Police have been quitting in droves in the last year | Hacker News Reader

Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

nytimes.com

104 pointslxm316 comments

> Finally, officers said they were asked to handle too much; they were constantly thrown at tangled societal problems like mental health breakdowns or drug overdoses, they said, for which they were ill-equipped — then blamed when things went wrong.

Sounds like they've got some common ground with the "defund the police" folks, if they'd listen a bit.

I'm guessing it would've been better if they went with "Distribute funds properly" instead of "Defund the police".

it would not have attracted any attention. it's hard to say if a boring statement like "allocate funds correctly" that inspires no critical thinking at all is more or less productive than an inflammatory one like "defund the police!" that probably gets a lot of people thinking about the issue, while at the same time causing a lot of reactionary movements to said slogan that work against it's general goals, at least in the short term.

Only absolutist sentiments make good slogans.

I want this on a t-shirt. It is funny with an exclamation point.

You can write a polite editorial in WaPo or Bloomberg with that title, but nobody will remember it five minutes later.

We have approximately 400 years of "black people should be treated equal to whites". 50+ since the Civil Rights Era of "hey, there's some systemic racial issues we need to address as a country". Sure, you can argue that "Black Lives Matter" is just too hard to understand, but it -has- brought attention to the issue.

>> they were constantly thrown at tangled societal problems like mental health breakdowns or drug overdoses

Shouldn't the EMT be called for a drug overdose? You know, someone to treat the patient rather than someone whose primary job would be to arrest them for illegal activity.

Related: I know an EMT and he says people they are there to help will sometimes attack them. That's a stressful job too.

> I know an EMT and he says people they are there to help will sometimes attack them.

And EMTs manage to do their jobs without weapons. Bet your friend also has stories about police interfering with EMTs doing their jobs and threatening violence.

This quote sounds like a bit too similar to the political proposal… maybe a cherry picked quote but doesn’t seem like something most police would say without prompt.

What makes you think they aren't listening? The problem is they're just further down into the nuts and bolts of the problem than the "defund the police" folks ever get, so it only looks like they aren't listening when they ignore infeasible or impractical ideas.

> What makes you think they aren't listening?

* gestures in the general direction of... everything *

Lol, every cop union I've seen is asking for more social workers. But cities don't want to add social workers, they want to replace cops with social workers, which is nuts. If social workers need police escorts for most calls, what good does it do to replace cops with them?

Face it, "defund the police" was a catchy but ultimately stupid phrase, but there's no backing out now with out looking like thoughtless hysterics that caused a massive spike in crime and murders, leading to thousands of excess deaths.

In most places that is the issues that the communities face. But Police like firefighters need to exist irrespective of any current need, so what else would you have them do in the mean time? Maybe they need to up their training to include those items. They aren't just town guards.

There is a trend of cross-training fire and police, creating 'public safety officers'

The job is supposed to be hard, I don't understand the problem. Perhaps we need 1-4 years of crisis training instead of 6 months of how to shoot.

God I wish they spent 6months learning to shoot. A friend of mine is a corrections deputy. Her first department ran her through a single range day where she was barely able to qualify.

Then she was sent to the state cop school, where they were to get two days of instruction, then quals.

She was worried, so I took her out for about 8 hours and taught her to shoot properly.

She went, and shot a perfect score, amd was given the marksman award for the class.

She has since gone on the embarrass most of the deputies she works with on their twice a year range days.

I am, on my best day, able to shoot at a USPSA B-class level. No grand master here. And I can shoot rings around her, all day, every day.

So we give them budget, they sort of determine how most of it is spent. At least that is how it is in most places. If they are ill-equipped, isn't that sort of on them? Where did the training go?

Policing has to be one of the hardest jobs in our modern society, I honestly couldn't event imagine the stress.

Imagine picking up a JIRA ticket at work and not knowing if that ticket is going to a run of the mill bug fix or something that can kill you. That's just out of the realm of possibility for an SWE but for a cop it can be any one of the calls they take on a daily basis.

I've always had respect for cops because it's one of those jobs that I just know I could never ever do, props to those in our society that do that work.

And if you make the incorrect commit in the moment -- or don't check with compliance, then a person is dead, you're on trial by the public; and possibly at risk for jail time.

[Addendum: And you're being promoted based on arrests, while sharing frustration with management about compliance, and likely seeing other cowboy coder style actions]

You might be surprised to see the rate at which police are charged and convicted of a crime while on the job. Hint: The number is incredibly low.

Yep, most around here just get put on "desk duty", essentially a "hey let's wait for this to all blow over then we'll get you back out there" play.

You're probably 1000x as likely to be fired for a bad commit than you are to be fired as a cop that has made a poor policing decision.

After all, you don't have a union.

However, qualified immunity would protect me from being held responsible.

My opinion of cops has changed as i've gotten older. I used to think they had nothing better to do but bother me, the youth, but in hindsight they have too much to do and are expected to always be on, alert, and accountable. Something that takes a lot of courage. I respect them more, especially after the extremely divisive events of the past 2-3 years, riots, attacks, etc.

If they were always accountable, this story wouldn’t have run.

I have a different view. I saw a lot of friends lose their fathers and mothers to the system thanks to dirty cops. Being white in a poor (understatement) neighborhood was an enlightening experience.

The police are very powerful voices in local governments. They have too much power. I consider the number of police officers to be inversely proportional to how civilized a place is.

> the number of police officers to be inversely proportional to how civilized a place is.

On a police-per-capita basis, that would make US East Coast urban areas substantially less civilized than either Middle America or the West Coast.

https://www.governing.com/archive/police-officers-per-capita...

Yes, and unsurprisingly urban centers (especially impoverished ones) have the most negative interactions with police, exacerbated by the heavy-handed presence.

I've had a similar change of heart in that I value police a lot more than I did as a youth frustrated by irrational drug laws.

Unfortunately I still have experiences which prove to me that some police have nothing better to do than annoy otherwise law abiding people. It's like any group of people, there are good cops and there are bad cops.

I grew up with cops. One of my parents was a cop - so we spent a lot of time with them when I was younger.

Trust me, a lot of them are not really that good of people. They’re often more broken and problematic than your random person. Substance abuse is very common and acting outside the law is also extremely common. I’ve seen many LEO’s beat their wives and drive drunk while having to go out and work on the same calls. Always a bit awkward when they have to respond to a call for one of their own - I should know, I was there.

As far as I can tell - most aren’t really that upstanding of citizens and the standards are pretty lax for what gets in. Some are genuinely nice and good people but I don’t see them last for very long because they move onto better things.

Law enforcement can be dangerous but it's only #22 in occupational death rates. Lumberjacks and roofers are far more likely to get killed.

https://www.ishn.com/articles/112748-top-25-most-dangerous-j...

Potential for death is a very limited way to measure dangerous occupations/activities.

This comment is supported by data.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5516a4.htm

> Floodwater contact with the nose, mouth, or eye was reported by 51% of firefighters (254 of 500) and 30% of police officers (258 of 864); 52% of police officers (473 of 910) and 63% of firefighters (330 of 524) reported rescuing citizens from flooded areas.

Not sure why you're downvoted. Chronic stress should be considered. Police have a much lower life expectancy than regular people. This could be either selection bias or the impact of chronic stress, and it has little to do with dying as an immediate proximate consequence of the occupation.

It's also just a very un-nuanced way to think about anything. It reminds me of a scene in the show Scrubs where one friend is discussing the difficulties of being a child of divorce. The other comments how he always found it interesting how children with divorced parents think they have the market cornered on issues/problems (paraphrasing here, obviously). Think about all the children who grew up with parents who should have divorced but didn't, thus extending the misery of living in that environment.

Living every single moment with PTSD, physical pain, anxiety, and so on shouldn't be diminished because it isn't as romantic and easily captured as death is.

