The whole "defund the police" movement feels very much in line with the "Luxury beliefs" [1] idea that has been floating around for the past year or so.
[1] https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...
[1] https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...
Why do you believe this? It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
The level of "defund" people are advocating for varies pretty wildly.
Yes, reallocating budget is perhaps a reasonable thing.
A non trivial number of the protesters are advocating for complete elimination of the police though.
Oddly enough, I'd expect the widespread riots that have continued all summer long will have the exact opposite effect in the medium to long term.
This categorically isn't defunding police, this is police abolition, and getting them confused is likely why you think it's a luxury belief because I fail to see what's luxurious about getting tear gassed every Friday/Saturday night or having the cops stand aside letting groups like the Proud Boys brutalize protestors and journalists. There's nothing luxurious about getting tear gassed for 3 months straight, it's a genuine struggle.
What's luxurious is you and I.
Why are you being tear gassed so often? I've been in US many times, for many months, I have never been tear gassed by police.
I got teargassed holding my hands up and chanting. Twice.
If the protest was deemed an unlawful assembly you were participating in civil disobedience where a police response should be expected.
If not, you should file a civil rights lawsuit.
Announcing an unlawful assembly is not carte blanche to dole out collective punishment or violence, either.
There's already lawsuits ongoing. They won't go anywhere in terms of reforms because individual cops are virtually always indemnified, difficult to identify in these situations (many covered their badge numbers and nametags with tape), and the city will absorb the cost without the department taking any real hits.
https://www.8toabolition.com/defund-the-police
Now, do they represent the majority of the people calling for defunding the police? I don't know. But it's not "categorically" different.
That's certainly what the conservative news outlets are reporting, but is it actually true?
Perception is all that matters, and a large chunk of the country follows conservative media.
Unfortunately the country is doing a great job of lining up behind their preferred propaganda outlets rather than looking for truth. This is true for both Liberals and Conservatives.
We hear what we want to hear.
So yes i would say the veracity of the statement is relavent here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...
As for the other two - two is not a "non trivial number" regardless of who gives them a platform. This YouGov poll [1] shows 11% support (and ~20% support among blacks and hispanics) for abolishing the police as of June, which is a non trivial number. But framing it as a yes/no question loses a lot of granularity - I bet most of those people would advocate replacing the current police force with something that materially resembles a (more community-based, less militarized) police force.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...
[1] https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/vgqowgynze/econTabReport.pdf
If the movement were "Demilitarize the police", then yes, that is absolutely something I could be in favor of.
As it stands, "Defund the police" is to me a weasel word version of "Abolish the police" and I honestly do think people are just being coy when they claim not to see that.
It's clickbait if they want to shift budgets.
I honestly have no idea whether it's primarily one vs the other.
There are a small but significant number of people in the current protests calling for policing as we know it to be abolished; they don't beat around the bush about it. The phrase "abolish the police" has 2.5 million google hits, a NYT op-ed, and a Wikipedia article.
Notably these funds don’t need to come at the expense of police funding.
We just dumped something like $5 trillion into a fire pit called COVID. There’s no lack of emergency funding for these programs if people demanded it.
Because impressions matter, and if you want to get buy-in from an already weary broader populace, you need to have clear messaging.
Shouting "defund the police" in the middle of riots where innocent bystanders are attacked and businesses are looted is terrible messaging.
BLM have overplayed their hand at this point and are on the cusp of real public backlash.
Then they are utterly useless.
The way you phrased it, the protests are nothing more than tantrums by oversized children.
Tantrums should not be rewarded.
They've achieved many, though far from all, of their goals in various municipalities.
Why do you believe that a PR campaign is the only protest of value?
> The way you phrased it, the protests are nothing more than tantrums by oversized children.
That is in no way implied from how I phrased it. Pain and weariness from racialized murders and intimidation by cops is not a childish tantrum and I hope you never have to endure that pain yourself. I do hope that you find the empathy to consider their position.
> Tantrums should not be rewarded.
