Thanks for the link. I’ll check it out. Alternatively, I’d also love to borrow the presentation style from 8cantwait but apply it to some of the points in this thread:
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Crime
Each community has an autonomous police agency, which "controlled the community police and served as the first instance of jurisdiction over internal affairs.[41] Each community also has its own judicial council and, according to Grubacic and O’Hearn, “has the freedom to decide on the specifics of the punishment according to local context.”[42] Zapatistas say they almost never imprison criminals. Instead, they generally assign community service as a punishment. Neils Barmeyer has observed a prominent use of fines as punishment in Zapatista communities.[43]
According to Grubacic and O’Hearn, there is an emphasis “on transformative rather than punitive justice. The parties involved can negotiate on compensation, and when the perpetrator has to take a loan from relatives to pay the fine, the participation of the family helps prevent further transgressions.”[44]
Gustavo Esteva argues that the Zapatista territories are “the safest place in Mexico and perhaps one of the safest in the world.”[45] In the Zapatista communities, land is communally owned and no one goes hungry, so one could argue that there is little to be gained from theft. With a significant degree of control over their work, education, culture and communities, the Zapatistas experience a comparably low level of alienation. “There are only two men in jail in the whole of the Zapatista area today,” says Esteva in a 2013 talk. “And these two guys are in jail because they committed the worst possible crime. They were cultivating marijuana. The problem in that case is not just the use of marijuana. The problem is they can give the government a pretext to attack the Zapatistas and to attack the communities.”.[46]
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The Weeds coming in hot with a defund the cops podcast.
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I appreciate your contrarianism, but na.
2017 Browns would wafflecrush the 1976 Steelers.
Defund the police and or demilitarize the police seem like solid goals.
“Abolish” is 100% the wrong rhetoric to use for this sentiment. Because the large majority of people who would actually be receptive to substantially reforming the police will hear “abolish police” and think well no I definitely don’t want there to not be the police. And they’ll think that because that’s what those words actually mean.
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So the abolish the police people are going about this all wrong. Not in when or where you want this to end, there you’re dead right, but on how to get there no offense but you’re totally clueless.
Let me show you just one alternate (and much sneakier) route:
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End the war on drugs. This is much much more popular than talking about abolishing police. It’s already almost dead, so just finish that up. Removing all the drug war related funding the police departments get will help, but so will a federal umbrella legalizing these substances. Put all regulation around product purity, accurate labeling, and heavy handed taxes whose revenues go to addiction treatment.
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Create a federal law enforcement agency with it’s own prosecutors whose only mission is to police the cops. Make it large and give it real teeth. There are a whole bunch of law enforcement outfits in the US who are almost entirely organized crime operations. These guys are very easy to attack publicly.
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Pass a federal law requiring municipalities to send fine revenue to a central agency to be redistributed on a per capita basis nationally. This absolutely includes seizures and ‘court costs’.
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Make it illegal to store prisoners in private facilities. Every prison must be a government facility. Create regulations that makes hiring prison guards expensive. Make it financially impossible to maintain a huge prison population. I’m thinking educational requirements AND a prisoner:jailer ratio that is like 8:1 or something. Make it illegal to keep anyone in custody above the ratio. This should get municipalities to prioritize the people who actually pose a threat to the community. If they try to screw with it by releasing dangerous people the counter move is to point out lots of more harmless prisoners they kept in when those dangerous people re offend.
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Finally do something about how we handle criminal records in this country. I don’t think it’s possible to force businesses to hire people who went to prison for doing something specific to that business (probably not right to force a company to hire an accountant/bookkeeper who did time for fraud/embezzlement) so the business probably needs to specify what charges they are looking for and the rest are excluded. Until we can do that correctly criminal background checks should be disabled, which will undoubtedly result in a solution being created in like 3-4 months.
Those things are way harder to attack than ‘abolish police’… but they completely alter the way the system functions by changing the incentives.
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Started under Bill Clinton, exploded under Obama.
Not surprised - here we’d say they’re just differing shades of Tory anyway.
Yeah… this is the problem with most of these ‘reform’ micro ideas. The problems are macro, and must be fixed macro. Rules were meant to be evaded and bent in all sorts of creative ways.
It’s not that we need to abolish the police, it’s that the system that currently recruits, trains, and incentivizes cops needs to be abolished. The goals of policing need to change dramatically.
I appreciate the criticisms of 8cantwait. I do want to re-emphasize that the overarching point I was trying to make was not that those ideas were the only ones that should be pursued. The point was:
And that the above isn’t true for “abolish the police.” Although I also think at least several points on the list are clearly worth pursuing, e.g. improved reporting, training and mandated de-escalation procedures, more standardized rules on use of force. The need for demilitarization is the point on which I think defunding is important, but I think it’s better to present the goal (demilitarization) and why it is important, not just the means (defunding).
