How much do we need the police?
npr.org
npr.org
Steven Pinker describes how that went:
> "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8:00 a.m. on October 7, 1969, when the Montreal police went on strike. By 11:20 am, the first bank was robbed. By noon, most of the downtown stores were closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order. This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters (and offered a foretaste of life as a scientist)."[16]
(Edit: I regret putting snark over substance in this reply. See my response below, and others’ in this subthread, for a more detailed rebuttal.)
Why not?
This is a very different scenario from a controlled, scheduled spindown of a department by the city government.
Don't know about that, but there is ABSOLUTELY enough selfish/predatory/angry people in any population that will commit violent acts for profit and pleasure if the risks of being brought to justice disappears.
I would not have guessed it would erupt as fast as it did in Montreal, but empirically, it did.
I expect day 2 would have been a lot worse. Pray that we never find out :)
> Obviously looting should be read as exposing underlying ills and unmet needs within society
Well, some people never find their needs met...
I'm a glass is half full kind of person so I see factors like empathy as a defining characteristic of humanity, but even I can't deny that such internalized inhibitions, biological and cultural, which mute anti-social behaviors aren't universal.
(Not to mention the sociopaths are already present in politics and police. Drawn to power)
Criminals are likely to organize in order to increase their chances of success and survival. Individuals will be quickly overwhelmed if they don't form their own organized defense forces. There's always a lot of extremely violent people protecting the "normal" ones.
enormous numbers of people in the US are living literally a paycheck or a medical emergency away from bankruptcy and homelessness
But sure, I agree that those desperate people can also be dangerous.
Then we democratize gun ownership. Next we create UBI so nobody has to steal to put food on the table, and guarantee jobs for anyone who wants one, and healthcare for all.
you end the poverty and almost-poverty and you stop a lot of the reasons behind WHY people loot when there's an opportunity to do so.
Well, it _was_ a problem until the government put cameras on every street corner and the police started tracking down and punishing every one of the vandals.
How would gun ownership help with this? I look out of a window at 2 AM and see a couple of guys destroying a bus stop. Should I grab my gun and start shooting at them?
that was my point w/ guns...
'Completely' is a meaningless term. Animals behave selfishly in almost every choice (even in altruism) as part of the survival instinct. There is a question of degree and there is a distribution curve that hasn't been fully explored. For some people, some desperate or casual situations lead to barbaric (lack of a better term) behavior, when possible, for some portion of the population. Even with a police force, the curve exists and we experience the effects.
All of them? No. Enough of them? Yes.
Uhhh Yes? This is the natural state of Man, and has been for 10,000 years. My goodness, we've only gotten over it in the last 1000 years (and that's being extremely charitable). We're thankfully at a point where we've been able to regulate ourselves with some rules here and there. But that natural state of Man is the raison d'être for those rules in the first place.
The Wikipedia page for a sibling comment points out that Montreal already had problems: bank robberies, riots and terrorist bombings.
So if it's a 'natural experiment' it's one against a background of high levels of disorder to begin with.
I think it's also somewhat of a caricature to imagine that a total police strike is somehow indicative of what a radical reduction on police activity would look like. Most people calling for "de-policing" would draw the line at "let's not send police after bank robberies, assaults, riots, home invasions, etc".
You could hardly pick a more dangerous time or place in Canadian history.
"Montreal was once known as the bank robbery capital of North America."
https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/history-through-...
NYPD went on strike in 2014, if anyone wants to research that themselves... RIP Eric Garner
Vox did an analysis of the NYPD "slowdown"[1] as it was also a useful natural experiment. They didn't enforce the low-level "broken windows" crimes, but only did the minimum required by their contract. Needless to say, the city fared far better than right now.
That said, neither of these is a good example of what life would be life without government-supplied police forces. They are very rapid, unplanned changes in policy which don't allow private parties to hire private industry replacements and don't reflect how much less tax would be paid (about 40% of local government revenues).
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/6/7501953/nypd-mayor-arrests-unio...
More to the point, though, the article doesn't suggest a complete abolition of all police; it suggests returning them to a more limited, core role.
If anything, this is an experiment in what happens if you unexpectedly swap the police in a city for a different set in the middle of a crisis.
> Well, I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. We have better alternatives for them.
The idea that this incident demonstrates that any city will go up in flames immediately if the police take the day off is a misreading this specific moment in history.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot
That's not to dispute the idea that cities will generally retain order if police are absent. I imagine it varies wildly from one time and place to another.
> In the first six months of 1969, there were 93 bank robberies in Montreal compared to 48 bank robberies in the first six months of 1968.[5] In January and February 1969, the FLQ staged 10 terrorist bombings in Montreal, and between August 1968 and February 1969, there were 75 bombings linked to the FLQ.[5] In February 1969, the FLQ set off bombs at the Montreal Stock Market (injuring 28 people) and at the offices of the Queen's Printer in Montreal.[5] March 1969 saw the outbreak of violent demonstrations as French-Canadians demanded that McGill University, a traditional bastion of Montreal's English-speaking elite, be transformed into a French-language university, leading to counter-demonstrations by English-Canadians to keep McGill an English language university.[4] The leader of the 'Operation McGill Français' protests was ironically a part-time Marxist political science lecturer from Ontario named Stanley Gray who could barely speak French, but who declared that McGill must become a French-language university to end "Anglo-elitism", rallying support from the Quebec separatist movement.[11] Over two weeks of clashes and protests, McGill was reduced to chaos as Quebec separatists stormed into the meetings of the McGill's Senate and administration chanting such slogans as "Révolution! Vive le Québec socialise! Vive le Québec libre!".[11] The climax of the 'Operation McGill Français' protests occurred on the evening of 28 March 1969 when a 9,000-strong group of Quebec separatists led by Gray tried to storm McGill, and clashed with the police who had been asked by McGill to keep Gray's group off the campus.[11] In September 1969, rioting broke out in the St. Leonard district between Italian-Canadians and French-Canadians with differing opinions of the language issue.[4] Italian immigrant parents had kept their children from school to protest the fact that the language of school instruction was now French instead of English, and on 10 September 1969, a group of 1,500 French-Canadian nationalists attempted to march through St. Leonard's Little Italy district to protest the school boycott.[12] Upon arrival, the marchers were attacked by the Italians, leading to a night of violence on the streets.[13]
People is being freely dossed with tear gas, in the middle of a pandemic that kills attacking lungs. We don't know how a disease that attack lungs could interact with exposure to a lung irritant but probably will not help. We will have an answer, we want it or not, in two weeks.
They are creating a flow of air directly towards the face of people. We don't know if a virus standing in the air could be collected and dragged into the nose, but it seems possible.
Being paranoid, we don't even know with what substance are all of those people being gassed. Who controls that tear gas canisters contain only tear gas? Are those canisters refillable? Are being refilled? By who? We don't know.
The goal of racist people has been always domination of the other races. Selective killings and birth control are not new strategies. Every single racist in the planet has fantasized about killing as many as possible without consequences. In the end is the same if you kill with a bullet, a hug or provoking a mosh pit / covid party. Except that the later are, unfortunately, untraceable.
So increasing the provocation could be seen as a desirable strategy if you are a racist policeman or governor.
And of course from now on, COVID is not the Trumps fault anymore. People had choosen freely to take more risks. Is like an experiment designed carefully to create thousands of new cases in a part of the population.
Disturbing. Look up psychological projection, and be more careful what you say.
Of course If racists really would not wanted to kill other people, they seem to have a long history of "oops, I did it again" unfortunate moments. Those people have a really bad luck
In any case, there is no excuse for riots.
Some riots and current outbreaks have certainly been caused by police.
In other incidents riot police have been filmed purposefully and willfully attacking already subdued members of the public; looking around first to check for observers of course! One of the cases the policeman put a weapon in the have of a subdued arrestee as a precursor to beating them.
These sorts of actions inflame the public and cause ongoing rioting.
It's been interesting witnessing quite measured, in relative terms, vigilante justice against some rioters too.
I haven't seen that footage, but of course I have heard of cases of violence against protesters. Doesn't really prove a deliberate approach to me. Maybe some police officers are also just human and get angry when people hurl stones at them and spit at them. If it's an excuse for the protesters, why not for the police. Sure, you'd hope they'd be trained in restraint, but at the end of the day, they are humans.
Also some footage may not tell the whole story. And maybe those cops were legitimately spooked by the umbrella. Better safe than sorry. I can't really blame them, wouldn't want to do their job.
In general, I think it would be wise not to provoke the police (or people with guns in general), don't wave around with objects that could be mistaken for guns, stuff like that? They should teach that in US schools, but every action movie teaches it, too. There is always that scene where a suspect reaches for their ID and then pauses because he realizes police might think he reaches for a weapon.
Yes, I've much sympathy with this. Police are human too - but just as if I get angry and lash out at someone in the street, without appropriate mitigations, I will be charged with assault - so too should police. That's rule of law in operation.
If you can stomach it then look on Reddit, the riot footage is illuminating IMO (of course remember the inherent selection and PoV biases).
But then charge the individual officers, not "the police".
now, couple that with systemic issues of rascim throughout all of american society, of which the police are part of, you have a terrible mix of rascism, power, lack of worry of consequences, and a general bad attitude of their role in society in "the police". that leaves the general public at risk and people of color at a substantially greater risk.
the point is that this isn't just a one off case. it happens time and time again. i have seen video after video of it, and that's just the ones captured on film! (still don't face any consequences.) i have seen a video of a black emt who had a patient inside pulled over and choked by a police officer because the police officer felt he hadn't yielded properly to his lights even though the call he was on was obviously less important than choking an emt with a patient. there's just countless other videos and documented cases.
so please, take your false rhetoric elsewhere. these are actual problems. if you think it's just a couple bad eggs, then think about what happens when there's bad eggs spread throughout the country. that's what systemic issues are.
riots and particularly looting are not great. but consider what they generally represent. they represent pent up anger of those at the bottom who feel they don't have any other recourse. some do indeed want to incite violence, but that doesn't invalidate the huge line of events that got us here. i would also ask that you view the police as an active participant in the rioting. i have seen video of police actively destroying property without a protester in site. the media is also a participant because we cannot trust what they report as truth.
