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Comment by staticassertion | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see how this cuts by age. A lot of older folks I talk to see police very differently, and often say "You just don't know how things used to be before the police", which I think really misses what people are asking for ie: redistribution of grossly overbudgeted police departments to preventative measures like better schooling, community centers, and more subtle reactive measures like un-armed "police" (or whatever you want to call this new role).

I also wonder if the question were phrased differently (and more accurately representing what is actually being asked for), more like "Would you support an N% cut to police budgets, which would come from X part of the police budget, to support preventative measures like social services?", if we'd see a different response.

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It’s hard to blame people for misunderstanding slogans that supposedly don’t mean what the plain meaning would suggest. Perhaps the young activists should say what they mean and mean what they say and then all those “older folks” might not miss the point.

They are engaging in a Motte and Bailey argument, perhaps unintentionally.

"They" are many people. I suspect that many of them don't understand that it's a motte and bailey argument. But I suspect that some of them do understand, and are doing it deliberately.

'I do,' Alice hastily replied... `that's the same thing, you know.'

That is to say, bradleyjg's phrasing reminded me of one of my favourite bits of Alice in Wonderland on saying what you mean and meaning what you say: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Alice's_Adventures_in_Wonderl...

> It’s hard to blame people for misunderstanding slogans that supposedly don’t mean what the plain meaning would suggest.

I find it very easy to blame people who are not willing to spend 10 seconds researching what a movement stands for. We can't say that it's okay to read three words on a sign, interpret it in your own context, and then blame the movement when you don't "understand" it. It's a slogan! What do you expect for a less-than-five-word sentence that people can unite under?

At a minimum, I'd hope that if you asked 5 people who were uniting under that less-than-five word slogan what that slogan meant, in terms of desired policy, that at least 3 of those 5 people would agree with one another.

Anyone who has had discussions with such supporters in good faith would be aware that they are closely aligned on the central points of reform.

All the supporters I have talked to are in favor of "reform", yes. The specifics of what exactly it means to "defund" the police varies pretty significantly between supporters though -- some say "obviously we still need police but maybe try sending in a social worker for the homeless guy who is lying unconscious onthe ground" and others say "defund means entirely defund, as in abolish, I mean what I say" (I'm assuming that is the slogan in question, but not entirely positive because the post I was replying to was vagueposting).

I’ve heard hundreds of supporters speak and the message is fairly uniform: reduce the operational scope and budget of police significantly and use those resources on programs - proven to work elsewhere - which help people and communities in ways that are more appropriate to the specific problem and more efficient in reducing crime. The degree in which the scope/budget varies, but of course some people are arguing for what they think is realistically achievable and others are arguing their ideal; both are valid debate strategies and don’t necessarily mean that they aren’t aligned.

The few people I’ve heard say “remove police entirely,” when asked to elaborate, meant that the entire organization/concept of policing should be rebuilt from the ground up, not that there should be no one in society available to respond to crimes occurring.

I'd expect something that's not so much more extreme than the idea it's trying to communicate. If people march around saying "tear down the bridges", tagging bridges with little Xs where the demolitions should start, I'm not gonna stick around to hear that they actually mean rural highways should be better funded.

Why not? Why are you not willing to invest time into understanding what other people are willing to march in the street for?

I'm willing to invest time, but I start from the assumption that the slogans and symbols of the marchers are honest attempts to explain what they're marching for.

> I find it very easy to blame people who are not willing to spend 10 seconds researching what a movement stands for.

Then you suffer from a profound lack of empathy.

I invested your "10 seconds". Google took me to a site called Defund the Police[1].

Reading this site, it seems that they want to... defund the police. As in, take the majority of their funding away, and put it somewhere else (nominally into social programs).

Not making a value judgement here, but I'm pretty sure this thing does what it says on the tin.

[1] https://defundthepolice.org

> I invested your "10 seconds". Google took me to a site called Defund the Police[1].

Weird. That page is not even at page 1 for me. Wikipedia comes up first for me and would generally be my go-to source for these topics.

> Reading this site, it seems that they want to... defund the police. As in, take the majority of their funding away, and put it somewhere else (nominally into social programs).

> Not making a value judgement here, but I'm pretty sure this thing does what it says on the tin.

Yes? This is correctly what the movement is about. The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.

DDG for "Defund the Police" from my normal browser at home in the UK with UK sites enabled

1) CNN: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/06/us/what-is-defund-police-...