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

> Law enforcement can be dangerous but it's only #22 in occupational death rates.

The original post has been edited to no longer make the claim about policing being the most dangerous, but a direct refutation is not whataboutism.

The original post didn't say "the most dangerous" but "one of the hardest". That's what it said when I made my comment and my comment is within 3 minutes of the parent -- and I had been reading comments for a good few minutes before then.

On the long tail of possible professions, #22 is pretty damn close to the top.

There was no direct refutation made and the comment is CERTAINLY a Whataboutism.

Police are in the top 5 in suicide rates. As are construction workers.

I don't really know what that represents other than stress. Your average veterinarian is as likely to kill herself as your average police officer is to kill himself.

Citation?

http://www.zeroattempts.org/suicide-professions.html

There's also a TED talk about suicide among veterinarians: https://youtu.be/objP3E625Xo

Unbeknownst to me, veterinarians are indeed in the top 11 job types at risk for suicide.

Teachers are not, however. Why do veterinarians and police kill themselves more than teachers do?

Stress like you mentioned, yes, but the psychology research seems to point to suicide as a poor coping skill, so it could be argued that a failure in supporting employees in building their coping skills is a contributing factor.

I imagine that information doesn't help very much psychologically.

And the majority of those are traffic accidents. If you limit it to homicides it drops many more places.

Untrue at least for USA, only 28% are road related deaths.

https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf

This is your source:

> SOURCE: US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 1995.

Notably from 1995.

Doesn't your source say that only 47% of police deaths are homicide? That's less than half of the statistic used for this ranking. Am I reading that table correctly?

I don't have my own stats or sources; I don't particularly have a dog in this hunt. This seems like not a useful source at all in my opinion.

Those are very old stats.

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/leo/default.html

Your source is only for the year 1995, and even there it was the second most common cause. It was the most common cause on average over the last ten years (traffic fatalities are split, you have to add them together): https://nleomf.org/facts-figures/causes-of-law-enforcement-d...

Even on your source they aren’t the majority

Did you sum the numbers for all types of moving vehicle sources of hazard?

If you do the math, it does appear to exceed the number of incidences of being shot on the job.

Yes and even then it doesn’t

Additionally the claim wasn’t, ‘exceed the number of incidences of being shot on the job’ it was, ‘majority of [deaths] are traffic accidents’

Depending on your perspective, the claim is not entirely incorrect.

The most neutral reading of the presented data is that police are equally likely to be shot, have a moving-vehicle accident, and have a job related illness.

The remainder of job related hazards are extremely marginal in comparison to those three.

Guns, vehicles, and illness compose the near totality of incidents and those incidents are distributed nearly equally between the three hazards.

The sum of traffic accidents is 335+4+1+2+58+4+130=534 vs. 528 who were shot.

Edit: Even better: the chance of being shot is way lower for an LEO than the average US citizen: Its .000122 for the average person vs. .000066 for an LEO.

(2017 numbers: 1/32510000039773=.000122 for the average vs. 1/80000053=.000066 for LEOs, gun deaths from here https://time.com/5476998/risk-of-guns-america/ and LEO deaths from the source above)

How many roofers or lumberjacks are killed by homicide in the course of doing their job?

this comment is always on threads like this. as if it's supposed to prove like "meh it's not THAT hard of a job"

roofers don't have to worry about making a split-second decision about whether or not they have to kill someone before they kill you.

yes they just make arbitrary decisions all day that might kill themselves

For people replying to this comment, the point is, policing isn’t as dangerous as you might think. Certainly it isn’t risk free, but people perform many more dangerous jobs. Police deaths are often tragic and a result of human on human violence though, so it tends to spark a stronger reaction than “well, a giant tree fell on Jimmy and he died”. Still tragic but there are no “bad guys” in that scenario for a lumberjack, for example. Police also are supposedly serving their communities and there is a perceived nobility to the profession that makes deaths while in service to the community much more visible. It can even trend towards a bit of hero worship. Not judging the profession itself, there are a lot of human factors in the job and certainly, anyone who has dealt with conflict can attest that dealing with other people all day is a lot more stressful than many other professions in that list.

When it comes to analysis of job hazards, death is perhaps the penultimate risk, but to ignore the vast breadth of other job hazards that law enforcement officers are exposed to is an analytical failure.

Further compounding the issue is that law enforcement is not the job that the police are often tasked with. Some of the job hazards they are exposed to are due to making inappropriate demands of law enforcement officials.

> When it comes to analysis of job hazards, death is perhaps the penultimate risk,

Death is penultimate to... what?

See the United States “Occupational Injury and Illness Classification Manual” at https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/oiicm.pdf

I've tried navigating that document, it's not clear to me where your ordering came from. FWIW 'penultimate' means second from last, suggesting that there is an 'ultimate' risk even more feared than death. I believe that's what GP was asking about.

Ah, sorry for not expounding further. I did understand what the GP was conveying, but I’m just saying:

It is common to consider some situations as being worse than death.

I suspect that most reasonable readers of that classification manual would be able to identify a selection of situations that could lead to being considered worse than death.

If you're familiar with The Princess Bride, "to the pain".

I suspect this doesn't account for the subset of cops out on the beat versus law enforcement clerical workers.

In most years the leading cause of death among on-duty police officers is traffic accidents.

So in a sense you're right but not really for the reasons you might think.

That's to be expected. It seems to make sense that a lumberjack and a roofer have an easier time becoming too relaxed compared to the police.

Accidents are less psychologically stressful than violence.

Citation?

Not something that can be empirically tested.

Looks like it can be.

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=Acc...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=rel...

> There is little information available that shows the relative values of stress across different occupations, which would enable the direct comparison of stress levels. This paper reports the rank order of 26 different occupations on stress and job satisfaction levels.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...

> One of the main tenets of GST, the introduction of noxious stimuli (i.e., experiencing violent events) correlates with negative coping strategies.

I wonder if the stress comes from how a police officer dies on the job rather than the absolute death rate of the profession.

Lumber harvesting is the most dangerous profession in the US but I imagine that most deaths would be described as "accidents". For example, someone cuts a leg with a chainsaw, a tree snaps in a weird way, someone gets pushed off a cliff.

Police officers, on the other hand, usually due to violence while interacting with other people.

In other words, a lumberjack, roofer, etc could think that they won't die today on the job because they are being careful, because there are safety protocols set by OHSA, etc. The same might not be true for police officers because there is little that they can do to address how others will interact with them.

In a sense, police officers might process their job more closely to how a soldier process their job than a lumberjack/roofer.

> I wonder if the stress comes from how a police officer dies on the job rather than the absolute death rate of the profession.

> Police officers, on the other hand, usually due to violence while interacting with other people.

Incorrect. It's mostly traffic accidents. https://www.npr.org/2010/12/29/132441719/Traffic-Accidents-L...

In 2020, it was mostly COVID. https://thedaily.case.edu/study-finds-more-active-duty-polic...

> there is little that they can do to address how others will interact with them

Don't police generally get training in conflict de-escalation?

Indeed they do.

The training documents that I’ve seen publicly available on the internet explicitly incorporate de-escalation techniques as the first and preferred option.

On the other hand, you have people like Dave Grossman (of the "Killology Research Group") telling cops at police seminars that one of the "perks" of the job is that, after killing another human being, they'll have the "best sex [they've] had in months". https://twitter.com/RzstProgramming/status/13852746532292853...

I understand your point, but it is a little disingenuous to bring that up as a point without considering the relative rates of attitudes such as that with the mainstream attitudes of law enforcement trainers.

Is this individual representative of the mainstream?

I mean, are the training documents that you've seen publicly available on the Internet representative of the mainstream? Why is your inclination that those are normative but this seminar is anomalous?

