary spending( $264 million out of $592 million), dwarfing every other expenditure, including human services, parks and recreation, and transportation combined. A whopping 39 percent of Chicago's 2017 budget went to police, and still the department got even more money, peaking in 2020 with a 7 percent increase to nearly $1.8 billion. "
Pretty much. I keep seeing people here use the multi-year police academies in Europe as an example of why they have less issues with police brutality, while at the same time saying that the police in the USA need less resources.
The police chief of the city in which I live, a suburb of Dallas, Texas, was asked why we haven't seen the sort of cases here that we've seen in Dallas and even other suburbs. His response was that we require all applicants to have a bachelors degree.
Could be correlation rather than causation, of course.
The same city where a police officer broke into the wrong apartment, thinking it was hers, and killed the man inside? Not sure I'd be pointing fingers if I were the Dallas PD.
The same city where a police officer broke into the wrong apartment, thinking it was hers, and killed an unarmed black man inside? Not sure I'd be pointing fingers if I were the Dallas PD.
Reading comprehension: I said I live in "a suburb of Dallas," while the incident you reference happened in the city of Dallas itself. I even drew a contrast between my city and what "we've seen in Dallas and even other suburbs."
You'd have been better off noticing the contrast I drew and talking about McKinney, another suburb of Dallas, in which a cop infamously stormed onto the scene and threw 15-year-old girl in a bikini to the concrete and pointed a gun at a teenage boy who objected.[0]
Ferguson is a suburb of St Louis. Kenosha is a suburb of either Milwaukee or Chicago, depending on who you ask. McKinney is a suburb of Dallas. Most of the footage from "Minneapolis" was actually from suburbs of Minneapolis. Current political advertising is heavily focused on using current footage from protests and warning that our suburbs are next if the other candidate is elected.
Police violence isn't only a suburban problem, but it is definitely also a suburban problem.
Defunding the police addresses the overspending. Despite millions of dollars for training, outcomes in police interactions haven't gotten better. Purchasing military surplus is another area they've spent increased budgets on as well.
>Purchasing military surplus is another area they've spent increased budgets on as well.
Police only pay for shipping. If those costs are swelling their expenses, they have a tiny budget.
The 1988 National Defense Authorization Act created a temporary program within the DoD to funnel surplus equipment to state law enforcement agencies involved in anti-drug activities at no cost other than shipping. The 1997 National Defense Authorization Act added anti-terrorism activities and made the program permanent.
Well, the number of people killed by officers, and the number of officers killed in the line of duty are both metrics that have remained fairly steady. Overall violent crime rate looks pretty steady as well over the past decade, though it's much decreased from the 2000-2010 rates.
It's not a single-metric question though. Probably not just a 10-20 metric question either.
The military connection is very interesting. You're right, of course. Military training is very rigorous and, more importantly, consistent. Police training is a wild hodgepodge and also sometimes basically non-existent.
The other thing I have seen talked about in this context, and which I agree with, is that in the military you are trained as part of a larger unit and loyal to an even larger cause/organization.
Police, on the other hand, are given a partner who they might serve with primarily for years almost-exclusivity. They become loyal to a very small group of people over their career and don't have the same esprit de corps as the military.
To some degree I think they both attract dangerous/violent people who are joining for the wrong reasons. (The desire to hold power over others or just flat-out hurt people). But the Military is more likely to drum these people out, especially before the worst happens, where police don't.
Have you noticed how the military - even up to the generals - are generally always publicly respectful to the civilian command whether or not they agree with them?
As a 23 year veteran, I can tell you that statement is missing a ton of context, and almost certainly is very inaccurate.
Most people in the military rarely if ever touch a firearm for their entire time in the military after they qualify with it in bootcamp - some don't even do that. De-escalation training? That's diametrically opposite of how an infantryman is trained, and totally irrelevant to anyone outside those combat arms fields. Most people in the military would never receive a single moment of training relevant to police work in their entire time in the military.
What you might be seeing is that most veterans tend to be a bit older, a bit more mature, and perhaps tend to view a badge less as a power trip and more of a responsibility due to the experiences they've had. I can't say that for sure, but it makes a bit more sense than saying military are better trained than police, when the vast majority of military members get absolutely no relevant training in anything related to police work.
I've seen cops get downright giddy over having an excuse to gas and beat a protest. One of them had a little smiley face on the end of their baton and was fully kitted in riot gear.
I see a lot of people lately citing the military as some bastion of self control when it comes to ROE too.
What they usually fail to see is that the military on patrol is usually in squads or at least in pairs, not alone like civilian officers. It's much easier to maintain control of a situation when you outnumber potential bad actors. When a normal beat cop is on patrol though they are usually alone (unless in a top 10 major city like NYC). That changes the dynamic as officers have to maintain the upper hand as if they get overpowered the suspect now has access to multiple firearms both on the officer and in a patrol vehicle.
That's also a fair point in a slightly different manner as well -- Soldiers on patrol are heavily supervised. They have an officer and usually a relatively senior NCO who directs the majority of their actions.
While training is important, the deeper problem is that of incentives. Our usual catchall way of discouraging uncivilized behavior is with the justice system - follow these laws or else. But when a perp can put on a uniform, commit violent crimes with impunity, and then not even be charged, the justice system has been coopted into something else.
(Or coming at it from the other direction, when a person can be destroyed by that "justice system" for simply smoking a plant. The war on drug users is also a large part of how the rule of law has been undermined)
This is even more pronounced among so-called fragile communities, where 95% of black residents want to retain police presence, and in the Chicago area, 68% want increased police presence.
This is why the defund the police people really need a better slogan. You can argue that the police should work differently than they do, but it's just obviously stupid to not have police.
> This is why the defund the police people really need a better slogan.
The defund and/or dismantle groups have acheived sufficient support to drive policy in a number of cities. What they need is concrete results to point to. While defund might also benefit from a better slogan, truly novel complex positions just aren't ever going to be effectively communicated by any simple slogan, especially when they have opponents that so understand what it means, don't want it, and are dedicated to fogging the issue to avoid direct engagement. But when you've got concrete examples to point to, it's a lot harder to fog the issue.
"Defund the police" refers to trimming bloated budgets and fully funding other programs that reduce crime such as funding inner city schools, child care for poor parents, etc.
Anecdotally from seeing discussions online and interviews on the news (which to be fair has some sample bias that will emphasize more extreme beliefs), a non negligible number of people who say "Defund the police" believe that police should be abolished.
There's a case to be made that while a city needs police it maybe doesn't need _these_ police. At some point an organization is so corrupt that it cannot be reformed. I have no problem with plans to reshape law enforcement through complete dissolution of current police departments.
Let's flip the framing: if the republicans said they have a plan to "defund social security and medicare", what do you think they are trying to do? Would your immediate reaction be positive or negative? Would "shifting budget to other programs" come to your mind?
I fail to see how this framing is useful to this discussion: Republicans enact austerity measures constantly, so I wouldn't think they would be shifting the money around anyways.
The "Defund the Police" line is coming from the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which believe in funding the social programs.
Do you find that you frequently need to explain "defund the police" to people? Don't you think that's a problem, given that a slogan is supposed to convey a clear message that is easy for everyone to understand what you're about?
It's a conversation starter. It's definitely sparked a lot of meaningful dialogues about the state of policing in the US and how to make it better for all involved.
I believe it's a conversation ender rather than starter. When people are throwing around a abolishing the police and using violent riots to push it that ends conversation rather than starts it.
It hasn't seemed to stop you from reading and even engaging with this conversation. I would think it's doing it's job as a slogan just fine. Of course you shouldn't forget the context of these "violent" riots were brought out of police violence, an on-going conversation in large part still because of the actions taken by protestors.
Hey this is me engaging with you saying everyone who holds that opinion is wrong and I'd vote the other way because won't be held hostage at the whim of mobs based on the color of people's skin.
That's not me having a conversation. That's me telling you this is actively harmful for whatever it is you're trying to talk about, because there is nothing to talk about anymore.
By allowing these riots to continue the local and state governments have abandoned the rule of law and have thus made the law unimportant.
Similarly those pushing political agendas through violent riots are terrorists and those who support them are enabling terrorism.
This isn't me having a conversation about your issue this is me telling you that your issue doesn't matter because resorting to violence and demanding those who are supposed to abate violence be abolished You've ended any converation possible.
Whatever you think it's doing it's not communicating anything except "accede or we will riot" and my response to that is violence begets violence be prepared to have things escalate instead of causing legitimate conversations.
It's a conversation like being held up is a conversation.
Lot to unpack in this response for sure. If you _personally_ feel you're being held up by this "mob based on the color of people's skin" I'm sorry you feel that way, but it shows a severe lack of of understanding when it comes to policing and how that affects communities of color.
If the police followed the "Rule of Law" there wouldn't be a disproportionate amount of Black men who face violence from the police. Should "bad cops" be held accountable? Or is everything fair game when "enforcing the law"?
Similarly, "accede or we will riot" is precisely the logical progression from "we've asked nicely to not kill us". Do you expect Americans to simply watch their family, friends and neighbors being extra-judicially killed?
It's this inability to empathize with a population, and an uncritical view of those who enforce the law that will lead to non-action, leading to more riots.
>If the police followed the "Rule of Law" there wouldn't be a disproportionate amount of Black men who face violence from the police. Should "bad cops" be held accountable? Or is everything fair game when "enforcing the law"?
For sure. but not with violent riots.
>Similarly, "accede or we will riot" is precisely the logical progression from "we've asked nicely to not kill us".
No, its terrorism. I have no problem with protests, but violent riots to push police reform are political violence, something I think leads to only more violence.
>Do you expect Americans to simply watch their family, friends and neighbors being extra-judicially killed?
No. But I expect people who perpetuate violence for political aims to keep perpetuating violence for political aims. I don't think its acceptable unless they're ready to receive political violence in kind.
>It's this inability to empathize with a population,
No. I empathize, but my empathy sits behind the knowledge that the rule of law and state monopoly of force must be maintained or all will devolve into tribal war.
>and an uncritical view of those who enforce the law that will lead to non-action, leading to more riots.
Choosing to commit political violence is a choice the rioters make. If the options are abolish the police or get riots, my reaction is "call in the national guard".
There are plenty of people to empathize with, and I don't think political violence is worth any empathy. Justifying political violence is a precursor to real civil war.
"No. I empathize, but my empathy sits behind the knowledge that the rule of law and state monopoly of force must be maintained or all will devolve into tribal war."
Some political violence is okay if the state is involved? Even if that violence is oppressive?
Politically motivated violence on behalf of the police is why we're in this situation to begin with. Any you're of the opinion that any retaliation to this violence to reform a broken system of state violence is somehow out of turn?
Now all violence is political violence because politically we don't want mobs of violent rioters looting and burning things down, so stopping them is political.
No thanks, I don't believe you to be anywhere near correct. You're an advocate for tribal warfare and that is where your policies will lead. Disaster.
Why does the US incarcerate individuals at world records? Tax Payers spend millions housing / feeding / providing healthcare to 1.4 million incarcerated people. Does the US simply have more criminals? or are we wasting money providing a ban-aid fix to crime which most first world countries have figured out.
It's much more expensive to over-police a broken social system than it is to foster the conditions which produce less crime overall.
It’s probably a mistake to even try to comment here, it feels like wading into a battlefield where words don’t even mean what they say.
This survey tells us what I thought we already knew for decades now. Black Americans, particular those living in high poverty and high crime areas, overwhelmingly support increased police funding and increased police presence in their communities.
While some protestors who are carrying signs like “Defund the police” may not take the slogan at face value, the ones spray painting “Fuck 12” or “ACAB” across their local courthouse certainly do, and they do not speak for the people responding to this Gallup poll.
The literal attacks on police (and police infrastructure) appear to be an intentional destabilization effort in order to neuter policing capacity within a community, resulting in increased violent crime (i.e. the “Fergusson effect”). While I think there are many well-meaning and good intentioned peaceful protestors that initially joined with “BLM”, the “Defund the police” movement has been hijacked by radical anarchists who professionally organize riots (there’s another term for this I won’t use) and absolutely believe police should be abolished.
National public perception of BLM which initially spiked positively after Floyd has been decreasing and overall become much more polarized. [1]
I'm trying to search for professional riot organizers but all I can find is articles debunking the idea that this position exists [1] [2] [3]. Would you mind citing where you heard this?