I think incidents like this murder or what it was, should be treated like a bug in the system, and protocols should be adjusted to prevent such accidents. If it was a murder, I would still call it an accident in terms of the system, but the accident then was hiring a murderer, which surely isn't deliberate by the system.
I've read (but can't confirm) that kneeling on suspects to constrain them is outlawed in many places in the US already, but wasn't yet in Minnesota. So maybe some places have learned that it is a risky approach, and others haven't.
From afar US police looks scary and brutal. On the other hand, the criminals they encounter may also be more brutal and dangerous than in other countries. So I'd first like to hear some of their side before making a judgement.
Other problems are not so easy to solve, like lack of consequences. It sounds easy, but I would guess you can not make the job too risky for police officers. I don't know enough details about policing in the US, but one example that may illustrate what I mean: here in Germany, midwives now have the problem that they can not get insurance anymore, because of huge liabilities should anything go wrong during birth. Unfortunately, nobody can guarantee a safe birth, so many midwives can not continue their jobs. Not saying police officers shouldn't be liable for anything, just that I can imagine it is not easy to find a good balance.
As for "PoC are at greater risk", I'd like to see the data supporting that thesis. Especially since many police officers are PoC themselves, and apparently they kill more PoC than white police officers. For whatever reason (I imagine they are more often on duty in predominantly black neighborhoods), but it at least challenges the hypothesis that the police is inherently racist.
Because they're police officers. It is and always has been the mandate of US police forces to violently repress non-whites, particularly Black people. The skin color of the cop doesn't change the function. Racism is not 'a white person did something mean to a non-white person'.
And what are you saying, without white people, there would be no need for police? PoC would just get by, no crime whatsoever? That seems unlikely to me.
The issue isn’t even just “crime” in the sense of robbery, etc. When there is no police, organized crime can take over. When we lived in Bangladesh in the 1980s, a minibus full of criminals showed up at the gate of our house. (This being Dhaka in the 1980s, we had a brick wall around the whole house with broken glass on top and a big metal gate, and an armed guard out front.) I don’t know if it was because my dad hadn’t bribed the right people or what, but it took police an hour or more to respond, during which time the criminals tried to drive through our gate.
(I don’t actually disagree with the thrust of the article, which is more that we need to rethink the roles where we have police. I’m just sharing this because I’ve seen a lot of “defund the police” in my Facebook, and I strongly suspect it’s from people who have never lived somewhere without effective policing.)
Just a heads up that "defund the police" isn't actually that different from "we need to rethink the roles where we have police"
They will, for example, say they cannot investigate the rape of a white woman, supposedly because lack of funds. But they will have plenty of funds to harass poor and non-white people for maybe smoking pot, but mostly for being poor and/or non-white.
We can see it right now, in that they teargas, shoot with rubber bullets, beat and arrest completely peaceful protesters and people just on their own porches but do nothing about looters. It is obvious why: looting makes protestors look bad (especially if news coverage cooperates with the police's narrative), makes people scared and proves that police are necessary.
Of course, the mafia can also provide safety if you obey them and pay them. Might even be a better deal for some populations than the current police.
If you want police that work for the population and are not an occupation force extracting tribute through use of force, you need to do more than reduce their budget. You need to punish the offenders (jail, not layoffs) and replace the people in charge (their union bosses and informal leaders, not just the nominal chief of police who might have little actual power).
And some of those completely peaceful protests have still met tear gas, and/or pepper spray. For example, see the protest in DC that was peaceful and broken up before curfew.
Is your assertion that nationwide, over 9 days, there hasn't been any peaceful protests?
Often there is an assumption that because they didn’t see what started it, it must have been nothing. You might think they didn’t have a good enough reason, but I have yet to see police in any city deploy OC for no reason at all.
Here's video of the incident from 13 minutes prior (June 1): https://www.facebook.com/jessica.bundy.79/videos/36571421876...
And earlier recording of the hours beforehand (June 1, earlier): https://www.facebook.com/jessica.bundy.79/videos/36570100309...
You're not missing any violent context; just the bigger picture.
There are no “pretexts” happening. These conspiracy theories are absurd.
From the ground video of this same incident, it was seen that protestors were pushing on the fence. They then deployed umbrellas, some of which were deployed over the barrier. An officer swats a pink umbrella out of his face and grabs it. The protestor tries to pull it away. A tug-of-war struggle ensues. Another officer notices there is a struggle and rushes in with his pepper spray to get the girl off.
The whole time, the crowd was told they are NOT allowed to cross this street. They can cross any other street. The precinct is this way. They form a plan to “push through” earlier, and they chant to let them through.
on the other side, there are clearly projectiles being thrown, and before the cops deploy flashbangs, you can see some flashing from the crowd side - not sure what that is.
You might think they overreacted. You might think he shouldn’t have started the scuffle with the umbrella. You might think they shouldn’t have raised their spray over a combative protestor pushing the barricade and mouthing off from 12 inches away from a cop’s face. That’s all fine to debate. But there is a clear pattern of escalation, tension, and confusion. The cops did not just say “let’s fuck up some protestors!” out of nowhere and then fire. And they definitely didn’t set up a pretext. You guys sound like Alex Jones with that shit.
The protestors had umbrellas for hours; they were not "deployed" shortly before officers initiated violence. Protesters were up against the fence for hours and did not push it forward substantially. The umbrella the officer grabbed wasn't in anyone's face.
Note that 12,000 complaints were filed about SPD's overuse of force after that night.
> you can see some flashing from the crowd side - not sure what that is
Bud, that's a camera.
> But there is a clear pattern of escalation, tension, and confusion.
I totally agree with that statement. SPD repeatedly escalates peaceful situations into violent ones.
> The cops did not just say “let’s fuck up some protestors!” out of nowhere
Actually, they did, on video: https://twitter.com/Bishop_Krystal/status/126800997417045196...
At 7:00 in the video the protesters pushed the fence a couple of meters forward and almost broke the police line, that is not peaceful protesting. Pushing up a blockade against police is very aggressive, and can't be done by a single bad apple either. If protesters had been acting like this for hours then it makes sense that the police sprays them.
https://www.facebook.com/jessica.bundy.79/videos/36571421876...
Why do you equate my post with something that resembles saying that anything the police did was justified?
Unlike the parent, everything you said about the incident is accurate. You’ve interjected your opinion on each event of the incident, which is fine. You’re having an honest conversation. We can’t have those when we start out with hyperbole, omissions, and fabrications. Case in point, you’ve suggested alternative actions that could have been taken, which would not have been possible if we went with the original narrative. After all, if they do this for “literally no reason”, there’s no possible fix for that.
Emphasizing de-escalation sounds like a great idea. On a subsequent night, they changed their procedures to put the fence about 100 ft in front of them. That would ensure that they could not feel “threatened” or agitated by protestors partially encroaching the barrier. It also solves the problem of a mouthy kid getting right in your face and cussing you out, which might trigger a negative reaction. It looked like it went a lot better that time.
The media focuses on violence and crime, because that's what media does — "if it bleeds, it ledes" — but that violence/property damage/theft has not been connected to the large Cap Hill/downtown protests for most of the week.
Your claim of "dozens of cars burning in the street" is, as far as I know, completely unfounded. As is "busting through every retailer's window and looting stores until they were bare." There isn't all that much retail downtown — do you mean Westlake?
There was some looting and some police cars burned on the first weekend, but it is important to understand (1) that these actions do not reflect the majority of protesters and (2) the history of violence perpetrated by SPD against citizens and especially citizens of color.
It is also important to understand that the SPD has responded to peaceful protest with violence every evening, through at least June 2. (I have not yet caught up with last night's protests.)
For example, another demand was to keep SPD in the consent decree under DOJ supervision. The city council was planning on ending it.
They council announced just today that they are retaining to consent decree, so that's a policy win for the protestors.
Prioritize rape/violence/home invasion, deprioritize protests/drugs/etc., and as you say punish offenders.
This is obvious.
>deprioritize protests/drugs/etc
Yeah, already done that. And it's miserable. My parents came to visit (from the midwest and right before the pandemic) and were absolutely appalled at seeing needles on the street when we went out to dinner. I don't blame them, really. I blame the people who pretend that shrugging at enforcing drug laws is some sort of "justice". It's not, it's political nihilism. And we've run this test 1000 times at this point across the country. Some will say that "it's not that bad", and to them I say "yeah ... I've been in worse places around the world too". Which is a snide way of saying that I'm really annoyed that people are okay with third world standards of living in the USA because they have this inverted sense of "justice".
Supervised injection sites, housing first integrated support, access to effective medicine (methadone), etc. are all stymied by various flavors of political problems.
What you're seeing is the result of a patchwork approach in disarray.
Still, I never once considered rounding up all the drinkers, sending them to jail, then disallowing them from ever participating in most of society for the rest of their lives. That's without even considering all the collateral damage, and people hassled for no reason. Worst of all IMO, is a classic critique that dates back to prohibition: Prohibition laws breed contempt for law and order. Peaceful citizens become criminals. Cops become fascists, rounding people up for no reason.
So, I'd say it's pretty reasonable to want to try something else. I'm unconvinced that there's no other option, or middle ground to deal with externalities. I also don't think you're being oppressed, or "living like you're in a third world country", because you sometimes see what's really going on in your city. Perhaps your efforts would be better spent on an anti-littering campaign.
As if that's what we're doing. "Yikes bro", maybe stop straw manning everything I said into some kind of crypto fascist fantasy? Maybe consider that not being able to have your elderly parents take the subway when they visit - because of risk of violence, or you just don't want them around open injection drug use - is a sign that what we're doing isn't working? We've been trying the decriminalization route for a decade at least. Do you actually think this is "success"? Or has real decriminalization never been tried?
> because you sometimes see what's really going on in your city.
And this is the nihilism. Thinking this is normal.