Please treat them like people.
You say the protests have achieved their goals. To me, that means they are an organized campaign of some sort.
The fact is, BLM is a national organization with nearly universal name recognition at this point. They have funding. They have PR teams. They are directing messaging.
And the fact remains that I think "Defund the Police" is terrible messaging.
> Please treat them like people.
As I said at the beginning, I think we're talking past each other.
I never meant to dehumanize the protesters.
The main point I am trying to make is that as someone with no horse in this race (i.e. I am neither pro-BLM nor pro-police) if I were forced to pick a side on the issue based on my current view of what is and has happened over the past couple months, I would come down on the side of the police. I'd rather just stay out of it.
All this said, as much as I think our politics differ, I really do respect the way you've responded to people in this thread, and I hope there are more people like you among the protesters because then maybe you've got an actual shot at achieving your goals.
As in there are various demands by various groups and you can identify the core where they overlap.
> The fact is, BLM is a national organization with nearly universal name recognition at this point. They have funding. They have PR teams. They are directing messaging.
BLM is decentralized. They don't have most of that.
> And the fact remains that I think "Defund the Police" is terrible messaging.
Okay. But it's not PR. It's not some campaign crafted by an overpaid consultant. It's a decentralized protest movement. I don't want it to be that, either. That's part of the problem in politics - caring far too much about this kind of thing. Focus on the realities, the people dying. The violent and aggressive and frequently racist police.
> > Please treat them like people.
> As I said at the beginning, I think we're talking past each other.
I think the attempt to infantilize was nearly dehumanizing.
> I never meant to dehumanize the protesters.
Then stop calling protests in response to murders by police a tantrum by oversized children.
> The main point I am trying to make is that as someone with no horse in this race (i.e. I am neither pro-BLM nor pro-police)
We all have a horse in this race. We live together in a society that has some level of control over things like policing, equity, violence, crime, poverty. The "neutral" position is implicit support for the status quo, much as being a "moderate" in politics indicates the same.
> if I were forced to pick a side on the issue based on my current view of what is and has happened over the past couple months, I would come down on the side of the police. I'd rather just stay out of it.
As I said before, ha.
> All this said, as much as I think our politics differ, I really do respect the way you've responded to people in this thread, and I hope there are more people like you among the protesters because then maybe you've got an actual shot at achieving your goals.
The vast majority of people in the protests are like me. You should go to one.
It is. Great that you support it.
> As it stands, "Defund the police" is to me a weasel word version of "Abolish the police"
So you understood the phrase wrong and now you know better.
TLDR: You support it but don't like the wording of the slogan.
There is a situation where a group of people have together under the slogan "defund the police". There is a very high risk that if they get the power to do something they will, literally and only, defund the police.
Not many people are reading policy documents. The point of unity in politics is usually the literal meaning of the words being used. Secret signals of "really we meant this other thing" tend not to work.
While that sounds great on paper, nothing the schools do is going to make a difference if the family support at home isn't there. You can't just throw money at the problem to make it better.
Anecdotal, but my sister used to work as a teacher & reading specialist in poorer areas. Per my last conversation with her on this topic, she said maybe 20% of the kids have a solid backing from family for education. The rest she had interacted with for one reason or another were a mix of parents who told her it was her job to teach and they wouldn't do that at home; another group of parents that were too drunk/drugged out to even answer the phone or call back; and another that would just swear at her for bothering them at home. All of her co-workers had similar accounts of this happening.
Kids that did want to learn in class were bullied for "acting white" and there were physical fights occurring weekly. She didn't teach high school, she taught 4/5th grade.
For us to make any progress with poorer schools there needs to be a community focus on education, having respect for each other, and having respect for the law. If you grow up for 18 years in an environment without those then nothing matters long term and we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.
The issue really isn't about race though, it is about poverty and culture. I know a kindergarten teacher from a very rural, very white, very poor school district who was cussed out by one of her 5 year old students. The parents don't care, and it shows in the students' progression through school and young adulthood. If parents show up at all, it is to yell at teachers for giving their children bad grades or any sort of discipline.