(also, note that "professionally organize riots" might as well mean that they are good at organizing them, or that they helped organize multiple riots)
That's a pretty weak set of evidence you have there for a claim as big as 'Snopes is ONE OF THE LEAST credible sources that you can find', emphasis mine.
I am not aware of any other site that is both excluded by the internet archive and has been found in the past to engage in dishonest attempts of covering up its mistakes. I would argue that both of them combined is quite a strong of an evidence for my claim.
Yes, fact-checking is hard. You can say things that are literally true but clearly imply false conclusions, or vice versa. And Snopes isn't perfect. I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to be getting here.
>ethicsalarms.com
This is a batshit right-wing conspiracy theory site. Anyone who cites it as an argument should immediately lose all semblance of credibility. Here are some direct quotes from that site that I found within the first 60 seconds of clicking around:
>>>CNN is obviously approaching the election as a partisan mission, and has signaled that fair coverage is not in the cards. The goal is to put Democrats in control of the government.
>>>Pelosi’s Democrats have orchestrated one attempted coup after another
>>>There have been 19 Plans to abuse various processes, laws and theories, all put forward and promoted by members of the Democratic Party/”resistance”/mainstream news media alliance since President Trump’s election in November of 2016... The desired effect of this barrage, apart from serving the goal of removing an elected President without the bother (and risk) of an election, has been to make it impossible for the President to govern, and to destroy his support among the public.
Yep. Fair and balanced, and definitely not unhinged. Moving on:
>Snopes and BBC articles about a commentator named Robert Lee
As Snopes says:
>There is no dispute that Robert Lee was moved off covering a University of Virginia football game for ESPN because of the coincidence of his name. However, ESPN’s intent appeared to have been a desire to avoid prompting public ridicule rather than public offense — a move that ended up subjecting the network (for different reasons) to the very mocking they had hoped to head off.
What else am I supposed to be seeing here? A megacorp attempted to sidestep a potentially awkward situation, and ran into the Striesand effect. Both Snopes and the BBC pointed out that it was maybe misguided, and we all had a chuckle at their expense. Do you think that Disney, of all companies, is a leftist organization, and that Snopes is covering for them?
>Google search for "snopes strawman"
The top results for me are, in order:
1. A bunch of Reddit results referring people to Snopes as a source because the thing they're arguing against is a made-up strawman.
>This is a batshit right-wing conspiracy theory site. Here are some direct quotes from that site that I found within the first 60 seconds of clicking around:
>>CNN is obviously approaching the election as a partisan mission, and has signaled that fair coverage is not in the cards. The goal is to put Democrats in control of the government.
In your view is CNN not partisan?
In regards to Robert Lee, like other misleading fact checks, the objection wasn't that he was fired. People were observing that it was misguided. I think we should be able to have this discussion without terms like "batshit right-wing conspiracy theory".
"Correct me if I am wrong, Snopes, you pathetic fools" -EthicsAlarms
Clearly you are citing some high-quality, objective journalism here my friend. Whoever writes for that web site needs medication and therapy. It is legit unhinged.
None of these links are sources. The first two are just editorials, the second one is practically frothing at the mouth.
The Robert Lee ones are pretty interesting, though. I think Snopes did an OK job of covering that particular story, though not ideal in my analysis. They pointed out that Mr. Lee was not actually fired by ESPN (he was not) and that ESPN was trying to avoid potential embarrassment and in the process ended up embarrassing themselves more - which is exactly what happened.
ESPN hired the guy, they clearly weren't offended by his name. They thought they were covering their asses and ended up making asses of themselves. All over an imagined issue that was really a non-issue.
That said, there is more opinion in that Snopes article than I would like. I'm don't think Snopes' best and highest function is to try to explain why ESPN behaved the way they did (unless they have facts to share). That said, their analysis seems sound.
Really, your links are kind of the opposite of sources. All you've proven is that many people do not trust Snopes or any other news source when they don't like what it says. More News at 11 folks.
p.s. - it's garbage in, garbage out. Your brain deserves better input than that.
By "professional organization of riots" I am referring to well organized networks to collect donations, move funds to local chapters, procure supplies (like food, water, body armor, fireworks), deploy forces on the ground against chosen targets, and even to manage the social media marketing surrounding these events.
If protestors aren't organized it's "chaos in the streets". If protestors are organized they're paid professionals. What would be a good middle ground to get your approval?
The media is trying to portray it as a stand-off between Black and White, but I think it's more of a class thing: people that think their position in the society is fair vs. those who are unhappy with it.
I would say, there are 4 groups involved:
1. Hard-working Blacks. Against gangs. Against violence. Pro police. Pro civilization. Don't really hate Whites.
2. Short-sighted Blacks. Pro gangs. Against education. Don't have a high-paying job. Plenty of free time. Often substance abuse. Unhappy with their lives. Feel unfairly disadvantaged over Whites.
3. Hard-working Whites. Pretty much, the same as hard-working Blacks. Reasonable people are reasonable regardless of their race.
4. Short-sighted Whites. Unhappy with their lives. Didn't put much effort in education, mastering hard skills, etc. Do have a better starting point than the short-sighted Blacks due to their parents' efforts. Feel unfairly advantaged over group #2 and jealous towards group #3.
The thing is, groups #1 and #3 are busy with their work, while groups #2 and #4 are extremely vocal. So the click-driven media makes it look like there's a problem between the Black and Whites. While, in reality, groups #1 and #3 (a.k.a. silent majority) are happily working together, while groups #2 and #4 are stirring up the pot.
All of these feel grossly oversimplified, but #2 and 4 especially. Many of the people protesting that are black, for example, may be unhappy with their lives and don't have high paying jobs, placing the blame on lack of opportunities in their area or the cost of education or whatever, but are far from being 'against education' and 'pro gangs'. To say that people who are vocal about current issues are not 'hard-working', are 'pro gang', 'against education', and not 'pro civilization' is borderline offensive.
I remember the rioters burning down the police precinct building just a couple miles away from here in Minneapolis. So I think it’s fair to say there have been attacks on police.
> At least 13 officers were inside the building at the time, Meuser said, and some wrote what they thought were final texts to family members and loved ones fearing they would be killed.
In Seattle recently they tried to use cement to seal the fire exits before burning the police station in order to kill the police inside. I would say that counts as an attack on the police.
Parent is strictly incorrect and is being taken in by very poor and dishonest sources of information. Your comment is purely speculation, please don't muddy the waters.
> I remember the rioters burning down the police precinct building just a couple miles away from here in Minneapolis. So I think it’s fair to say there have been attacks on police.
Out of interest, if there was an intentional fire in a school, would consider this act to be an "attack on elementary school children"? Or would you consider there to be a distinction between setting a fire in a building and harm to actual human beings?
Agreed 100%. There is a large swath of american politics right now that is putting a clamp on free speech and you can see people reacting to it... even in here.
The goal of the defund movements is to balkanize police duties so that the people tasked with these duties have appropriate training, weaponry (if any), etc, to place more money into community development and fighting poverty, and to increase civilian oversight, since there have been decades and decades of attempts to reform the police and it does not work.
Without trying to pick sides, the argument would be that these redistributive programs will not enhance public safety but instead will make things worse. For those who can afford it, the safety "gap" will be addressed by private security forces, gated communities, or simply re-locating (and taking their tax dollars with them).
And there's an opposite argument to that, that the police would be able to properly allocate the appropriate officers to where they're needed.
Right now, officers are trained and conditioned in a way that keeps their gun at the forefront of responses. Especially in Minneapolis, where--as of six years ago--96% of the MPD were not from Minneapolis, but commuted from surrounding suburbs, there's an "us vs them" occupier mentality that results from not being a public servant in your own neighborhood. Many MPD cops openly talk about Minneapolis being akin to entering a warzone.
If we had people properly trained in deescalating non-violent or domestic situations, who people would feel confident in calling because they wouldn't be worried about somehow getting shot, the armed officers would be able to focus their efforts on the situations requiring their presence.
It's a complicated situation. But it's been shown time and again that our system isn't necessarily working, and it would be beneficial to look at other approaches and countries for guidance.
It's crazy to me that there's no actual police education in the US, but on the other hand, the police where I'm from, where a 3 year degree from a police school is required, the police are constantly understaffed, and especially the districts suffer. Especially in the US where education isn't free, I can't see that approach be anything other than a disaster.
"Defund the police" doesn't mean "tax break for citizens". It means reallocating those funds, which emphasizes training.
There's very little oversight of how the police spend their money, which leads to instances like Snoqualmie purchasing a mine-resistant armored vehicle instead of investing in training.
As a way of communicating "spend more money training police", "defund the police" utterly fails. And the really extreme advocates really do mean "defund the police" as in no policing or police force at all.
Stop playing word games. I'll continue to advocate for specific police reforms that are plainly described and that I have some hope of understanding what is being proposed.
I won't advocate via the mantra of "defund the police" because, as I pointed out, no one agrees on what that means. This distortion of language makes it very difficult to have rational discussion. Witness all the problems caused by not understanding that "protesting" and "rioting" are actually different activities and that "mostly peaceful" is not a valid synonym for "frequently violent".
The vocabulary of critical social justice theory is another minefield of words used in novel ways. Lots of people don't understand this (including myself until I started researching this recently) so you get very divisive interactions going on because people are talking past each other.
> Without trying to pick sides, the argument would be that these redistributive programs will not enhance public safety but instead will make things worse.
I see no reason that redistributing their duties related to things like traffic infractions, non-criminal calls, property crime, medical emergencies, etc. would do anything but help public safety, as cops are not particularly good at most of those things. They lack the training and professional culture to handle them appropriately. Rather than give them yet more money to train in such a wide variety of situations, we should have actual professionals that know how to handle, say, mental health crises respond to them, and only involve police as a backup to them at most.
Also, the vast majority of crime is related to poverty. Even gang violence is a product of poverty and the drug war, both of which can be addressed through policy and reallocation of funds.
> For those who can afford it, the safety "gap" will be addressed by private security forces, gated communities, or simply re-locating (and taking their tax dollars with them).
I wouldn't mind this much, as anyone interested in using their capital to do such things are also meddling unhelpfully in local politics.
With reduced policing and increased chaos and rioting it seems logical that those with means will employ private security forces.
It's the same reason guns are selling like crazy, with new gun owners at all-time high.
I fear a situation where because of empathy the state has given up the monopoly on force by essentially allowing violent riots that destroy individuals livelihoods, and those individuals will look for some other way to secure themselves and their property.
> With reduced policing and increased chaos and rioting it seems logical that those with means will employ private security forces.
Why do you believe chaos and rioting will be the outcome of reworking policing? That "chaos" and riots are a direct result of the status quo of violent and often racist policing.
I disagree. The chaos and riots are a direct result of weak leadership. When the mayor and governor practically declare a "purge" this is what you get. This would happen in any place and any time in which the government stands down and tells the civilian population they are on their own. We've been locked down for months and it seems like the only thing that's legal to do is burn down buildings and rob stores.
This will only be ended with overwhelming violence. Either the state needs to step up and accept their role/responsibility as the monopoly holder on violence, or I fear the general population will. And if the average joe does it, it'll be in the form of mass killings at rallies, which no one wants.
There were rioters armed in various ways. A favorite was a long and narrow skateboard, because denying that it is intended as a weapon works pretty well. Business owners, homeowners, and their friends were caught in the middle, and typically armed with rifles similar to the AR-15.
Rioters chased a guy down the street. He fell. The rioters were soon upon him. He shot at one while on the ground, and got hit by a skateboard. He then managed to stand (this I feel is where the biased video editing will start) and fire at the skateboard attacker who was coming back for another attack. That shot, at a range of 1 to 5 feet, turned the attacker's biceps into a mist that is visible in the video. (other footage shows a fist-sized chunk missing) Way off on the right side of the video another armed rioter apparently has second thoughts, stopping his approach and backing off a bit. Yet another rioter doesn't seem to get the message, continues approaching, and is shot. The shooter then carefully walks down the street.
Meanwhile, in a different location but close enough that the shots from one video can be heard in the other, there is another shooting with a similar gun. This time the rioter suffers a head shot or two, then drops down with whole-body spasms that suggest brain stem destruction. I could see a bullet wound on the side of the head, but it looked like a grazing wound. I think there was another that hit the neck or entered a nostril. The nose was bleeding, and the neck was hidden by a scarf.
The shooter was the same in both instances. The extra shots are of unknown origin. The head shot, that I described second, was the first instance.
The rioters were dumb enough to corner a man with a gun. One did the silly "come on, shoot me" thing and got shot in the head. The rioters then chased the shooter a very long ways, until he fell to the ground.