Is criminalizing all drug users the answer though? We have 50 years or so of results there that show that has serious issues as well. Why are we willing to spend 30-40 thousand a year on imprisoning folks at a rate that no other country even comes close to, but not try spending similar amounts of money on actual rehabilitation and welfare programs for the addicted and mentally ill?
It seems worth a shot to me...
I am not advocating this though. I don't see anyone else in this thread advocating this either. I'm merely asking that we at least stop doing the insane thing of just ignoring it and letting people shoot up on the sidewalk or at the bus stop. I'm all for some creative solutions to this, fine, but the only thing that seems to gain traction today is "what we're already doing, but louder".
There's lots of countries where people wouldn't consider needles and feces in the streets to be the "reality of living in an urban area." For example Tokyo or Stockholm (both of which are in strongly anti-drug countries).
Please be honest. No one is that dumb, especially not you. The reason Japan's streets are clean is that they are used primarily by the Japanese. They have different cultural defaults than we do, and perhaps one might say that in this respect they are just better. Japan's cops are actually drastically less aggressive and abusive than USA cops. Also, numerous Japanese have told me that they wished their drug prohibition could be repealed. If that happened, no one would expect Ginza to turn into the Tenderloin.
Sounds like they're a protection racket, no different from the Mafia.
The issue here clearly isn't funding. The issue is control. Police in the U.S. have been allowed to become an autocratic state in their own right, and it is this state which needs to be dismantled.
Nothing is going to change if the police training and punishment for violating basic freedoms is not addressed.
Also see Brazil with Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho which are violent organizations that have/had lofty goals similar to the growing movement (i.e. anti-police brutality, vengeance)[1]. Those groups now partake in degenerate drug and sex fueled parties and slaughter their enemies using advanced weapons. No need to worry though; their code of conduct proclaims that they fight for liberty, justice and peace and that rape is bad -- they're obviously the good guys.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primeiro_Comando_da_Capital#Hi...
This actually highlights the different experiences between middle class white (or Brazilian) and a black person (or someone living in the favelas). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_police_militias [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batalh%C3%A3o_de_Opera%C3%A7%C... [3] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xweavd/police-are-killing...
For a different take, do the Amish have a police force or are they frequently policed from the outside? Many people who advocate anarchism do so in the context of communities in which widespread looting makes little sense.
Apart from violence, there's another big thing that probably went missing, too - authorization for certain people to enter private property for reasons of the general good. The reason we call the police for welfare checks, for better or worse, is that nobody else has the right to enter your house. A doctor might be better suited to responding to someone undergoing a mental health crisis, but they can't break in. Similarly, you see stories of "police rescue deer from rooftop" or whatever because nobody else is authorized to climb onto random rooftops. If a society wants to get rid of the police, it needs to designate some other group to handle this use case. It can't simply get rid of the police.
A "natural experiment" of a world without police is quite unnatural: it's a world built up around the police with a sudden police-shaped gap in the middle.
To pick an analogy that should make sense to folks here, it's like shutting down your datacenter for 16 hours, suffering serious outages, and then concluding that your company absolutely needs its datacenter. Well, yes, it does today, but that's not what the people saying you should look at public cloud are advocating.
> A "natural experiment" of a world without police is quite unnatural: it's a world built up around the police with a sudden police-shaped gap in the middle.
The hole can also get filled in unexpected ways. This past weekend during the riots and looting, when the police in Chicago were stretched too thin, some people were happy the local gangs were protecting them from the looters.
Isn't that reinventing the police, just with a different name?
I'm not at all saying that this by itself would eliminate racially-disproportionate violence done by the police (and you could argue that it'd risk increasing it, in fact - George Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch leader, not a cop). But it would straightforwardly eliminate a host of excesses from militarized equipment and training to asset forfeiture to the blue wall to qualified immunity to even (relatively) minor things like quotas.
(And to be clear, I'm not saying that "arm the populace and set up civilian watches" is a complete or good replacement for the police - I'm just saying it seems like the minimal possible step to take if you're carving the police out of a society that evolved around having police. If you don't even take that step, the results of a "natural experiment" of a day without police aren't meaningful. But it's not an actual policy proposal; a serious attempt at getting rid of the police would in fact want to be careful about making an even less-accountable shadow police.)
So the civilian watch would effectively only have lethal force to stop a threat then? All of those things have a purpose. Armored vehicles for example are most often used to approach armed suspects who have holed themselves up in a defensive position without risking seat or police lives. Stingrays are used to track gang, cartel, weapons dealing, and terrorist activities.
You could argue that only federal entities should have that power, but then the FBI/DEA/ATF would inevitably fill the power vacuum and take over a lot of roles that would otherwise be done by police. The alternative of course if that we simply don't use Stingrays, armored vehicles, riot shields and rubber bullets, but then a lot of crime would go unpunished either from lack of information gathering or simply from fear of death (for example, a civilian with just a gun would have a much higher chance of death trying to free a child from an armed abductor that a swat team with armored vehicles, bulletproof shields, etc.)
Imagine an armed and dangerous HOA, functioning as its own "community policy force."
What fresh hell is this?
This is the kind of behavior that I expect to see widely across America if we rely on random citizens to patrol instead of police. He was told by 911 to stay in his car, but instead he got out and shot Treyvon in supposed "self defense".
The same solutions will not be applied universally across the US because the challenges are very different for different communities. Many Black communities that are asking for community policing will benefit; doing community policing in white spaces is not guaranteed to make them any safer for Black people, but I don't know if that's being called for. And honesty I'm not sure it makes them less safe, either, when you look at what happened to Treyvom Martin and Ahmed Aubrey's cases (and all the others that do not get media attention).
The wikipedia article says that he was injured and that he got into a conflict with him before shooting. He claims that this was while he was returning to his car and he was attacked by him. If this is true I see no misconduct by him.
Police in the US are professionally credentialed faster than a master plumber. After less training, less testing, and less oversight, they're handed lethal discretion and informal qualified immunity latitude, in less time than it takes for someone to hang a shingle out as a one-man plumbing business.
Have you ever lived in a country where people don’t have weapons? It is like night and day really - I never heard of a shooting in my neighborhood, and when Police shoots someone unarmed by accident, it is nationwide news (in a nation of 40M, I remember one situation happening a few years back).
edit: I found some stats for my country. Every year, for 40M population Poland: 125 uses of guns by Police (warning shots etc), around 25 times shot towards a person, 1-2 people killed.
I know for a fact that the police in Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Balkan countries is extremely shitty. You do not need an armed police in order for them to be violent.
http://hawzhin.press/2020/06/01/how-to-abolish-the-police-le...
It doesn’t scale.
That's just hiring someone else to use force to take it back. So we at least agree that taking it back by force is the right thing to do. I'll even go so far as agreeing with you that it's morally justified to hire someone else to do it for you. I suspect our area of disagreement is really narrow on this issue.
Yes, there are often police who do not follow the regulations on how to interact with suspects, but I believe it is better to have guidelines which are sometimes broken than none at all.
edit: changed vigilantes to mercenaries for consistency
I'd say it's a toss-up if I absolutely had to guess.
We literally cannot remove the police without a collapse of the state and consequently the rest of our civilization, and if you think for even one moment about how that would play out it would be apparent: everything fractures into private armies with no incentive to uphold democratic rule of law; the most powerful private armies become de facto states and their ruler a law unto himself--effectively a king. Obviously modern society can't survive under these conditions--no one can trust rule of law which absolutely underpins our economy. So congratulations, you've rediscovered the dark ages and doomed hundreds of millions to deaths from violence, illness, and starvation. :)
I'm not saying that Trump supporters should not be able to, but the anti-police crowd seem to not think far enough ahead to realize that taking power away from police and giving it to the people means giving it to people that they see as political and ideological enemies as well.
Edit: would someone like to dispute this instead of just downvoting? I'm trying to discuss in good faith; this seems to be a real problem with the idea of arming the populace: inevitably there will be citizens who have different ideas on self-policing their community. Would we only allow people with socially acceptable ideologies to have arms?
You just described the situation today, both inside, and outside, of the police.
Many (naturally, well-armed) police are both Trump supporters, and racists.
Many Trump supporters, and racists, are extremely well-armed in the USA.
Yet they are not bestowed with the power of self-policing, and are still subject to a higher authority which regulates what is and isn't acceptable defense of self or property. Who would regulate their behavior? Instead of a small subset of racists having power, you would have ALL racists having power. I think they would love to have the ability to police their own communities without having to go through the trouble of becoming a police officer. There would be George Zimmerman to type situations happening every other day since they know police are not coming. Last year 9 black and 19 white unarmed people were shot by police out of a population of 328 million people. Any number may be unacceptable, but that number would certainly be orders of magnitude higher if untrained citizens who do not have the protocols that police must follow are given the power to self-police.
Also Trump supporters don't equal Pro 2A. Most of my USA based colleagues are Pro 2A, including the Biden supporters, and most are not Trump fans.
Also most people that I know with gun permits in my country (extremely rare) are more knowledgeable on laws than most policemen; same for gun training, we do train policemen in the range and we see that.
In a neighborhood where people are armed there is no need to patrol on the streets. Guess what is the place around the gun range that is never robbed? The gun range. People don't take risks, they pick the easy targets, gun-free zones are perfect targets for people that ignore the laws.
Isn't this what the administration of virtually every major city have been working for decades to create? So this is an experiment that matches current conditions. Somehow I don't see most folks arguing that we don't really need police also being for unrestricted firearms ownership and repeal of the myriad of barriers that exist between the law abiding citizen and gun ownership right now. So maybe start with that if you want less police?
Obtaining arms should be, for every single adult, as quick, easy, convenient, and cheap as obtaining a blog.
Many, many of us have been saying that for hundreds of years.
A pamphlet might be typeset in an hour by the unskilled printer's apprentice.
Not many enough, apparently. There are many cities where it's literally impossible to own a handgun legally unless you are connected to either law enforcement or one of the political mafias. There are even more places where it's possible but has so many idiotic limitations that the intent is clearly to discourage all but the most determined and evade lawsuits by pointing "yes, you need a form that can be only found in a disused closet behind the door saying 'Beware of the leopard!' - but the form is there, your honor, so no undue burden for firearm ownership!"
