Maybe they could take some money from the police budget. I recall some protests to that effect.
Second, though you might think otherwise from Very Online commentary, cutting funding for the police has in fact not much support from Chicago communities. The Online Discourse seems to have a real problem getting its head around the idea that communities of color in Chicago are both very justifiably upset at CPD for abusing them, and very justifiably upset at CPD for ignoring them.
At any rate, Chicago will not be taking money from the Chicago Police Department to fund community broadband.
[1]: https://www.citybureau.org/newswire/2020/10/16/chicagos-budg...
It's worth noting the age difference - that defunding police is popular among younger people of color, and unpopular among older people of color, still by and large subscribing to the tough-on-crime approach.
A lot of the ideas underneath defund have legs! In most places, the police should stop doing traffic enforcement (replace with unarmed compliance patrols, the way we handle parking tickets) and obviously, police shouldn't be doing mental health wellness checks anywhere. No-knock warrants should be outlawed in almost all circumstances.
There are lots of other structural reform ideas Defund hasn't really touched; for instance, police should be licensed by their respective states, so that misconduct can result in a revocation that preempts union contracts. Civilian oversight bodies should be given more authority.
It's just that advocates for these ideas centered the least popular and least important aspect of the policy.
I'd despair except the idea behind a national police reform policy push was, I think, ill-conceived from the jump. In Oak Park, where I live, a switch of just 2-3 trustees in our 2021 elections would give us a majority that could rewrite the police general orders, and whatever ordinances govern our police union contract. That's like 10,000 votes, not 70,000,000.
What's more, if you watch town board meetings --- which is easier to do in the C19 era because they're all online --- you'll notice that one of the most powerful bits of evidence in support of any policy idea is "what do the neighboring townships do". It likely won't take many trustee board flips to get a decent snowball rolling.
Its a dumbfounding gaffe on the part of the activists using it as a rallying cry.
I don't think its a strawman because unfortunately its the majority of arguments I see... but people will bring up the APCs or "military equipment" some departments have as an example of things that can be cut... while perhaps true a one off APC or extra equipment isn't going to be anywhere close to how much it would cost for many city projects.
What if someone is walking in the street, naked, and screaming things? Are they violent? Are they mentally ill? Are they on drugs?
I get the intention here but I don’t think I’ve really seen anyone ask why we police this way. Is there a lesson we are forgetting?
It’s like the tale of the new property owners that come across a fence that appears random. They’d be wise to verify why the fence was put there before removing it.
Also, I think your implicit assumption is incorrect (that the police typically don’t have the individual‘s safety in mind, or that they only have the general public’s safety in mind).
Because we created police forces to round up slaves and then just kept adding more responsibilities to them. In fact, before we had ambulances, police officers would just throw the injured/sick in the back of their paddy wagon and drive them to a doctor. Frustrated with the staggeringly high death rate for people in his community, a black doctor eventually created the idea of an ambulance and specialized paramedics who handle that situation instead of police. It was so effective, white neighborhoods started calling him too and we eventually adopted the idea everywhere.
The idea of defunding the police means to do more of that. Trained specialists for different types of calls who are dispatched based on need. Much like how police will often show up with an ambulance to make sure it’s safe but then leave pretty quickly once they confirm it is, the same could be done with other non-violent calls like the one you described.
This isn’t rocket science, and it’s well steeped in research. We just need to be able to get over our biases.
"Less" policing can mean better services that replace poorly executed police functions.
I don't think you're second question is answerable as phrased, but I think having fewer killers on the street probably matters for quality of life in Chicago, or, at the very least, quantity of life.
What is the alternative to detectives that solves more crimes?
You asked whether police solve crimes and whether that matters to people, and you gestured at the existence of alternatives. I answered your two questions, and you didn't contest those answers. And I asked what those alternatives might be. I guess what I'm saying is I don't know why you're talking about the complaint rate for patrol cops now.
The first year will be a bit rocky, but after that the worst offenders will be removed from the planet.
I haven't seen evidence that this is an effective strategy, though there's not really compelling evidence in either direction. At the very least, I can argue that this should be tested thoroughly before implementation in Chicago.
On a personal level, I really do not want to be made responsible for killing anyone, though I expect your response is that enough people would be willing to kill a person that there would be a kind of herd immunity. I also do not believe in the death penalty, even for murder. Accordingly, I disagree with this plan wholeheartedly, exactly to the degree that it is effective.
The police department however has had numerous scandals.
It is worth noting that, earlier this year, when property crime briefly became popular in certain rich areas, the response of the city government was to deepen segregation by raising the bridges over the Chicago river, which serves as a boundary between the poor south/west and the rich north. Chicago's inequality problem is more serious than its crime problem.
But I'd contest that the bridges that separate the Loop from the rest of city is symbolic as a divide between rich and poor. Plenty of the near west side across the river is affluent, as are the near west suburbs, and the lower north side. It's remarkable how much of the violence (especially homicides) are concentrated to East and West Garfield Park outside the south side where it's less concentrated. Raising the bridges doesn't really inconvenience anyone but commuters going between the Loop, West Loop, and River North. The bridges were raised to prevent looting of the store fronts, not stop violent crime. I wouldn't compare the boarding up of stores in Emeryville at the same time as symptoms of the divide between rich and poor in the east bay.
All that said, the violence is much better today than it was even a few years ago, and orders of magnitude improved over 30 years ago. Though there is debate whether crime was reduced or just spread out to the suburbs after the demolition of housing projects like Cabrini Green.
And while property crime and violent crime are separate to a degree, I think the city's response says a lot. My experience in Chicago is that the police are more interested in keeping crime contained than truly eliminating it.
This is pretty silly. The highways were open between the north and south sides (I crossed the river the next day without issue); they were only isolating the hardest hit commercial districts to dissuade more damage. It wasn’t some ploy by our Black mayor to increase racial segregation.