The guy who got shot in the biceps was attempting to use a pistol to execute the guy on the ground. I couldn't make it out, but the biceps loser had a cell phone in his left hand and a pistol in his right hand. He held both hands up as if to surrender, using that to get closer to the guy on the ground. At this point the guy on the ground had killed 2 people, but he held back. The biceps loser suddenly brought his hands down to fire the pistol. It was a clear attempt to execute the guy on the ground, who then shot off the biceps that was on the arm holding the pistol.
The shooter showed lots of restraint. In numerous cases, he pointed his rifle at potential attackers, but he didn't shoot if they backed off. Legally, he's going to be fine, but I wouldn't be surprised if a politically-motivated trial happens.
His score is 4 rioters shot, 3 of whom died. The biceps loser, who tried to perform an execution, will almost certainly live. The arm might be saved, but that is uncertain.
My overall impression is that it looked like a zombie movie. WTF. The rioters just kept coming, seemingly unaware that in real life you can actually get mangled or killed. The rioters are insane. It's interesting that they scream "medic" when injured. They don't scream "police" or "call 911" or "help" or anything normal. It's like they imagine themselves to be soldiers or in a video game.
Incidentally, the shooter has been arrested and reportedly will be charged with 1 count of 1st degree murder (intentional homicide is what it's called in Illinois).
They're literally a response to George Floyd being murdered. The straw that broke the camel's back. Every single protest has chanting of the high-profile cases of black people being murdered by police.
> The chaos and riots are a direct result of weak leadership. When the mayor and governor practically declare a "purge" this is what you get.
I have no idea what this is referring to.
> This would happen in any place and any time in which the government stands down and tells the civilian population they are on their own.
When the government stands down from what? Civilian population on their own for what? I have so many questions.
> We've been locked down for months and it seems like the only thing that's legal to do is burn down buildings and rob stores.
Are you trying to make this about the pandemic?
> This will only be ended with overwhelming violence. Either the state needs to step up and accept their role/responsibility as the monopoly holder on violence, or I fear the general population will. And if the average joe does it, it'll be in the form of mass killings at rallies, which no one wants.
It will be ended when cops stop murdering black people. That seems like a more copacetic solution than escalating violence.
In Portland the major and governor have ordered police to stand down. Rioters even occupied an area for a week or more, you might recall news stories about chaz/chop? When your neighborhood is violently overtaken by an occupying force and the government does nothing, what do you call that? And of course Portland is not the only city to have made the police stand down and refused to call in the national guard after 3 months now of nightly riots, they're just the most egregious.
>Are you trying to make this about the pandemic?
I'm not trying to make this about any one thing, but I think it's foolish to imagine that the pandemic lockdowns have no impact on the proverbial temperature in the room.
> It will be ended when cops stop murdering black people. That seems like a more copacetic solution than escalating violence.
Police violence against black people is a problem in every way except statistically.
> In Portland the major and governor have ordered police to stand down. Rioters even occupied an area for a week or more, you might recall news stories about chaz/chop?
I went there personally. It was a defensive protest area with blockades against cars that had been running into protesters and aggressive cops.
> When your neighborhood is violently overtaken by an occupying force and the government does nothing, what do you call that?
"Violently overtaken". It's just protesters being in an area, most of which was a public park. It wasn't seized using weapons or anything like you might assume based on how you word that claim.
In addition, the denizens of Capitol Hill reported being much happier with CHAZ than the constant nightly indiscriminate and liberal use of teargas that seeped into their apartments and hurt their children and infants. CHAZ put a stop to that by preventing organized police aggression.
> And of course Portland is not the only city to have made the police stand down and refused to call in the national guard after 3 months now of nightly riots, they're just the most egregious.
PPD was extremely aggressive and escalatory. There's a reason they're targeted by calls to stand down or otherwise be massively restricted. They also have a long-standing history of collaborating with white supremacists. Nothing there is okay.
> I'm not trying to make this about any one thing, but I think it's foolish to imagine that the pandemic lockdowns have no impact on the proverbial temperature in the room.
I think it's callous and dismissive to speculate that protests about yet another unarmed black man being murdered by cops is about the pandemic.
> Police violence against black people is a problem in every way except statistically.
>I went there personally. It was a defensive protest area with blockades against cars that had been running into protesters and aggressive cops.
This same group of people was throwing rocks, hitting people with sticks, permanently blinding people with powerful lasers, and other acts of violence. Whether you agree with it or not, they were violent occupiers of several city blocks, not just a park. And they were definitely armed. They even created their own "peacekeeping" force which walked around with AR-15s.
>I think it's callous and dismissive to speculate that protests about yet another unarmed black man being murdered by cops is about the pandemic.
George Floyd died of an overdose of fentanyl. He was complaining about not being able to breathe before he was lying on the ground. While he was still up, he begged the police to lay him down on the ground, which they did. It appears you are the victim of race baiting. It's a shame, because the police involved in this are almost certainly going to be found not guilty, but because this story has been ginned up so much it will result in even more violent riots in the streets.
People who accomplish their political goals through violent means continue to be violent because you're teaching them that its effective. The more you surrender to violent rioters demanding policy change through fire and violence rather than the ballot box, the more you demonstrate that violence is the way to accomplish anything.
The outcome of surrendering to violent mobs is to embolden and empower violent mobs. There will be more and worse.
> People who accomplish their political goals through violent means continue to be violent because you're teaching them that its effective.
This sounds like a description of police departments throughout the United States.
> The more you surrender to violent rioters demanding policy change through fire and violence rather than the ballot box, the more you demonstrate that violence is the way to accomplish anything.
The rioters aren't doing that. The rioters are releasing pent-up frustration and anger at a system that abuses them. They're not sending any message other than their own pain.
The organized protesters are making such demands. They're being met with extreme police violence and aggression.
> The outcome of surrendering to violent mobs is to embolden and empower violent mobs. There will be more and worse.
Please actually attend a protest to see how the power dynamics work.
>This sounds like a description of police departments throughout the United States.
No. Racism is bad but not all police are racist (I would guess most aren't) and the violence is not for political purposes.
>The rioters aren't doing that. The rioters are releasing pent-up frustration and anger at a system that abuses them. They're not sending any message other than their own pain.
Disagree. They're burning down businesses, attacking people, threatening them and intimidating them. You can be in pain without attacking others. Once you attack others you're not communicating pain, you're attacking people, and you can expect to receive it in kind when the people you intimidate and threaten communicate their own pain.
>The organized protesters are making such demands. They're being met with extreme police violence and aggression.
yawn
>Please actually attend a protest to see how the power dynamics work.
I have been to protests, but violent riots are not protests, and rewarding violent rioters and defending them is its own power dynamic. The power dynamic right now is heavily on the side of violent rioters and people pushing political violence, and it will lead to even more tragedy.
> No. Racism is bad but not all police are racist (I would guess most aren't) and the violence is not for political purposes.
The police are reacting to a direct political criticism of their legitimacy by hurting, disabling, nearly killing protesters indiscriminately. Of course it's political. They're fighting for their own budgets that are at risk via the political process.
We could discuss of all the fun ways that the police are racist (it is primarily, but not solely, systemic), but I don't think it was really a point of contention.
> Disagree. They're burning down businesses, attacking people, threatening them and intimidating them.
This doesn't contradict anything I said.
> You can be in pain without attacking others. Once you attack others you're not communicating pain, you're attacking people, and you can expect to receive it in kind when the people you intimidate and threaten communicate their own pain.
I hope you never experience the pain and frustration they did, because that is exactly how this kind of systemic abuse is expressed. I highly doubt you've have to see your friends beaten, arrested, killed, mistreated, talked down to constantly, and then watch executions by cops of people like yourself over and over and over again without anyone caring to do anything about it.
This is essentially a form of tone policing long after the damage and horrors have already happened.
> >The organized protesters are making such demands. They're being met with extreme police violence and aggression.
> yawn
I have to wonder what you find boring about extreme police violence and collective punishment happening right in front of you.
> >Please actually attend a protest to see how the power dynamics work.
> I have been to protests
George Floyd protests where the police form a line to block you, then start moving on you?
> but violent riots are not protests, and rewarding violent rioters and defending them is its own power dynamic.
You haven't been to them, so please stop trying to explain the power dynamic to someone who has.
> The power dynamic right now is heavily on the side of violent rioters and people pushing political violence, and it will lead to even more tragedy.
It absolutely is not. Protesters will be beaten, gassed, maimed, and arrested. Cops will get off scot-free regardless of the extreme violences they commit indiscriminately against protesters.
I'll give you an example: I watched a woman get shot with a grenade in her chest. It stopped her heart. She was rushed to the hospital by medics and that's the only reason she lived. Her crime? Standing in the middle of the street yelling protest slogans 20-30 feet away from the cops.
Tell me, what was the power dynamic there? What consequences will any officers face for nearly murdering that woman?
I was receptive to your argument up until you mentioned the "Ferguson effect".
The people of Ferguson Missouri were exploited by their policemen years before Garner was killed [1]. The Department of Justice found that the city itself had targeted African Americans, fining them at every turn, and imprisoning them when they couldn't pay. I find it hard to believe that these victims wanted to give their “protectors” even more money.
Frankly, pretending the anger isn't real, that it's just a few professional rabble-rousers riling up the woefully ignorant-- is akin to the rhetoric China has weaponized in Hong Kong.
Having a demilitarised civilian police force maintaining order through the consent of the public has been a thing since the 1820s. I’d like to see how Americans would respond to a police force formed with a modern version of the peelian principles as its guiding rule set.
In my opinion a huge amount of damage has been done by the deliberate choice to act aggressively and quell the protests by ever greater force, and that damage has been done to the respect of the legitimacy of the power police forces hold. People aren’t going to cooperate with a force they see as an armed occupier.
I have trouble with this view. I don't see it. I've lived in a few protest capitals, in different countries, and I've even been on organizing teams for protests. Polices are always either just there, or they escort specifically, unless there's that one group of shitheads that wants to cause trouble.
Portland is greatly misportrayed by the media. NY Times and USA Today show people shaking a fence. You jump to AndyNgo and there's video of people sawing through fences with power tools. Political cartoonist like Matt Bors say police are afraid of laser pointers. People are using green lasers that can blind people, and may have blinded at least three federal officers. People I know there say it's pretty normal for a few hours, and then at night, a lot of anarco-anticaps cause a shit ton of damage.
Police are not actively quelling protests. I think most of them are fine with people just protesting. Police do want to stop riots. Looting is destroying cities and should be stopped. CHAZ was a nightmare where the police stopped showing up when businesses and residents repeatably called them[0]. I watched police cruisers on fire in Chicago back in May, and two weekends ago businesses took a second massive hit. The bigger chains are open again, but many small stores may be closed for good.
Not all police officers are good, but it's insane to think the majority of them are psychos. The vast majority of people I know who are police, want to do the right thing.
There was a time when local police would turn fire hoses on peaceful protestors and release dogs. It's what turned the nation towards ML King and the movement he stood for, because America wanted to stand against the violence. When protestors burn down gas stations and car dealerships, the American people will still turn against the violence.
Its true. I've been watching the Live Streams with hours and hours of content rather than just highlights and summaries, and overwhelmingly the police forces have shown incredible restraint.
To everyone who views individual events out of context and condemns an entire system, I say you are actively harming society with your hubris.
How can a police officer, armed to the teeth, beating or shooting at an unarmed person be taken "out of context"? Did their feelings get hurt by the angry protester that they just had to fight back using physical force? What possible context are you talking about?
From what I've seen, Portland protests turns into a riots, with stones and firebombs being hurdled at police. Police then decide to clear the area (clearly within the law), antifa members refuse to move, so are forcefully moved. Usually involves antifa screaming and crying. They are then arrested and released and it starts all over again the next night.
Have you looked at any of the videos of police beating up peaceful protesters from the last few months?
Sure, there are cases where protests escalate into riots, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the many, many, documented cases of peaceful protests where police initiated violence.
How do you reconcile behaviour like this https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/20/christopher... with your view that "Polices are always either just there, or they escort specifically"? In this case they actively escalate violence against a peaceful and unarmed protester (who also happens to be a Navy vet).
How about Buffalo police assaulting this old man, leaving him with blood pouring from his ears? (https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2020/06/05/buffalo-police-push...) Are the riot police "wanting to do the right thing" here? Especially when they walk past him and leave him lying as his blood pools on the sidewalk? Can you honestly watch that video and feel fine with how the police handled that situation?