And the funniest thing that all these things happen in exactly the same places where they talk about not needing the police anymore.
It's amazing how a population that suffers heavily from wide firearm availability (the only civilized country where you semi-regularly have school massacres) thinks that the solution to anything can be "more guns for everyone".
People are often irresponsible, irrational, intoxicated, etc. Making lethal force easily available to everyone won't solve your safety issues - will only make them worse. I think a big reason why cops are so violent in the US is that they need to be - any bum can have a gun and might kill them; that's not a concern for people in Europe, so police can be slightly more relaxed when dealing with a minority that is known to have above-average stats for criminals & general violence (e.g. gypsy here; yes, they may face many discrimination issues that black people face in US, but nobody shoots them just because they have the wrong skin color)
We've had by far the greatest firearms proliferation in the Western world for centuries. In the 1920's you could buy fully automatic Thompson sub-machineguns from a mail-in catalog. ( http://www.nfatoys.com/tsmg/web/coltguns.htm ) Yet school shootings are a relatively recent (~30 years) phenomenon. Over that same 30-year period we've also had an increase in single-parent households as well as an increase in SSRI drug prescriptions. There doesn't seem to be anywhere near the willingness to attack those social issues or investigate their impacts on murderous outbursts.
Firearms proliferation seems to work well for Kennesaw, Georgia. https://edition.cnn.com/2018/03/06/us/kennesaw-georgia-gun-o...
But the data for everywhere else is a mixed bag: https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/concealed-...
It all indicates the problem isn't the gun, it's the person. And taking their gun away doesn't take away their problems. I find it odd that the current climate of acceptance and a desire to help others can so staunchly ignore mental health issues.
[0] https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/416881/rates-of-gun-crim...
Really? How did the persons become worse because of the gun control laws? Because that's what your message implies, that said rise in violent crimes is related to enacting gun control.
No, it doesn't.
> that said rise in violent crimes is related to enacting gun control
The person did not become worse but rather found the chance to attack someone who could not defend themselves because they did not have a gun.
Well as Wikipedia describes how it went beforehand:
> In the first six months of 1969, there were 93 bank robberies in Montreal compared to 48 bank robberies in the first six months of 1968.[5] In January and February 1969, the FLQ staged 10 terrorist bombings in Montreal, and between August 1968 and February 1969, there were 75 bombings linked to the FLQ.[5] In February 1969, the FLQ set off bombs at the Montreal Stock Market (injuring 28 people) and at the offices of the Queen's Printer in Montreal.[5] March 1969 saw the outbreak of violent demonstrations as French-Canadians demanded that McGill University, a traditional bastion of Montreal's English-speaking elite, be transformed into a French-language university, leading to counter-demonstrations by English-Canadians to keep McGill an English language university.[4] The leader of the 'Operation McGill Français' protests was ironically a part-time Marxist political science lecturer from Ontario named Stanley Gray who could barely speak French, but who declared that McGill must become a French-language university to end "Anglo-elitism", rallying support from the Quebec separatist movement.[11] Over two weeks of clashes and protests, McGill was reduced to chaos as Quebec separatists stormed into the meetings of the McGill's Senate and administration chanting such slogans as "Révolution! Vive le Québec socialise! Vive le Québec libre!".[11] The climax of the 'Operation McGill Français' protests occurred on the evening of 28 March 1969 when a 9,000-strong group of Quebec separatists led by Gray tried to storm McGill, and clashed with the police who had been asked by McGill to keep Gray's group off the campus.[11] In September 1969, rioting broke out in the St. Leonard district between Italian-Canadians and French-Canadians with differing opinions of the language issue.[4] Italian immigrant parents had kept their children from school to protest the fact that the language of school instruction was now French instead of English, and on 10 September 1969, a group of 1,500 French-Canadian nationalists attempted to march through St. Leonard's Little Italy district to protest the school boycott.[12] Upon arrival, the marchers were attacked by the Italians, leading to a night of violence on the streets.[13]
And this was all while the police were on the job, so it seems like pretty important context (especially considering the article is not the headline and we're talking about policing scope here).
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/if-the-nypd-is-on-strike-mayb...
> “Well, I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them.”
Vitale offers a nuanced perspective, and your response is a barely-related strawman.
I'm a bit surprised by someone who's familiar with an anarchist theory to be this naive about this stuff.
Today in Rojava (society in Syria based in part on anarchist principles) they are replacing the police with alternative institutions.
You can read more about it here: http://hawzhin.press/2020/06/01/how-to-abolish-the-police-le...
So instead of looking at alternative societies in Syria, how about looking at European countries and the way they are policing? Or Canada?
The latest police strike announcement was for April (12th to 19th) this year, and was over the lack of PPE for field work. The strike was cancelled as PPE was made available before the strike date.
The article doesn't advocate for "no police". It says that we tend to ignore more and more societal problems and simply ask police to deal with the consequences. It underlines that police aren't --and will never be-- social workers; their mode of operation is to use legitimate violence to prevent or punish undesirable behavior. When a problem is dealt with by the police, the result is more violence. This is hardly police's fault: it's why they're there.
The article suggests society should actually address its problems (poverty, homelessness, drug use, etc.) instead of ignoring them, and that police should be a solution of last resort, not the standard response to anything that's "wrong".
We can agree or disagree, but quoting Pinker saying "that no police results in chaos" is not helping the discussion.
This is a straw-man. The article isn't calling for abolishing police: "I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them."
"De Blasio, in this sense, is a remarkably unimaginative politician, like Andrew Cuomo. Police did stop doing their jobs, momentarily, after the murders of Liu and Ramos, in protest of de Blasio’s allegedly anti-police gestures. Arrests and summonses plummeted in early 2015. This, in labor and political parlance, is called a slowdown. The truth about the slowdown, as I’ve written before, is that crime remained quite low. Lack of police enforcement did not unleash the sort of disorder Lynch and his ilk always promise would come. It’s a small sample size, yes. But de Blasio has never used this data point to his advantage. Instead, he has grown only more defensive of his police department. Even in an age of COVID-19-induced catastrophe, with tax revenue evaporating by the month, de Blasio cannot bring himself to meaningfully cut funding to his police department."
Source: https://rossbarkan.substack.com/p/why-is-the-nypd-so-powerfu...
Disarm and civilize the police but keep their SWAT units as a separate department that only backs up police when requested.
This would throwing a lot less people in jail and having police that live in the community. But hey, this is just wishful imagination, politicians and police union would commit sedition if anything like this happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police under history, look at the "modern police" section. I find this poster against police in Wales a bit amusing: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/No_Polic...
Law enforcement is not the synonymous with police.
That can be done in a reasonable amount of time.
Cops in LA are also very highly paid especially in benefits and overtime. Part of the reason why they are so short staffed is that it is cheaper to pay a cop well into the 6 figures in over time and pay for one retirement pension then it is to hire two regular time cops and pay two pensions. I don't know how you fix this issue beyond enforcing stricter criminal punishment against bad cops and start actually busting heads instead of slapping wrists.
That would indicate a leadership problem. Regular people just won't stay around when everyone from the top down is bent, even if the salary is outrageous.
https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends
BLM doesn't form protests when black men are killed by black cops. They are politically savvy and understand that the optics of that aren't conducive to their message. In fact, they don't appear to care at all about non black people killed by police either. The 76 percent of people killed by police that aren't black don't interest them.
The real danger to black men in USA is being murdered by a non cop. Black men are insanely overrepresented in both homicide victimization and perpetration.
It should be noted that southern whites in the USA had massive rates of homicide until the early 20th century. They have significantly higher rates of violence compared to northern whites even today.
Culture > Race
I don't know if this includes deaths by things like choking or beating.
If this is correct, death by cop is actually pretty rare. Not bitten by shark rare, but maybe in the magnitude of fatally falling off a ladder rare.
Which of course isn't to say harassment or abuse by cop is also rare. Nor to say there isn't racial disparity because the chart clearly shows there is.
So it’s around 20-100x more per capita than it could be.
In the United States when you look at the data that is posted in my previous comment you will see that the vast majority of police shootings involve an armed suspect.
However even if you only look at data on unarmed suspects I highly suspect that the US has a higher per capita rate than either Germany or Poland.
At USC, they have these security people who just walk around the off campus area and report belligerent activity. Their uniforms are bright, so you can spot them at night and run over if needed. At the very least this sort of security needs to be in place in all parks and transit stops, there are just too many insane people left to fester on the street unfortunately. I'd love to have more shelters and mental health services built, and fully support all efforts at the ballot, but that's a 5-10 year timeline with land permitting and construction versus just handing out high vis vests and walkie talkies, and the situation certainly isn't improving in the mean time.
It;s also worth noting that when the UK faced a similar problem with an undiverse militarized police force in northern Ireland they did this https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/police/patten/recommend.htm and launched a bunch of investigation(the Stevens enquiries) into past crimes of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
The problem in America blocking any meaningful solutions to genuine problems is the collective denial the American middle class have towards past sins and current systematic problems with the American way not that it's a new problem that have never been solved before.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/03/george-floyd-pro...
Either they are not perceived as well as you think or these protests aren't about what they claim to be about.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/03/george-floyd-pro...
Either the metropolitan police are not perceived as well as you think they are or these protests aren't about what they claim to be about.
And I'm not really arguing either side so much as pointing out that the current disorder and violence is in response to regular police violence. Regular.
No place breaks down due simply to an absence of police. But I've heard of police states -- and those aren't something anyone talking about the merits of order and safety should be arguing for.
1. Police don't just start one day misbehaving without any warning. It takes years to get there, years where they see there is no consequence for being more and more out of line and years of having immunity for their actions.
2. That event was not handled properly, the cop should have been arrested on the spot or in a couple of hours, not days later. These lack of immediate action was seen as an attempt to cover up or minimize the gravity of the situation and that is a very good reason for public protests.
