Damn, Comcast going commie.
Ay, yo, can we talk about the fact that Northern Ireland actually disbanded their fascist cops and no one missed them at all? What if we disband the LAPD and NYPD the same way? Everyone needs to read up on what went down in Belfast because that shit is coming to your neighborhood in 2020. Defund these thugs in uniforms, send them on their way.
Disbandment
The Ulster Special Constabulary was disbanded in May 1970. It has been argued that their failure to deal with the 1969 disturbances were due to a failure on behalf of the Northern Ireland government to modernise their equipment, weaponry, training and approach to the job.[79]
On the disbandment of the USC, many of its members joined the newly established Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), the part-time security force which replaced the B Specials. Unlike the Special Constabulary, the UDR was placed under military control. Other B Specials joined the new Part Time Reserve of the RUC. The USC continued to do duties for a month after the formation of the UDR and RUC Reserve to give both of the new forces time to consolidate.
In the final handover to the Ulster Defence Regiment, the B Specials had to surrender their weapons and uniforms.[80] Despite the governmentâs concerns about the handover of weapons and equipment, every single uniform and every single weapon was handed in.[80]
We could if any of that was true. The Ulster Special Constabulary was nothing like the LAPD, it was more like the National Guard. Also youâre cheering on replacing them with a British Army regiment lol:
Recruiting in Northern Ireland at a time of intercommunal strife, some of its (mostly Ulster Protestant) members were involved in sectarian killings. The regiment was originally intended to more accurately reflect the demographics of Northern Ireland, and began with Catholic recruits accounting for 18% of its soldiers; but by the end of 1972, after the introduction of internment this had dropped to around 3%. It is doubtful if any other unit of the British Army has ever come under the same sustained criticism as the UDR.
The Troubles went on for like another 28 years or something, during which time the IRA killed over 500 of the Ulster Defence Regiment and Royal Ulster Constabulary combined. The RUC killed 55 people in that time, not sure about the UDR. Other than that, everything went great.
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The RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) were the âregularâ police force in the North of Ireland, although there was nothing regular about the RUC as they were enforcing the laws of an apartheid statelet. The USC (Ulster Special Constabulary) were a sort of reserve police force, in reality the USC were state organised loyalist thugs.
The RUC were reformed in 2001 as part of the Good Friday Agreement, including a name change to the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland). I donât know if that has made any difference on the ground, Marty would know more about that as he lives there.
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I used to own a book called Opening Skinnerâs Box, which cast a somewhat skeptical eye over some famous psychological experiments. I liked it, I think thatâs where I first got hip to the Stanford experiment being dubious. The author has since been accused of making up some of the stuff in her interviews with experts but I think the book has value nonetheless; none of what she is accused of making up is central to the arguments in the book.
IDK if a thread would survive but my general take would be to be very skeptical of psychological experiments claiming to demonstrate sweeping facts about the human condition. Another famous psychological principle which is dubious is the Bystander Effect, a theory developed after the murder of Kitty Genovese in which people supposedly stood there and did nothing while she was murdered. I can recommend the Youâre Wrong About episode on this. To bring the thread back on topic, one thing almost never mentioned is that Genovese was a lesbian, that she lived among many other homosexual people, and that people in her apartment block had a healthy reluctance to call the police as a result. Thatâs about 5% of the way along the Bystander Effect debunking, but itâs similar to the Stanford Experiment in that what is true about it is just another demonstration that people tend to conform and what is interesting and unique about it is largely bullshit.
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I thought the Bystander Effect has been replicated across numerous types of situations.
The point of the bystander effect is that people conform and the other thing in those experiments is that if one person starts helping, others will follow.
555 people killed in 28 years? Thatâs about the same rate as police killings in the US per capita.
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Fuck me, imagine if BLM had that kind of a k/d ratio.
I want to borrow a riff from Radley Balkoâs Rise of the Warrior Cop here, but the National Guard would absolutely kill and beat up fewer black people than the LAPD if they were put in charge of things. Military raids in houses in Iraq usually result in less death and destruction than SWAT team raids. Itâs like, if we have to choose between two militarized police forces, I want the ones with some basic level of professionalism and accountability.
Right, I was just saying that in no sense is it any kind of blueprint for the US, in fact what should be done is to shrink the police down to that sort of force that just handles hardcore law enforcement, rather than what they do now which try to solve social problems with the law. The way to do incrementalism isnât to try to reform the police, but to subtract functions from them so their area of responsibility shrinks.
Qualified immunity is a court-created right. Letâs see if the GOP will hate on it once they find that out!
Demilitarizing the police, abolishing police unions, and dissolving and reforming especially corrupt police departments are all reforms that havenât been tried on any wide scale. Not sure where you got the idea that all reforms have been tried. Pretty wild idea given that the direction of the trendline.
Except what bobman described isnât abolition? Itâs literally reforming bad police departments.
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If the radical centrists get to pretend it was their idea maybe thatâs ok. Keep using the word âAbolishâ though. They need someone extreme to think of as crazy otherwise theyâre the crazy extremist.
Thanks Bob. Those nuts were going to fire every cop in America yesterday. Iâm glad someone sensible has a plan for right-sizing the police.
But reforming the police by taking away their tanks and guns and tasers and all their extralegal privileges and dismantling the worst departments to be rebuilt from the ground up is very popular. Abolishing the police by doing all those things is very unpopular.
Reforming them is popular because people want to abolish them. Andrew Cuomo would love to be on TV talking about a Blue Ribbon Commission to study racial disparities in policing instead of begging protesters for mercy.
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No, see, although itâs in opposition to the plain meaning of the word, in direct contradiction to the meaning of âAbolish ICEâ and opinions differ on what it means, itâs a great slogan and the problem is that people like us, easily in the top tenth of a percent most-educated-about-politics people in the world, are too fucking ignorant to get it. If you like I can drive this point home by googling you up some reading materials that I also havenât read.
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If people wanted to abolish them, wouldnât abolishing them be popular?
Implicit bias training and blue ribbon commissions are actually a great example to think about. They are examples of how doing nothing about police violence (very unpopular) can be packaged as reforming the police (yay!). The larger context is that the electorate has a sense of what the problems are and what changes theyâd like to see, but they donât have fine-grained preferences about what policies are appropriate to solve the problems, which is why we have representative government. The electorate wants an end to the baroque brutality of the police, but they donât want the world they imagine would arise if the police, who are still a deeply respected institution, disappeared. Thus, the demand is to figure out a way to reform the police to make all this bad stuff stop. Regardless of your substantive views, the correct answer is âOf course, we know just how to reform the police: we need to do X, Y and Z.â If you want to do nothing, you appoint a commission and do some lunch-and-learns about bias. If you want to have real change, you plug in meaningful systemic policy changes for X, Y and Z.
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Itâs called leadership and opinions are changing fast. Radical centrists are starting to imagine that they came up with cutting police equipment and budgets.
I could have sworn the conclusion there was more like âwhich is how representative governments fool people into thinking they are doing something.â
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