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Comment by Digory | Hacker News Reader

A BLM co-founder is on NPR advocating to "defund the police." "It’s not possible for the entity of law enforcement to be a compassionate, caring governmental agency in black communities. That’s not the training, that’s not the institution."[0]

There's a continuum of what "defund" means, but the idealists are pushing for actual, no-hyperbole defunding and disbanding. Police cannot be made good. They believe would be easier to reduce crime some other way than authorized state violence, and the funds could be redirected to those ways.

[0] https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/06/03/black-lives-matte...

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In response to persistent injustice by police, there are really only a few options:

(a) Get used to it.

(b) Get ready to join up. More officers who care about justice mean that it's easier to get rid of the unjust officers.

It doesn't shock me that (c) is being mentioned. It's probably a bluff, but might have enough credibility to change the power dynamics.

The current way that police are chosen, trained, and managed seems to have a corrosive effect on members of the police force. Option (b) with a sprinkling of (c) seems best, but it's clear the status quo in depts is not resulting in policing that is positive for the community as a whole.

One would expect that if the system were set up right, it should a) find people who would police well b) setup systems to ensure as few abuses as possible happen c) encourage the good cops to push out the bad cops.

It's pretty clear that it's more than the people themselves that are broken. The system isn't set up to result in good policing.

B) It is easier to pull someone down than it is to pull someone up

It worked for the country of Georgia. They disbanded their entire national police force, and violent crime immediately went down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_Georgia_(co...

This page says Georgia has 42k police officers.

I think the disbandment you mention was clearing out old corrupt officers and replacing them with new recruits, which is mentioned there. Not actually getting rid of the police.

They do now. Because yes, they did re-establish the police force later. But step one was completely eliminating the existing force. 100% reset.

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