> Intensive specialized training is provided to offic- ers in departments using a police-based specialized police response. This strategy involves having sworn officers with specialized mental health training pro- vide crisis intervention services and act as liaisons to the formal mental health system. Deane et al.2 found that only three percent of departments use this ap- proach—among them, the Memphis Crisis Inter- vention Team (CIT). CIT officers make up about 15 to 20 percent of patrol officers and receive 40 hours of training that focuses on scenarios derived from actual incidents. Officers receive extensive training in de-escalation techniques.9 The second approach, a police-based specialized mental health response, was used by 12 percent of the departments. Mental health consultants, who were not sworn officers, were hired by the police depart- ment to provide on-site and telephone consultation to officers in the field. The third approach, a mental- health-based specialized mental health response, was used by 30 percent of the departments. This strategy involved reliance on mobile crisis teams. The teams were part of the local community mental health ser- vice system. The teams had developed a relationship with the local police departments to provide assis- tance on the scene.

http://jaapl.org/content/jaapl/33/1/50.full.pdf

Of note, the remaining 55% of the departments in that study did not have a formal policy at the time (2005).

edit: additionally, in that paper they discuss the notably high proportion of police officers expressing interest in mental health training - almost all of them

To be clear, this is referring to a very specific subset of police: "crisis intervention team" officers within the 3% of departments that use a "police-based specialized police response" to mental health issues.

That is not a correct reading of the quoted analysis.

In tabular form:

CIT 3%

police-based specialized mental health response 12%

mental- health-based specialized mental health response 30%

no formal policy 55%

Agreed. And the relevant sentences, within the paragraph about CIT:

> CIT officers make up about 15 to 20 percent of patrol officers and receive 40 hours of training that focuses on scenarios derived from actual incidents. Officers receive extensive training in de-escalation techniques.

It's ambiguous whether "officers" in the second sentence refers to all officers or only CIT officers (I read it as the latter). Regardless, according to this analysis only 0.45–3% of all patrol officers receive this training that is specifically with regard to people with mental illness.

Edit in case my math is unclear: according to this research, 3% of all department use CIT or similar. Assuming 100% of officers in those departments receive the training, that works out to 3% of all patrol officers. Assuming only the ~15% of CIT officers receive the training, that works out to 0.45% of all patrol officers.

I didn’t understand why they chose to include that extra information about CIT, but maybe the authors were just being thorough.

I did read it as if it were written: 15-20% of Memphis Police patrol officers are also CIT officers

edit: I’d highlight that the authors did emphasize the intensive nature of de-escalation techniques for CIT training and that perhaps they were singling out Memphis as “state-of-the-art” police policy, at that time, with regard to law enforcement officers being tasked with mental health care.

In reply to your edit, you also need to account for the same training that may or may not be provided in all the other cases. This review article did not highlight any such data, but it likely exists in the research under review or in other available research

Sure — but the point is that given the evidence we’ve discussed so far, there’s no reason to believe de-escalation training is more normative than that disturbing seminar.

There is some suggestion in the presented data that police are asking for normative mental health training.

Can dig into the research to find out if anyone has empirically studied the attitudes of the trainers, themselves.

There is no reason to believe that de-escalation training is less normative than that disturbing seminar, either.

It’s important to understand that this includes everyone in policing even those who work behind a desk not just those that are near the front lines so to speak. The usbls collects it for the entire policing sector not just the job of police officer:

https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf

Yes and flying is safer than driving.

said by someone who probably has a #9999 most dangerous job.

Tell that to my wife’s old deputy (she was a dispatcher), that took a 7.62 round from an AK in the ass. Or his buddy that was medically retired after that from fucking is his back getting the shot-in-ass guy out of the fire fight.

Or the corrections deputy my friend worked with that was sexually assaulted by escaped two prisoners in a stairwell.

Imagine just doing your best to help your local community by building some online community notice board, only for a rabid horde to start picketing your house, shouting ALL PROGRAMMERS ARE BASTARDS!!!

The problem is lots of police members don't do their best to help their local communities, and the ones that do stand behind that ones that definitely don't.

Most people I know can't distinguish the difference between an anonymous hacker and their IT department. Many roles are vilified by society due to ignorance, not just the police. I hear about the good software developers are doing in the world, much more often than I do the police. That certainly has an effect on everyone's perceptions of these roles in society.

I'm glad to hear you conducted a thorough survey with the millions of good police officers out there and found out they support the bad apples. If only everyone had access to this unprecedented data you have collected, we could finally put this matter to rest.

Who needs statistics when you can see the police acting like this in your own day to day life?

That's the reality for a huge amount of people.

Bad cops are extremely rarely seriously punished, and its ever rarer for other cops to finger them for it.

Imagine using your online community notice board to murder a member of your community, and when your community tries to hold you accountable your fellow programmers, politicians, and members of your political party around the country circle the wagons and shout PROGRAMMER LIVES MATTER!!!

I mean, sure, if that online community board somehow shoots unarmed people I'd want to picket your house too.

Programmers have none of the authority, nor the history of abuses of power that cops do.

I'm not saying all or even most cops are bastards. But there's a non-trivial number of bastards, and the harm they've done to the communities they police (and to other cops, honestly) is immense.

If people were picketing me that intensely, I'd do some serious soul-searching of myself, my coworkers and my reporting structure.

If programmers were resulting in deaths in my community, I'd be picketting right with them with "I'm a programmer. Please hold me accountable. End qualified immunity for programmers."

assert great_power == great_resposibility

Etc

> only for a rabid horde to start picketing your house, shouting ALL PROGRAMMERS ARE BASTARDS!!!

Won’t lie, I’d probably hop outside and join them.

>Policing has to be one of the hardest jobs in our modern society

I'm guessing "our modern society" refers to the United States and not modern society as a whole.

As far as I can tell, in my country, only two police officers have died on the job between the years 2000 and 2016. There also seems to be a wide disparity in people who get killed by a police officer. It seems more like it's just inherently more dangerous to be American, whether or not you're a police officer or not.

Will you tell us what country that is?

Finland. Population of 5.5 million people, around 1.5 million registered firearms (2016).

Police work is far less dangerous than common perception. Similar danger as an average construction worker.

Right, but it seems like many of the cops have the same perception.

Could be a case where better awareness of the statistics would actually improve the problem.

Also though, danger resulting from your own stupidity, from other peoples stupidity, and from other peoples malicious activities, hit different psychologically IME. I'm willing to bet consturction workers get a lot less of the third and a lot more of the first.

Maybe something that better training could help with a bit, but probably not fix. Also selecting people who are well suited for that sort of environment.

I would think it varies depending on where you are policing.

Yep, always live in fear, always be ready to kill anything you are afraid of. Sounds like safe people to be around…

In civilized countries where guns aren't ubiquitous most police call outs won't be for something that can kill them. It's bizarre to me that it's just normal in America to expect someone to have a gun. Also, let's not pretend a lot of them aren't doing it for the power trip.

I'm of the belief that the US model of policing is incompatible with an expected armed society;

This can be seen in police shootings vs armed militias at protests.. If police approached every suspect as if the suspect were open carrying a high powered semi auto pistol, they'd be much less likely to approach suspects as they do. They'd be much more respectful, keep a vehicle between them, and focus on de-escalation as opposed to confrontation.

And in a country with 44% of suspects owning a fire arm, to confront someone is the wrong move.

> Also, let's not pretend a lot of them aren't doing it for the power trip.

... and the ability (in many/most? places) to retire after 20 years with ~50% pay. SO many of these people give zero fucks about the communities they're policing because they don't actually live in them and, generally, aren't incentivized to do so. They take these jobs because it's the best of a limited number of options. They then adopt a siege/deployment mentality and bulldoze their way through 20 years of service in order to retire early and open a bar, fuck off to Florida, hang out on their boat, etc.

https://fee.org/articles/by-the-numbers-how-dangerous-is-it-...

