I will grant you that allowing police to use tape to cover their name tags is wrong on many levels.
But if protesters use this technology to target policemen's families, why would anyone in their right mind take the job?
Ideally, you aren't; you are going to disband the centralized, omnipurpose paramilitary law enforcement entities known as "police departments", redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities that for the most part are not exclusively, or even centrally, law enforcement, and not violate the public trust the way police departments have broadly and systematically done over an extended period of time.
The metric we should look at is not GDP per capita (which is how the U.S. bears similarity to Europe), it is crime.
If you look at intentional homicide rates among large countries (>1m population), the U.S. is comparable to countries like Ecuador, Argentina, Kenya, and Pakistan [1].
The U.S. intentional homicide rate is bigger than Western European countries by a factor of 4 or 5.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
A major contention of the defund/dismantle movement is that the US prioritization of paramilitary law enforcement for local funding exacerbates the social problems that create crime, even if you don't count crime-by-police.
Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year, at a surface level this feels extremely efficient — certainly more so than other parts of our bureaucracy.
Crime occurs for social, cultural, and/or financial reasons — focusing on the financial, we have a giant bureaucratic and inefficient government, an incredibly large population, and a lot of waste. I don't think one could argue the $24/person/month we pay for police would make a substantial difference / stop a ton of crime.
I should imagine it's gone up since then?
> Considering over 240 million 911 calls are placed in a given year
But if you cut the police spending by, say, 50% and used that money instead to providing social services, mental health services, etc., how many of those 911 calls go away?
I already know the answer. It makes the place look a hell of a lot like Western Europe.
The people not making their living outside the law don't need more police and they sure as shit don't need more militarized police. The largest group of people who are making their living outside of the law can easily be made to not be doing that by an act of congress.
It will reduce the profitability of the drug trade, which may result in less crimes or an increase in other crimes. It may also increase the number of people addicted to drugs, which, in the United States, leads to an exponential increase in both violent crime and property crime [1].
There's many other forms of crime and homicide than drug-related, and plenty of people need the police for reasons that are not related to drugs.
Separately, those people would not be making their living "not outside the law," they would be out of work. Drug legalization doesn't mean we allow existing supply chains from violent cartels.
Violent crime in the U.S. is just far more deadly.
It's a tough problem, but I suspect the actual solution probably has to do more with shifting our culture than with changing our laws.
What will happen if domain-specific entities protect their specific regions and there are issues with other entities near-by?
What have the Romans ever done for us? There has been local law enforcement for ages until empires started. Civilization happens because somebody unites a region under one law enforcement. It's not pretty for everybody, but by which force should domain specific forces not fight each other if central authority is disbanded?
Subdividing the police department could work.
New-York inhabitant already thank you, especially given the radical upspike in violence since the NYPD defunding !
You can't have unarmed law enforcement against armed gang-bangers...
They don't mean regional fiefdoms.
Domain here meaning function, not territory. What we currently have for local law enforcement is mainly territory-based all-purpose paramilitary forces. (State and federal law enforcement is mostly divided among domain-specific agencies, most of which report to top-level departments with some focus other than generic law enforcement.)
> but by which force should domain specific forces not fight each other if central authority is disbanded?
No one has suggested disbanding central authority, either at local or higher levels, only disbanding centralized all-purpose local paramilitary law-enforcement agencies.
> Despite the uptick of crime in his ward, Cunningham, who supports the creation of a new community safety agency to replace the police department, said it’s particularly important now to start instituting some of those public health-based approaches to violence prevention. Recently, the council took more than $1 million from the police budget to hire “violence interrupters” to intervene and defuse potentially violent confrontations. [1]
> “If we have these systems in place we are getting ahead of the violence,” said Cunningham. “That’s why I have advocated so strongly for the violence interrupters, because if they are interrupting the violence before the guns are being fired, then the MPD doesn’t have to respond to that violence.”
> “What I am sort of flabbergasted by right now is colleagues, who a very short time ago were calling for abolition, are now suggesting we should be putting more resources and funding into MPD,” Cunningham said.
I'm questioning the general competence of politicians when the best solution they have is hiring unarmed citizens to... interrupt potentially armed and unhinged aggressors?
1 - https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/09/15/with-violent-crime-...
Activists are going to decide they don't like them and start stalking them as well.
Also, there is now a watchman watching the watchman, but who's watching the watchman watching the watchman ?
I do not condone violence and at the moment the police seem to be doing most of it. There needs to be a check on that.
I guess your opinion then fully depends on where the MSM camera are pointed toward, because you've got to be awfully blind if you think ONLY the police has been violent.
You heard: "you think ONLY the police has been violent"
I said: "I do not condone violence"
You seem to heave heard: "I do not condone violence [and don't think anyone except for police has used it]."
Try harder.
I am aware that others are violent, but they're also not pepper spraying people milling around with their kids or black bagging people on the street.
Someone who claims to have the most dangerous job in America getting nervous about being identified while pepper spraying protestors has got an uphill battle convincing me that they're the victim. Armed agents of the state also clearly have to have a role in a country with as many guns as ours.
They should conduct themselves professionally enough that they aren't pepper spraying people sitting in the street and aiming rubber bullets at their heads. Start there. If you are captured on film pepper spraying some 20 year old kid sitting on the street in the face for a solid twenty seconds? No, you are absolutely not qualified to carry a firearm, much less "protect the peace".
U.S. civilians own nearly 400 million firearms, which is larger than the country's population. The intentional homicide rate is comparable to Kenya, Pakistan, Ecuador, or Argentina (5x higher than Western Europe). Are you sure that police will be able to operate effectively without being armed in a somewhat militaristic manner?
