A few things… first the cops in most countries are not armed. They don’t get shot. Second the number of cops who actually get shot at in a year in this country is very low.
I’m calling for a maximally demililitarized police force. A velvet glove for the inevitable iron fist you need to maintain the state monopoly on violence. I’m not kidding about step 2 being to call in the people whose job it is to do violence. I just don’t think the door kickers should also be expected to handle real mental health calls. Too much of a code switch for anyone.
I’d also like to see the police budget cover all lawsuit costs directly without being allowed to buy insurance. Meaning the city gives you X money to run the police department and one of your costs is legal expenses, so run your department with an eye to not fucking people up for no reason.
I’d also see every jurisdiction in the country pool their ticket revenue and have it be distributed per capita to disincentivize revenue collection through policing. Cops should be giving people tickets for being obviously dangerous assholes, not to hit a quota by picking on vulnerable people who can’t fight a bullshit ticket.
There are ways to tilt the game board in a more favorable way, but they’re all going to be fought tooth and nail by the blue lives matter crowd.
And yes I’m also trying to get the current crop of cops out of day to day interactions with citizens until someone has tried to talk it out with some meaningful level of skill.
Unfortunately I do see the state having the option to use violence as being mandatory. If nothing else because the only way to preserve the monopoly on violence is to use violence on anyone who would challenge that monopoly. People attempting to use violence for personal gain should expect the state to intervene with more force than they can bring, no matter how much that is. You lose that you end up where Mexico is today at the low end.
It’s at the barrel of a gun. One of my biggest worries is what we’re going to do about all the ex cops breaking bad.
Come on man the current criminal justice system is one of the parts of our civilization that future history books will gloss over for 2-3 paragraphs followed by six paragraphs about the day we declared premature victory over it. It has to end sometime.
The war on drugs is winding down and there are cameras everywhere. The cops in their current form are fucked. The question is when not if. I think these are some of the mildest possible moves you could make that would actually start to fix the problem.
In the future there will be fewer higher trained cops per capita and their job will actually be keeping the peace not keeping the poors out of rich neighborhoods. They’ll actually spend their time trying to catch predatory people doing predatory things and send them to relatively humane places we segregate them from the general population and attempt to rehabilitate them at.
We live in a time in history full of great and rapid change. Just because the government has been stuck for 30-40 years doesn’t mean the world didn’t change around it. The cops are an anachronism. There’s nowhere near enough demand for their services at the level they are at much less where they’re going to be as the Boomers die at an accelerating rate.
The reason the defund the police movement is so important is that it threatens them with extinction if they don’t change. That downward pressure on police budgets should force them to the table to negotiate a new deal.
I don’t think it’s nitty to point out that 77% /= “basically everyone” as the tweeter puts it.
And there is a difference between:
Responding to a question about “do I think I would feel safer if more police”
Actually “would feel safer” as the tweeter stated it
Actually being safer
Like I’m on team #abolishthepolice and honestly in the moment of taking a survey I could see myself answering “more safe” the way the question is posed. I mean after all they are just asking about if there were more police patrols. Phrasing the question that way brings to mind just you know cops out cruising around in their cars. But cops don’t just innocuously cruise around in cars. That’s the whole issue. So, we end up with a poll question where police behavior is described in a very neutral/safe way, and then ask people to guess at what their psychological state would be in a hypothetical situation.
There are a couple of other questions in the survey that are interesting as it deals with people’s perception. They asked people if they thought that crime had gone up in their country/state/community. The yes response was 72%, 51%, 33% respectively. That’s a huge gap between what people perceived as happening nationwide compared to what they experience.
I hope one takeaway from the poll is the relative consistency among races rather than the majorities. It shows that people’s views on this kind of thing is based more on random life experiences and cultural influence than any kind of logical race based threat assessment. Including yours.
I’d agree that the majorities are relatively close to each other. However, 26% of Black compared to 10% of White would feel less safe. 2.5x higher is a fairly significant difference.
That seems to not align as well with your next point. But I’m not 100% that I’m getting what you’re saying here.
Most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen in my neighborhood: cops driving down the street so narrow that two cars can’t pass in most places at about 40mph to get to the park where two brothers were having a wrestling fight.
2nd place: dozens of cops in the neighborhood, guns drawn, for a supposed home invasion that turned out to be a package delivered to the wrong house.
It’s nitty in the context of whether the policy has broad support across multiple population strata, which is the point of the poll.
I also think it’s disingenuous to assume the polled sample is interpreting “police patrols” in some idealized fashion rather than the much simpler interpretation: cops on the beat near your residence. To the extent the notion evokes idealized versions that isn’t exactly an argument in favor of abolishing either.
It polled at 77% overall, and at only 65% among Blacks. That is broad support, I agree. If the tweeter had said that instead of “basically everybody” I’d have no nit to pick. When it comes to policing in America, if some poll question has 65% support among Black people, I’m never gonna describe it to be “basically everyone”. Sorry, but if I was a professional journalist and tweeter, I’d be more precise.
Again you are agreeing with me. When I say that poll respondents are assuming an idealized interpretation of “police patrols”, your description: “cops on a beat near your residence” is exactly what I’m saying people will have in their minds. An innocuous conception of what they are being asked about.
The problem I have though is that in theory, and we’re talking idealized theory to the point I wouldn’t mind it being labelled magical thinking, I’m not anti-statist, at all. The first political thought I ever remember having was way back, when I was a little, little kid, watching some movie (and I couldn’t begin to know how to pinpoint the specific movie at this point) where a black man living in the south in a semi-rural area gets harassed by the Klan, or some Klan adjacent types, at his home at night where his family his sleeping and he runs them off with a shotgun. I didn’t think, hell yeah show 'em who’s boss, rather, I thought how horribly stressful that must be to have to do that, and how terrible it was that nobody would help him, and how great it’d be if the police or whomever protected him so he could get a good night’s rest and not have to worry about that bullshit sleeping with one eye open and a shotgun next to his bed.
I’m not a little kid anymore and I understand the sometimes huge gulf between what’s practical in practice and what’s ideal in theory, but I don’t think I’m ever going to be dissuaded from the notion the state could and should, in an alternate universe maybe, protect those who can’t protect themselves, who will always need help.
Like, if push comes to shove blast those Klan members with a low orbiting ion cannon or something. That’d be fucking rad.
Sure, but the cops didn’t know he was a child, and all the tweeters stressing the fact he was are just doing what the young woman in those tweets I linked is describing. I’m not exaggerating to make an intellectual point; it really is gross and disgusting to me.