> but it's insane to think the majority of them are psychos.
This is a strawman. The post you replied to was not claiming anything close to this.
> I think most of them are fine with people just protesting.
This can be true at the same time as the viewpoint you're arguing against being true. A couple bad actors escalating things can result in a peaceful protest turning into an uncontrollable riot. Also, use of force orders vary by county, as do the orders handed down to the cops on the ground. Read https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/de-escalation-keeps-pro... for some evidence-based discussion around varying use-of-force policies and how they affect the outcomes during protests.
> There was a time when local police would turn fire hoses on peaceful protestors and release dogs.
We've made progress since then, but to claim we've fixed the problem is like claiming that racism in the USA ended with the victory of the civil rights movement.
That's patently ridiculous. There's dozens and dozens of incidents like the videos I have listed below of police just brutalizing people, and they've done this to journalists too. Police are angry and want to violently stop protestors.
Pretty sure police officers nightly beating of protestors, pulling off masks and pepper spraying their eyes and assaulting reporters is a very direct attempt at quelling descent.
In my view, these videos are evidence of serious and pervasive cultural problems in police departments around the country, and with how they see their role in society. There’s simply no way to justify the behavior seen in many of these clips.
So the best reply you could come up with was to assert that those videos are lies with weasel words without addressing facts or providing any substance or counterpoint?
Burying your head in the sand does not count as honest discourse or objective reasoning.
Every video in marricks's post started after things started happening; right in the middle. There is not context. We have no idea what happened BEFORE. That's the context that's missing.
Go back and watch the newly released Floyd bodycam videos; the entire 30min and 18min clips. Dude was reaching around in the car, was being a total fucking asshole, swallowed 2mg of fentenyl; the cops were nothing but nice (as they could be) to him. Dude was claiming he couldn't breath and cried out to his mom even before they asked him to get in the car, and long before he was on the ground.
It's a complete and total lie compared to the narrative that's been stuffed down our throat by the 24/7/365 Insta-rage-a-media.
> Every video in marricks's post started after things started happening;
If you really believe that pulling the "they did it first" card helps your case in any way, I'm sorry to break it to you but people only started to protest after the police was caught, again, doing pretty egregious stuff against innocent members of the public, including killing people in broad day light.
And I'm dumbfounded by your attempt at whitewashing police murders by spewing bullshit like "the guy was being a total fucking asshole".
What's wrong with selectively chosen videos of police brutality? They still prove it exists and is unprovoked. (And as mentioned in another post, there's a thread cataloging hundreds of them, so they're not really that selective...)
Andy Ngo is an amazing, on the ground journalist. He has covered an amazing amount of stuff in Seattle and Portland that's not reported on any other major new media outlet. I've watched a lot of his coverage and I use to live in Seattle. Based on what I see and what I hear from others on the ground there, I respect his reporting and think it's valuable.
Is it bias? Of course. Every single news agency has a bias. But I still think Andy is trying to report accurately and do the right thing. I balance what he says against his opposition and I have decided for myself that I think his intent is good.
He mostly just reposts other people’s work with his own very selective spin. You might as well follow the original photo journalists and watch the raw scenes to form your own opinion rather than have Andy Ngo spin it for you. You won’t find videos of pipe bombs exploding and proud boys pointing guns at protestors and police assaulting protestors if all you follow is Andy Ngo because those things don’t fit his agenda.
Andy's reporting in Portland this year was just 100% stealing videos from other reporters and adding his own narrative to them.
Most memorably to me he took a video of a couch burning at the justice center and claimed antifa were burning a homeless persons belongings.
Truth was he wasn't even there and stole the video from another journalist. That journalist post accurately described what happened but he didn't care, he knew the story he wanted to tell.
Andy's tone is extremely neutral but it seems like pretty much everything he says is pulled out of his ass to smear leftists.
The people taking power tools to the fence weren’t provocateurs. There was an effort to remove the fence. It’s reasonable to debate whether that’s legitimate form or protest or warrants the outsized and very violent responses we continue to see, but I think most people discussing Portland have very little grasp of the whole context of the past 90 days of continuous protests unfortunately. I also think people fail to put things in proper perspective when weighing small acts of vandalism against responses.
But I agree with you Andy Ngo is not a legitimate journalist. An example of that was compile by this thread last year.
Oh that Twitter thread seems quite unbiased. Here's the author's tagline "Exclusively practicing non-consensual redistribution of corporate wealth into the hands of working families by exploiting rules the plutocracy wrote for itself."
Antifa supporter doesn't like Andy Ngo. No surprise there.
As I said it’s reasonable to debate. Personally I don’t think the fence should’ve been attacked because it gives people like yourself who are looking for an excuse to ignore the problems raised by these problems everything you need to do so. But that’s the thing about protests, they’re a large diverse group of people who have their own ideas about things. In the end after following 90 days of what’s happened in Portland including the violence against protestors from police that included them nearly killing one protestor for sport and showing up in paramilitary units abducting people. They got exactly what they wanted. Clips that will switch off your brain to the rest of the issues.
Nobody is trying to quell protests. I don’t know how that misconception is still alive. The problem is the rioting. Nobody would be trying to disperse crowds if everyone was peaceful.
> Nobody would be trying to disperse crowds if everyone was peaceful.
That's not really true. There is an area between "lawful protesting" and "rioting" that's usually called civil disobedience. Civil disobedience as usually understood is peaceful, but it's also by design inherently disruptive.
In Austin, TX protestors blocked the main highway through the city. That was obviously incredibly disruptive, but many people believe the city police's forceful response of shooting less-lethal rounds relatively indiscriminately into the crowd was the exact type of response people were protesting against. A large group of trauma doctors in Austin wrote a paper arguing against using these types of rounds for crowd control due to the horrific injuries they treated: https://www.statesman.com/news/20200816/beanbag-rounds-cause...
In my mind civil disobedience, as an ethical concept, is about refusing to comply with one or more laws that you believe to be unjust. Disregarding the Jim Crow laws seems to be the "textbook" example in this regard.
So blocking a road in order to draw attention to some other incident of injustice isn't about how the law about blocking roads is unjust, nor is it even about the some other unjust law. In your example the protest was about the George Floyd killing in which the police officers were rather quickly charged with a crime.
The protesters in your example are indeed "protesting" but I don't think that their tactics are an illustration of civil disobedience, as I understand it.
So if we are to excuse protestors for breaking laws I think there needs to be a different ethical argument that must be made. And that argument has to tackle the problem of which crimes can be excused: disorderly conduct, assault, arson, vandalism, theft/looting, manslaughter? And perhaps it matters how that disobedience is directed? For example, torching the police vehicle of the police force that is implicated in the injustice seems different to me (but still not necessarily excusable) than torching the police vehicle in a city thousands of miles a way from the incident, or than looting your local Best Buy.
For those of you who feel like these types of protests are ethical/warranted/justified, I would ask, what is the limiting principle? What would represent the protesters going "too far"? When would it be appropriate to say enough is enough? When is it no longer protesting and is just criminal behavior?
I would add that another component of civil disobedience is a willingness to accept the consequences, to be arrested without violence or any resistance. I should have included that in my original comment.
> to be arrested without violence or any resistance.
Again, why are people insisting on redefining words because they don't like their meaning? Chaining yourself to a physical structure like a building or tree, and going so far as to make cutting those chains difficult, is one of the prototypical examples of civil disobedience. The whole point is to make it difficult for police to arrest and remove the protestors in those situations.
I would argue that those are examples of non-violent approaches. Another tactic is to "play dead" so that the protesters have to be physically carried away, tedious and time consuming.
But those tactics are very different than what is going on and I think it is quite easy to distinguish between that sort of thing and rioting.
Sorry, I was feeling adversarial last night because of Jacob Blake. Discussion about the right way to protest without the context of the actions precipitating it isn’t getting the job done.
Perhaps I focused too much on one type of civil disobedience. The examples you cite are useful in illustrating that the disobedience has to be peaceful. Or perhaps it might be better to say that the moral authority or message of the protest is vastly strengthened by peaceful disobedience. The willingness to be arrested without resisting is also an important component as it communicates a concurrent belief in the rule of law while still protesting.
When the disobedience includes assault, vandalism, arson, looting, and so on, it is no longer a protest, it is a riot and it looses all its moral legitimacy as a protest in my mind.
It is an interesting question. My first thought is that a core element of the Boston Tea Party was that the colonist had no representation, there was no legitimate way for them to participate in their governance and they were protesting specific laws/taxes that were being imposed without their consent.
I don't think that the current situation in the US is analogous. There are lots of ways to affect change without resorting to violence: peaceful protest, drafting new laws, voting for more police funding, voting for different representatives, voting for different executives.
The idea that all those options have been exhausted and the only solution is to physically and economically destroy communities in order to draw attention to the problem is illogical and self-defeating. In an even more bizarre twist, the story that seems to be emerging is that the rioter's demands are to make changes that aren't wanted by the people in the communities that the rioters purport to represent (see recent polls that minority communities want more police, not less).
> There is no oracle that says civil disobedience for cause X is just but cause Y is unjust.
I'm not making any comment about the justness or unjustness of the underlying cause of the protests
> The police cannot simply allow it to occur so they will react with the amount of force needed to end it swiftly.
This statement, however, is simply bullshit, and the US has literally hundreds of years of examples of how civil disobedience can be dealt with reasonably and humanely (of course as well as other examples where it's dealt with viciously). The protest would have eventually died down (an effective strategy to dealing with these kinds of protests is just to cordon them off and wait it out, they'll eventually need food and water), protestors would have been arrested and cited with an appropriate misdemeanor.
Your proposed strategy opens civil society up to endless denial of service attacks. Normal life grinds to a halt every time someone feels like they need to "protest". Would you be OK with a single person just sitting in the middle of a highway holding a protest sign? 5 people? 10? 50? Is the nature of the protest important?
The classical notion of civil disobedience is that you have to be willing to accept the consequences, so you can't resist arrest and you have to accept being jailed or paying the fine etc. What I don't see in the recent "protests" is any willingness to be arrested. In fact I see lots of people resisting arrest.
Folks, this concept isn't that difficult, and there seem to be a bunch of comments arguing about what civil disobedience really is, as if we didn't have hundreds of years of examples and jurisprudence to go by.
I'm in no way disagreeing that there were clear, obvious examples of violence and property destruction, just as clearly as there were many examples of peaceful protests. But these protests are like Rorschach tests: everyone sees in them what their mind tells them to see. I can say for a fact that in the particular instance I cited in Austin there were clear examples of police firing into the crowd in an indiscriminate fashion. Not even the police chief is really trying to defend it anymore.
My understanding is that in many historical examples of civil disobedience there was often an prior understanding between the protesters and the police as to what was going to happen. In a sense, it was scripted.
I'm not going to try to justify the police actions in Austin -- I don't know the details, but it seems to me that taking a large number of people into custody with no "script" and with the people not ready to be detained is probably quite hazardous, stressful, and ripe for something to go very wrong.
> Folks, this concept isn't that difficult, and there seem to be a bunch of comments arguing about what civil disobedience really is, as if we didn't have hundreds of years of examples and jurisprudence to go by.
I think what I've learned it discussing this is that in fact most people don't understand the philosophy of civil disobedience. Most people seem use the term to mean "breaking things, intimidating people, and baiting the police to draw attention to a just cause". And there is a unexplained rule that determines when the cause is "just" enough to excuse committing the crime that draws the attention.
Civil disobedience only works when there's civil reciprocity in a reasonable time frame. It's being abandoned as a tactic because it has been yielding diminishing returns, and radical folk are conscious that conditions keep worsening, in terms of both direct violence and funding of a repressive status quo.
Just as every single human being desires peace in the same way they desire happiness. The love of peace, therefore, is not a virtue. When those who are leading their nations sing the praise of peace they are sincere. They seek war to achieve their peace. Even violent criminals demand peace, if only for themselves. They do not love war; they aspire to an unjust peace.
That is at least an honest statement that what is going on isn't "civil disobedience". Yet there are people who are insisting that the riotous activities can be accurately given that label.
Just as there are lots of people that insist on conflating all protests with riots and cheer when the police gas the former only to act surprised when that leads to the latter.
I realize that we all struggle to overcome confirmation bias, but I really am not seeing the police preemptively gassing people prior to the riotous or threatening behavior. I don't doubt that there might be some examples of this but it is overwhelming outnumbered by people rioting but claiming that they are "peacefully assembling". What I really can't figure out is how many of these people are honest in thinking that the riotous behavior is legitimate (and useful) protest, how many of them are just excited to participate in a very realistic LARP game, and how many are attempting insurrection/rebellion.