Both #1 and #2 are not the fault of the police, but for people governing over the police force. Quoting from a well known psychologist, the regular policemen has an IQ around 90, the police oversight body should compensate for that.
My understanding is that the program has been quite successful, and other cities have begun implementing their own similar programs using it as a model.
A friend of mine went through this, so I went through all the options with the a few emergency psychiatric wards.
These days, even if the person has medical insurance or someone wants to pay out of pocket, the mental health professionals aren’t allowed to do anything without getting the person in need of emergency care to sign an emergency consent form under their own free will, and while capable of making legal decisions (which is by-definition impossible). Pre signing the form “just in case” doesn’t count. My friend did this, in fact.
Other than waiting for the situation to escalate to violence (and getting the person incarcerated without care) the only option is to have a police officer (with no medical credentials) come out and make a diagnosis.
The officer almost always (and in this case, did) overrides any doctors and loved ones involved in the case, and finds that the person does not need care.
The triage nurse at one of the care centers told me that most residents of the many waterfront encampments in the city were people her office had previously turned away.
Here's a more contemporaneous 1984 NY Times investigative article detailing the history: "How Release of Mental Patients Began", https://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-me...
EDIT: The report mentioned in the article is presumably, "The Homeless Mentally Ill: A Task Force Report of the American Psychiatric Association", https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.36.7.782 I can't find a freely available copy online, however.
> Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations where the average citizen would be arrested.
> So when we turn a problem over to the police to manage, there will be violence, because those are ultimately the tools that they are most equipped to utilize: handcuffs, threats, guns, arrests. That's what really is at the root of policing. So if we don't want violence, we should try to figure out how to not get the police involved.
> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system. And so policing has always been the primary tool for managing those threats to the public order. Just as we understand the use of police to deal with homelessness as a political failure, every time we turn a political order problem over to the police to manage, that's also a political failure.
That depends entirely on how much power you give them, and how much accountability you impose upon their use of it. The primary role of police in society is to simply be the wide end of the funnel for the incarceration pipeline. Trying to give them duties that conflict with those objectives is simply always going to fail. Personally I wouldn’t want my children receiving civics instruction from somebody who has to hedge against the possibility that one day they’ll be trying to put them in jail.
> The primary role of police in society is to simply be the wide end of the funnel for the incarceration pipeline.
Only if your idea of a perfect society is one where everybody is incarcerated. I'd rather have one where as few people as possible need to be incarcerated to keep order.
Providing the police with conflicting responsibilities isn’t going to solve that problem. At best it’s a waste of resources, and at worse it makes everything worse. You can’t expect the police to earnestly participate in improving a community when at any moment their responsibilities may obligate them to decide that it’s the community members who are the problem, and that they need to go to jail.
The very nature of the justice system is adversarial, and the police are it’s enforcers. Attempting to burden them with responsibilities that directly conflict with their role in the system isn’t going to fix anything.
civics officers would encourage civic knowledge, pride and engagement, and would only be enforcers at the thinnest of margins. they'd teach people about how government works and and what help is available, rather than being antagonistic.
also, investigation--solving harder, bigger crimes--should get more resources relative to enforcement, which tends to be directed at insignificant crimes of (opportunistic) desperation rather than crippling, serial crimes like corruption and embezzlement.
it's a focus on encouraging trust and cooperation rather than safety and paranoia.
For example, in the recent mass protests, the police generally stay pretty chill until something triggers them -- one too many water bottles thrown after curfew, or whatever. Relatively, minor offenses by a few people in the crowd can trigger the police to shutdown the entire protest or the entire city. They can't be expected to do much else, except stand still as more bad actors (emboldened by police non-action) keep ramping up their provocations, eventually leading to the same outcome. Crowd dispersal and mass arrest is really their only tool when things start to slide out of control.
I can't imagine how a young police officer feels when their age peers are screaming epithets at them inches from their face, when last Tuesday some of the same people were crime victims and damn happy to see you. The old cops probably have zero fucks to give at this point.
Mayors and Chiefs are also stuck between doing too little or doing too much. Many careers have been ended by going too far in either direction.
It is interesting to see how different cities are handling the mass protests. I think LA and Atlanta are doing well now. They seem to calmly start arresting everyone who is still out right after curfew. I think last night, Atlanta began dispersing the crowds 30 seconds after curfew (they did use tear gas though). Similar for LA, where the cops and national guard slowly corner curfew violating groups of people and drivers. Then they systematically arrest everyone.
In contrast, Seattle, waits and waits hoping everyone will just go home, but that doesn't seem work. Eventually, it is late and inevitably the police get triggered and then it is tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber bullet time.
The Seattle process seems like it is designed to guarantee violent confrontation between protestors and police. Where the LA process seems like it designed to clear the streets safely before it gets dark, enabling LA police to focus on rioters or looters (if any)
Edit-to-Add:
Watching live as the Seattle Mayor is addressing a crowd at the City Hall, she can barely be heard over the crowd booing her. She is not going to get an outcome she is hoping for. I expect more violent police/protestors confrontation tonight.
A peaceful protest is not a justification to issue a curfew. It is explicitly protected by the first amendment. A blanket curfew is a gross violation of it. The Lt. Governor of Washington happens to agree with me on this.
Here, but for a limited curfew the people can still protest at will.
I am sure you know why there are curfews in Seattle and other places. It is because of the violence of the past few days. It is not to suppress free speech. Cyrus knows that.
I think it sucks, but until the late night violence subsides this is probably the new normal.
An alternative, I guess would be enabling the police to use more force against active rioters/looters, but that isn't going to happen. The man power isn't available. Besides King County (where Seattle is) does not prosecute property crimes or pretty much any misdemeanor (except for domestic or sexual violence and hate crimes).
On Tuesday night, the violence was started by a water bottle thrown into the police line. In response, the police gassed four city blocks, including residential apartments. People in those apartments were trapped between gas pouring into their rooms from the streets, the police, and the curfew. There's a baby in intensive care, because
If you want to reduce violence, don't issue a curfew. Disarm the police, instead. They've started violence on three out of the four days. Or, alternatively, protect the protesters from it. [1]
It should be noted that Seattle's protesters have done a remarkable job of preventing instigation and vandalism, but they can't do that, when they are running from flashbangs and gas.
[1] The national guard is there, unarmed, standing behind the police line. It has behaved with dignity, restraint, and respect - but it should be deployed on the protest side of the police line. The police is completely out of control.
Some act like that stuff has nothing to do with the curfew being imposed.
Now, as you may now, the local subreddit is filled with people suggesting different Hong Kong style tactics to exhaust the police or stretch their resources. Of course, exhausting the police will make it more dangerous for everyone. Because the police will be forced to take shortcuts or make mistakes which will increase the risk for everyone.
To what end? Seattle is a progressive city that could reform the police tomorrow if they wanted too.
edit-to-add:
Looks like Seattle police are getting to disperse the crowd. They are putting on gas masks and the scanner report objects being thrown from the crowd at 12th and Pine.
And on Saturday, they started off kettling protesters, and then followed it up with unprovoked gas attacks, long before the curfew, or the burning started. Again, there is plenty of video footage, and detailed timelines of all of this.
> To what end? Seattle is a progressive city that could reform the police tomorrow if they wanted too.
Seattle is a progressive city with an abusive police force that has successfully resisted reform for two decades. Its police union is one of the most sheltered from accountability in the country. It is under federal sanction for police brutality, that both the union, and the city has done its best to push back on, and ignore. The current mayor is a former federal prosecutor, that ran on a campaign of, among other things, police accountability that she immediately abandoned, as soon as she got into office. She is currently turning a completely blind eye to what is happening in her own town.
Meanwhile, the governor is telling everyone that everything is fine, and that the Office of Police Accountability will handle any police misbehaviour. The OPA consists of 9 police officers, and 1 civilian... And its decisions aren't even binding - but are carried out at the pleasure of the police chief.
If reform were so easy, we'd have done it a decade ago. Instead, we have a nightmarish quagmire, where the none of the checks and balances work, and the government is actively covering for the police. For an outside observer, if you didn't know this were about Seattle, you may assume that I described the political situation in East BuFu, Flyover Country.
In Australia I wouldn’t hesitate to contact the police or talk to them on the street if something happened. (Just like I wouldn’t hesitate to call an ambulance if someone gets hurt). When I lived in the Bay Area that attitude seemed naive and stupid / dangerous.
They also have a pretty decent rep for brutality themselves, particularly if you're indigenous.
So you are presenting a very misleading view.
No they don't have a 'decent rep' for brutality, whatever that means. Comparing AU police to US police is insane. Every encounter with police like a traffic stop in the US is a nonzero chance of getting killed. That's not at all comparable to Australia where there are no tasers and the use of lethal force is in the single digits per year nationally.
The view you're presenting is significantly more divorced from reality than the GP. Just like GP said, calling the police in the states even if you need their aid, is a gamble. In Australia I would not hesitate to call or interact with the police under any circumstances. Even in the immediate vicinity the Bourke St incident, I felt safe approaching and interacting with the SRG guys decked out in their military gear and automatic rifles. They went out of their way to make sure me and people with me got a safe corridor to leave the area. In the states, that'd be about a 100% chance of getting shot.
"Noor was convicted of third degree murder and second degree manslaughter for killing Ms Damond Ruszczyk just minutes after she called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in the alley behind her Minneapolis home in July 2017."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-08/mohamed-noor-sentence...
> The risk is not to the caller
Just yesterday there was news coverage of a store owner who called police for aid against looters and was attacked and handcuffed by those same police when they arrived on the scene.
Also, incidents like this:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/26/kazeem-oyen...
Any single one of these stories would provoke a national outcry here. They're unthinkable here. But it's everyday life in the US.
> But you don’t make a mental “death chance calculation” when you call the cops.
Yeah I do. When I was visiting the states my friend was instructing me to do things like turn on my interior car light and slowly put my hands on the steering wheel and do absolutely nothing that could possibly provoke the cop. That sounded fucking insane to me, coming from Australia.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/it-does-happen-here-calls-to...
> “The family of an Aboriginal man who died in custody says protests against police brutality in the US should be a wake-up call about the plight of Indigenous Australians in the justice system.
