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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

> My guess is that as police are defunded (Minneapolis is getting rid of police department entirely) folks who can pay and see a role for security will probably contract for it. In the bay area this is already happening to a small degree.

I think in a lot of major metros, even funded police aren't meeting people's needs. If we aren't getting what we're paying for, we should stop paying.

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I think a lot of people feel that way.

Am I more likely to have a positive or negative interaction with police? I honestly don't know, and I'm white in a nice area. Crime is low and something like a burglary is extremely unlikely. I think police may be providing an unseen benefit to me by enforcing the law on others - I don't want vehicles doing 50 mph on my residential street, maybe they would without police? Or maybe they wouldn't?

I'm not taking a side on this issue, but I do empathize with those who believe they are unlikely to ever benefit from police presence, and thus don't want to pay for police.

This is a major part of the problem in these debates. People don't measure or argue from what they can't see. We often imagine issues as scalars, when more often they are a single knob on a complex machine, most of which is invisible to even the best informed people.

Like all things, it’s a complex issue.

Personally, I think the underlying issue is a lack of accountability. Address that, and many issues resolve themselves.

> I do empathize with those who believe they are unlikely to ever benefit from police presence, and thus don't want to pay for police.

You're saying this like the majority these people have a net-positive impact on tax revenue. It's quite the opposite.

Black Americans want to retain their current level of police presence (or rather, that of the status quo ante). This might be because in many cases they are quite likely to be the victim of a burglary:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/black-americans-police-r...

https://www.newsweek.com/denying-crime-wave-progressives-are...

If the videos online are any indicator, police do a lot more than simply enforce the law: they regularly harass and intimidate anyone behaving in ways that are nonstandard (including simply existing while being a minority or poor) even if no laws are being broken, and suffer no consequences whatsoever for such illegal and often violent conduct.

This is presumably what some people want, but in general the police as protectors of the status quo is, in my view, a bad thing. The status quo sucks and changing it isn't illegal—yet the cops in the US will treat you as it it were.

It's a bad and fiercely unamerican system.

Reading a lot of the comment there seems to be a recency bias towards complaining a more recent set of policies to change police funding and ignoring the more long term problem that police may not be meeting the people needs even with large budgets.

The issue might not be funding level but misuse as you point out.

> If we aren't getting what we're paying for, we should stop paying.

Would you apply that to government services generally, where we're not getting what we pay for?

“We” in this case is public policy about how tax money is spent, not individuals’ tax payments.

Given that: yes, we should absolutely stop funding services where society isn’t getting what it’s paying for—or fix them.

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