2) https://defundthepolice.org

3) Wikipedia

4) Daily Caller (sigh)

5) Guardian

CNN opens with

It's as straightforward as it sounds: Instead of funding a police department, a sizable chunk of a city's budget is invested in communities, especially marginalized ones where much of the policing occurs.

Wikipedia states

"Defund the police" is a slogan that supports divesting funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources. Activists who use the phrase may do so with varying intentions; some seek modest reductions, while others argue for full defunding as a step toward the abolition of contemporary police services.

> The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.

You'd think conservatives would be all for that - smaller state, lower taxes

Why would anyone be 'for that'?

Defunding the police in high crime areas will only result in more crime.

Most Black communities are underpoliced, not overpoliced, and they don't get a response often enough when they call 9/11.

So many areas have called for 'more policing' - we saw this in the UK/London where crime rates came up in the last 24 months due to cuts in policing.

What we want are police that avoid having to shoot people necessarily.

> You'd think conservatives would be all for that - smaller state, lower taxes.

I think conservatives might get behind defunding the police if those funds were routed back to the taxpayer, rather than to expanding social programs -- or any government program, for that matter.

Moving money from a strongly conservative part of the government to a strongly leftist part of the government looks too much like a power grab to gain traction with conservatives.

You'd also get conservative buy-in if it came with a pro-gun stance. If citizens are going to police their own communities, then they need to have the option to carry and employ arms as necessary for the task.

I think there's a lot of opportunity for give-and-take in criminal justice reform -- prisons and drug policy should also be on the table! -- but it requires both sides putting things of equal value on the fire, and I don't see that happening.

> The misunderstanding we're talking about here is that people assume it means only cutting down police funds without investing it anywhere else.

Pretty sure people understood that part.

Edit: I am also seeing downvotes on my above comment, which seems to indicate that a fair number of people disagree with the assessment that "defund the police" means "defund the police".

I would expect a slogan that is not so insane that that it constantly has be explained and interpreted by apologists. Lets cut the crap. Defund the police means defund the police.

Make love, not war

The personal is political

We’re here. We’re queer.

We are the 99%

Black Lives Matter

NYC tried unarmed “police” to handle minor moving violations and parking. It was a disaster. People bullied them, assaulted them, and/or ignored them.

The sad truth is that people respect police not because of the badge but because of the gun, and because of the threat of violence.

Many of the reform ideas being thrown around lately are ideas that places across the US have already tried.

I think people are saying photos and videos from Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Kenosha, WI. They’re thinking they’ll take their chances with the police than with arsonists and rioters.

The US is indeed a different place than countries where unarmed police are the norm.

It's a pretty sad realization that perhaps the reason we have such violent police is, in part, because we have such a violent society.

Unarmed police is not really the norm:

> In some countries including Iceland, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom (Northern Ireland excepted), Maldives, the police do not carry firearms unless the situation is expected to merit it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country#...

Where the hell are unarmed police the norm other than the UK and NZ? I lived in NZ for three years and the police still had guns, just locked in the boot of their cars. Australian cops (lived there for 1 year) had firearms.

Unarmed police are pretty rare on this planet. Even Japanese cops carry guns.

Germany has a force separate from the police to handle parking infractions and things of that sort (Ordnungsamt), and they're not armed. I think this is somewhat common in Europe.

That specific thing is common in the US, too. Parking enforcement, at least in places populous enough to warrant dedicated parking enforcement personnel, usually don't arm their meter maids.

Having a separate (unarmed) parking enforcement is extremely common in the US as well. They are commonly called "meter maids."

Giving a ticket to a parked car and to a person(who has to show you his ID) are 2 very different things.

> Where the hell are unarmed police the norm other than the UK and NZ?

Here's a sampling. I think not every country is considered in these lists though. Or at least, given there can be multiple police forces in a jurisdiction with only some of them armed, it's not always a clear-cut answer.

https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/10601.jpeg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country#...

Some island police don't carry firearms, although those aren't really comparable. Also many (most?) street cops in China aren't armed.

I always get a chuckle when UK and US media bash the Japanese justice system. English speakers are lucky they don't have to hear the devastating retorts the Japanese would be able to make back - they must be falling off their chairs laughing at the kind of reporting the BBC and Vox make on them.

Ding ding ding

> It's a pretty sad realization that perhaps the reason we have such violent police is, in part, because we have such a violent society.

