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Comment by aortega | Hacker News Reader

I'm not from US and when I see people claim for abolition of police I can only imagine the world they live in, completely disconnected from reality. Seriously, abolishing police? Is this some kind of demolition-man-like future?

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“Abolish the police” isn't “abolish law enforcement” or even “abolish armed law enforcement”, but “abolish the centralize all-purpose paramilitart law-enforcement agencies that dominate local law enforcement (and, often, more than that, up to and sometimes including local politics) throughout the US. Its a call to radically redesign local government and community services and redesign how law enforcement fits into that, because of the perception not only that the current model is broken, but that decades of pouring money into reforms of police within the current model in response to problems has exacerbate the problems by draining resources from other priorities and forcing the police to expand the scope of their responsibility further out of the scope of their competency. Reform within the existing basic model being viewed as a failure leaves seeking a different model.

Is abolishing the police primarily an actual sub-movement or is it primarily a straw-man?

"De-fund the police," as I've heard explained from people who actually claim to hold the belief, is about taxpayers being very generous when funding police and very stingy when funding education, infrastructure, and social programs. The idea is that the next marginal dollar might not best be spent on the police, even though taxpayers following historical trends would overwhelmingly vote to spend it there.

I'm no social scientist, but I've certainly noticed that in the inner city the police always seem to have freshly painted, frequently-washed, current-year cars, freshly paved and remodeled offices with new signs and landscaping, new uniforms, and so on, while the food bank and the school are decrepit and run-down. The one time I bothered to look up salaries, they were, uhhh, entirely in-line with those outer appearances. On the basis of this purely personal and anecdotal evidence, I would tentatively support such proposals.

Visiting San Francisco and seeing signs in every parking lot warning you to keep your valuables out-of-sight when parked and then learning that apparently they've decided to not punish crimes with damage below $1000, resulting in a predictable crime wave, makes me think that some part of the "de-fund the police" movement actually does want to get rid of the police, though.

I haven't been paying enough attention to figure out how large these relative sub-groups are. Legitimately, I mean -- obviously if you listen to conservative media you'll get the impression that the crazies are the majority, while if you listen to liberal media you'll get the impression that they're a tiny minority -- I just haven't done the homework to make up my mind as to who's right.

Either way, I'll give a close reading to any proposals they manage to get on to the ballot.

The "defund" slogan is misleading. It doesn't mean "abolition"

No, that’s what it means.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

Many articles from BLM leaders making this unambiguous statement.

A very few people may want police abolished. That doesn't change the common meaning of "defund" as it is used by the vast majority of people.

If your reality were getting stopped and frisked statistically more because of your color or pulled over more for “looking suspicious”, your viewpoint might change. There have been plenty of cases where Black men were “suspiciously” going into their own homes.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2018/07/29/missio...

Did you read the article? Or forget the title of this thread?

Anecdotes aside, there doesn't seem to be a significant difference between races on their opinions of police (and whether they want more or less of them in their neighborhoods).

Yes and I’ve also read other articles. From the conservative Cato institute

https://www.cato.org/blog/do-police-treat-all-races-equally

Roughly seven-in-ten white Americans (72%) say police officers treat racial and ethnic groups equally at least some of the time. By way of comparison, half of Hispanics and just 33% of black adults say the same

That doesn't mean 66% of black adults want to defund the police.

I'm sure they, along with many others, want changes in police behavior and improved accountability, but that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with funding (or "abolishing" as the root of this thread wondered about).

The link was in response to this.

there doesn't seem to be a significant difference between races on their opinions of police

I'm sure they, along with many others, want changes in police behavior and improved accountability,

Is “improved accountability” a nice way to say “stop shooting and beating unarmed Black people” or “stop pulling over Black people in neighborhoods where they ‘don’t look like they belong’”?

It's worth noting that Cato is right-libertarian, not simply conservative.

Fair point.

I'm a black American and I've been pulled over twice here in Japan (in the past 5 years) for what I concluded was basically "Driving While Black". I still think "Abolish/defund the police" are terrible slogans and equally terrible policy positions to take. But I continue to live in Japan because I know that the police here aren't inclined to put a bullet in my ass either. I like the Japanese "koban" model for deploying police forces. I also recognize that the overall baseline level of violence, and the proliferation of firearms, presents a vastly different force protection situation for urban American police than it does for their Japanese counterparts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dban

There's a ton of problems I have law enforcement in the US, and the bulk of it boils down to terrible screening of personnel and inappropriate training. Fixing both of those issues will require more funding, not less. Better psychological screening (to eliminate sociopaths), higher pay (to retain quality personnel, and be able to rotate people off the streets more frequently), longer training and with different curriculum (stop learning tactics from Israeli counter-insurgency personnel), etc...

That happens in every country. We call it "Illegal face possession", it's called profiling.

What form does it take in your country? Is it based on the amount of melanin in the profiling victim's skin, or are there other arbitrary factors?

Sex, race, clothing and general aspect, like everywhere else.

That still doesn’t negate that if you are on the receiving end, you might be a little hostile to the police.

I'm no friends with police but they have been way more times in my side that against me.

But if that one time they are against you they short you in the back seven times, suffocate you for nine minutes, or arrest you on trumped up charges, it doesn’t really balance out does it?

That’s about like an abused spouse. “He doesn’t always beat me”.

It’s truly amazing. You must be thinking, people can’t possibly be this dumb. Unfortunately it’s true. Marxism is alive and well. Anarchists in west coast cities have been emboldened by the riots. The whole movement is a combination of the painfully naive and criminals.

People keep jumping in to say “defund doesn’t mean defund” or “abolish doesn’t mean abolish”, but they really do mean it literally. They also chant “all cops are bastards”.

Well, we gave them the chance to create their own utopia in the CHAZ area and that became another stunning failure.

It goes to show that realistically, they (who ever wants to defund the police) are really asking for an anarcho-communist utopia.

It was ad hoc and unplanned. That doesn't make for a good example of how police reform should work.

Come to America, experience American police when you get a chance. My university's (an also-ran regional institution) police force got a million dollar's worth of military surplus!

Not being from the US is no excuse for being ignorant and arrogant on the matter.

Personal attacks will get you banned on HN. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

> I can only imagine the world they live in

You know, you can go and read why they advocate for that position. You can do more than just imagine--more than just imprinting your own biases onto their position. It's just lazy.

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