Of course, putting any sort of onus on the parents gets talked down, as it undermines the argument that things will magically get better if only we threw more money at the problem... because the problem isn't the school or the teachers at all.
The culture of black communities dealing with poverty and crime that you refer to didn't come from nowhere. It was not simply imported from 17th century Africa, in the way that the apple pie was brought over from England. It is a product of a people who were bravely struggling and striving to cope in the worst possible circumstances.
Brutally enslaved for more than 200 years, their literal chains finally removed, they continued to be viciously abused and systematically and savagely oppressed throughout the following century. They weren't event treated as fully human by the federal law until 2 generations ago. Only two generations! Many states had incredibly racist and oppressive laws even more recently than that. The most cursory research reveals an utterly depraved history. One simple and terrible example is redlining, which unfortunately was occurring even after the civil rights act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining).
We have a duty as a nation to attempt to heal the damage that we have caused. It is impossible to fully mend what we have broken, but we damn well better try.
25% percent of the US’s population as a nation is 1st and 2nd generation immigrants, a substantial portion of which arrived after 1965 because desegregation and immigration reforms coincide. [1] Whatever “we” you might be thinking, it risks running an egocentric fallacy to assume it expands to the entirety of the US population.
[1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/02/07/second-generation...
If you're talking about reparations, I think you might find that the math doesn't really work in this case.
Most immigration is not a luxurious, touristic affair but comes out of necessity. There are even people who would consider immigrations as voluntarily getting themselves colonized, coming here for the country to extract their resources in exchange of a promise of better life circumstances. We certainly extract more out of immigrants economically, academically, psychologically, who were raised and educated elsewhere, who are incentivized to work very hard or go back, who also suffer mentally from this process.
Requiring them to pitch in assuming they had perfect information and made a completely free preference is at best ignorant. Of course it is the honorable thing to answer the suffering of fellow humans, but that goes both ways, and thinking that that problem is always the one and only problem of this world is plain, pure narcissism.
Only 1 in 5 Americans supports it: https://thehill.com/homenews/news/504511-1-in-5-supports-rep...
Also you say this as though the US is the only country that had slaves. Chattel slavery was (unfortunately) the predominate form of labor in the entire world for centuries. The US was the 3rd to last country in the Americas to abolish it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
Other societies in the world have largely decided that we’re better off just burying the hatchet.
We aren’t talking about other countries. I’m familiar with history. I know many terrible things have happened.
Whatever it may be, I want no part of it. To assume that all immigrants, who today represent 25% of Americans, are willing to sign onto policy positions that are focused on correcting (distant) past wrongs as opposed to solving the problems we have TODAY — is what I'm calling presumptuous.
So then the problem became one of the state not doing enough to fund the single mother family. Not only accepting this but making it an ideal.
Read Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s research from the early 1960’s that could have been a corner stone of the civil rights movement. But then it wasn’t.
Anyways this rejection of the traditional family structure is essentially what triggered the family values movement on the right in the late 70’s and early 1980’s.
Interestingly as the legitimization of single mothers became more and more mainstream we continued to see black kids grow up in entrenched poverty as dropout rates and criminal activity climbed year over year for these kids compared to previous generations.
So now the solution is “reparations”. Of course it wasn’t the radical ideas of middle class radicals being experimented on black people that has caused this inescapable spiral. It’s that we need to give money to single mothers and we are here because we simply haven’t given enough.
Some misguided people will say blacks did better before the Civil Rights Act. But they are wrong not in that the Civil Rights Act was bad - it is good - mandatory to be sure. It’s that during this same era we rejected rigorous research and science for so called theories that claimed the 2-parent family was a tool of oppression. This got interlaced into the black power movement and we saw the destruction of the black family and the resulting mess we are in today.
In the end these ideas are illiberal and it is my hope they wither away after enough people are able to look past the facade and the tyrannical machinery is exposed. And then maybe some of these orgs can grow into something that’s actually useful.
