Started under Bill Clinton, exploded under Obama.
Not surprised - here weâd say theyâre just differing shades of Tory anyway.
Yeah⌠this is the problem with most of these âreformâ 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.
Itâs not that we need to abolish the police, itâs 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 isnât true for âabolish the police.â 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 itâs 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. Weâre not running for office. And I submit that having a percentage of the population reacting to police riots with âAbolish the Policeâ could be strategically good for someone who just wants demilitarization.
Increased reporting- I donât know man⌠they started tracking crime stats sometime in the 90âs and since then the whole system has gotten significantly more dystopian. Iâm not sure that further gamifying policing is every going to be that good of an idea. Civilians arenât getting killed because we donât 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 âall they need is additional trainingâ 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 werenât 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 isnât going to help. The cops donât follow the rules, donât 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 youâre 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 doesnât 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 theyâll 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 wonât make things worse.
These âscientific policingâ arguments people put forward weâve all heard before. Remember the 90âs? This stuff is like academic work on counterinsurgency. It looks really good on paper until you try it out in real life, where it doesnât work at all.
I was thinking more of social movement dynamics and research on how framing affects public support. Not candidates and campaigns.
Iâm 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 stateâUtahârequires 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 donât think itâs 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 youâre setting up a PR victory but youâre actually giving the police the opportunity to âimprove thingsâ by âlowering the rate of police violenceâ 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 itâs citizen reported to some central federal database, and that wonât be reliable either because the feds wonât 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 itâs 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 isnât that what police should be required to do? This shit isnât hard - youâre 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 youâre in relationship and youâre mad every single day, Iâd tell you to break it off. If youâre mad every day about living in a house, Iâd 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 thatâs for damn sure and youâre fighting for that?
16th Century England?
Right. The poll upthread currently has around a 50/50 split of people thinking âAbolish the Policeâ is or is not consistent with a state law enforcement body, including a split of people who voted âyesâ to it in an earlier poll. Nobody knows what that shit means. Also, the other common âabolishâ slogan on the US Left is âAbolish ICEâ, which definitely does mean âpermanently end that function of governmentâ and not âbuild a new organization to take on those responsibilitiesâ.
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Grunching, but this is the easiest fix. You absolutely do not need police to handle most traffic enforcement. We already have red light cameras, we already have photo radar technology. The rest can be dealt with through city bylaw offices.
And, quite honestly, people donât respect driving laws now as it is (Iâll let you know the next time I see a car come to a full stop at a stop sign, itâll likely be several weeks). North American cities are designed to let drivers do whatever the hell they want. Fewer police wonât make the situation much worse.
Even if you need people giving tickets, they donât need the authority to put you in handcuffs anymore than a DMV clerk does.
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For the most part yeah, but I need my truck to bring solar panels to all the homesteading permaculturalists.
I have been mulling over a long post on this issue for days but it would be very personal and Iâm not sure how comfortable I am with it. Would appreciate some guidance tbh.
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Itâs so weird how nazis keep popping up in police forces around the country
SS lightning bolts is obv, 0351 seems to mean Marine Infantry Assault. Feeling safe?