> Speaking in the wake of video footage of an Aboriginal teenager being kicked to the ground by a NSW policeman, Paul Francis-Silva, whose uncle died in a Sydney prison in 2015, said: "It does happen here in Australia - the brutality, and the injustice against the First Nations people.”
You could also agree Australians are full of racist, evil cops as well, yes? Or is picking a few extreme examples not allowed for your country?
Because domestic calls are so unpredictable in a gun-owning society, callers can expect to see a drawn gun pointing at you.
The police often do no-knock residential intrusions, while throwing a grenade into the house.
(For non-US readers: I'm not exaggerating. "Dirty Harry" movies are documentaries about living in the US.)
Don't just judge the police on your experiences as an innocent bystander, but by how they treat those they think are less innocent. Police in Australia are far more likely to use violence and intimidation than Kiwi cops, in a large part because they are armed. Carrying a firearm creates an inherent power imbalance and a willingness to use violence and force to resolve an incident than deescalation techniques. NZ cops are much more likely to attempt to defuse the situation, or avoid the situation becoming (potentially) violent in the first place, using force is seen as a last resort than a first option (although it's a different story if you're Maori or Polynesian).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFaPooJBDSg
Imagine this situation playing out in the states. Guy would be riddled with bullets in seconds.
Not nonzero but... well, you can do the math.
This sort of thing add to the perception of American police.
It is true American cops do shoot more people than their counterparts in non gun owning countries. And they can get a bit jumpy until they see what a person is about, which is somewhat understandable given the environment.
The advice to keep your hands in plain sight and don't make quick movements is good. It's very unlikely you'll get shot (as per the stats above) but to help keep everyone calm and happy. It's not really a big imposition.
This probably sounds like weird advice coming from another place. But every place has it's strange things. You have to understand, America is not far removed from it's frontier days. It's always been a fairly violent country. That doesn't mean it's not in general safe, it is for the most part, it's just there are a lot of guns and a fair amount of violence compared to Sweden or some place like that.
US 30.4 vs Australia 1.7
So yeah, there are are issues with police in Australia, but the issues are far more extreme in the US.
If the police have an image problem then perhaps they need to promote a culture of restraint, civility, and justice by enforcing the law against their own at all times not just when the criminals behavior makes it onto television and sparks riots that threatens to burn down the nation.
> Somehow we lost all perspective and have come to expect that our officers, whose jobs regularly confront them with mortal danger and the darkest parts of human nature, will always display the same perfect virtues we carefully signal everyday on Facebook.
We can work on the them becoming paragons of virtue after they stop executing citizens in the street, attacking people peacefully protesting, planting drugs on people, and raping them.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/11/us/florida-deputy-arrested-pl...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pennsylvania-police-officer-ch...
After we get we stop raping, framing, and murdering people yes I do in fact expect those charged with serving law and order to deal with bad people without themselves becoming bad people. People in most of the developed world seem to be managing this so I don't agree that it is an impossible dream.
Many people expressed and believed that automotive fatalities were just an inevitable consequence of the the mode of transport while others insisted on pushing for systematic reforms that drastically reduced fatalities.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/automobiles/50-years-ago-...
Similarly you argue that bad behavior by some police is inevitable. I don't agree
Police officers in the US face 12.9 fatalities per 100,000 workers. In comparison, construction workers see 14.3, agricultural workers see 17.7, farmers and ranchers around 24 and truck drivers 26.9.
As for the rest of your argument, if the 'fine' police officers don't do anything to stand up to the bad police officers or adhere to the blue wall of silence: Then they are not fine people.
I can understand how it might feel scary, though. Just because they don't have much worse outcomes than the average American of their demographic doesn't mean that they don't have more terrifying experiences than average. That's not an excuse, though. Abusive parents are often reacting to past trauma that was inflicted on them, but we still shouldn't allow them to abuse their children. Protecting the public in a constitutional way needs to be the top priority. Officer safety and wellbeing come close behind, but they should still always be in second place.
I don't know about you but I don't have to "carefully" display not killing people who are on the ground unarmed. You're depicting people with 6 months of training as if they were in a fucking warzone every day.
They definitely still carry firearms, and (although they're not as bad as american police) they definitely do abuse their power.
Just this week we had yet another story about this: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/02/video...
That's certainly not the case in Victoria. Aussie cops might be better than American ones, if you're respectable looking, but they still have the same attitude that comes with carrying a gun and being willing and able to use it.
Victoria and NSW police have a bad track record when it comes to abusing their powers and unnecessary violence. Just look at the recent case of an NSW police officer slamming an aboriginal kid to the ground because he'd had a "bad day", or the multiple cases of unlawful strip searches on minors, or the vicpol officers who pepper sprayed and verbally abused a disabled man who they were called to do a welfare check on, or the gay man who's arm they shattered when they raided the wrong house.
The way the police treat you here is highly dependent on how they perceive you. If you ever have the misfortune of getting in trouble with the police, they'll grill you on all sorts of irrelevant shit trying to get a read on you: what suburb you live in, what you do for a job, whether you have a girlfriend/boyfriend. If you're a single man living in a western suburb (in Sydney/Melbourne) with a blue collar job, they'll treat you like dirt. I ended up getting arrested a while back, and when they found out I'm a software engineer living in a more affluent suburb, their demeanour changed instantly.
But maybe that's just me, as a Canadian, with unrealistic beliefs that the police are on my side.
But I could be very wrong so I'm interested in hearing other viewpoints. Or maybe you're thinking of different organizations that I'm less familiar with (perhaps the RCMP?)
Meanwhile on /r/all today... https://old.reddit.com/r/onguardforthee/comments/gvu8fz/cana...
https://www.vancourier.com/opinion/number-of-vancouver-polic...
The 2010 G20 summit in Toronto must have been a walk in the park. One can see the police hand in hand with protesters singing kumbaya. Noted that this event had police officers from all over the country participating. Many conveniently forgot to wear badges and nametags, some conveniently had masks on:
https://www.google.com/search?q=g20+toronto+police+brutality...
And Vancouver, lovely city! Until they lose the Stanley Cup of course:
https://www.google.com/search?q=vancouver+stanley+cup+riots&...
It's slightly better in very small towns where everyone knows everyone and e.g. the chief's kids go to school with your kids
If I was ever in a bad situation and a cop suddenly showed up, I'd feel huge relief.
My dad -- also brown -- has also had the police called on him (usually because he's berating someone at a store or something), and the cops have only ever diffused the situation, never added to it.
Yes, police have the authority to use violence; that doesn't necessarily mean they have to have some sort of essence of violence that drives them to be violent all the time. Indeed, police in many situations do successfully negotiate situations without employing violence. So, clearly resolving situations peacefully is possible even while maintaining the capability of violence; just, often the police have no particular incentive to do so.
Indeed, you can look at the military; soldiers are also violence workers, and yet they seem to be much better at not being violent than the police are, staying disciplined and not firing until the rules of engagement allow them to, where the police seem to often start shooting as soon as they get a bit scared.
The problem is there's hardly any accountability; the feedback loop is horribly broken. A police offer's incentive ought be to employ violence precisely and only when it is called for. To, y'know, correctly use their judgment to discern in the moment what action is most appropriate. It is far from impossible! But since there's minimal accountability for police, well, that's not what happens.
Yes, they are pretty good at RoE, and when it's time to shoot, they shoot the hell out of their target. But their job is distinctly not to spend all day in pursuit of individual criminals and apprehending them.
Military tries to avoid contact with criminals until it's fireball time.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2020/06/03/the-rebellion-in-defense...
The main problem with this is that they don't know what they will be facing when they get to the scene. In most cases things go smoothly (traffic stops, domestic calls, detective work). But when things go bad they go bad quickly.
Of course if the first-responding police wore different uniforms, then there may be less chance of escalation. And people would know that as soon as the first responder has to call backup, then things will get really bad for them -- kind of like if you harass a social worker, you will have a very bad day.
That's how the Brits do it and I think the Germans too.
They do all have extensible batons and training in how to use that to defend themselves against somebody who is a bit handy with their fists or waving a blade about while they retreat, as well as training in how to de-escalate.
Even when there's an armed suspect retreating is very often the appropriate thing. Because you've got time and numbers on your side. Why risk getting stabbed (or shot) to make an arrest now, when in the not too distant future the suspect will be asleep and you or your colleagues can trivially disarm them?
There are scenarios when police need an immediate armed intervention, but they just aren't (and shouldn't be) common enough to justify giving every single cop a handgun and the training needed to use it effectively.
Of course the Americans seem to have largely skipped the second part of that, which doesn't help at all.
I do agree with the training in de-escalation though. German Police has a much more extensive training then the US.
> Q: Are the interactions that are happening right now between police and protesters something that you think is predictable? Or is this something new that we haven't seen before?
> A: It's not completely new; it's just the intensity of it compared [with], let's say, five years ago during the Eric Garner and the Mike Brown protests. What we're seeing is really an immediate escalation to very high levels of force, a high degree of confrontation.
> And I think part of it is driven by deep frustration within policing, which is that police feel under assault, and they have no answer. They trotted out all the possible solutions: police-community dialogue sessions, implicit bias training, community policing, body cameras. And it just didn't work. It didn't make any difference. And so they ran out of excuses.
> So the protests today are a much more kind of existential threat to the police. And the police are overreacting as a result.
I think these quotes are not much better. The primary purpose and responsibility of our government is to protect life and property and maintain the rule of law. What we’ve seen in the last week is peaceful protests subverted by essentially militant groups into what is perhaps best described as insurrection.
If anything the initial police response was mismanaged and totally insufficient. The lack of policing gave space and air to the riotous members hiding within the protests to spread mayhem, destruction, and death. (e.g. [1])
That much at least is my own opinion from following many hours of social media, live-streams and first person accounts.
I would also take issue with the idea that body cameras have not increased accountability at least, even though the cameras do nothing to change the baseline level of danger and violence inherent in police work. I think most police are happy for the camera as it will tell their story and protect them against false accusations.
