There's a growing call to defund the police. Here's what it means
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The alternatives in those particular situations (the neighborhood makes it work) looks a lot like vigilantism to me, which doesn't sound net safer. There's no particular requirement of equality or due process there, not even notionally.
Why on earth do they need to be armed? There is zero reason for a local police officer be carrying firearms. It's insane. Dis-arming all but specialist firearms officers should be the first step.
I find it really frightening when I visit the US and all the police are armed to the teeth.
In the US, that's not the case and any attempts to restrict gun ownership meets huge political hurdles. Even if those restrictions are what other countries would deem to be common sense, e.g. Switzerland or New Zealand.
I think it's all kinds of crazy to sell guns in supermarkets with next to no checks on who owns them, but I get why police would want to have guns in the US.
Let's lower the stakes with what we do control - the police carrying guns.
What? Of course criminals carry guns to threaten and harm other citizens, including other criminals. They aren’t principally concerned with defending themselves against the police.
Yea, A, you might be able to get a single shot hunting rifle in a walmart in a rural part of the USA... but it may not work to begin with because it's a cheap piece of crap. You're really not going to buy some eggs, milk, loaf of bread and an AK in the same store in the USA. Stop believing bullshit.
B, Neil Steinberg for the Chicago Sun Times believed the same thing of "no checks". He got denied a gun because he got picked up for beating his wife a few years prior. Then blamed the store for the deny. Which, a gun store clerk/owner is in full legal right to deny service to anyone, even if the customer qualifies. The DEA encourages them to deny and report people if they feel the customer is purchasing a gun for malice... except, Neil beat his wife after drinking too much booze. So the DEA denied him on that one. Lots of people think they can get easily approved for a gun and realize real quick they can't. I've been in gun stores plenty of times to see people apply, wait and get denied.
Just like in countries where guns are illegal, you can buy guns on the black market.
If you actually know cops in the USA, they generally like those with conceal permit licenses. It means they're not prior felons, they don't want to lose their gun or the license, thus don't want to do anything stupid. There are exceptions, just like with anything else. "Sovereign citizens" are a special class of complete stupid. But a majority of legal gun owners have zero interest in doing anything stupid. I already know all of this is unpopular opinion and I'll get lambasted by non-gun owners. Whatever.
and yes, I do own 4 handguns, 2 shotguns (for trap), and .30-06 for moose hunting, and have a concealed carry permit.
> you might be able to get a single shot hunting rifle in a walmart in a rural part of the USA... but it may not work to begin with because it's a cheap piece of crap.
My nearest grocery store in a major city is bi-mart and I can pick up some very nice semi-auto pistols along with my local dairy’s milk
> If you actually know cops in the USA, they generally like those with conceal permit licenses.
The cops I know generally hate conceal permits because it gives holders an inflated sense of their abilities on how and when to use the weapon in a high stress situation
Again, everyone’s got different anecdotes but they don’t make compelling arguments.
You don't have to look far to find massacres committed by legal gun owners in the US: El Paso (2019), Las Vegas (2017), the list goes on. If someone can legally buy a gun and then do this, the checks are insufficient. Contrastingly, there hasn't been a similar event in the UK in my lifetime.
I'm not suggesting all gun owners are lunatics, bear ill will to others or do anything unsafe with their guns. Nonetheless, if someone can legally buy a gun and do anything with it, the arms race with police is inevitable.
This is false.
One has to pass a federal background check and some states have additional checks and restrictions as well.
For example, contrast the UK, which in addition to outright banning most firearms such as handguns, requires a "good reason" to issue a firearms permit - and things like self defense are not considered acceptable reasons [2].
[0] https://injury.findlaw.com/product-liability/gun-laws.html
[1] https://consumer.findlaw.com/consumer-transactions/private-g...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_the_Uni...
2. Next to no checks. I looked at comments challenging my assertion and did a quick bit of research, finding articles such as [1] which suggests there are minimal checks that consume very little time. As far as I can tell, the checks are based on whether you've previously committed crimes which ignores whether you're likely to commit a crime with a gun in the future (such as the 2019 El Paso shooting). More alarmingly, I found suggestions that these checks are optional and performed at the discretion of the seller, although I didn't pursue it further to corroborate the claims.
What about the quote was false?
What do you think is the chance of being killed by shot and killed by police in countries that don't arm their police like they're in a war zone, like the UK?
A lot lower, at around 0.000005%.
Do you realise that the general homicide rate in the UK is also lower, at 1.2 per 100,000, compared to 4.96 in the US?
Officers writing parking violations might not need firearms, but traffic stops are also dangerous as individuals with outstanding warrants might be desperate to avoid arrest. Also, intoxicated people are famously bad drivers.
The antagonist had a kitchen knife and the first responding policewoman drew her pistol. But what now? She had gone straight to the lethal option and had no other recourse. The antagonist became more aggressive to defend himself.
Her colleague thankfully disarmed him with use of a truncheon.
Not true. I presume that PSNI, like any law enforcement agency in the U.S., operates with some form of a use of force continuum that ranges from officer presence to deadly force. One of the most important aspects of that continuum that is taught to officers is that you can move up and down the continuum as the situation dictates. If you draw your sidearm you are not obligated to remain at that level of the use of force continuum. You should continue to make every effort to gain control of the situation, and deescalate.
At the same time, you are not obligated to use a lower level of force than that which you are facing, and a kitchen knife is a deadly weapon. It's very much a training issue as much as anything to educate officers in deescalation techniques, less-lethal weapons and control techniques, and scene management to minimize casualties. In the situation you describe though, it was absolutely appropriate for her to draw her sidearm, while still doing everything in her power to regain control of the situation so that she would not need to use it.