If that’s the case, objectively, many other jobs deserve more respect first.

We know different cops. The only cops I've met are mildly racist and intellectually lazy. Sure they were occassionally nice to have a beer with. But then they'd start talking and leave no doubt they aren't one of the good apples.

Imagine getting a JIRA ticket thinking, "fucking Java bug, again. Only way to fix this is to yank the power cord out."

Honestly, delivery people have to put up with way more shit and don't have weapons, the law, nor even a union that has their back. That's a tough job.

I’ve had a completely different experience than you. Cops who I’ve known have been pretty normal, compassionate people. They routinely tell me the most important skill in effective law enforcement is your ability to communicate.

This gets toward the heart of the issue here. (Also, same issue when discussing public education.)

Reasonable people living in different places or with different skin colors (as a specific differentiator) in the same place have vastly different experiences with the same individuals or police forces. This creates a fundamental conflict in the discussion/debate because both sides are speaking about it (usually) as if their experience is the experience.

Live in many southern US towns and you'll see very different treatment of people based on race which has a natural result that white people view cops as reasonable and polite (their experience) and black or Hispanic people view cops as unreasonable and oppressive (their experience).

Something tells me you don't get detained enough by the police because you "match the description"

I’m talking about a few people I know personally who happen to be cops (some white dudes, some POCs). Obviously this is anecdotal, as is the original comment I replied to.

However, I did experience profiling several times when I was younger and drove a mini-truck in the Bay Area. I have slightly darker skin and am routinely mistaken for hispanic. In the couple of years I owned the mini-truck, I was pulled over several times for things like a tail light out (it wasn’t), or “reports of stolen trucks that fit this description”. While unfair from a profiling perspective, I was compliant and polite, and the cops were professional (outside of the initial profiling). After running my license and registration they always let me on my way without any harassment. Now, I’m not saying my experience is indicative of other’s experience with cops but just that I’ve glimpsed the other side a bit.

This... "outside of the initial profiling"

doesn't jibe with this... "let me on my way without any harassment."

Sure, I should have said without any further harassment. But they did not escalate the situation. I’m sure if I was not very compliant, things could have turned out differently.

I can imagine how they become this way. With most offenders being from minority groups it's hard to keep an open mind if you're having to chase after them every day. Even though these problems are societal, not really caused by the minorities themselves but rather lack of opportunities etc

But if you're on the business end of society's failures on a daily basis I can imagine how this changes one's opinion.

I've worked as a technical support agent and I really started to be afraid of our company's products, being confronted with the worst that could happen to them every day. The knowledge that the calls I was getting were only about 0.1% of products in the field was easy to forget.

Let's not ignore the fact that minorities neighborhoods have historically faced higher levels of scrutiny from police.

It's not just that offenders are from minority groups... Consider that police are going out into minority groups looking for offenders.

I saw a stat a while back that showed that any higher levels of policing of minority communities was directly attributable to higher levels of disturbance reports from within the communities themselves.

So police aren’t just looking for offenders in minority communities. They’re going where the communities are asking them to be.

This article explains the situation better: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2016/09...

There's also evidence to show that all else held equal, police respond with more force when dealing with minorities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_use_of_deadly_force_in_....

Do you have a source for the stat that you mentioned.

Most policing is in minority neighborhoods, but not necessarily most crime.

For example, white drivers carrying drugs is higher, but Black folks are more likely to get stopped and searched for drugs.

So it's not that Black folks commit more of these crimes, they are just monitored more closely than their white counterparts regardless of outcome or reality. https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl...

>> Imagine getting a JIRA ticket thinking, "fucking Java bug, again. Only way to fix this is to yank the power cord out."

You must not have worked with a lot of support staff

Honestly, what conversation can we have about policing with a person who thinks a delivery driver has a more dangerous life than a cop? Only thing I can tell you is I hope you have a lot of delivery drivers living next to you if police shortage becomes a reality and crime trajectory continues on the same path as in 2020 and 2021. Or perhaps your keyboard can be as effective in self-defense as it is in the spreading of nonsense.

> crime trajectory continues on the same path as in 2020 and 2021.

Ah yes, the crime trajectory of 2020, which is different from the crime trajectory of 2000-2019. And we both know why.

The paranoid mentality that any call could kill you is the exact reason why so many unarmed black people are shot. If you can’t carry out a day’s work without the unreasonable fear that you will be shot, and any action makes you “fear for your life” so that why you emptied your clip into a car, then you shouldn’t be a cop. Cops needs to have cooler heads and this should be measured and verified before allowing them to carry weapons.

I’ve heard that ex-military make the best cops because they are used to dangerous situations without panicking. I fully support this because they know that they aren’t GI Joe.

Except "so many unarmed black people are shot" is a lie. A larger per-capita percentages of unarmed whites are shot than blacks.

Could you point me in the general direction of a source? I would like to find more about this.

The data do not support your statement. Using the search term "per capita police violence deaths" on DDG in private mode, the links below were results #2 and #4. (Results #1 and #3 were comparisons by country, and are not included here from irrelevance. This is not a case of cherry-picking results.)

https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/07/16/the-research-is-cle...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123070/police-shootings...

Blacktriangle was specifically talking about unarmed people shot by police. Your links are about shootings that include both armed and unarmed people.

Got a source on that? I do, but it doesn't bear out your assertion:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

> Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems to only be increasing, with a total 371 civilians having been shot, 71 of whom were Black, in the first five months of 2021. In 2020, there were 1,021 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 there were 999 fatal shootings. Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 36 fatal shootings per million of the population as of May 2021.

Note that your source is for all shootings, and they specifically make a claim about "unarmed" individuals being shot, the implication that while black individuals are more likely to be killed by police, those killed are more likely to be armed and potentially violent.

I don't have a source supporting or disproving that claim, I'm just pointing out that the source you provided doesn't address the claim they are making.

Fair point, thanks for noting

Even if it's true that more unarmed whites per-capita are shot, there's still an unacceptable amount of unarmed blacks that are shot (a threshold I would argue is crossed roughly at "any of them", but certainly before where it stands now). That data point should be used in the context of "it's even worse than you think", not the opposite.

Absolute death by police in 2020: white 457, black 241. https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

Population: white 197M, black 40M. https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Race-and-Ethnicit...

Per-capita: close to 3 times as many black people shot. I couldn't find clear statistics for unarmed victims. Please post if they're much different.

This site says it's normally close to 2x more unarmed white people shot, so it would still be less per capita. It's still a relatively small number for both; a mid-teens amount of unarmed black people, and a mid to high 20s unarmed white people.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

Note that we are not sure how many folks are killed by police every year let alone the demographics of those deaths. But even the data we have doesn't look good.

https://policeviolencereport.org/

US police departments are not required to provide this information. It must be collected ad hoc by outside orgs.

Many reports will (I kid you not) list sickle cell disease as cause of death during a police stop.

You used to be able to get data on armed vs. unarmed at killedbypolice.net, although it took a bit of effort. The site was simply a chronological list of all the known police killings in the US, for each giving name, age, race, gender, location, and linking to news stories covering the killing.

Unfortunately that site shut down, someone else got the name, and it now redirects to RoBarGuns.com, a gun review and buying guides site.

You can still get the data from archive.org here [1]. That has all the 2020 shootings up through July 20th, and has links for prior years back to 2014, and the last month of 2013.

I remember a couple years ago going through the then previous year and picking something like 50 at random (via a random number generator) and looking into the details, but I don't remember if I specifically took note of armed vs. unarmed.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200723033637/https://killedbyp...

https://policeviolencereport.org/

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/

Those aren't unarmed, though (you pointed that out but I wanted to make it clear)

One of the most pernicious myths about police shootings is that officers shoot unarmed black men at an alarming rate, when in fact just 2% of the people who were killed by an officer were unarmed and black. Since the beginning of 2015, law enforcement officers across the country have actually killed 33 more unarmed white people than unarmed black people.

