I’ve always been skeptical of the idea of community defense groups because I don’t think I would prefer them to the police as we currently know them if I lived in a community where Trump got over 50%.
If you abolish capitalism, you probably need a police-like organization to enforce the dissolution of capitalism.
2016 police poll
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I’m leaning towards yes but regardless my larger issue is once we get to the point where we’re discussing whether or not a force who polices is a police force, we’ve gone wildly off track.
I’m aware of that, but I fear an untrained horde of Trump supporters cos-playing as cops more than a trained horde of Trump supporters cos-playing as the military.
This should explain my stance better: I’ve never wanted to talk about it because, honestly, it’s the thing that made me jaded and hate everybody, and I only alluded to it once, here,
The focus was on juveniles who were tried and convicted as adults. So, murderers. Mostly poor black juveniles from Chicago. We actually corresponded heavily with these kids and that’s what preempted the idea of the book. Doing any advocacy in this regard can’t help but get you involved in the prison abolition movement.
So that was the start of losing my faith. It was like, talking in these circles, “Ok, that’s great that all your guys are apparently members of the church choir who plant flower beds, but my guys have multiple murders under their belt at the age of 16, like, actual fucking murderers, so what about them?”
This is why I get beyond infuriated when I see the responses to people trying to police (heh) the message, saying “abolish the police” is a bad slogan. Like yeah, the majority of them are being dishonest, fuck them, but for God’s sake the whole “abolish the police” slogan is a repurposing of the prison abolition message! Everybody has been fucked with by the police. Even well-to-do white people get a little sketched out, and barring that there’s the recent posts itt about ridiculous traffic stop ticket quotas and other nonsense. That’s all a way easier message than, “What about the 16yo murderers?”
Because, my kids were good kids and there but for the grace of God goes anyone else’s kids. I don’t need anybody to talk down to me about the ideal post-capitalist society resulting in a reduction or elimination of crime and “crime” and subsequently the PIC, mfs, holy shit, that’s my entire point in calling them fundamentally good kids! Why do you think (lol this is assuming people actually read my posts even though I post like nobody does) I’ve more than once derided and mocked and laughed-at-to-keep-from-crying the concept of posting Trayvon Martin’s prepubescent pictures? Fine, Trayvon was disappointingly not a cat burglar and was closer to an angel than not, that’s great, but that’s why I’m not concerned about him (conceptually, duh, specifically it’s a fucking tragedy) because he’s not where the rubber meets the road.
In short, it’s whatever, this is just me offering one of my standpoints in these discussions.
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I just made that up; the reality is I had to google a picture of Angela Davis just now and was surprised because this entire time I thought that was Erykah Badu.
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They found that expanding police forces leads to net decrease in deaths.
We find that expanding police personnel leads to reductions in serious crime. With respect to homicide, we find that every 10-17 officers hired abate one new homicide per year. In per capita terms the effects are approximately twice as large for Black victims. In short, larger police forces save lives and the lives saved are disproportionately Black lives.
They also found that expanded police forces lead to less index crimes - robberies, burglaries, assaults and so on - but that this decrease is mediated simply by increased police presence. Arrests for these crimes actually decline at the same time crime decreases.
When cities hire more police officers, there is a decline in “index” crimes — serious offenses like robberies, aggravated assaults and burglaries that have high social costs and sometimes lead to a prison spell. Critically, arrests for these types of crimes decline too. Why would a larger police force reduce serious crime while also making fewer arrests for that type of crime? The answer lies in the ability of a larger police force to deter offending from happening in the first place. For example, police force expansion leads to an especially large decline in arrests for street crimes like robbery and vehicle thefts — crimes for which more cops on the street might be a particularly effective deterrent. Because fewer crimes are committed, there are fewer people to arrest. Interestingly, the decline in index crime arrests is four to six times larger for Black civilians than whites, which suggests that investments in policing are unlikely to have contributed to the massive and racially disparate growth in the scale of incarceration in the United States during the last four decades.
They also found that increased police numbers increase the number of discretionary arrests and that these arrests increase in a racially biased manner:
Of course, prison sentences are not the only way in which investments in police may widen the net of the criminal justice system. The majority of arrests that police officers make are not for serious index crimes. Instead, most arrests are for lower-level “quality-of-life” offenses, crimes that often do not have an identified victim but that lead to a criminal record and sometimes a jail sentence, each of which can substantially disrupt people’s lives. In some cases, these arrests, which typically involve a great deal of officer discretion, are thought to be a source of broken trust between police officers and citizens, particularly in communities that are predominantly low-income and Black. Do larger police forces lead to a proliferation of arrests for “quality-of-life” offenses and is there a racial gradient to the effects? Our research suggests that the answer to both questions is yes, with each additional police officer hired making between seven and 22 additional arrests for such crimes. With respect to arrests for liquor law violations and drug possession, two leading arrest charges for which police usually have tremendous discretion, our research finds particularly large and racially disparate impacts, with arrests three times larger among Black civilians.
The answer here is to take discretionary powers away from the police. Stop using police for traffic stops. Decriminalise drug possession. Stop doing insane things like measuring police success by how many arrests they make.
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Well, nothing is gonna happen to those two, but the fact that they’re even charged is progress.