Of the 10 cases last year where an unarmed black person was shot and killed by police, in most cases the police officer(s) involved were being violently attacked by the person they shot, and video footage was often crucial in evaluating the use of force after the fact. In the two cases that did result in charges, body camera evidence was a material factor in at least one case (Atatiana Jefferson).
[1] - https://twitter.com/stillgray/status/1268176768822685696?s=2...
That's a rather pejorative way of expressing the point. (Thanks NPR.) It would be better to say that policing is about protecting law-abiding citizens from people who are acting antisocially and often violently.
Many of those people are simply criminals. They belong in prison, and often force is required to get them there.
Others are experiencing mental-health problems to varying degrees. Some force may be required, but it's a lot to ask that policemen also serve as social workers, psychologists, etc. The place I live has a parallel organization to provide this, and they work hand-in-hand with the police. It seems to work pretty well.
The lack of such a parallel organization is not a failing of policing, though. It's a failure our elected politicians, and perhaps ultimately ourselves.
So I always found it fascinating how the police --and its public perception-- is portrayed in US media.
Putting someone in handcuffs is not necessarily violent, but it involves using force to impose the will of the state on an individual.
But of course, the problem is different: what KIND of policing we need, and how do we provide accountability. Quis custodiet custodes? [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...
edit: note that the "ipsos" part of the sentence in the wikipedia link is correct, but can be largely omitted. I studied Latin at school (loved it) and this happens frequently with Latin quotations.
Compare
> Who will guard the guards themselves?
with
> Who will guard the guards?
Instead of an addict finding help, or a poorer community member getting assistance, or a troubled kid accessing mental health services - they inevitably instead end up interacting with the police. It's both shortsighted priorities and not the thing police are supposed to deal with.
Unless people become tame and “just get along” police have to confront violence, like it or not.
Of course, we can improve policing. They can get trained better, they can learn to deescalate first. But they also need coöperation from the people they police... and that can take time.
All those jobs were dumped on cops, who aren't that good at it.
Especially dealing with crazies and druggies, and having no good place to send them.
On the other hand, cops are too hard to fire. It's not like they're stack-ranked. The bottom few percent are not fired for underperforming. Bad cops are a minority, but they're not ex-cops soon enough.
And over represented on street duty because the specialty task force jobs, management and investigator roles are where the high achievers work their way to.
The "drug" war is entirely caused by society being crummy and having incomplete social safety nets. Those things should ALSO be fixed, but take far longer than a moderately sized reply to even begin to discuss. Staying on topic for just 'the drug war' and related arrests.
It would be trivial to make all of the criminals in the drug war vanish nearly instantly: just make getting a drug fix legal, cheap, and easy. (General reference, compare the Prohibition of Alcohol to booze today vs other drugs.)
Yes, some drugs are really bad, but making them not-legally-obtainable just means some criminal's going to fill the gap.
Clearly, the answer is that police departments are filling roles they do not need to fill, and have expensive, military style equipment they do not need to have. I hope we see more cities bringing these ideas to the table.
The former [1].
>1033 receipts are associated with both an increase in the number of observed police killings in a given year as well as the change in the number of police killings from year to year, controlling for a battery of possible confounding variables including county wealth, racial makeup, civilian drug use, and violent crime.
[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/militarization-makes-police-more-v...
It's ridiculous for the mayor to be doing this. Where there is crime, policing is needed. Cities that have tried to cut back in the past (the impetus usually being budget) usually end up with problems, and it usually doesn't work out.
The number of 911 calls is rising rapidly.
Surely, there's an opportunity to 'not buy big surplus toys from the Army' but I suggest that this is not a hugely meaningful budget line item.
The problem in America is absolutely not 'over-policing', it's that police are asked to play more roles many of which they might not be suited to, and of course, some police are far too aggressive, which is also driven by the great prevalence of guns in the population.
The disband crowd still wants people patrolling and available to deal with emergencies, but generally wants them to be specialized, unarmed, and focused on peace rather than violence. Ensure we have mental health specialists on call, dedicated people focused on addressing the homeless community, etc. Yes, we'll need a few folks who are trained to use force, but that shouldn't be the normal mode of police.
For example, if you forced the car thieves out of the car, or parked it in place by blocking the road, you might be looking at assault charges.
Similar arguments can be said for most other common crimes.
Consider noise ordinances (harassing / threatening your neighbor until they shut up), trespassers (Threats? Forcibly move them?), burglaries (rob them back?), domestic violence (victims that kill the assailant are often charged with premeditated murder), etc.
To make a tired argument, without any sort of moral guidance, people have no reason to live other than for their immediate needs. On of my friends grew up in the Baltimore inner city, and he says this is how most people are. They just act on their impulses and smash in a friend's face because they owe a few dollars. What turned my friend's life around is his decision to follow God instead of his own desires. I think there is something to that. It doesn't seem that giving people free money and housing solves the problem.
There are many much more destituted countries than inner city USA where people have much more functional societies with much less. I spent most of my childhood growing up in such a place. No running water or plumbing. Limited technology. Electricity one hour a week. Everyone walked everywhere. People lived off of what they could gather and fish. There wasn't widespread violence, drug use, sexual abuse, etc. like we see in the inner cities. The difference is these communities were very religious (muslim and animism) and they did not have much exposure to corrupting US substances such as drugs and pornography.
But a problem arises when community outreach or community contacts by non-police have a risk of violence associated with them.
Especially contacts with people with a history of mental health related violence. Or, domestic violence intervention. These two examples is probably where a lot of unwanted or unexpected police violence occurs. I don't know if sending in social workers would work well in such contexts.
Sending out social workers with police escorts probably doesn't change outcomes very much. But is could help depending if the armed police do not have to lead the encounter.
It’s not a theoretical situation. It sounds like you’re speculating but you could read about it or talk to people about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
> The Peelian principles summarise the ideas that Sir Robert Peel developed to define an ethical police force. The approach expressed in these principles is commonly known as policing by consent in the United Kingdom and other countries including Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
> In this model of policing, police officers are regarded as citizens in uniform. They exercise their powers to police their fellow citizens with the implicit consent of those fellow citizens. "Policing by consent" indicates that the legitimacy of policing in the eyes of the public is based upon a general consensus of support that follows from transparency about their powers, their integrity in exercising those powers and their accountability for doing so.
Example: The US military spreading democracy by consent. Sure, lots of recipients of 'democracy' have expressed that they want us to leave, but individuals cannot withdraw their consent from our democracy.
> To recognise always that the power of the police to fulfil their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behaviour, and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
It's a tactical truism that you can't police a city without consent of the populace. You can destroy it, but not rule it. Look at what happened in Mogadishu or Baghdad, it takes thousands of troops and the willingness to kill civilians to hold a hostile city, even for the US military. Recognizing that is pretty much realpolitik.
- - - -
In re: consent and democracy in general, I dunno. It's not like the social contract is an actual document that you have to sign (or not), eh? I tried to build a flying saucer and leave the planet. YMMV.
Police are often the revenue generators for individual towns. That's inherently wrong.
Isn't this already a solved problem in other parts of the world, such as Britain, Ireland, Norway, Iceland and New Zealand, where most officers are unarmed when they are on patrol? Why can't we learn from other countries?
He’s saying let’s analyze the work they do, find alternatives for those roles, and _then_ reduce the scope of the police force.
Defunding seems much less important and farther down the road than making their jobs achievable, and the rest of us safer.
There are secondary effects too, though. The police force competes for funds with other public infrastructure like schools. Defunding the police means we can allocate that money to more productive and less violent causes.
Does the police force operate like an autonomous organization or something? Is there a reason why the city can't institute a policy like "all civil forfeitures" go toward social outreach programs only?
It feels like Europe and other places have a much more reasonable and nuanced view. Police get funded, and well funded, but the job requirements are strict, and the emphasis is more about public good and safety. If there's a crime the police do exist and do show up but they also don't shoot people dead in their house at 3am.
It's pretty clear that police unions allow for a lot of this institutional rot and inability to address abuse. I fear that the left doesn't want to recognize that unions are capable of becoming institutional agents of oppression and injustice. Yet reforming public sector unions is perhaps one of the most practical and effective steps to correcting the malfeasance of police as we know them today without fundamentally changing how they operate.
Let's not lump other public sector unions in with police unions; the teacher's union has nothing to do with police brutality.
> However, in most cities and states, police unions are treated as members in good standing of local labor councils and federations. They often work closely with other municipal unions, from firefighters to teachers, to protect labor rights and municipal budgets. Given their size and power, most other city unions are wary of alienating them.
> This is an enormous political problem. If the police are to be defunded and reined in, their unions need to be split off and isolated from the rest of organized labor. If police unions are able to maintain a common front with other city unions, they will almost certainly be able to resist any meaningful efforts to restrain them.
So basically, yea other unions are complicit and unable to reign in the abuse of police unions. It's not the way I'd try to solve it but that's how Jacobin seems to be posing the issue - other unions in the locality should be reforming neighboring unions.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/police-labor-union-organi...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enfo...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...
Policing isn't even in the top ten most dangerous jobs. Save the honors for fishermen and lumberjacks.
Total Line of Duty Deaths: 147
9/11 related cancer 24
Accidenta l1
Assault 3
Automobile crash 22
Drowned 1
Duty related illness 2
Explosion 1
Gunfire 48
Gunfire (Inadvertent) 2
Heart attack 19
Motorcycle crash 1
Struck by vehicle 14
Training accident 1
Vehicle pursuit 1
Vehicular assault 7Did you read the article? The roadmap he laid out seems to be the middle ground you're looking for.
However, the reason this interview is topical has to do with someone paying for cigarettes with a possibly counterfeit bill and refusing to give them back. That seems to me to be an entirely reasonable reason to call the police.
"It would be easy to think that the police officer is a figure who has existed since the beginning of civilization. […] however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered […] on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704." - How the U.S. Got Its Police Force http://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
"Slave patrols and Night Watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities. For example, New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans (National Constable Association, 1995), the St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city, and many southern police departments began as slave patrols. In 1704, the colony of Carolina developed the nation’s first slave patrol. Slave patrols helped to maintain the economic order and to assist the wealthy landowners in recovering and punishing slaves who essentially were considered property." - A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...