Any number more than 0 is too many. "Cops shoot unarmed white people too" is not the defense of cops you think it is.

You are correct, however it does frame the issue differently, i.e. we need to find out how to not shoot people vs all cops are racist.

Maybe ex-combat military, but the vast majority of military never see combat.

Police departments increasingly utilize military gear and tactics. I wish they would also "take" the UCMJ, rules of engagement, and Geneva conventions.

> I’ve heard that ex-military make the best cops because they are used to dangerous situations without panicking.

This is a good point and one I think is missed. Police really do need more training. When departments started phasing out choke holds I think it was a mistake. The hold itself was not the problem, but lack of proper training.

I've read some proposals that want every police officer to be at a minimum a blue belt in BJJ. For perspective, that's a year or so of training. Someone going 3x/week means they will have 20-30 simulated fights PER week. That's how you get someone to stay relaxed in a stressful and physical situation.

Of course, when weapons are involved it's a different situation. But, in unarmed situation a person with a year+ of BJJ training will easily control the other person with little danger to either of them. And the LEO, knowing this, will not reach for their weapon first.

A couple weeks ago, I needed to shut a business down to add capacity to their electrical service. I arranged it to be late in the day, but once I got involved, I discovered it was an unexpected type of meter can and I can't turn off the power. So I have all the breakers off, no load, undo the load-side wires to the meter, live, and make it all up, also live, the last half hour by flashlight. There's enough power to incinerate me, but I know how to do my job well. I'm probably at greater risk from physical abuse of my body over decades, back and knees. Most jobs are less safe than programming.

Also imagine that your profession has become so highly politicized that many people actually hate you based on some misguided ideology vs how you have actually comported yourself while on the job. While I respect law enforcement, you couldn’t pay me enough to work in that field. Although . . . big tech is also becoming highly politicized so many of us may find ourselves in the same boat to one degree or another.

I don't want to say policing is not hard, every first responder has hard job because they are not sent to people who are completely fine -- usually the situation involves some kind of crime or distress or both.

But, the dangers, though present, are IMO largely overstated. There are 700 thousand officers in US and on any given day some of them must necessarily come into trouble. The statistics list about 360 officers getting killed in line of duty, annually. That is 1/700000 chance of getting killed every day, over 30 year career that would amount to 1 in 70 chance of getting killed on duty or about similar as dying from all other types of accidents, including car accidents.

Is that small? No, I don't think so, that is nothing to sneeze at. But is still a lot less than dying from some easily preventable diseases. So if you are Police officer and keep eating shit food it might be that the shit food is actually more dangerous to you than your job.

Going through Covid is statistically more dangerous than lifetime of being police officer. At least as an officer you are doing this (hopefully) for public good and you know and accept risks.

It is also less than probability of dying on some other types of duties.

The difference being, that policing is typically done when something already interesting happens with potentially a lot of cameras present on scene, then being investigated.

If you go to be a police officer or fireman or military, you understand your choices and the dangers you are facing. It should not be a surprise, nor it should be a reason to kill any person not to your liking, on sight.

You're also describing pizza delivery and convenience store cashier, but they don't have the legal ability to beat the shit out of their customers because someone wasn't fast enough / was too fast getting their wallets out.

I always am asked when I say we should reduce policing budgets, "have you ever needed police?" In my experience, they've always been either so late that myself and neighbours have had to get involved in breaking up a rape / other violent situations, or just completely useless when I've needed them for paperwork related stuff, i.e. credit card fraud. I think the police are asked to handle too many edge case situations, e.g. managing mentally ill populations, but are also grossly overpaid compared to other civil institutions, that if budgets were appropriately distributed, would lead to less of the issues police are required to intervene in. Also, among police put-maneuvering pregnant women, beating elderly bystanders just standing in Buffalo, or the myriad other documented instances of unnecessary police violence, there is a serious "bad apples spoil the bunch" issue in US policing due to the culture of other "innocent" officers backing their bad apples instead of weeding them out.

In any business, a department/team that isn't serving clients is usually re-evaluated, and budgets/resources re-allocated if they don't meet some performance plan. I don't see why bringing some business-world reasoning to policing in the US is so controversial, but I suspect that's more a framing thing of "defund the police" enflaming peoples emotions, as they get mad before reasoning.

Yeah. The only time I've "needed" police was because my insurance required a police report. It's not like the police did anything except file "yep, burglary at (address)".

The number of times I've seen police in situations they were clearly unequipped for is insane though. It's a not-infrequent occurrence near where I live to see them standing around and talking to a homeless person. Regardless of the motivation (are they trying to help or hassle the person), they don't have the training or incentives to be the right people for that.

Right. I don't like how the article conflates a rise of crime with cops retiring/resigning. Cops generally don't prevent crime, but respond after the fact to sort things out.

There's also no reason a cop, as understood today, needs to show up for some paperwork stuff, like credit card fraud. Any type of civilian government representative should be trusted by the credit card company to file that away.

There's a concentrated corporate media propaganda effort in effect right now to conflate the rise in crime with the outright rejection of US police powers by the general populace.

And yet despite this, there's still a bunch of people, even in an adjacent thread on this site about the US' low trust in media [0], complaining about the "leftist bias", "left-wing bias in the media", "left-wing slant", etc.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27617011

Here are some facts from the City of Vallejo, a city of 120,000 people located 30 miles north-east of San Francisco:

- Recently featured in ABC's 20/20 show for a "Gone Girl" case were the Vallejo Police Department accused a couple of faking a kidnapping. The woman was sexually assaulted during her kidnapping, and the VPD staged a news conference claiming the whole thing was made up. The city paid the couple millions for the VPD's mistakes. https://abc7news.com/gone-girl-kidnapping-vallejo-police-apo...

- A police officer shot and killed a person riding his bicycle without a helmet, when the person did not stop. The city paid the person's family millions in settlement. https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/5-7-million-settlement-r...

- Officers practice of celebrating kills with ceremony and badge-tip bending was recently uncovered. https://openvallejo.org/2020/07/28/vallejo-police-bend-badge...

- Recently fired the Police Union president for destroying police evidence and threatening a journalist. The officer was hired by his father, who was the Police Chief a few years ago. He basically threatened a black journalist who was moving from California to the South of Lynching. https://abc7news.com/vallejo-police-association-union-presid...

- I think one thing a lot of people don't know if how much their local police officer make. Here are the stats for the city of Vallejo, the person costing the city $600K/year in wage and benefit was recently fired. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=vallejo...

Just an FYI, your first link, (abc7news), is broken - "PAGE NOT FOUND".

It should be working now, after refresh.

Thanks for fixing!

The two ABC news links are broken. Are they still online?

https://openvallejo.org/2020/07/28/vallejo-police-bend-badge...

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/5-7-million-settlement-r...

https://abc7news.com/vallejo-police-association-union-presid...

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=vallejo...

https://abc7news.com/vallejo-police-association-union-presid...

One word: California

Wow, that cop who murdered a bicyclist wasn't charged with a crime and continued being a cop where he then murdered yet another person. Absolutely insane.

I don't think enough people are talking about the huge change in the crime landscape. Here in Atlanta, violent crime is up 50, 60% while arrests are down 40%. We're down hundreds of cops and morale is terrible.

Cops aren't doing their jobs because they fear politically motivated prosecution. And for good reason given that a handful of them faced politically motivated prosecution.

We're still below the worst days of violent crime but it's an extremely worrying trend. It took US cities decades to recover from the high crime of the last century and we really don't want the cycle to start again.

Calling the previous century's reductions in crime a "recovery" is a flat out lie.

The world was a much more violent place, and it's been steadily getting less violent.