> redistribute law enforcement responsibilities among domain-specific entities
What will happen if I call 911 and report someone stole from me at gunpoint? What if I report that someone violated my restraining order against them? What if I report that someone is yelling threateningly at waitstaff at a restaurant?
> not violate the public trust
While we absolutely need more oversight, there are over ~55,000,000 documented police-public encounters in a given year, and ~1,000 cases of lethal force used by police (vast majority were people attempting to harm the officers).
The rate of lethal force as a percent of interactions: 0.0000206473%.
The rate of lethal force against the total U.S. population: 0.00000343477%.
I have a problem with centralized, all-purpose paramilitary law enforcement agencies.
If you ignore half the words of a description, it can change the meaning significantly.
In a country as armed and violent as the United States, escalation happens quickly and dangerously. We've all seen videos of officers pulling a car over for speeding and being executed the moment they look away, there's been more than a few in the past couple months alone [1] [2] [3]. Nearly any situation can become lethal for the officer and civilians [4], so I think it's fair to ask in what situations there would be an armed responder.
Edited with sources as it was downvoted:
[1] https://nypost.com/2020/09/15/police-release-footage-of-fata... [2] https://apnews.com/article/808248ed232ca2a83dad8780359bf69b [3] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/20/us/south-carolina-deputy-kill...
[4] https://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/16-153...
- Mao Zedong
It's easy to wonder how the government would collect taxes without armed police. Or confiscate guns if stricter gun control laws are created. The reality is, of course, that they merely want to defund or disarm this version of the police.
> What will happen if I call 911 and report someone stole from me at gunpoint? What if I report that someone violated my restraining order against them?
FYI, the police have no obligation to do anything in the restraining order scenario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_of_Castle_Rock_v._Gonzale...
In fact, police have no obligation of duty to you as an individual in almost any scenario.
Wasn't an open warrant for violating a restraining order what led to the Jacob Blake alteraction?
Yeah, I don't know why the biggest argument people raise against radical reform of the US law enforcement system is "the current system is doing a spectacularly bad job at controlling crime, so we shouldn't mess with it".
Why is the crime rate high? Is it really because of police, or do they help? How will some radical restructuring reduce it?
There are many questions here.
Preventative policing, while effective in social democratic countries with low inequality like the Nordics, isn't on the table when we see violent crime that mirrors African and South American countries. Disincentivizing homicide in a country rife with inequality and materialism is a harder task than we imagine.
There are ~900,000 police officers in the United States, and 240 million 911 calls, and 50 million police-public interactions. That's an average of over 50 interactions per day for a police officer.
Those are numbers per year, not per day.
The murder clearance rates are quite low when I checked, so at least part of issues is the way police prioritize their work. And you wont raise murder clearance rates by surveilling protesters nor by having guns from army nor by arresting people for loitering and what not.
You cant disincentivize homicide when you don't catch murderers. And most murders are also among people who know each other, not random events.
I would argue that anything above 0.00% is wrong. Police must and should always use non-lethal approach. Regardless of their situation. Sound / visual / sensory approach would incapacitate the violent persona and bring it to justice. Police in now way should be granted judge and executioner roles.
We are either consider life precious or not at all. No middle ground.
Of the percent I cited, >90% of that lethal force is against an armed individual.
I don't know what sensory approach could prevent every single death, when there are so many cases of violence in this country.
Where there is a will...
There are values of 0.00000343477% which are below 0.00%.
>The rate of lethal force as a percent of interactions: 0.0000206473%.
Could you explain this number? I get 0.001818%. Did you forget to correct for the factor 100 in giving a percentage?
What is the percentage when it comes to Black and Latinos in the US?
In other words, disband PD to create... another PD.
A mob follows no rules and some try to blind police officers using lasers. Or they can simply harass somebody for days on end.
No one ever won a lawsuit against a mob.
Why is it acceptable when police stop people for breaking traffic laws, but "false imprisonment" when other drivers do it?
On a more serious note, this is the stuff Libertarians have been talking about for decades. There is no consistency to government power and laws at all, so it's all smoke and mirrors. And only backed by circular power. I.e. Government gives itself legitimacy because it is government.
We’re not in a perfect world, and — as all humans are imperfect — evidence of badness will accumulate in even the best of us. I wish I knew how to fix that, because it also applies to literally all online activity, and isn’t just a cops thing.
" If you have nothing to hide, why refusing surveillance?"
So police should be exempted from mass surveillance ban ?!?
Whatever the solution ends up being, I want the police to be the same as everyone else with regard to that solution.
I don’t really get normal human psychology, so I don’t know if everybody or nobody should have facial recognition software in public places, but I do think it should be a choice of “everybody or nobody”.
How much "wrong" does an organization have to commit before it becomes a net liability?
"But if protesters use this technology to target policemen's families, why would anyone in their right mind take the job?"
Why would anyone in their right mind take a job where they covered their name tag to protect their identity?
Sunshine is a disinfectant.
If the police have lost consent of the governed, then the problem is with the government.
Nutjobs who want power over others and are willing to imperil themselves to pursue it will continue to become cops. By discouraging people in their right mind from joining the police, the police will become more dangerous. 'All Cops Are Bad' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Unfortunately I think some police reform/abolition activists have decided to accelerate this feedback loop under the theory that making things much worse is the only way to make things better. 'ACAB' makes bad cops think they're in good company while probably making good cops want to quit (and similarly filters new police recruits.) The premise is presumably that when cops get worse, more of the public will support reform. 'Accelerationist' approaches like thus might be well intentioned, but I think the consequences are more likely to be disastrous.
Escalate appropriately to targetting family - you know the same way they would if crazed vegans attacked a meat packing worker. Anyone so cowardly they cannot accept working for a living for an entity /with a legal monopoly on use of force/ has no business being a police officer. If they cannot accept being protected like everybody else we don't want the cravens.