Go back and look at the George Floyd protests in Minneapolis around May 30 - people were protesting peacefully the day after the incident (the most disruptive thing I saw was blocking intersections and some graffiti), but cops broke out the tear gas. That heavy-handed behavior in my view led directly to the full on riot the following day. (There's also an allegation that a right wing provocateur got things going by smashing the windows of an Autozone store, but I'm not sure how much of a causal role that played, and think the riot would probably have happened anyway).
Certainly, this is not always the case as local and temporal contexts vary widely. Some riots are spontaneous, some are planned to target state property or force its defense, some are engineered to exploit chaos for profit. You might find it informative to drop in on one if it is occurring in your area; counterintuitively it's not particularly dangerous to attend as a neutral person, though you should be prepared for the possibility of being tear gassed.
Honestly, this is kind of like putting your hand inside the mouth of a crocodile and then complaining that you have been bitten. Or if you start insulting/harassing and physically blocking someone and then start complaining that you were punched as a result.
I would consider civil disobedience something more like as a policeman to refuse to disrupt a peaceful protest, or illegally publishing data (consider Aaron Swartz, Alexandra Elbakyan, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning), or someone like Oskar Schindler.
A crocodile is a vicious wild animal. And in your analogy... the police are the crocodiles?
Sorry for being facetious, but the whole point is that people expect police to have some self-control (unlike an animal) and behave better in these situations. If you're a cashier, and a customer is yelling at you, berating you, taunting you, etc. you're expected to try to remain calm and attempt to de-escalate the situation - certainly you're not supposed to attack the person. If anything, police should be held to an even higher standard than this.
I am not implying that. For example a worker in a gun manufactory can be civilly disobedient too by not showing up, slacking off, or intentionally making arms of subpar quality.
Edit: I am talking about wartime labor mobilization. In addition the government owns gun manufactories too.
> to make themselves heard in a way that cannot be ignored.
You are stepping away from just civil disobedience then. Riots, sieges, or a full scale revolution fit that description better.
> For example a worker in a gun manufactory can be civilly disobedient too by not showing up, slacking off, or intentionally making arms of subpar quality.
You can't just redefine words to suit your fancy because you don't like what the word actually means. That example you give is literally 100% not what civil disobedience means. Civil disobedience by definition means defying government, not your employer.
I feel like you're being intentionally obtuse. Civil disobedience is protest against a government, and is usually assumed to be non-violent. Look at Wikipedia, pick any result out of Google. Blocking a highway is classic civil disobedience, in line with making a human chain and blocking access to government buildings.
Equating these acts with "siege" screams bad faith to me, I feel like every example you've given is intentionally misleading or missing the point.
If I blocked someone from getting in their driveway and shouted insults at them, I think getting punched would be reasonable. I am not a professional conflict resolver.
Police, on the other hand, are our paid civil servants. It is their job to remove passion and emotion from the interaction and to deescalate potentially dangerous situations. They have a duty to respond sub-proportionately in a way that resolves conflict unless their life is in danger.
Time and time again we see police responding by escalating tension, passion, and violence. This is a spectacular failure of their duty and huge breach of public trust.
Pretty sure police officers nightly beating of protestors, pulling off masks and pepper spraying their eyes and assaulting reporters is a very direct attempt at quelling protestors.
If you followed the nightly protests in Portland OR with any closeness it'd be abundantly clear. Examples just in the past 20 days:
You see enough of these videos and you appreciate the cops and just vindictive and angry at the prospect of losing "power". It doesn't matter what protestors do (and they most they've done to directly threaten officers is thrown water bottles and apples and flares into an empty police building), police will use any reason (or none) to beat protestors.
* As far as I know these videos have resulted in NO reprimands to officers, might as well be standard operating procedure as it continues to happen nightly
> Today I watched a police officer in kenosha wisconsin get knocked unconscious with a brick. The fellow police officers picked him up and dragged him away - while the crowd changed "Fuck the police" and recorded it.
The idea that the worst the protesters have done is throw apples at the police is so crazy I don't even know how you could be that deep in a bubble
I'm directly talking about Portland, where plenty of protestors have been knocked unconscious by police. People get pepper sprayed in the eyes for no reason besides cops are angry.
If you want to conflate places to strengthen a case then you need to dive in to what happened at Kenosha and the lack of police response to that tragedy or any of the others.
If you want to bring up how "protestors were asking for it" by showing up to protests then we got to ask if police are asking for mass nation wide protests by actively resisting change and harming black lives.
Do you even live in Portland? I do and I live a mile away from the Justice Center where protests centered. There was looting the first night but not much at all since. Also, it's been normal COVID times business as usual in the surrounding area during business hours. If you want to make up narratives choose a different city.
Also, if you think police can just beat people senseless because they feel challenged then you're just a short step away from text book fascism.
I believe the commonly used term for this is "largely peaceful".
Sure. They're largely peaceful, except when attacking and almost killing civilians[1]. And it's not even intended as a joke. There's some crazy levels of cognitive dissonance going on.
Yep, one night protestors were just as brutal as police, mistaken identity and tensions high from the other night when a car almost ran protesters over.
You have one example versus dozens of examples of police violence. And it's Andy Ngo, who once again didn't actually take the video footage.
You're the one with cognitive dissonance claiming all nights are violently attacking civilians when you have one example. Somehow though most nights police beat protestors or use tear gas and that’s ok by you?
Are you being willfully dishonest or just naive? Portland is not doing this to protesters. They are rioting. They do this after giving half a dozen warnings. They say that anyone who does not vacate the riot will be subject to crowd control measures and arrest. The rioters remain and continue to be violent and to intentionally shield those committing the most egregious acts. It’s disgusting. The police must respond to the nightly attempts to burn down buildings and attacks on them from projectiles, laser blinding attempts, incendiary devices, and more.
There is no justification for it whatsoever. There is no legitimate cause behind any of it.
Watch the hour long interview with the Portland cop that was going around. It’s good perspective.
Today I watched a police officer in kenosha wisconsin get knocked unconscious with a brick. The fellow police officers picked him up and dragged him away - while the crowd changed "Fuck the police" and recorded it.
In the same vein, I saw store owners starting to shoot at protestors.
I suspect, generally, all parties would rather have police keeping the peace. No one wants a gun battle in the streets as people try to protect their property from looters.
I'm not 100% sure what I'd do in this case, but these are not friendly protests. I'm finding the police remarkably restrained. Even in some of these videos we are seeing, people are taking police officers weapons and / or assaulting a police officer before they open fire.
If you're attacking someone who's armed (police officer or not) you should be prepared to suffer the consequences. (I'm not saying all cases are like this, just mentioning that there's a clear tilt to the coverage here).
This kinda elides the context of it being a response to what looked to many people like a blatant attempted murder.
If you're attacking someone who's armed (police officer or not) you should be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Conversely, if police departments abuse their authority, shouldn't they expect to be punished by the people they serve, and in a similarly peremptory manner?
Nobody gives a shit about peaceful protests. If they did the Iraq war would never have happened and many policy areas would be far different from how they are. Riots should not be a first resort but when other types of civic engagement have failed they're a wholly legitimate tactic to force change.
> Riots should not be a first resort but when other types of civic engagement have failed they're a wholly legitimate tactic to force change.
This statement is devoid of any explanation as to what types of "change" are important enough to override "other types of civic engagement". The legislative process, voting, representative democracy, the "rule of law" are all designed to avoid having people take matters into their own hands. If you are going to argue that all that should be thrown out it has to be more convincing than just some generic statement that "change" is necessary.
You aren't making the case for abandoning the rule of law, you are just asserting that it is the right thing to do in this case.
Your argument seems to be that everything possible has been tried to address police violence and that there is no other solution other than to riot.
I could point to various crime statistics to suggest that the problem is not in fact intractable or "fairly common" (while still being a problem to be addressed) but it really isn't worth it. Even if I shared your apparent assessment of the problem, how does it make sense to physically and economically destroy communities in response? How does it make sense to make it impossible to actually "police" in these communities? How does it make sense to drive away anyone with resources from these communities? Why do you even think the people reacting this way are making a principled statement about police violence and aren't just taking advantage of the situation?
The phrase "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" comes to mind but it is entirely inadequate to describe the disastrous sequence of events that is going on in so many communities right now.
It's simple enough. The police primarily operate to preserve the existing social order which prioritizes property over life. The deliberate infliction of economic pain is being used to coerce change, because other avenues have failed. The authorities there could very easily preempt this by arresting the police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back and charging him with attempted murder. He'll have his day in court and be given ample opportunity to make the argument for why his actions were justified.
In general, rioting is used selectively, targeting official buildings followed by corporate concerns, which extract capital from local communities. Little of the news coverage about Kenosha drew attention to the fact that the largest building burned down Monday night was the WI Dept of Corrections; many commentators prefer to focus your attention on commercial damage in order to push the idea that it's indiscriminate.
> The authorities there could very easily preempt this by arresting the police officer who shot Jacob Blake in the back and charging him with attempted murder.
You think the mob will stop? You are advocating for a justice system driven by threats from the mob that must be responded to in real time. You aren't even attempting to grapple with the particular facts that are in evidence at the moment in this case, never mind what might be discovered by actually asking questions. You aren't describing a justice system based on the rule of law, you are describing mob rule. It won't end well for anybody. Why would anyone in their right mind be a police office given the framework you describe? Why would anyone choose to stay in that type of a jurisdiction? The logical consequences of your framework would be disastrous for the community. The medicine you are prescribing is far, far worse than the disease.
Yes, I'm pretty sure it would, or at least would have had this happened earlier. I'm not advocating for mob rule; I'm saying that riots are a response to the lack of justice that prevails. The police officer should have been arrested immediately on suspicion of attempted murder, much as Derek Chauvin should have been arrested immediately on suspicion of murder for killing George Floyd.
The reality is that police often shoot and kill with a sense of impunity because they enjoy considerable legal immunity, to the point that the identity of a police officer who carries out a shooting is often withheld from the public. I'm saying that any time a police officer shoots, kills, or seriously injures someone, they should be immediately relieved of duty pending a full inquiry, no matter what the circumstances. If there is a colorable suspicion of misbehavior (eg the shooting was not a case of returning fire or action during the commission of a crime), then they should be subject to arrest like any other criminal suspect, while retaining their full panoply of legal rights like presumption of innocence, access to counsel etc.
If a lot of people don't want to be cops who are subject to such restraints, good. I don't want cops who use force casually. What we have now is a system that throws the book at anyone who takes or threatens life (with far higher sentences than most other developed countries despite little evidence of a deterrent effect) while frequently applying light or no penalties, or sometimes no serious investigation, to police officers who commit similar acts. These inequities are compounded by economic and racial disparities in the application of force, legal sanctions and so on.
Unless you've lived in other countries or have significant first- or second-hand experience (including talking to current and former police officers) this might be hard information to accept.
> If a lot of people don't want to be cops who are subject to such restraints, good. I don't want cops who use force casually. What we have now is a system that throws the book at anyone who takes or threatens life (with far higher sentences than most other developed countries despite little evidence of a deterrent effect) while frequently applying light or no penalties, or sometimes no serious investigation, to police officers who commit similar acts.
A core principle of a civil society with the rule of law is the government is granted a monopoly on the use of force to enforce the laws. If someone steals from you, you don't get to hunt them down and kidnap them for 1 year even if the punishment for the crime is 1 year of imprisonment. We explicitly grant police the authority to use force and when they don't use it properly they are subject to exactly the same punishment as you and I. There is no conceptual asymmetry on the use of illegitimate force. Self-defense is another example of this. You can legitimately use force against an attacker in self-defense. If you kill someone in self-defense that isn't murder and isn't an example of a double standard.
> I'm saying that any time a police officer shoots, kills, or seriously injures someone, they should be immediately relieved of duty pending a full inquiry, no matter what the circumstances.
I'm pretty sure this is exactly what happens. The mob isn't waiting more than 30 minutes never mind for a "full inquiry".
> If there is a colorable suspicion of misbehavior (eg the shooting was not a case of returning fire or action during the commission of a crime), then they should be subject to arrest like any other criminal suspect, while retaining their full panoply of legal rights like presumption of innocence, access to counsel etc.
Tell that to the mob and its enablers. We have state governors opining on who was right or wrong just hours after tragic events, without any attempt to understand what really happened. This encourages mobs and rioting.