In terms of violent crime overall the US isn't an outlier, it is located at the median of the OECD in terms of violent crime. The outlier for the US is murder, overwhelmingly due to the mass proliferation of illegal gun possession.

This has been written about for decades and remains true today.

"America doesn’t have more crime than other rich countries. It just has more guns."

https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9217163/america-guns-europe

"The seminal work here is a 1999 book by Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, called Crime Is Not the Problem. Zimring and Hawkins set out to examine what was, at the time, the conventional wisdom: that America had a uniquely terrible crime problem, one without any parallel in other developed democracies.

"They found, pretty definitively, that the conventional wisdom was wrong. "Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher," they write."

... "A landmark 1997 study actually tried to answer this question. Its findings — which scholars say still hold up — are that America doesn't really have a significantly higher rate of crime compared to similar countries. But that crime is much likelier to be lethal: American criminals just kill more people than do their counterparts in other developed countries. And guns appear to be a big part of what makes this difference."

> The outlier for the US is murder, overwhelmingly due to the mass proliferation of illegal gun possession.

Emphasis mine.

Most people miss that part and just blame people having guns in general, when law-abiding citizens with legally registered guns is not part of the overall problem.

I'm sure you believe you have all the facts but this is why right wing people believe they're being gaslighted by the media.

This point could probably do with elaboration.

Each of the three factions has a blindspot that it taboos and finds impossible to understand. Each faction is held in the thrall. I'll describe a Left wing version where their hero lives in Right wing world and a Liberal version.

So - our Society in caricature.

Left

Suppose you were studying economics or sociology and everybody had a odd paradox they couldn't solve. There were these different groups of people. Some lead long healthy lives and have most quality of life indicators in their favour. The other group has dire outcomes - nasty brutish and short. Nobody can figure it out. The same pattern plays out in different countries and in different centuries. Everybody would like for the people suffering not to suffer but we're perplexed and the newspapers report on a regular basis the status of these people, great people and intellectuals write books about it, classes are held in universities all over the country in the search for the solution.

Then one day some autistic figures it out. It's because some are poor and others are rich. It can be confirmed by checking bank balances. Surprisingly this person does not receive a round of applause and confetti in the streets - he is promptly fired from his job, his friends avert their eyes. Soon he is homeless and is found proclaiming his Truth under a bridge - to find him just turn Left on James Damore St.

Liberal

The Liberals believe in Robots, AGI and similar ideas for artificial humans - have so for centuries. Their fable is the Android - the dream of the artificial human that coincidentally replaces all forms of blue collar labour. The root of the word Robot literally means slave. Their nemesis is the Computer - the information processing machine that works best at replacing their own human generated information processing. Of course they try to use this machine to replace blue collar labour instead. They invest incredible energies here but ignore that each of their schemes for technological and economic improvement is based on some type of forced transfer or even slavery. While technologies not based on theft or slavery exist - these are ignored. They are mostly preoccupied with schemes to move groups of people around the surface of the planet to disrupt their foreign and domestic competitors in the name of social improvement - which it is for them.

I can pass the idealogical Turing test - can't say the same of the people who inhabit Reddit, Metafilter and HN - and I think most of the Right's intellectual firepower remains subtext in our society unless you read old books to find plot holes or the exchange between other civilizations and ours opens up in a way that cannot be censored by the information organs of the West.

Is there a source for this? If I search up "NYPD unarmed officer", I get a bunch of results regarding police violence on unarmed civilians, and if I search up "new york unarmed officer", I get a bunch of results relating to security guards.

Check out the history of NYPD “brownies” and, most recently, the green uniforms.

Every time they try to disarm part of the police force, those officers get attacked.

Can't this be solved by disarming them, but letting them keep the gun (no bullets)?

They solved it in 1996 by incorporating traffic "officers" into the police force.

https://buffalonews.com/news/traffic-brownies-join-nypd/arti...

yes, because I'm sure no one will realize that within a month and then just run because there are no consequences.

I don't mean all the officers. If you "disarmed" 50% of the officers, you'd expect officer shootings to drop by 40% (random estimate), but I doubt people would alter their behavior knowing that there's still 50% chance they can get shot.

Free guns for anyone who already has one. Smart.

Of course there isn't, hence why instead of providing you a source, OP just tells you to look up some vague thing. (Hilariously, you are now the top result for 'nypd brownies unarmed')

You know how I know you didn't actually look that up?

It's not like this is secret information.

https://bfy.tw/Osdd

I'm many days late, so I don't expect an actual response, but there's literally not a single article on the front page of that search that says anything that matches your original claim?