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This comes up a lot, but this forum is not some kind of campaign headquarters. We’re not running for office. And I submit that having a percentage of the population reacting to police riots with “Abolish the Police” could be strategically good for someone who just wants demilitarization.
Increased reporting- I don’t know man… they started tracking crime stats sometime in the 90’s and since then the whole system has gotten significantly more dystopian. I’m not sure that further gamifying policing is every going to be that good of an idea. Civilians aren’t getting killed because we don’t know exactly how many are getting killed. They are getting killed because of the way the system is structured.
Training- Again I really think that most of the time these ‘all they need is additional training’ arguments are bullshit. They are doing this stuff because they are empowered and incentivized to do this kind of stuff. Training is certainly a part of it, and the level of training for many law enforcement agencies would be funny if it weren’t so scary, but the best trained police forces in the country are ALSO doing this stuff.
Standardized rules on the use of force- Yeah this isn’t going to help. The cops don’t follow the rules, don’t leave their body cams on, and their standard operating procedure when something goes off book is to tell the necessary lies to put it back inside the lines. All you’re going to do with this is change the stories when they are lying. A huge % of what cops do day in and day out is illegal already and that doesn’t seem to matter much.
Demilitarization is a nice idea but very unrealistic. At this point the departments already have these toys. If you just take away the funding for this stuff they’ll still have the toys we already gave them.
Defunding will work on the principle that the cops are a negative presence in most neighborhoods, which means having fewer of them won’t make things worse.
These ‘scientific policing’ arguments people put forward we’ve all heard before. Remember the 90’s? This stuff is like academic work on counterinsurgency. It looks really good on paper until you try it out in real life, where it doesn’t work at all.
I was thinking more of social movement dynamics and research on how framing affects public support. Not candidates and campaigns.
I’m talking about reporting on what the police do, not the kind of thing already found in FBI UCR data. See for example The Atlantic:
A second thing Congress could do is pass legislation to further encourage better data collection about what police do and how they do it. For example, no one really knows how often American police use force, why force was used, whether it was justified, or under what circumstances it is effective. No one knows how many high-speed pursuits have been conducted or why they were initiated; how many fleeing drivers have been caught, or the number of collisions, injuries, or deaths that resulted. Only one state—Utah—requires agencies to report forcible entries and tactical-team deployments. Neither the police, nor anyone else, can tell us how many people have been injured when taken into custody, how many people have been arrested only to be later released without charges, or how many cases local prosecutors have refused to file for lack of evidence, constitutional violations, or police misconduct.)
Moreover, no state or federal officials know how many publicly owned surveillance cameras police have deployed or privately owned cameras they can access, or where those resources are allocated. No state or federal officials know how many internal or citizen complaints of officer misconduct exist, whether people were dissuaded from making a complaint or their complaint was ignored or minimized, or the ultimate disposition of the complaint and whether the offending officer was disciplined. These data are not the administrative minutiae of policing; this is basic information about the everyday actions of government officials that is crucial to ensuring that such actions are properly regulated.
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Yes, the fact that none of this is tracked is a problem. I just don’t think it’s the foundational problem. I think we already have dozens of easily accessible examples of data being intentionally corrupted by the police. Remember a few years back when all the outrage was about reclassifying felonies downward?
You think you’re setting up a PR victory but you’re actually giving the police the opportunity to ‘improve things’ by ‘lowering the rate of police violence’ which really means not capturing all the incidents and claiming improvement.
Either the data is self reported in which case the cops will falsify it… or it’s citizen reported to some central federal database, and that won’t be reliable either because the feds won’t be able to verify those reports.
And even if you somehow managed to get an accurate count I have real doubts it would make a difference. People are bad with statistics AND large numbers. They know it’s bad now. One video like the recent MN one does more for reform than your stats would. Wasting political capital on something like this seems bad.
When I was working EVERY trauma bay patient was real time videoed from arrival to admission or discharge from the bay - we were doing it for quality control, but isn’t that what police should be required to do? This shit isn’t hard - you’re working, your camera is on any time you interact with the public - how the actual fuck did that sociopath MSP cop racked up about 20 complaints on civilians and nothing being done. Cop shuts off camera, lose job. Period.
MM MD
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shrugs People uproot all the time for far less. If you are white your ancestors literally did that. If you’re in relationship and you’re mad every single day, I’d tell you to break it off. If you’re mad every day about living in a house, I’d tell you to move to another house. Whatever is making you angry every day, ingest less of it.
In the last few days we got people calling cops pigs, took me a few days to remember where calling people that word came from. Those people are not going to make things better that’s for damn sure and you’re fighting for that?