Same thing happened in Chicago a couple of weeks ago. Some ridiculously vague account on social media regarding an interaction with police and a mob arrives to loot and pillage all night long.
Just a couple of days ago in Mineapolis someone committed suicide while police approached and that triggered more rioting.
We won't survive as a society if every police interaction is interpreted immediately as yet another racial injustice, never mind if every rumor of a police interaction is interpreted that way. Mobs and rioting need to be shutdown hard so we have room for "full inquiry", but there are political leaders who not only won't shut down this activity they are actively encouraging it.
It's not a misconception. As an example, here's a video of riot-gear-clad police marching on a crowd that is peacefully listening to a violin vigil for a man murdered by that same police department: https://twitter.com/jessiedesigngal/status/12771260192462602...
The parent claimed that it was a misconception that police were "quelling" peaceful protest and I shared a video of police disrupting a very obviously peaceful protest - feels relatively straightforward?
Watching the original video, do you legitimately believe that any of the police officers are in danger? Do you believe that a single (unsubstantiated claim, without any evidence of a) thrown object justifies pepper spraying reporters and attacking bystanders with batons?
I originally shared the video claiming that police were interfering with a peaceful protest. You disputed that the police were interfering, saying they were marching past. When I shared further evidence that the police were in fact disrupting the protest and hurting people who were participating, you found reason to instead believe that the protest was not peaceful. Consider your biases.
Here [0] [1] [2] [3] are more examples of and news articles discussing police attacking peaceful protesters.
Yep. In Seattle the vast majority of protests had no issues, because they were peaceful, permitted, and constructive. Literally the only ones that ran into problems with the police were the ones that were breaking the law, violating police orders, committing violence, blocking highways, etc. Those particular situations were often claimed to be “peaceful protests” in social media but were definitely just violent rioting and opportunistic destruction/theft.
I have no idea how people have fallen for the misleading narrative that violence was caused by police. It’s a textbook example of either the naivety of an emotionally charged mob, or incredible social media marketing, or both.
Unfortunately many well-meaning protesters were also swept up in events that were subsumed by antifa/far left groups whose aim was confrontation and violence. For them, the coming backlash against their movement (due to violence) is going to sting.
This is my view as well. I think the American public has unrealistic expectations of what law enforcement can actually do in these situations and further, what federal law enforcement and the national guard is capable of.
It seems like when they sent DHS down to Portland it ended up just exacerbating the situation. No "order" was restored; they just left after a week or so.
And I think more broadly, the "tough on crime" crowd needs to recognize the limits of its own ideology. We have the largest prison system in the world and still do not have law & order on our streets.
A point that often gets lost in the discussion is that the United States, having no gendarmarie [1], has a police force that is less militarized than many European nations. Gendarmaries are literally a branch of the armed forces for the sole purpose of internal policing.
This is true in a de jure sense, but nonsensical in a de facto sense. Simply comparing video footage of riots in france vs the US shows the US police police to be considerably more heavily equipped and aggressively inclined.
What? Have you watched any of the riot video from France?[1] Lots of tear gas and at the end, the police corral the crowd under a bridge and then hit them with batons when they start to leave. Seem at a minimum as rough as US police if not more.
No, it's a different concept. The gendarmarie is specifically internal military police. The Gendarmerie Nationale [1] and Garde Nationale [2] are separate entities. There is some minor overlap, but they have fundamentally different mission statements.
I'm not from US and when I see people claim for abolition of police I can only imagine the world they live in, completely disconnected from reality.
Seriously, abolishing police? Is this some kind of demolition-man-like future?
“Abolish the police” isn't “abolish law enforcement” or even “abolish armed law enforcement”, but “abolish the centralize all-purpose paramilitart law-enforcement agencies that dominate local law enforcement (and, often, more than that, up to and sometimes including local politics) throughout the US. Its a call to radically redesign local government and community services and redesign how law enforcement fits into that, because of the perception not only that the current model is broken, but that decades of pouring money into reforms of police within the current model in response to problems has exacerbate the problems by draining resources from other priorities and forcing the police to expand the scope of their responsibility further out of the scope of their competency. Reform within the existing basic model being viewed as a failure leaves seeking a different model.
Is abolishing the police primarily an actual sub-movement or is it primarily a straw-man?
"De-fund the police," as I've heard explained from people who actually claim to hold the belief, is about taxpayers being very generous when funding police and very stingy when funding education, infrastructure, and social programs. The idea is that the next marginal dollar might not best be spent on the police, even though taxpayers following historical trends would overwhelmingly vote to spend it there.
I'm no social scientist, but I've certainly noticed that in the inner city the police always seem to have freshly painted, frequently-washed, current-year cars, freshly paved and remodeled offices with new signs and landscaping, new uniforms, and so on, while the food bank and the school are decrepit and run-down. The one time I bothered to look up salaries, they were, uhhh, entirely in-line with those outer appearances. On the basis of this purely personal and anecdotal evidence, I would tentatively support such proposals.
Visiting San Francisco and seeing signs in every parking lot warning you to keep your valuables out-of-sight when parked and then learning that apparently they've decided to not punish crimes with damage below $1000, resulting in a predictable crime wave, makes me think that some part of the "de-fund the police" movement actually does want to get rid of the police, though.
I haven't been paying enough attention to figure out how large these relative sub-groups are. Legitimately, I mean -- obviously if you listen to conservative media you'll get the impression that the crazies are the majority, while if you listen to liberal media you'll get the impression that they're a tiny minority -- I just haven't done the homework to make up my mind as to who's right.
Either way, I'll give a close reading to any proposals they manage to get on to the ballot.
If your reality were getting stopped and frisked statistically more because of your color or pulled over more for “looking suspicious”, your viewpoint might change. There have been plenty of cases where Black men were “suspiciously” going into their own homes.
Did you read the article? Or forget the title of this thread?
Anecdotes aside, there doesn't seem to be a significant difference between races on their opinions of police (and whether they want more or less of them in their neighborhoods).
Roughly seven-in-ten white Americans (72%) say police officers treat racial and ethnic groups equally at least some of the time. By way of comparison, half of Hispanics and just 33% of black adults say the same
That doesn't mean 66% of black adults want to defund the police.
I'm sure they, along with many others, want changes in police behavior and improved accountability, but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with funding (or "abolishing" as the root of this thread wondered about).
there doesn't seem to be a significant difference between races on their opinions of police
I'm sure they, along with many others, want changes in police behavior and improved accountability,
Is “improved accountability” a nice way to say “stop shooting and beating unarmed Black people” or “stop pulling over Black people in neighborhoods where they ‘don’t look like they belong’”?
I'm a black American and I've been pulled over twice here in Japan (in the past 5 years) for what I concluded was basically "Driving While Black". I still think "Abolish/defund the police" are terrible slogans and equally terrible policy positions to take. But I continue to live in Japan because I know that the police here aren't inclined to put a bullet in my ass either. I like the Japanese "koban" model for deploying police forces. I also recognize that the overall baseline level of violence, and the proliferation of firearms, presents a vastly different force protection situation for urban American police than it does for their Japanese counterparts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dban
There's a ton of problems I have law enforcement in the US, and the bulk of it boils down to terrible screening of personnel and inappropriate training. Fixing both of those issues will require more funding, not less. Better psychological screening (to eliminate sociopaths), higher pay (to retain quality personnel, and be able to rotate people off the streets more frequently), longer training and with different curriculum (stop learning tactics from Israeli counter-insurgency personnel), etc...
But if that one time they are against you they short you in the back seven times, suffocate you for nine minutes, or arrest you on trumped up charges, it doesn’t really balance out does it?
That’s about like an abused spouse. “He doesn’t always beat me”.
It’s truly amazing. You must be thinking, people can’t possibly be this dumb. Unfortunately it’s true. Marxism is alive and well. Anarchists in west coast cities have been emboldened by the riots. The whole movement is a combination of the painfully naive and criminals.
People keep jumping in to say “defund doesn’t mean defund” or “abolish doesn’t mean abolish”, but they really do mean it literally. They also chant “all cops are bastards”.
Come to America, experience American police when you get a chance. My university's (an also-ran regional institution) police force got a million dollar's worth of military surplus!
You know, you can go and read why they advocate for that position. You can do more than just imagine--more than just imprinting your own biases onto their position. It's just lazy.
Since many people here are not discussing the actual article, let me copy-paste the author's conclusion:
> It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions.
> Most Black Americans want the police to spend at least as much time in their area as they currently do, indicating that they value the need for the service that police provide. However, that exposure comes with more trepidation for Black than White or Hispanic Americans about what they might experience in a police encounter. And those harboring the least confidence that they will be treated well, or who have had negative encounters in the past, are much more likely to want the police presence curtailed.
There's a good case for defunding the police in parts of the country where crime has gone down, but my impression is the worse police-citizen interactions happen in areas where the police are stretched thin (maybe I'm wrong about this), moreover, when you are trying to reform a provider of an essential service, it is typically better to provide a carrot and a stick (see education reform for instance), otherwise not only do you get organized resistance to the reforms but you also reduce morale. Good morale is important, not only for good performance, but for reducing the siege mentality among the police.
Requiring people to make an extra effort to do their job better (even if the level of better is still below average), while cutting their pay (even if their pay probably should not be as high as it is), seems like setting yourself up for failure.
1. Balkanize police into distinct departments with different training and oversight. The police are tasked with far too many jobs at once and don't do a very good job at any of them.
2. Redirect some portion of funding to community development and fighting poverty, i.e. crime prevention. Instead of buying military surplus equipment, create after-school programs, ensure that kids get fed, etc.
If a police department is stretched thin, balkanizing should help with that. Having police doing too many things is a big part of the problem.
The police resist reforms constantly. They protect themselves and lie brazenly with little consequence. While morale is certainly something to consider, it's not the elephant in the room. There must be real consequences, and for that there must be real mechanisms of oversight, firing, and prosecution of cops and those who act in bad faith to protect fellow cops.
The police often pay for shipping, maintenance, and kitting out the equipment. They might receive a free stripped-down M16, but they still use their own budgets to make it tacticool. Just an optic and light run $1k or so.
The call for defunding the police isn't meant to cut their pay, or even to eliminate the police.
It's to stop sending police armed with lethal weaponry to scenarios that don't require it. Homelessness, poverty, drug abuse, and mental disorders are things that cops are not equipped to deal with, yet we send cops to deal with them. Defunding the police means to stop sending cops to those instances and instead funnel the money into social programs to deal with them.
You can want a police presence, you can also want those police to be properly trained in use of force, and you can want a more robust policy for dealing with emergent mental health issues all at the same time. None of those are exclusive of each other.
If I were a police officer or worked in that area of policy, I would be appalled at the degree of correlation that the more frequently people reported seeing the police, the less they wanted to see police around.
This is yet another false and divisive zero sum framing of a complex issue. Everyone deserves quality police service from their municipal and state authorities, police deserve accountability for colleagues that break the law and put good police officers at risk, and everyone deserves policing that is unbiased and increases public safety regardless of race, creed, or any other factor.
I wonder what surprises this will lead to in the upcoming election, where the Democrats have firmly placed themselves on the side of those wanting to defund the police.
I was shocked to see them take that position in any seriousness. I think as more places burn they are starting to see it’s a losing narrative. It you are right, it’s the side they took.
Bad word choice from the get go though. Should have been reform the police, they went to hard and landed on defund.
But you don't have to read far to get to this bit:
> Fewer than one in five Black Americans feel very confident that the police in their area would treat them with courtesy and respect. While similar to the 24% of Asian Americans saying the same, it is markedly lower than the 40% of Hispanic Americans and the 56% of White Americans who feel this way. This could either stem from Black Americans' own negative experiences with the police or from their familiarity with people who have had negative encounters with law enforcement.
Most Americans (52%) according to the poll, are not very confident that police would treat them with courtesy and respect. That's shameful if you ask me. The power that police wield makes it all the more important that they are respectful in their interactions with the public. But we wouldn't accept that kind of performance in any private business front of house role
Considering the nature of many (not most) police interactions (i.e. as a suspect, even just a speeding ticket) what would you consider a reasonable target for "courteous and respectful" interactions? 100%?
I would just find it hard to believe if I've just committed a crime and been arrested by the police that I would be able to describe the interaction as "courteous and respectful", even if the police did everything right.
> Considering the nature of many (not most) police interactions (i.e. as a suspect, even just a speeding ticket) what would you consider a reasonable target for "courteous and respectful" interactions? 100%?