There's an article from the NY Post, which is literally a tabloid, that claims the "only thing keeping them safe" is people mistaking them for cops, but not that they were explicitly disarmed and attacked as a result?

This just sounds mad coming from a British person. Almost all of our police are unarmed and do a decent job, the only place police routinely carry guns are airports for obvious reasons and Northern Ireland which literally had a decades-long sectarian insurgency happen there. At least nominally, the British police operate under Peel's idea of "policing by consent" where police officers are merely citizens in uniform charged with keeping order rather than the more Continental (at the time) model of armed enforcers of royal/state power.

It's hard to genuinely respect someone when there's a gun-related power dynamic forcing you to. That's not respect, that's just the threat of force. It's probably too late for America to adopt Peel's principles of policing but it's not done us much harm.

Canada is a very safe place but we require law enforcement officers to carry guns.

There is a lot more respect for police, less mob violence, petty fighting and doesn't require a large camera network.

Guns provide more respect.

Fear and respect are two completely different things though. Under the Peelite model of policing, it's impossible to create genuine community police officers when there's a huge power differential (IE a tool that can easily end a life) between police and public.

> “You just don't know how things used to be before the police", which I think really misses what people are asking for ie: redistribution of grossly overbudgeted police departments to preventative

Or more likely they don’t think preventative measures work as well as you think they do.

Edit: Once you have seen acts of senseless violence - real cruel stuff - it is hard to believe that some people can be reliably rehabilitated.

Maybe that cruelty could have been nipped in the bud if they had received better care in the past - but that’s not a risk I would take with my community.

> Once you have seen acts of senseless violence - real cruel stuff - it is hard to believe that some people can be reliably rehabilitated.

It's ironic that this is exactly how many feel about the police themselves.

Focusing on the rare cruel cases has meant we aren’t funding preventive measures which could prevent the vast majority of other crime.

> which could prevent the vast majority of other crime.

Could it?

California is one of the richest places on earth and has an incredibly progressive population.

So “we” have the desire and the money - and have for at least 20 years - and yet we have more violent crime than much poorer places.

I think it'd also be productive to have community education on your rights and responsibilities with police.

You have rights, you don't have to do anything outside the law. But you do have to comply with lawful orders. If everybody understood these things, there would be much less trouble, fear, and violence.

Agreed! We should start by teaching police what lawful orders they're actually able to give, prevent them from lying about their powers and individuals' rights, and putting the ones who do intimidate people into relinquishing their rights in prison.

I think this falls into better education of the public, many times these incidents arise because people try to argue their case with the officer but the officer is not the judge nor the jury. Trying to argue your case with a belligerent officer is only going to serve their purpose. Whereas if people know that have an absolute right to remain silent and exercise that right, they will be better served, especially if the officer is issuing unlawful orders / abusing power. If the officer thinks you are guilty, you cannot talk your way out of jail, but you can certainly give them more ammo to charge you with. e.g Resisting, Obstruction charges.

I agree with you.

Other than undercover cops being able to lie to cover their background, the fact that police can -- legally! ruled so by the supreme court! -- lie to citizens is a real problem.

How are citizens supposed to trust police that can freely lie to them without consequence?

and putting the ones who do intimidate people into relinquishing their rights in prison

Are you saying if a cop is interrogating someone and says "I know you did this, if you don't talk you're going to prison for a long time", we should send that cop to prison?

That would be intimidating a person into relinquishing their rights.

when was "before the police"?

Often they're referring to New York in the 60s/70s. Of course, there were absolutely police back then. But they largely attribute the increase in their feeling of personal safety with a larger investment in police.

Statistically crime in NY peaked in 1990.

I would expect crime statistics to peak shortly after a surge in policing but not actual crime.

Murders peaked 1990 and not a lot of murders goes unreported. Then in just a few years NYC went from being one of the most murderous cities in USA to one of the least murderous cities.

Lawmen != police

My town just had the sheriff for example. The sheriff had a small crew of 1-2 deputies and a secretary. When something really rough would happen, the sheriff would round up a crew. It was a really light group of people. Lots of differences between that, a militia, community policing, etc. Even today some rural communities are “policed” very differently. Now that same town has a standing police force of 40 officers, a K-9 unit, and they have fancy military vehicles. This is with a change from 5000->10000 in population.

This was all up until pretty recently (1940s-1950s) too.

where are some of the grossly over budgeted police departments?

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