There's no reason we couldn't instantaneously recover from to the recent increases in violent crime.

Maybe they'd be more respected if they respected the communities they're supposed to protect? I don't know about Atlanta, but here in Chicago I've had nothing but horrible interactions with the police. How can you expect people to support you when you treat everyone like they're out to kill you?

I wonder how much of this spike in violent crime is being driven by people just being burned-out by the slow-motion and, frankly, boring "apocalypse" that is the pandemic? I've personally noticed that reckless driving is also way up, and I have to imagine many other small crimes are too. If people don't feel like they care about the world, or that the world cares about them, why should they go out of their way to respect the law? If this is the case, hopefully this will just end up being a transient spike that will settle back down to the long-term trend as people readjust to "normality".

I'm going to call BS on this. So many sensationalist stories were written about how there's "a spike in crime," but they're comparing this year to last year! Of course there was a spike in crime, last year there was a pandemic and national lockdown. Crime shifted to online and domestic, and now that the country is opening back up it's shifting back.

Take a look at the actual reported felony offenses and you'll see that yes there's a YTD spike this year, but it's still below where it was in 2019.

YTD crimes: 2019 - 10,963 2020 - 9,022 2021 - 9,928

Really the only scary increases in crime have been in domestic violence (which I bet also explains the increase in murders).

See https://www.atlantapd.org/home/showpublisheddocument/3037/63...

Also I'd really question wanting to retain police in a department that were so fickle they'd allow violent crimes to occur because they aren't worshiped enough. That is a type of self-centered police officer I'd like to leave anyways.

>I'm going to call BS on this.

We've gone from 80-90 murders a year to 150 in 2020. There's absolutely something happening. I haven't dug into your numbers but reported crime rates is pretty easy to goose. Hard to hide bodies though.

They've also seen an increase in domestic violence by ~150%, so yeah, that's a pretty obvious indicator of where the murders are coming from... It's not a bunch of street violence preventable by policing though, it's a bunch of dysfunctional families that could be prevented with education and community.

My father is a Police Officer and he and any other officers with military service are using their service time to retire early. None of them enjoy being cops any more.

I don't think anyone, even the cops are saying that there aren't issue with today's current policing. And I think that is the biggest problem with the whole defund police movement. When you have one side shouting "All cops our bad" "F the police" etc, why would you expect the other side to listen, even if there were valid complaints/criticism. Of course the cops are going to bristle, dig their heels in and be stubborn. It's just human nature.

I think the movement would be more effective if this was treated like how the people tried to convince coalminers to get green jobs. Retraining for other jobs, financial support etc. I can guarantee you that plenty of cops would love to be park rangers, park wardens, student mentors, etc, especially in todays climate.

> When you have one side shouting "All cops our bad" "F the police" etc,

To keep with the hacker news software developer metaphor; It's not dissimilar from the industry often seeing Facebook developers as unscrupulous about privacy. Or Solarwinds (CEO blaming an intern).

The target audience for those calls isn't the police though, so police bristling and the message not convincing them isn't a major "problem" with the message. It's not a goal either, and it brings with it some negative side effects, but given the effectiveness of the message the people behind it almost certainly consider the negative side effects worth it.

The targets are politicians (to redistribute funds), voters (to vote for politicians who will...), and prosecutors (to prosecute criminals who happen to wear a uniform).

Nor is the goal to convince cops to get other jobs. Cops don't decide on what the police budget is or how many cops there will be. The goal is to get the people who do decide that there should be less cops. Coal miners is different in that the goal was to appease the population of coal miners...

I'm not sure the message is a good idea myself, its seems unnecessarily divisive to society, and that's a bad thing. It's pretty important to understand the goals of the message when evaluating whether or not it does what it intends to though.

Democracy is said to be the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

However, I note that, from a democratic perspective, it appears that the broader public does not actually want a reduced police force, and this appears to be true across racial lines[1].

So, let us perhaps say, instead: democracy is the theory that the extremely-online elites and activists know what they want, and that the common people deserve to get it good and hard.

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

> So, let us perhaps say, instead: democracy is theory that the extremely-online elites and activists know what they want, and that the common people deserve to get it good and hard.

Holding a (small time) elected leadership position, this definitely matches my own observations. I have to deal with the opinions of those I represent on the matters I’m elected to handle quite frequently; the opinions of the few and the loud quite often do not match the opinions and priorities of the majority, but the few and loud do stand out, and the pressure they create gives the illusion of majority opinion.

Does this make sense, or am I not expressing myself well?

obnocracy - rule of the most obnoxious?

Volumocracy - the rule of the loudest.

Interesting. Are you aware of any blog/channel/whatever where I could read honest reports from elected officials on the nuts and bolts of their jobs?

It is true that even among minorities support for the existence of an active police force remains high. However, the principles of policing by consent still hold: a community deserves to be policed by police it recognizes as members of that community, not outsiders, and which have the community's best interests at heart. There is still a lot of work to be done in the US regarding these things.

That appears to be a general argument for self-determination or segregation, according to tastes.

The concept of policing by consent arose in a city which, at that time in the 19th century, was not riven by racial conflict. To claim that it is an argument for segregation is ahistorical. Self-determination maybe, but the concept was originally put forward in order to improve outcomes, not for the political liberation of the local people per se.

No more so than laws about elected officials actually living in the districts they're representing.

Am I the only one who thinks that police officers should be paid more, not less? These should be highly specialized and trained jobs that are hard to get and easy to lose if you're bad at them / criminal -- seems like the reality right now is that they're easy to get and hard to lose.

Probably, but so should teachers, nurses, etc. Can you name one occupation outside politics/lawyers where you think people should be paid less?

Telemarketers.

When I was a student they used to get minimum wage. You can't go lower than that. Absolutely terrible way to make a living. 'Lucky' for us, it's now mostly pre-recorded robocalls.

Yes, but the accounting is not as clear as you'd think. It's a complicated relationship between understrength departments with unfilled vacancies, and overtime budgets.

Police officers throughout the country, but especially in cities, tend to supplement large portions of their income through overtime work. It means they're chronically underpaid for what they do throughout the country. And the way they bring themselves to what they want to be making is through exhausting themselves with overwork.

In Baltimore, some officers doubled their salaries. Others approached 50%. They averaged 12+ hour shifts per day for weeks. In fy 2019, a BPD sergeant made $260,000. The department went $50 million over budget for overtime. There are virtually entire books written on this, piecemealed in small budget stories throughout USA.

I agree that an effective police force probably needs to see their job as a profession and a career and that investment into officers is important, but also I think cops are already well paid.

Cops in my area cross six figures within about 5 years of joining (this is informed by police officers I know but probably far from uniform) and they get some of the best pension benefits available and have to work far less time than most other professions to receive full retirement benefits.

My understanding with my state's troopers is that they can retire with 75% of their highest earning years after working 25 years, or 50% after working 20 years.

Raising compensation from that level would make them some of the most well paid workers in the state and they only require 6 months of training.

“ The paper looked at the life expectancy for 2,800 male police officers in Buffalo, N.Y., who spent at least five years on the force between 1950 and 2005. It compared the officers’ life expectancy with that of the overall white male population of the United States. The researchers excluded women and minority officers because they accounted for a small percentage of the potential pool, which would have made it hard to conduct statistically valid comparisons.

According to the study, officers in the study had a "significantly lower" life expectancy than U.S. white men as a whole, with the gap especially large for those at younger ages.

Specifically, the study found that an officer who lived to age 50 could expect to live only 7.8 additional years, while a typical U.S. white man was expected to live an additional 35 years.

Calculations using a different metric known as the years of potential life lost found a similar disparity. The years of potential life lost for police officers aged 40 to 44 was more than 38 times bigger than it was for the population as a whole, and the average for all age groups was 21 times bigger.