Yes. I'd aim for 100%.
Obviously that's hard to reach, but I think it's certainly possible to do better than 50%. (Though note that it was presumed 50%, not actual measured 50%, so it's more about perception than necessarily about reality).
As you allude to, many interactions with the police are not in the context of getting arrested. You might be the one to call the police if you need them for whatever reason, you might be just an onlooker, you might randomly see police moving around your city for whatever reason.
But even in cases like speeding tickets, there's no reason for the police not to be courteous and respectful, so long as you behave that way.
I'm not disagreeing, it was an honest question and your answer is reasonable.
We should aim for 100%, but it's unlikely we'd ever get there in the real world.
What would make a good metric is having a similar score across all communities as well. Obviously the black and Asian communities have a different perspective and that's something that could be fixed.
This ought not be particularly difficult to understand. Black folks don't want the police to go away, we want the police to generally do the job they are hired for.
But also, we don't have a big problem with the extreme rhetoric against the police because for years and years, in the face of overwhelming evidence of misconduct, there hasn't been meaningful reform. Desperate times, desperate measures.
I don’t understand the point of this survey. They could have also asked whether people think water is wet or not. The debate here is not about police presence, but (1) what type of presence and (2) what the alternatives are. Absence an alternative, of course people will say they want the same police presence. I would be curious to see if the question is framed along the lines of “Do you want 10% of police budget be spend on mental health” or “Do you want 15% of police budget on rehabilitation and integration”, on housing, on schools etc. That will tell is what the trade offs are and what people feel about those trade-offs
Never heard the slogan. The popular slogan is “defund the police” and is already been applied in the sense that some funding is being redirected to other services. SF has a police budget of $750mn and I think they are redirecting $40 mn to unarmed response to non violent mental health issues. Which is great IMO
New York Times: “Yes, we mean literally abolish the police”. That’s the title. Implying there is an associated slogan, and that part of people saying it are serious.
Perhaps the "defund" is so entrenched in the conservative playbook as meaning "eliminate by starving of operating capital" that using "defund" to mean "free up capital to be re-prioritized to other social causes" simply seems nonintuitive or alien to them.
also, the dictionary definition of 'defund' means "to withdraw funding from"
if you wanted to campaign on partially defunding the police, then you'd get a different reaction.
i'm not aware of any previous major political movements which used the slogan 'defund X' to mean 'partially reduce funding to, but continue to support sufficiently to ensure proper functioning of X"
so if (a) defund doesn't imply "partially reduce funding" and (b) the word defund has not historically been used that way and (c) plenty of activists say "literally abolish the police" [1] then if people are failing to interpret it the way you'd like, the burden is on proponents to have a better slogan to communicate their message
> After Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2004, I became president of a failed state. Law enforcement agencies functioned like criminal gangs. Officers demanded bribes, trafficked narcotics and weapons, and worked for political and business elites as a mercenary security force. Georgia was a textbook example of “predatory policing”: Police did not perform the basic responsibilities of ensuring public safety, instead enriching themselves and their patrons by extorting citizens. A 2003 survey found that just 2.3 percent of Georgians held a positive view of police.
> Given that reality, police reform was not only a matter of restructuring institutions or implementing better policies. We had to change the mentality of a broken, cynical, and fearful society.
> Before people could begin to trust the police, we—the new political elites—had to earn their trust. Challenging the status quo was not enough. We had to destroy it and build something better.
> We replaced them with an entirely new force of Patrol Police, who had no background in law enforcement and thus no ties to old, corrupted elites. Recruits had to pass a competitive examination and complete a course in criminal procedure code. They were trained in persuasion, negotiation, and mediation skills to minimize the use of force.
> In 2005 Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili fired "the entire traffic police force" of the Georgian National Police due to corruption, numbering around 30,000 police officers. ... Throughout the reformation, policemen were presented with new Volkswagen cars and navy blue uniforms, with "Police" written on the back.
I believe what one want is not no police, but rather a non-racist, fair, police. Maybe I missed something, but imho the protests are not for the removal of police, but rather for a police you can trust and rely on, regardless of your look.
Of course they do. But they want police, people that are professional and courteous and a net positive for the society they operate in. Not the power tripping racist scum that seems to make up a good portion of the police in the USA (and; unfortunately; elsewhere as well).
Police is a good thing when implemented properly, and a dangerous component that can easily get out of control when allowed to.
Wanting police presence != wanting the police to shoot them in the back or choke them, literally, to death. The poll also states:
Fewer than one in five Black Americans feel very confident that the police in their area would treat them with courtesy and respect. While similar to the 24% of Asian Americans saying the same, it is markedly lower than the 40% of Hispanic Americans and the 56% of White Americans who feel this way. This could either stem from Black Americans' own negative experiences with the police or from their familiarity with people who have had negative encounters with law enforcement.
Black americans deserve to enjoy the confidence that 56% of white americans do in terms of being treated with courtesy and respect.
This seems like a massive vote of no confidence in policing. A massive 19% of black Americans would like to see less police. i.e. just take their chances. Imagine this in the context of other essential services i.e. 19% of people wanted less hospitals or ambulances.
"A massive 19% of black Americans would like to see less police. i.e. just take their chances."
"A massive 19% of overweight Americans would like to eat less food. i.e. just starve."
Suppose there were police hanging out in front of your door all day, and you said you wanted to see less police. Does that mean you want to "just take your chances"?
The question is what the threshold should be before cops feel justified in coming by. Wanting the threshold higher doesn't mean you want it so high they never come.
Defunding the police has become very popular in the circles many HN commenters frequent, so it's interesting to realize just how niche of a position it is.
So I know quite a few people SF who are both anti police and anti second ammendment and it just makes absolutely no sense to me. The craziest thing is half of them seemed to be on the marxist/anti-capitalist spectrum too and I always wondered what their plan would be to enforce those ideals without police or an individaual mandate like the 2'nd ammendment. It boggles the mind.
> I always wondered what their plan would be to enforce those ideals without police
The plan is to replace the police with their own ideology enforcement system, which every totalitarian ideology does by necessity.
You can already see this in action. The defund the police proponents are aggressively pushing for building new de facto police structures that they would control (they won't call them police). The goal, as in all Marxist outcomes (happens every single time without exception), is to replace the existing power structures with new power structures that are aligned to the Marxist outcome they're pursuing and that will help enforce their aims and beliefs. The new police would be involved in things such as cultural & behavioral enforcement for example, they would not be narrowly focused on crime, they would be tasked at assisting the revolution.
They don't want to remove the police per se. They want to replace them. They want their own enforcement systems put into place, that they can control and that are aligned to their ideology. It is a cultural revolution attempt, plain and simple. This is why Antifa is at the center of the riots, they aren't anti-authoritarian, they're merely supposedly anti-Fascism, and they're universally pro-Marxism and openly violent (which tells you everything you need to know); it's nothing more than the escalation of the classic left vs right conflict, with Antifa being a violent militia wing for the extreme left.
This is a horribly spun headline. The question was not whether to "retain presence", it was "Would you rather the police spend more time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently spend in your area?".
And unsurprisingly the answers split with roughly half the respondents saying "same" and the remainder split between "more" and "less". Which is about what you get with any status-quo question like this.
The headline, being phrased along the lines of a protest demand, makes this sound like a majority disagreeing with the premise of the BLM movement, when that's not the question at all.
(It is worth noting, though, that the answers anticorrelate with the amount of actual police work! The more people see the police, the LESS they want them around.)
A few people mentioning that a "respected" polling company such as Gallup has methods to correct for potential bias in such polls.
The Gallup Panel is 100,000 members, with weighting being applied "according to gender, age, race, Hispanic ethnicity, education and region".
One of those weights is nullified in this headline, and it's also notable that there is no mention of any direct weighting for economic factors.
Education and region could be considered proxies here, but given the sample and the already reduced weighting, this seems like a result on very weak footing.
I read several years ago that policing unions were initially reluctant to wear body cameras but are now very much in favour as they usually provide evidence that supports the police officer's statement of events.
Upper middle class morons who’ve never faced hardships or seen true evil, just lived in their bubble want to feel important and hyper tribalism reinforced via social media anger bubbles makes it a waste of time to have any nuance or discussions. These mobs are ruining primarily low income and minority lives while blue check marks rile them up and media gaslights and fans the flames. Every single city which has had these riots has seen a dramatic upshot in violent crime and economy ravaged. None have recovered since Ferguson
Well yes. But it goes both ways. I would argue that the Right doesn't have the ability to have a nuance discussion around this topic either. They read the headline "defund the police" and assume that means less police to deal with violent crimes. "defund the police" means to reallocate resources from police to people better capable of resolving low impact community issues. And let the police deal with violent crimes. If done properly you might see more police resources available to keep the community safe from violent crime.
If the staff in your local monopoly grocery store is underperforming, do you defund the store? How about your engineering company? In each case, the solution is to replace/remove under-performers while increasing funding, rather than to defund.
This is what Camden did when they "defunded": dissolve the city police, bringing the city under county sheriff jurisdiction, then pay for new staffing at the county level. They may have been able to save some money because they broke the police union, but in the long term funding increased.
But the grocery store doesn't do surgeries or tennis lessons. If the grocery store was responsible for surgeries and doing a bad job, i absolutely would defund them and give the money to surgeons instead. Surgeons are trained at doing surgery. See what i did there? Same applies to police dealing with mental ill people. Mental health professionals should be involved instead.
This sounds like an absurd analogy but only because America doesn't know how to operate community services in any other way than with a heavy police force. It's a failure of imagination and / or unwilling to look at the rest of the world for successful examples of alternative methods.
Agreed riots against individualsand businesses and people in communities is extremely counterproductive and is mostly a result of directionless and angry people acting like idiots.
Instead, there should be organization and all violence should be directed to the state sponsored goon squads that can break into people's home and murder them with little to no consequence.
Of course, this has happened before and ended with the comical exposure of the right wing clowns that still serve as idols of right wingers today.
A number that have been caught actually rioting are white supremacists seeking to provoke a race war, and at least some caught encouraging it online (haven't seen any caught actually rioting)have been specifically police officers that are also white supremacists seeking to provoke a race war.
I'd like to see some sources for this claim. It's not impossible, and it would even make some sense, but... evidence?
[Edit: Even harder: There's a difference between "it happened, but rarely" and "it's responsible for the majority of the cases". If it happens, how often does it happen?]
just look at any photos of the protests and count the white to black ratio
if those are all far righters white rioters, this is even more confusing!!!
plot twist, they are actually anti fa claiming to be alt right and start a race war so there is more police brutality and there is more evidence to call for defunding police !$$!
1. You are falsely drawing an equivalence between protesters and rioters; they aren't identical groups.
2. I never said all the rioters were white supremacist provocateurs, just that a number of the roots that have been arrested, and some of the online encouragers, have turned out to be (and, in the latter case, specifically also law enforcement officers.)
so you are claiming majority of the rioting is by alt right and law enforcement? i am very interested to see you substantiate that claim
i attended one blm march in my town and it was mostly (almost entirely) white, and the most active participants seemed to be mostly white non local college kids, who gave no indication of being alt right
the organizers were also predominantly white, some seemed very experienced with this sort of thing (and pretty elderly)
i cannot help but draw comparisons with ellison's book
it also seemed to be mostly organized as a photo op, and had us spend most of our time marching around an abandoned high school, with perhaps a few minutes along a main road which is when some participants spent their time taking pics and filming
i personally was highly disappointed with the march, and do not see how it can bring about greatly needed local change in the most racist county in my state
I wonder how many people here have personally been wrongfully shot at by the police versus just watching it on the media? I for one have been shot at several times after being mistaken for carrying a gun when it was really just groceries.
Sure, no one has suggested police departments as currently constituted should both exist and withdraw from Black neighborhoods, except for police unions applying terrorist negotiating tactics.
More relevant questions
(With regard to “defund the police”): should significant funding and responsibility be redirected from the police to preventive and specialized responsive social services?
(With regard to “dismantle/abolish the police”:) Should centralized all-purpose paramilitary local law enforcement agencies be disbanded, with law enforcement responsibilities distributed within specialized agencies whose agents (both armed law enforcement and other) would be domain specialists as well (for law enforcement officers) trained in law enforcement (which also involves transferring non-law enforcement responsibilities and funding more to non-law-enforcememt units.)
I walk with the dog and sometimes the kids every day, so I see police patrolling around. Had an interesting conversation the other day with the police officer:
- So officer, how have things changed since covid?