In which a police officer kills a kid with mental health issues, is fired, and gets hired back in his hometown in Wyoming. The mom of the kid alerts the hometown what the cop did and a guy with mental health issues in the hometown finds out and tells his mom, that guy will probably kill me.
And then the cop does
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Fuck the police, but also FUCK “subscription law enforcement services.”
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A Citizen spokesperson told Motherboard that "LAPS offers a personal rapid response service that we are testing internally with employees as a small test. For example, if someone would like an escort to walk them home late at night, they can request this service.
Like this response was workshopped to be the most innocuous problem to solve. Guys it’s just like the campus police walking a coed to her car at night!
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Fuck the police unions.
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Meh, like this seems like a pretty common (or should be common) employment thing. If management wants to fire someone, they need to get the paperwork in so they don’t hang a decision over someone forever otherwise it becomes a de facto fire at will situation.
Broward Circuit Judge Keathan Frink concluded that arbitrators last year were correct in ruling that the fired Broward County deputies, Brian Miller and Joshua Stambaugh, should get their jobs back, with back pay plus other benefits, the Sun Sentinel reported. That includes accrued sick and vacation time, overtime and off-duty detail pay, among other benefits that they would have been paid had they not been fired.
One arbitrator had ruled in September that Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony acted 13 days too late when he fired deputy Stambaugh in 2019 for his conduct during the February 2018 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The shooting left 17 dead.
State law says discipline against law enforcement officers must occur within 180 days of an investigation’s completion. Another arbitrator reinstated Miller last May, saying Tony had missed that deadline by two days.
Chicago police and government kept trying to hang the increased crime rate on the elimination of cash bail. The problem? The stats didn’t back them up and leaked emails from a hack shows that they knew it and kept saying it anyways
About 10 days later, then-Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Susan Lee emailed some of her colleagues, alerting them that a group of other public officials had taken issue with the mayor and superintendent “attributing violence to the people bonding out” of jail, referring to the process in which people accused of crimes can pay money to be released from jail if a judge finds they would not be a threat to public safety.
Lee noted that the group had data showing that “very few folks who bond out actually commit violent offenses with a gun.”
Lee wrote in the email that she knew there were “concerns about the quality of this data from some,” but she also wrote that the Chicago Police Department was invited to review the data, but that review “never happened.”
Despite Lee’s concerns, and the available data, the talking point persisted.
A year later, police Superintendent David Brown got up in front of reporters and repeated the familiar refrain.
“Electronic monitoring and low bond amounts given to offenders endangers our residents and flies in the face of the hard work our police officers put in on a daily basis to take them off the streets,” Brown said. “I will continue to bring attention to the sheer number of repeat offenders who are given little to no jail time and low bonds and … go on to commit more crimes.”
By that point, the emails show, city officials were scrambling to find evidence that would justify Lightfoot and Brown’s claims, but their efforts were largely unsuccessful.
One week before Brown made his comments, in an email thread spurred by a question from Crain’s Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz, the mayor’s office and CPD were able to find only two examples of bail decisions leading to new gun crimes.
On top of that, Pat Mullane, a top mayoral spokesman at the time, admitted to colleagues that one of the two examples was “kind of weak.” But he said the city needed to provide them “so the [superintendent] doesn’t look like he’s pointing the finger.”
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This always rings as “terrorized people stay inline more often.”
I am like okay but so what. So allegedly crime goes down because police terrorize entire populations into compliance? Is that a goal that is to be applauded?
I prefer to go for people appreciating a force designed to serve the community for serving the community.
Reports telling me minorities benefit more are fundamentally racist and hate supporting as all get out.
It’s like a study finding that women talk back less to their husbands when it is completely legal for the husband to beat them at any time for any reason.
The end result is all that matters.
If we put all black people in prison the crime rate in black communities would be zero. These reports are just a step down this same path. It also does nothing to deal with the significant issues with police actions creating more criminals.
Pretty sure I saw that 20/20 Dateline 48 hours end up in Rape.
While the data does say that increased police presence leads to more discretionary interactions with the community, the idea that this constitutes “terrorizing” is spin that you’re injecting. The data says police presence is net-valuable and polls of minorities agree with this. For example, a 2020 Gallup poll had 61% of Black Americans wanting police presence in their area to stay the same, with the rest equally split between wanting less presence (19%) or more presence (20%). White Americans were, no surprises, more likely to support police (71% same, 17% more) but still, 81% of Black Americans do not want less police presence. The straightforward way to interpret this plus the data is that police presence in an area is net-positive, despite its downsides, and that the community knows it.
The fact that you establish something as bad doesn’t prove that the right thing to do is get rid of it, which is sort of the point of the thread. The title isn’t “Is the state of policing in America bad?” because there’s universal agreement on that. It’s often the case in politics that the choice is between several bad options. For example, democracy - a bad way to run a country, but it’s not obvious that there’s any better ways to do it.
The data says that discretionary incidents are what are racially applied and a lot of shooting incidents start with trivial interactions. So find ways to limit police contact.
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not all policing is terrorizing, but increased presence together with military-style tactical raids sends a somewhat different message. everyone connected to a wrongful drug bust will be forever triggered by seeing just a simple patrol officer at dusk.
not to mention that it continues a culture in which cops act knowing that overwhelming physical and judicial power is their backup.