Finally, using a third metric, the study found that a male police officer aged 50 to 54 years had "close to a 40% probability of death compared to a 1% probability for males in the general population in that same age category."”

It’s possible that because they live less, one could argue they should be compensated more to account for their more imminent death.

I can agree, but I think higher pay should come with more qualification. The qualifications for police officers are laughably bad

https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2020/06/11/ohio-requir...

In my city, the qualifications for being a LEO keep dropping. It used to be that you had to have some college credit hours, which degraded to completing high school, which degraded to at least a GED. Now, I think you just have to apply and be able to pass the physical; there is basically no mental standard. On top of this, the budget is so tight that they basically have one day at the range for training.

So, yes, I agree that LEOs should get better benefits (salary, car, insurance, etc.) as well as much more training. Maybe then we can have LEOs that can handle the job instead of young men with inferiority complexes that just want to bully people.

4 days a week of work, 1 day of training.

Depending on the municipality (ie, tax payers) police are paid really well or really poorly. My city, Miami, police probationaries start at $55k, and that's just a high school diploma. On the flipside, the highway patrol, who work the same areas, start at $37k.

Are you aware how much LEO actually make, once you factor in overtime pay and the clever way they rig their pension amounts? It's probably higher than you'd think.

Finally, officers said they were asked to handle too much; they were constantly thrown at tangled societal problems like mental health breakdowns or drug overdoses, they said, for which they were ill-equipped — then blamed when things went wrong.

Yes. Untrained people should not be sent to deal with these issues. Hopefully, this leads to municipalities actually training people to deal with these issues instead of continuing to try to shove cops into obviously non-cop shaped holes.

I doubt that it is that simple.

By the time police are called in, it likely is a police issue: a crime has been committed or there is an imminent threat of violence. Having specially trained people to deal with those issues may marginally improve the situation, but they will end up being the police in all but name. The blame will be shifted away from the police and the burden will be put on the new organization.

What we need is a means of reducing the social ills that lead to mental health breakdowns and drug overdoses. That requires proactive involvement in the community rather than a response model.

Yes. This is a conversation I have had with many friends.

Police are misused, imo, by society to clean up macro issues, one person at a time, that police have no ability to control outside criminal investigation.

Police are where "the rubber meets the road" for policy failure and unrecognized socioculturally trends. They are easy to blame for up-the-pyramid authority while being the only easily visible aspect of a ineffective, corrupt gvt.

Honestly, I don't have a lot of sympathy. Many PDs have done this to themselves with bullshit like asset seizures, buying military-grade equipment for no reason, dragging their feet on officer investigations and complaints ("paid administrative leave"...what a joke) just to name a few.

Over the past ~60 years as municipal budgets for infrastructure, parks, social services and the like have shrunk, you know what part hasn't but actually got larger? Police budgets. And look where it's got us today.

While I agree there is a problem, we can still have sympathy for police who joined the force to help people and now feel like they can't. The system can be broken while the majority of people in the system can be good people.

Nurses have also been quitting in droves in the last year. Specifically, nurses that work at hospitals.

Coincidentally, the murder rate is way up.

> A 25 percent increase in murder in 2020 would mean the United States surpassed 20,000 murders in a year for the first time since 1995. (The final official numbers for 2020 will not be released until late September.) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/upshot/murder-rate-usa.ht...

Thanks, BLM.

Conveniently ignoring that there was a global pandemic going on for most of the year with record high unemployment. Crime went up basically as soon as the pandemic started.

At least in England and Wales the pandemic seems to have led to a reduction in crime:

> Total police recorded crime decreased by 4% in England and Wales to approximately 5.8 million offences in the 12 months ending June 2020; police reported crime levels were relatively stable from July 2019 to March 2020 and the annual decrease was mainly driven by substantial falls during the April to June 2020 period, particularly in theft offences.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...

As far as I know this is fairly unique to the United States, and even then the crime stats are a bit... strange. Overall crime stats are just coming in at the federal level so the picture is very much incomplete, but if we look at particular cities (ex. New York City), we can see a sharp increase in murder and burglary, but a decrease in basically every other type of crime (leading to a net reduction) [1].

This seems to be the trend in cities across the country including Dallas [2], LA [3], and Chicago [4]. Murders are way up, but overall crime is down.

[1]: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/p0106a/overall-crime-new...

[2]: https://dallaspolice.net/resources/CrimeReports/NIBRS%20Week...

[3]: http://lapd-assets.lapdonline.org/assets/pdf/cityprof.pdf

[4]: https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-shootings-2020-shooting-crim...

> Minneapolis, which had 912 uniformed officers in May 2019, is now down to 699.

23% of officers leaving in only a year and a half. What kind of impact will this have in 3-5 years as officers who are holding out for pensions also retire?

No amount of furious statistical spin will overcome what will happen in Minneapolis and this time around, people will be watching.

I wonder how these numbers correlate to overall resignation numbers in all jobs since those seem to be going up too. I feel it’s part of the larger pattern of covid burnout.

About 20 years ago, when I was living in Yorktown Heights NY (in Westchester county - a pretty high end county just north of NYC), we had to call 911 once because my then wife slipped on the ice and fell when she returned from work late night.

I called and said what had happened and within a short time we had police, ambulance and a fire person show up (I guess they were all bored).

IMO that's part of the problem in US policing: The assumption is that the people are bad (in my case that I had hit my wife I guess - I was interviewed by the cops before she was taken to hospital for a checkup). I called 911 for a medical emergency, not a criminal issue so why do cops have to come and treat me like a criminal. If you think that something is wrong then you find a way to find something wrong.

I wrote a blog about US policing a few years ago because I feared for my son's safety: https://medium.com/@sanjiva.weerawarana/police-in-us-need-to....

I certainly wouldn't want to be a cop. The downsides right now seem so much greater than any upside. And you already needed to be doing it for some reason more than just money.

But a lot of the problem is self-inflicted. The bad apples may be few, but instead of making a show of culling those from the force, they celebrate protecting them. We need less militarization, a lot more transparency, an actual separate oversight organization that has the power to police the police. And we need to 'defund the police' only in the sense that we need to quit asking them to be social workers, and actually shift funding to that department so it can be properly staffed.

It's possible, and very desirable, to rebuild trust in our police force. But we do need to agree on that first. It's become yet another front in the ongoing tribal warfare so I don't think anything meaningful will change in the near future.

> you already needed to be doing it for some reason more than just money.

This just isn't true. It is a good, steady, well paying job with great benefits, _lots_ of overtime, a union that will fall over itself to protect you and (often) the ability to retire after ~20 years with ~50% pay.

I personally know people who've chosen to "grin and bear it" and go down that path for these exact reasons. From a purely objective standpoint, I also sometimes wonder if maybe they made a better life choice than I did: If I'd chosen that route, I'd be retiring with a pension in about three years.

I could have gotten the same by staying in the military 20 years, without the headache that comes with being a cop.

At least where I live, you need (or needed, it could have recently changed) a bachelor's degree to become a police officer, and it pays 53K per year. It doesn't seem like a great gig to me, at least financially.

> It doesn't seem like a great gig to me, at least financially.

To each their own, of course, but compared to minimum wage or slightly more in retail/pumping gas/whatever, I could see how $53K (to start; before overtime) could be pretty compelling.

Also, FWIW, it looks like Connecticut and New York (my points of reference) do not require a bachelors degree -- only a HS diploma or GED.

Yeah, the bachelor's degree requirement used to be really common, but I believe a lot of departments dropped the requirement to increase the number of eligible people. Just checked our local department and it looks like they've dropped the education requirement to an associates degree (and they provide for some equivalents, like military service, to get around that).

I wonder if it is mostly "good" cops or "bad" cops quitting.