- Sir, you won't believe the stuff I get called for. Getting teenagers off their cell phones, wife angry that husband didn't do his share of the chores
- What about what people associate with "crime"?
- Down.
As crime declines overall (it has been for many years now), I believe we really need to rethink the jobs we ask police officers to do. They are hammers and they go into situations that don't require hammering and bad things happen.
Ya, that's what anyone intelligent says any time "defund the police" is mentioned (and I completely agree with it, btw). But they should probably choose another slogan if that's what they actually mean. "Defund" in the context of government policy generally means to eliminate via the funding mechanism.
The reality is defunding does literally mean completely eliminate to many of the groups calling for defunding. The partial reduction in funding is just a stepping stone. See https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol..., an opinion piece titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police”
Note that “defund” and “dismantle/abolish” are separate positions (though many people who hold one as their preferred also view the other as superior to the stays quo, and worse yet while there is a strong tendency in what the language means, the use of each isn't perfectly consistent.)
Which probably shouldn't be surprising since there isn't a single top-down organization behind any of them.
I don't disagree, but then I'm in the “abolish" camp anyway; the misunderstanding there is, I think, not something that can be cured with a different slogan, because “Redesign community services and local government, with a particular focus on deemphasizing force-based law enforcement and decentralizing it within domain specialized agencies, usually with broader responsibility for their focal domain than just law enforcement.” Doesn’t reduce well to bumper sticker size. It's just something you have to explain a lot until people understand it.
"Reform the police" is a perfectly fine slogan that captures what they claim to want. Its only flaw is that it isn't controversial, and so won't get the same level of attention. This slogan, like all too many things of late, is a perfect example of Scott Alexander's "toxoplasma" theory:
> "Reform the police" is a perfectly fine slogan that captures what they claim to want. I
It is not, because the “police reform” movement of the last several decades that drives more funding for retraining and additional resources to police in the name of correcting the exact same problems “defund the police” sellar to address is exactly what they are diametrically opposed to and a reason against, and blame for exacerbating the problem by further draining resources from other local services and leading to police taking even more responsibilities outside of their core competencies.
I mean, sure, in a context-free sense, yes, what they seek is, or includes, reform of policing, but that slogan has existing loading in the current context and it's something the group in question defines themself on opposition to, so no, it's not a perfectly fine slogan, any more than “pro-life” would be for a movement for robust publicly funded universal healthcare including comprehensive reproductive health coverage.
Situation: half the country wants to enclose the country in a giant styrofoam bubble to keep people out. The other half wants to import foreigners at gun point.
Conclusion: We have 100% popular support for immigration reform! Why can't those layabouts in government make it happen?
This headline buries the more material difference outlined in the article, which is the major difference between black/Asian Americans and other groups in how likely they feel they are to be treated with respect by the police in any individual encounter.
This poll is either disingenuous or misguided - what percent of black Americans want better social services?
The call the defund the police doesn’t end with taking money from the police, the goal is to be able to provide more specific services using other departments outside of law enforcement.
Because the call to "defund the police" has been referenced implying it meant "get rid of police" and do nothing else? That's the whole pole... it's not implied that there will be other services provided to go along with the reduction in standard policing.
Really? Which of the recent high profile incidents didn't involve someone physically resisting the police and/or acting aggressively to others while repeatedly ignoring the police yelling at them to back off?
For each case you can find (if you can find any at all), there are millions - yes, literally millions - of police interactions that don't end that way.
If you interact with the police peacefully, the odds of you experiencing any violence are virtually zero.
Ryan Whitaker (who was white, incidentally), who opened his front door armed with a gun he was legally and constitutionally permitted to have and to use to protect his home and was kneeling to put his gun down when he was killed?
(And, uh, Jacob Blake?)
I mean, yes, I have been pulled over by the police on 101 and not killed, and I once ran a stop sign in Palo Alto and I wasn't killed either, and I went to pay my ticket at the police station and I still wasn't killed then. But that's true in the other direction - I'm sure I have interacted with millions of people throughout my life, and yet if I killed a single one of them without cause, I would rightly be called a murderer. No one would be saying that the risk of encountering me is virtually zero.
I'm glad you had the good sense not to mention any of the cases over the past few months that have been the main source of riots, but please re-read what I was responding to and what I wrote because it still stands: these cases - though tragic, and worth trying our best to prevent - are so incredibly rare (relative to the number of total interactions with police) that the odds of violence truly are virtually zero.
(FWIW Breonna Taylor wasn't asleep, not that it justifies her death and Jacob Blake was most definitely resisting - even the super shaky cell phone coverage from a bystander makes that obvious)
You were asked to link an example of people not physically resisting. You linked Breonna Taylor, who's death while unfortunate, doesn't quite fit the bill. She had links to 2 known drug sellers, a warrant was being executed, and her boyfriend fired on officers.
I mean, yeah that's fun. "Perhaps someday there won't be any violence." Cops carry guns, it's for a reason.
Cops are people, not some idealized identity of justice. Perhaps it would be prudent to consider the idea that the people with guns who can legally shoot you should be treated with a little more consideration. I can't imagine turning my back on cops and reaching into my vehicle, but maybe that's white privilege.
The government is legally able to take violent action. You don't want it another way. So then really, what's your point besides all cops are bad?
I carry a gun every day too, and there is precisely zero mortal danger to anyone who peacefully interacts with me. It is an entirely reasonable expectation to demand that from government staff.
The police do not have any special legal privileges when it comes to shooting people over any private citizen. To grant them such, de facto, as we have done, is to abandon the rule of law (or the equal application thereof) in society.
I think a higher standard is reasonable and possible. Indeed, almost everyone in society is subject to it. Police, if they are to exist, should be as well.
The law dictates when it's okay to shoot people in self-defense. No person should receive special extra privileges to shoot people with a different standard.
The police do not legally have that right; but in practice they get to murder anyone they want and get away with it.
The rules for the police are very different than the rules for everyone else. That's due to inequality in the application of the law: the rules that apply to you and I do not apply to them.
Perhaps you, as many do, think the police should be in a special class of their own, above the law.
I think the laws should apply equally to all people.
The 2nd Amendment explicitly disagrees with you :)
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Everybody always remembers that last part, but take a look at the very beginning. Three branches—Executive, Legislative, and Judicial—deal in the world of law and are supposed to keep each other in check and balance. Three branches—Militia, Police, and Military—deal in the world of force and are supposed to keep each other in check and balance. Except now in 2020 we're being told nobody in the first group should ever need a tool to defend themselves, and the other two groups resemble each other more and more every day.
> Three branches—Militia, Police, and Military—deal in the world of force and are supposed to keep each other in check
That's not actually the underlying model of the 2nd Amendment.
The underlying model of the second amendment is that professional standing armed forces are a threat to liberty (even when nominally dedicated to external security, because they are inevitably applied internally; permanent paramilitart police were not a thing at the time of the 2nd.) Because of this, it is essentially to have effective citizen militia that can be called up for internal and external security needs, so that governments aren't tempted to create permanent forces for this purposes beyond cadres to support the mobilization of the militia. The 2A isn't about having a balanced triangle (“police” didn't really exist for several decades after the 2A), it's about having one of those three obviate the need for the others.
There is probably a good debate to be had about whether that model was durably workable at the time, whether it is workable in the modern world, and whether it would in particular be reachable from where the US is now. But we've lost that in our 2A debates.
> The police have all the responsibility to de-escalate situations. If they're not doing that then they're the ones in the wrong.
I strongly disagree, and submit that a big part of the problem is this exact mentality.
Police should get gobs of training, they have to take the high road, they have to learn to not let their buttons get pushed, etc., etc. - all of those things are true. But the primary responsibility has always rested and should always rest on the shoulders of individual citizens that the police are interacting with. People need to be accountable for their actions.
I'm very sorry when anyone loses their life due to an altercation with the police, but the elephant in the room is that pretty much all of these are completely and easily preventable if people show even a smidgen of accountability for their actions. The common factors across victims of police shooting is not race, but (a) commission of a crime and (b) resisting arrest. Remove either from the equation and the death rate drops dramatically; remove both and it's virtually zero.
Yes, let's continue to figure out how to improve law enforcement. If we find actual instances of racism, let's work to eradicate them. Whatever problems exist in policing, let's study them and fix them. But let's not pretend for a moment that any real progress will be made while there is a pervasive attitude that crime and/or belligerence towards cops isn't a massive part of the problem.
Why does this study show that so many black people want the same or more police presence? Because the overwhelming majority of them (and everyone else) obey the law and, in the event they do interact with the police, refrain from punching them, fleeing the scene, etc.
> Police should get gobs of training, they have to take the high road, they have to learn to not let their buttons get pushed, etc., etc. - all of those things are true. But the primary responsibility has always rested and should always rest on the shoulders of individual citizens that the police are interacting with. People need to be accountable for their actions.
Maybe if cops can't control their emotions they shouldn't be given a gun and then immune to essentially any misuse of the gun?
> (a) commission of a crime and (b) resisting arrest.
We have a judicial system for a reason. The police isn't the arbiter of justice. Especially when the historical reasons for the formation of police in many countries and the US was to control slaves, former slaves, and economic activists.
> Whatever problems exist in policing, let's study them and fix them.
The studies are all out there. Are you refusing to take a look?
> while there is a pervasive attitude that crime and/or belligerence towards cops isn't a massive part of the problem.
You're trying to shine a piece of turd and say it'll get better. A piece of turd, no matter how shiny, is going to be a piece of turd. Police, the way & the numbers they have today, are not necessary for a functioning society.
meanwhile study:
Results are based on a Gallup Panel web study completed by 36,463 U.S. adults, aged 18 and older, fielded June 23-July 6, 2020. The survey was conducted in English. Individuals without internet access were not covered by this study. The Gallup Panel is a probability-based panel of U.S. adults whom Gallup selects using address-based sampling methods and random-digit-dial phone interviews that cover landlines and cellphones. The sample for this study was weighted to be demographically representative of the U.S. adult population, using the most recent Current Population Survey figures.
So they excluded the lowest income Black Americans.
And the issue here is that the question just asked "should there be less police" - that's not what the police abolition movement is arguing for.
How would've the results been if the question asked:
"Should we reduce police force presence in your neighbourhood by 90% while also ensuring that you will get more grants for education, healthcare, and housing"
Or even:
"Should we abolish policing (while still maintaining a skeleton force to respond to aggressive incidents) in exchange for providing housing for everyone making below a certain amount of money?"
>> (a) commission of a crime and (b) resisting arrest.
> We have a judicial system for a reason.
I don't disagree; I'm actually making a different point, a pragmatic one, that it is really easy to almost entirely eliminate the risk of dying at the hands of the police, and that it is completely within one's own power.
I'm all for doing what we can to do to improve the police to make an already rare problem (relatively speaking) even more rare, but if the objective is to reduce deaths at the hands of the police, that's not where the low hanging fruit is.
it is of course the officer's job to deal with the situation.
--
here is an analogy of a pedestrian crossing. It is the job of the motorist to pay attention, but it helps to train the pedestrian as well.
While the responsibility for the accident is put on the motorist, wont the pedestrian be better off with the training?
The claim is not "Citizens need to take responsibility for de-escalating situations," the claim is "If the citizenry, as a whole, were less deferential to police and more aware of when police were overstepping their authority, police would be less inclined to abuse their authority."
It's not the job of any individual citizen to fix the police, but it sure is the job of the democratic society as a whole to fix it (because if you make it the police's job, they're certainly not going to actually do it).
> there needs to be basic training for citizens as well.
Agreed. Citizens need to understand their Constitutional rights and their role as civil masters, and stop deferring, when setting policy, to totalitarians that are supposed to be their paid agents, but prefer to invert that power structure at the expense of citizen rights.
The state of civics education in America is appalling, as is the state of history education that would demonstrate the cost of the problem.
One of the problems is how police education happens. In Europe, police education starts in high school, you go to a specialized high school for it (and then continue to police college). As a result, the police are much more skilled and professional. You start by studying the law. I don't think you even shoot a gun before you know the law very well.
It's unheard of that the police would say shoot a drunk guy with a knife. The way it happens, is that one of the cops who has more martial arts experience (which is one of the things the cops study, which they can do since their education takes much longer) puts on a protective vest and physically immobilizes the drunk.
In the US, the same situation is very likely to end up with the the drunk having more holes in him than a colander.
What's also funny to me is the extent to which police in the US tackle people. Tackling someone is like the worst idea in the world.