To really underscore this point, it’s worth looking at the inflation adjusted total per-pupil education expenditures over time: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d19/tables/dt19_236.55.a...
I have never once seen those vehicles used in regular law enforcement duties such as traffic stops.
They are used in exceptional cases like active shooter situations, hostage / barricaded / swat scenarios, natural disasters like flooding due to their high clearance, and the occasional parade or community day to let kids play in the big truck. In all, they are a defensive vehicle with no weapons that costs the department very little and has a wide range of uses if the shit hits the fan.
I really don't get the outrage of them other than the optics of it "being from the military" and idiots calling them "tanks". If there are specific bad uses of police force those are great to call out, but the utility of the vehicle which is basically free for a real world need is a no brainer.
My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.
They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things. People standing around chanting. Then they wait until curfew is over, maybe declare the assembly unlawful, and start using chemical weapons and intimidation on the crowd.
So regular riot control equipment in 95% of the world...
The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.
> My police department should not be anywhere near militarized. It's inappropriate, wrong, and is a waste of funds because they should not be kitted out that way.
How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization? I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose. They also still use fire hoses in many other countries which we stopped doing in the 60s due to the bad optics of them during the racial tension.
> They bring out those vehicles during protests, among other things.
Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so. Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too. But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
Yes, militarization of the police is normalized in many countries. That doesn't make it acceptable. They're trigger-happy and violent. It's part of the culture.
> The only other stuff they mention are semi-auto rifles which are not militarization. Us civilians have the same rifles which are way more accurate than a standard handgun. I dont want an officer using a handgun at 50-100 yards trying to stop an active shooter, I want them to have the best tool for the job which would be a patrol rifle. That's safer for everyone, especially bystanders.
Do you believe that there needs to be a line of officers wielding rifles behind a line of riot cops with flashbangs and tear gas launchers (used liberally and indiscriminately) behind a line of shielded riot cops grabbing things from protesters and generally trying to provoke a reaction? These things all work in tandem, in this context. That line of cops is part of their show of force, as they take anti-cop protests very personally. It's a form of intimidation and escalation.
> How is riot control pads / shields and an armored vehicle to stop bullets and rocks being thrown militarization?
Half of that is literally military equipment and US police departments are frequently under a "warrior" mindset. It's been heavily exported to various different PDs. They treat confrontations as a fight between them and the "bad guys", not public safety or law enforcement. Having a bunch of military or tacticool gear is part of that mindset.
> I don't see any offensive weapons used other than crowd control agents which last I checked are used in most of the world for the same purpose.
Normalization is not the same as moral or acceptable. Plus, this isn't quite a consistent take when it comes to these kinds of things. When Soviet bloc countries used far less serious responses to color revolutions, they were decried as totalitarian, antidemocratic monsters. But we do worse here and it's just normal business as usual.
And those "crowd control" agents are chemical weapons, explosives, and "less lethal" weapons causing permanent disability and injury. I watched a woman get shot with a grenade (either flashbang or teargas) and she went into cardiac arrest, only living because medics rushed her to the hospital. She was forward but still 30 feet from any officers. She was shot straight in the chest. She was just standing there and yelling.
> Judging how the protests have turned to riots over the past few months in major cities, they are completely justified in doing so.
They absolutely are not. It's a form of escalation and the cops have frequently provoked these responses with theses "shows of force".
> Getting rocks, molotov cocktails and everything else under the sun thrown at you when you're trying to stop people from burning down communities would make me want the best protection too.
The cops aren't trying to stop people from burning down communities. They don't actually do that, they don't deescalate, they don't actually even defend the private property (which is usually much of their function) so much as blast through and hurt people indiscriminately.
> But even in those cases the vehicles are used as transport and command / observation platforms. You mostly have a problem with crowd control tactics it sounds like which are pretty standard when dealing with a declared riot. Here is a good video on the tactics with explanations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yT9bit2-1pg
I'm very familiar with their tactics, they used them against me.
