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Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it will work. Minneapolis has one of the highest crime rates in the country, just as Baltimore did, and that city saw crime rates rise even higher after protests led to tighter regulations on the Police ... but I don't live in Minneapolis and so I'm curious to see how it will turn out. I support this as a great social experiment.

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But the high crime rate and low rate of actually solving and punishing crimes reinforces the argument. It’s worth comparing various police-related statistics between Minneapolis and St. Paul. Police across America do indeed have systemic problems, but Minneapolis does seem to belong to a handful of truly bad police departments.

My sense is that most (but not all) of the people cheering this on are like you. They don't live there, they have no family there, and they have no ties to the city or the state. Spoke with a childhood friend last night, and he's leaving the city and moving to Minnetonka once his lease is up in August. Everyone else he knows is doing something similar. Obviously this is all anecdotal, and like you said we get to watch a massive experiment play out in real time. With the advent of more virtual work, people are going to bail on places where they see risk as too high. I don't live there anymore, was born in Iowa, but grew up in Minneapolis and moved there when I was 5. People, especially in tech it seems, have an element of optimism that's useful in most situations. I don't share that in this case. We've approached a sort of social contagion where if you don't support the most extreme positions you are shamed (literally, like the Mayor was).

I feel this way about San Francisco. I'm getting out this month, and I'm not coming back until I have to. I can leave without a COL salary adjustment so long as I stay in the state. I imagine lots of other people are doing the same thing as me. There's little point to staying in the city as a renter if you don't have to go into the office. There's almost no point in staying if you can't go into the office, even if you wanted to.

We're also helping out everyone else by leaving if you think about it. Landlords will be forced to reduced rents even further for the people who can't leave but don't qualify for aid, and aren't lucky enough to be in a rent-controlled unit.

It’s interesting that we never consider the status quo to ever be an extreme. Perhaps part of why these root-to-branch efforts seem so extreme is because the Overton window has been shifted so far to the right wrt Criminal Justice we’ve lost perspective.

American policing is not exactly a shining beacon of civil achievement. It has a long history of being both problematic and largely ineffectual at establishing law & order within the confines of the US constitution.

When violent crime started dropping precipitously in the 90s researchers scrambled to figure out the recipe so it could be repeated and amplified. Ultimately they came up empty handed. Interestingly, the Environmental Lead Hypothesis emerged as a likely cause (especially because the pattern can be seen across different countries, cultures, and criminal justice systems) but does have its own share of detractors.

But regardless, we don’t actually have solid evidence our current approach to law & order is even effective. It’s largely a faith-based system. And it’s performance is abysmal... So we should be open to “radical” change as micro-optimizations aren’t going to help us here.

The Overton Window is as far left as it ever has been such that drug possession is becoming more decriminalized, sentencing and bail reforms have recently passed, and body cameras are more prevalent than ever before.

Reduced policing in Baltimore after Freddy Gray's death has led to more than 100 extra murders of black men per year.

Baltimore police have willfully chosen to disengage with community policing. There was no real “reduction in policing”.

Their budget has also risen by about $60 million since Freddy Gray. No real change in department culture other than low officer morale.

This is an example of the more “moderate” police reform in action: no fundamental change to police structure, just some new training and procedures. It didnt work. Officers hate it so they pouted and disengaged.

I still live in Minneapolis and most people that I know want to stay.

Everyone who watched the video knows George Floyd was murdered, but the MPD and its union still want to fight their termination and all charges.

MPD response to protesters has been incompetent, callous, and malicious. The majority of MPD are suburban Trump supporters and like all Trump supporters they can't stand progressive places like Minneapolis. The last straw for me was when the MPD police arrested a reporter in broad daylight on live TV.

Cities live and die based on those with real roots in the city. Which is why it’s largely not worthwhile to shape city policy on the desire of “tourists” who are either transient or “if 1 bad thing I don’t like happens I’m leaving immediately”

All public sector unions should be banned, I'm not going to fight you on that one. But, again, I just don't share this optimism.

>The majority of MPD are suburban Trump supporters and like all Trump supporters they can't stand progressive places like Minneapolis.

Maybe things have changed since I moved away in 2013, but this wasn't true back then. Both parents of one of my classmates in elementary school were cops and lived in South Minneapolis. If it is true today, that seems to suggest an interesting selection bias no? Either MPD only hires surburban Trump supporters or only these suburban Trump supporters want to sign up to be cops in the city. In either case, and like I mentioned above, we get to watch a neat little experiment play out in real time if we're going to disband the MPD and rebuild it.

It was true, even back then. In 2015, only 5.4% of the MPD lived within city limits. [1] This isn't a recent change, and IMO it's a major driver of the "occupier"/"us vs them" mindset many cops in the MPD appear to have. (example: [2])

[1] https://www.mprnews.org/story/2015/03/20/police-officer-resi... [2] http://www.citypages.com/news/minneapolis-police-officer-urg...

As another commenter pointed out, Over 90% of MPD has been from outside the metro for a long time.

Sounds like you never really knew what's going on here. The MPD is incompetent and wiping the slate clean is not an extreme position to many people here.

I don't believe the suggestion here is to disband the concept of having police entirely, just to disband the current police department.

Fair enough. The devil is in the details of course. But I am skeptical that the crime rates would drop if there is less policing since the crime rates are not caused by police.

> I am skeptical that the crime rates would drop if there is less policing since the crime rates are not caused by police.

About that...

>When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.

https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...

An alternative interpretation is that crime rates are so high because police spending is the wrong way to deal with the problem. Money that could be spent on drug treatment programs is instead being spent 10x on a paramilitary organization that openly admits and jokes about its policy is to shoot first and ask questions later.

Historically police department reorganizations have actually often involved increases in "policing," in addition to structural changes in what "policing" looks like...

is reducing crime rates the goal here?

reducing the abuses committed by police department is a benefit to society, even if the reported crime rate rises (up to a point, of course)

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