While most people today believe that they are “free” and “independent” the facts are that they’re still living in enslavement. The only difference is that they’ve been indoctrinated from early childhood to accept their slavery. And in the case of the police, they’ve been conditioned to accept the enforcers of their enslavement as something good and beneficial to themselves, when in fact, the police exist to enforce whatever the masters dictate and to protect the masters and their economic interests from the slaves. This fact is proven on a daily basis worldwide; whenever and wherever the slaves rise up against the current system of enslavement, the police rush in to suppress them. And yet, very few of the slaves take note of the obvious and ask themselves the question: who do the police really serve?
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-ho...
> New data presented at the conference by a Dutch scholar, Pieter Spierenburg, showed that the homicide rate in Amsterdam, for example, dropped from 47 per 100,000 people in the mid-15th century to 1 to 1.5 per 100,000 in the early 19th century.
> Professor Stone has estimated that the homicide rate in medieval England was on average 10 times that of 20th century England. A study of the university town of Oxford in the 1340's showed an extraordinarily high annual rate of about 110 per 100,000 people. Studies of London in the first half of the 14th century determined a homicide rate of 36 to 52 per 100,000 people per year.
You can thank your local police department, among other institutions, for that dramatic decline in crime rates.
Combine all that lacking social programs and support with the culture around guns, which a lot of the populace owns, and you have by necessity a very militant police force. America has a lot of social issues which much of the populace does not want to address and the police end up arresting it all and putting them in prison. It impacts the middle classes a lot less and they don't want to pay for it so as a populace they suffer the consequences of those choices in their schools and criminal gangs and subsequently military-like police. There are other ways to do this but I highly doubt America will choose any of them in the coming decade.
Because they're all considered "leftist" if not "socialist" politics now, and the Overton window of acceptable discussion in the US has moved very far to the right over the last four years.
MDMA is far safer and fun then MDA MDE PMA PMMA but you get the latter sold as it because no one wants anything but MDMA. Same with all sorts of synthetic RCs and drugs.
1) Replace 90% of police with community officers (unarmed) and social workers. Have them working their 'beats' regularly, pro-actively monitoring their areas and checking in with their charges. Again, unarmed.
2) Keep 10% for old style police work, that are only escalated to when specific conditions are met: approved by a municipal authority, wear bodycams, and have the permission of the caller to appear (within reason). Make it a real pain in the neck to bring them out, so they only show up for truly dangerous situations, not like some guy reselling cigarettes that ends in death.
A lawyer recently made an observation that really stuck with me: Only call the police when you're okay with the person you're calling about possibly dying. Sounds pretty strong when you put it that way - but it's just making explicit the implicit idea that the police will show up, the police are authorized (expected, even) to use force, and if there's disobedience or even just misunderstanding, the person could end up dead. See for example this story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond
If peace officers did most of the work, that could be a game-changing improvement.
Or perhaps we should settle the matter now, distribute working firearms and ammo to every non-felon over the age of 16 (or possibly 12). Either things will heat up and cool rapidly or everyone will suddenly acquire good manners. In the long run the USA can begin a renaissance of political equality and good will for all.
While saying we should shrink the police departments, the author seems to say we should do it to help the cops who are being overburdened with things they shouldn’t be asked to do.
I like the approach because it’s not saying cops are bad, but rather seems to say their behaviors are hurting people and they may be hurting as well and proposes solutions that may help everyone.
Really grateful I read this tonight.
This appears to be another diversion (or attempt at despair) gathered from all of the pieces in motion so far in 2020.
Sticking to the policy debate, do you/we really need paramilitary prisons on american soil would have made for better rootcause reporting.
I found this part in particular egregious:
> Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use violence in situations where the average citizen would be arrested.
Look at American policing from a Northern European perspective in general and a Norwegian perspective in particular it is pretty clear to me what some of the problems are.
American police has VERY SHORT TRAINING which from what I have read is very focused on the use of violence. Even the rule of engagement emphasize shock, terror and control, rather than de-escalation.
You become a police in the US in mere weeks in a very military style Academy.
In Norway and I believe much of Europe police training is a lot like taking a Bachelor degree running several years. Training emphasize a lot on social work, psychology, human rights, understanding behavior of people with mental problems, the criminal mind etc.
What I have seen from US police recruitment videos seems to be that they are essentially recruiting some sort of soldier. In Norway it is much more like recruiting a social worker. For instance far more women work in the police here. And I know from people who have worked in security that a common strategy here is to pair up women with bigger guys because women are often good at defusing situations. They often make people calm down more easily. Big testosterone brutes shouting loudly, don't calm people down.
The US has a violent police force because that is how they are trained to be. That is the kind of people they are recruiting and that is how they get equipped.
It seems profoundly wrong to just sort of "GIVE UP" on policing all together when there are so many flaws in how it is done.
It does not mean I entirely disagree. I do in fact agree that policing in the US covers far too many areas. People call cops for things that would be unthinkable here in Norway. The barrier to calling the police in the US seems exceedingly low.
Like you see minor disorder in a class causing police to be called. Police is called to handle situations a teacher should handle.
And yes the US does of course use its police and prison system as a compensation for having no functioning welfare state. Because the US does not want to pay money to take care of poor people they instead pay triple to have the police handle problems a much cheaper civilians agency could have handled.
But I guess in the US it is much easier to get funding for police than for "soft" government type of jobs. Until Americans stop hating and distrusting government so much I am not sure how you solve that.
I am all for reforming the US social safety net and criminal justice system, but I think you need to understand what we deal with. We have, for one reason or another, very dangerous areas of our nation and they are filled with weapons and hopeless people willing to use them. I don't think the problem we face has an easy solution. I think it helps to try to empathize with the situation black people in America face on a daily basis. Then it helps to empathize with the situation first responders have to deal with on a daily basis.
Here is a rather disturbing video which led to a firefighter and a civilian losing their life:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=4&v=fR6lMfMx4O8&...
it helped me understand the issue is not so simple.
It definitely feels like the police in the US are generally less trained than those in most western European countries (or at least the one I live in), and while this doesn't necessarily make them more violent, it does seem to increase the variance in attitude and behavior I've experienced among cops in the US. There are those I wouldn't trust to use physical force even when necessary, and clearly others I would not trust to use force as a secondary or last-resort option. It's rather concerning when you don't know what you will get.
This is definitely not equally true of every department. I've lived in some smaller towns where the police are noticeably more compassionate, as well as some cities like SF where the presiding strategy seems to be avoiding the overuse the police partly because of their inherent unpredictability, an overly punitive justice system, etc.
Make the posted speed limit actually tend to line up for green to green when going straight, and send turns down the road from the sides just before straight (to make going a tiny bit slower hit the green).
In a world of increasing inequality fewer people need the police.
The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much.
A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put you into this situation to begin with.
So using the police as a tool against protesters only proves them right. A protest should never be met with violence, unless you want to encourage more action from protestors.
In other words the police are the wrong tool for the job. The police absolutely should not be involved in protests. This is a great job for social workers.
Riots on the other hand should be met with police action. However, if you have a riot then that means you didn't hear the demands of the people to begin with. If you make it to a full blown riot you have MESSED UP.
The whole philosophy behind protests is really easy to understand. Spend a bit of time reading Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, a little Ghandi and then you start with a lot of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X to understand the philosophies behind American protests.
Not necessarily. Riots can begin when bad actors take advantage of the cover of numbers provided by a peaceful protest. If there are enough bad actors, usually masquerading as peaceful protesters, to reach critical mass, then a riot can start.
All it takes is for one person to break a window to signal to the other bad actors that the riot is about to begin. This piece by Tanner Greer [1] examines the phenomenon in way more detail than I do here.
[1] https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/05/on-days-of-disor...
What if we saw a bad actor at a rally for a politician, and then bring the full force of the state upon the entire crowd because of that bad actor. It would be absurd to use that opportunity to mace and teargas and shoot rubber bullets to disperse the crowd. It is equally absurd to do the same here in political protests.
Or you lost a sports game, let's not pretend the bar for rioting is very high...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_rio...
EDIT: Sorry, I missed "you just won a sports game" as a reason for rioting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_riot
> After the Canadiens defeated the Boston Bruins in the first round of the 2008 Stanley Cup playoffs, fans began rioting in celebration.
But it's also a separate issue entirely. It's like seeing a scatter plot and being like but what about this point right here ---------------------------->
However to understand why this would be the case(starting from a naive POV), you have to go beyond general discussion of injustices and reforms into deeper examination of the power structure and loyalties, which is hard to surface out of soundbite media.
Getting large groups of people together to chant in common cause can easily be just about showing solidarity around a common cause. People out in the streets today aren't trying to get police to abuse them. They're trying to show the world this is something they care about.
Why beat the crap out of someone for saying I believe x? It's antithetical to the American spirit, I think.
This is going to sound a bit conspiratorial, but I've long suspected that there is a bit of astroturfing happening on Hacker News and this doesn't alleviate my suspicions.
> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.
People like to give examples such as the civil rights' movement as the effectiveness of pacific demonstration, but that was just a good tactical decision made by Dr. King and other organizers, since they knew that police was ready to kill them at any excuse. In the case of black leaders of the time, any demonstration, even a pacific one, was able to make them subversive to the system.
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/ive... ... the American Negro collectively is richer than most nations of the world. We have an annual income of more than thirty billion dollars a year, which is more than all of the exports of the United States and more than the national budget of Canada. Did you know that? That's power right there, if we know how to pool it. (Yeah) [Applause] We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles; we don't need any Molotov cocktails. (Yes) We just need to go around to these stores (Yes sir), and to these massive industries in our country (Amen), and say, "God sent us by here (All right) to say to you that you're not treating His children right. (That's right) And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda fair treatment where God's children are concerned. Now if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you."
Obviously Dr. King didn't realise that economic sanctions are a form of violence monopolised by state level actors?