In every protest I went to where things escalated, it was the police doing the primary escalation. Bull rushing the crowd. Trying to grab things from the crowd. Shooting teargas and OC gas and flashbangs into the crowd prior to even making any announcements. Bicycle cops hitting passersby with their bicycles. A kid got maced.
None of this requires the straw man that protests never turn into riots.
This is incoherent. Beating peaceful protesters doesn't serve the goal of deescalation. Every single time, it resulted in more anger and frustration. Water bottles being thrown.
> When the police are worried the crowd might escalate, they preemptive action to end the situation before it can happen, because crowd-initiated escalations are much more destructive and deadly.
End the situation? It escalated every single time, exactly how you'd expect. Cops becoming aggressive and violent against protesters is not going to cool any heads. They teargassed kids, you know. In what world is that considered a way to "end the situation"?
> Once protesters are shooting at people it's too late to step in.
This is part of that dangerous warrior mentality, treating every group like an immediate existential threat that must be neutralized with violence based on nothing but speculation.
If you're justifying police violence and aggression based on what you imagine might happen, you're part of the problem.
Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.
I've never said this.
> and I don't agree; it seems to me that once they start breaking random things, there's a serious and unacceptable risk they'll start killing people.
That is absurd. Damaging property is nothing like hurting people. In fact, alleging that the two are comparable is somewhat dehumanizing, as it's used to justify hurting people over damage to things. Things* should not have any level of parity with human life, particularly things like broken windows.
> Truly peaceful protests where nothing's being vandalized or set on fire - yes, the police should never respond to those by force.
Last time, you said the police could preemptively assume a protest will hurt people and start engaging in the violence we've been talking about. Now there's the good protester / bad rioter dichotomy, something often decried by civil rights leaders because it was the rallying cry of segregationists. That and outside agitators.
I was gassed and flashbanged in a protest where we were holding our hands up and chanting, "hands up, don't shoot".
If you are going to post an article to support your argument, you might want to make sure it actually supports your argument.
Police don't pay for surplus military gear, the DoD offers it for free. Police only have to pay for shipping. It has been this way since the program was created in 1988.
Most policing is just policing,
The 'tactical cops' should be punted for reasons other than cost obviously, but that's not it.
This is exactly the OP's point - it's 'luxury thinking'.
Usually when police presence goes down, crime goes up. We see this in London over the last few years.
We want more, better, police in rough ares, not less.
And good jobs, obviously, parents with stability create better conditions for their kids.
Nearly all crimes that are policed are crimes of poverty. Rather than focusing so thoroughly on punitive measures, it is far better for everyone to focus on the root causes.
Poverty. That's the root issue. But it's cheaper to blame the poverty on bad additudes and poor choices rather than acknowledge the causality goes in the other direction and pony up the cash for programs to break the cycle of poverty.
> having respect for the law
Additional humvees buy you fear not respect.
- putting food on the table
- putting kids through school with at least one new set of clothes a year
- having food in your belly makes it far easier to cope with the endless "why" questions of the curious child
Sure, there are social issues to address as well, but don't go assuming that throwing money at the problem won't help at all.
they clearly mean defund when they say defund. Many other activists feel the same. why say defund when you mean something else.
Basically, with your suggestion, nothing will change, other than police garages. That's clearly not what the protestors want, and as such, we can immediately discard your assertion.
Your comment is based on a false assumption. Demilitarizing the police would be a great idea! But the idea of defunding presumes excess funds.
Data on funding amounts are a bit harder to come by but they generally show the US has less police funding than Europe per capita.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
Super interesting concept. Thanks for this mental mode of seeing this phenomena. I'm going to really think it over. Even if I end up rejecting it in favor of some other mental mode, it's still an amazingly interesting lens for looking at recent events.
Since when is human rationality “luxury”? This article just shot itself in the foot.
Most people's interpretation of "human rationality" is little more than a religion of its own.