That's not what the person you're replying to means.
They mean despite what other options the officer had available to them, they had already reached for the lethal option (drawing their pistol) and from there had nowhere to go but threatening to kill or actually killing.
As soon as an officer turns up with a firearm, you have irreversibly escalated the situation to out-of-control insanity.
Police can’t enforce restraining orders when the victim doesn’t have $10K’s to hire a lawyer to go to court and get the order in the first place. Getting such orders is hit or miss from what I’ve heard, even if you have the cash.
Instead, sand an unarmed social worker to recover the items. If the abuser escalates, or the social worker witnesses abuse, send the police to arrest the abuser and prosecute them for assault. Now, the prosecution has an unbiased witness to help them win their case.
90% of the time, the abuser won’t escalate, and the police won’t need to drive out. Repeat the exercise for all routine police actions. (Heck, we even have armed police enforcing playground rules in many schools.)
Having done that, and having eliminated 90% of the police’s workload, cut their budget 80%, and hold what’s left of the department to a much higher standard.
A 10% rate of violence is huge, especially when irrationality and domestic abuse is involved. If armed police are reduced dramatically in number, will they be able to respond in ten minutes?
This is mostly due to racial disparities in prosecution and sentencing than crime rates between races. Drug possession accounts for a significant fraction of the disparity: Whites use illegal drugs at a similar rate, but rarely go to prison for it.
https://www.mic.com/articles/86519/19-actual-statistics-abou...
The thousands upon thousands of sooo called "victimless" crime that it used to dump millions of people in to the criminal system which then society punishes for the rest of their lives by denying them opportunities in all segments of life from Jobs to Housing to access to government assistance.
Often time people have "no other means of making money" due to this cycle of over criminalization, they were busted with a small amount of weed, from that point they were a "convicted criminal" where by many employers will deny them a job, schools will deny them admission, landlords will deny them housing, etc.
We have a narrative in this nation that a Misdemeanor Conviction Is Not a Big Deal [1], this is a false narrative one that the legal system pushes because they often over charge individuals with felonies then "allow" them to plea out to a "lesser" misdemeanor to improve the efficiency of "justice".
The biggest flaw in the system is that we have created so many criminal laws that we need to make the "justice system" an assembly line of contract negotiation
[1] https://time.com/76356/a-misdemeanor-conviction-is-not-a-big...
[2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/overcriminal...
Edit: What's nice about cops versus, for instance, the Department of Motor Vehicles is that police make home visits. Maybe some of the boring stuff could be done by non-violent agencies that make home visits, like child protective services.
Not to say there isn't any consideration. Some people say that poverty, mental health issues or lack of quality education is a driver of crime and that we need to divert resources. Others, people like me, want to experiment to replace some of the things police do, study it, follow the evidence and maybe eventually build something entirely different.
What I love about this debate is it's causing people to think about, often for the first time, why we've set it up this way.
What then?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2193971/Camden-poli...
The county police became the de facto police department for Camden, which is a model for what would likely happen in any city: the police or sheriff’s department for the next largest jurisdiction encompassing the city would start policing the city.
Policy-wise the motivations for retaining a city police department can be differences in crime between urban and suburban/rural areas, and population density & subsequent patrol officer density - and as a subset of that, response times. I would imagine that cities, and specifically the elected leaders, are also under significant pressure from police unions to retain their departments. Furthermore, disbanding a police department for any major city means that the county or state police department suddenly has to take on the workload of what was previously being done by hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of city police, and no department is prepared for that.
> And presumably if there's no county police the state police have jurisdiction.
There are many cities in the US that are outside of any county, and are their own incorporated entity on par in the hierarchy with the surrounding counties. As such the state police would be the most likely department to take over policing. Again though, that's a major resource burden and logistics problem; any feelings about the pros and cons of reduced police presence aside no policy maker is likely going to be comfortable with that kind of impact.
That won’t be better, it will be far worse, but it’s a thing people can do, so in the absence of other things to do, it may end up as the thing that is done. Desperate people do foolish things if they see no alternative.
It had sent a signal that police is to serve civil society and not be part of oppresion apparatus.
https://www.dcaf.ch/transforming-police-central-and-eastern-...
If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting, then other cities toying with the idea decide to follow suit.
Eventually you even get to a place where even the rightwingers are proposing this in the slower-moving places, if marijuana legalization is any kind of model - I'm in a state with a very loose medical marijuana bill sitting on the Governor's desk that will be de facto recreational legalization, which was proposed and pushed through by Repubs, and that really kinda blows my mind.
But it also applies to the non-police. They aren't angels, either. And in the absence of police, they aren't going to become angels. They're going to still beat their wives, they're going to still mug random strangers, they're going to still do protection rackets. And they may do even more of those things when they don't have to worry about being stopped.
And then, the victims aren't angels, either. If they use a Second Amendment defense to those problems, they're not going to do it perfectly. They're going to do it in anger. They're going to do it with vigilante justice, hitting more people than they should, and hitting some of the wrong people.
> If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting...
In light of human nature, I'm not banking on the results being wonderful.
First, folks who have been calling for prison abolition, for instance, tend to be anti-gun control because it's a tool that's used to put more black and brown people in prisons. A lot of these folks also call for defunding police.
Second, this is different from saying "citizens don't need guns." That different argument is simply based on the idea that people are less safe when they have guns, not more safe. While some is due to accidents, much of it is suicides.
I appreciate the discord between current political alliances, but explaining that it exists seems to imply that major reductions in policing is not a fully considered plan.