Bad cops might be sensing that there time is up and are upset that they might be held accountable for something they wouldn't have before. They also feel like they might be losing some power, which might be what attracted "bad" cops to the position in the first place.

Good cops might be finding it too hard to do their job, and be fed up with being demonized even though that got into the profession to help people. Which is what the article seems to indicate, but this seemed to be based on interviews with retiring police officers. Of course they are going to think that. I am sure the internet mobs attacking retiring police officers is not the correct way to respond.

>>last summer had chipped away at his professional pride

why do cops get to have "professional pride" when basically all other dangerous jobs are un-glamourous and lower paid? [0] Do these people contribute less to society?

I am in the camp, which I assume most people are, where most cops are good, but they need additional qualification and help dealing with different problems (homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, evictions ...). The fact that someone can graduate high school and, before the rest of their class starts college, can be a full blown police officer doesn't sit right with me. Also, the fact that it is nearly impossible to arrest a police office is not right, if anything they should be held to a higher standard.

Overall, I think change is needed, but it is important to not take it out on individual people, nobody thinks they are the "bad guy".

[0]https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/careers/2018/01/09/work...

I don’t blame them. We’ve spent decades pumping the police into a paramilitary force that when reality meets expectations it’s just another human (often I believe) trying to make the best of their situation. Personally I distrust most police and I’m suspicious of them, but removing funding is a bad idea in my book, and I’m sad to see police leaving the profession.

When it comes right down to it, many of us need the police more than they need us. We think we’re a bunch of badd asses that can defend the homestead if we had to, but we still call 911. When the police don’t show up, we get horrible outcomes, and it’s worse for everyone.

The Rule of Law is the most powerful tool we have to stop grievances from building up into irreconcilable feuds. The problem is that the police have long found ways to escape the rule of law, through conspiracy and corruption with public attorneys. And now with the prevalence of cameras, this has been laid bare.

It shouldn't ultimately matter that many officers are racist, latently or overtly. It shouldn't matter that an officer is having a bad day, or feels disrespected. It shouldn't matter that an officer is frustrated that a suspect is running away, or scared that a citizen might be armed. Just as it doesn't matter when any other citizen is such things - because the consequences of committing second degree murder are similar regardless of your backstory.

If cops truly want to be the good guys, then they need to support criminal punishment for their colleagues that commit crimes and then hide behind the uniform - even crimes that they perceive as helping punish the bad guys. Not with their current standard of "did this violate internal policy?", but rather with the usual criminal justice standard of "was this use of force necessary to prevent imminent harm to self or others?". Because when criminals are allowed to take cover behind the uniform, it makes the uniform a symbol of criminality.

This certainly wouldn't solve every issue, especially the injustices that don't rise to the level of murder. But visible justice for the most severe victims of criminal police would go a long way to restoring public trust.

I've been wondering. We are citizens, police are citizens, "we" are all responsible, but it turns into an us vs them attitude.

I wonder what society would be like if every person had a mandatory stint as a part of a police force (like countries that have mandatory military service). It would make everybody everybody part of both sides. Probably not practical, but an interesting thought.

For people against the concept of police, what do you see replacing it? Privatized security forces? Community members/ local militia? A more limited public police force? National guard?

I think the majority of activists think that recording abuse on their cell phones and sharing it on social media will protect them

I think most activists recognize there will still need to be people authorized to use violence in certain circumstances, they just want to minimize the number of those people and make them more accountable. Most of the proposals I've seen call for the creation of a public safety department whose employees would not be authorized to use force and who could be sent to deal with situations where violence is not necessary (such as, say, a person trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, like George Floyd was doing when the police were called on him).

Let's see....

- Dangerous work

- Cast as the villian by national media and politicians

- Under constant scrutiny

- Low Wages

- Target of organized agitators

- Occasionally doxed, with threats to family

TBH, it was the last political cycle that spelled the tipping point.

the middle-of-the-road opinion that defund activists hate is the "just get rid of the bad apples!" concept; that most police are good people and a few of them are bad apples. But let's say you're in the "bad apples" camp. When people like this, who are pro-police don't seem to be able to identify any bad apples whatsover, including an officer as egregious as Derek Chauvin, it points to the possibility that they don't actually believe in the "bad apples" theory and it's just a smoke screen.

"bad apples" might not be satisfying to anti-police activists but it would be nice if more people could agree on some of the obviously very bad apples that are present.

Also people who says "good apple" "bad apple" don't think accessory after the fact applies to LEO's, like it would in normal situations.

Just a week ago I needed an answer re interstate transportion of controlled items. I realized I am the only person I know who knows any cops. This struck me as ludicrous as many people I know have strong (>75% negative) opinions about police. I got my answers directly.

In the US, a typical metro area police is what I descrobe as a janitor of humanity. Domestic violence, mental illness, drunks and drug addicts, vehicle accidents, and various antisocial acts make up a good portion of a day's chores. Being insulted, spit on, bitten, having offenders intentionally defecate in patrol cars, and of course a rainbow of physical confrontation are all common occurences.

Imagine dealing with that everyday, every week, every month, for years. The "us vs. them mentality" is of course not good, and not how police ought to be thinking, but as I came to know cops, it became clear to me that I would not have the moral fortitude to maintain a default empathy.

Now, add in politicians, activists and media asserting that you are a agent of oppression, a sociopath, and liable for outcomes in the thousands of conflicts you will encounter in your career.

Maybe it's finally the time for private sector to step in?

Privately funded regional and/or local (HOA-funded) police departments that are immune to political games with funding that's independent from political trends. Private security startups must be working in this area, right?

Just take a look what amazon is doing to shipping industry, how well researched and optimized their deliveries are. Policing is no different (infinite potential for optimizations and innovations) given that private entities (not government) are managing it and (most importantly) are accountable for it.

I hope this post is a troll.

Guys, police are self-abolishing. Victory is within grasp.

But seriously. Why is this surprising? This is a completely rational reaction of people who feel they're being unfairly demonized as a group despite most of them being professional and doing their jobs the best they can with the training and incentives they're given. Enjoy the crime wave.

The issue is accountability. Police unions are much too strong, so the bad cops are reinstated even when they're on camera doing something heinous. How is the public supposed to feel about that?

Shouldn't people call for more regulations against the Union instead of the entire department?

The issue should be accountability. Police unions are a root cause of the problem. Instead, ordinary officers are being treated like the first five paragraphs of this story. The most popular slogan is "defund the police". There's people non-ironically advocating for 'abolishing prisons'.

This is why they're quitting, and this is why the drive to meaningfully reform police will be wasted this time around, too. It will be drowned in the consequences of the actions of radicals who push for simple solutions that are simply wrong, and all the nice middle-class folks from nice middle-class neighbourhoods who enable and support them, instead of calling them out on their bullshit.

> Instead, ordinary officers are being treated like the first five paragraphs of this story.

This should be an unsurprising reaction to there generally being minimal consequences for individual bad cops, though.

Sure. Unsurprising reactions all around. However, people who live in a city will generally have to deal with more serious consequences than people who cannot afford to live there, paid $37k to be spat on, abused and called a pig regardless of their individual actions. The latter can just quit. The former will hopefully live through a crime wave and urban decay unscathed.

> This is why they're quitting

The article doesn't say they're quitting because of slogans. From the article's citations, it sounds like they're quitting because they're essentially caught between a rock and a hard place; The public is angry with them because of little to no accountability and the police unions are too powerful and afraid to lose any bit of that power to be bothered to give an inch of accountability. It's an excruciating situation.

> despite most of them being professional and doing their jobs the best they can

If you stand in solidarity with those who flagrantly abuse their power, you're not doing your best.

> If you stand in solidarity with those who flagrantly abuse their power, you're not doing your best.

I've been thinking of this. And everyone on HN is not doing their best then.

Every tech employer that we all work for qualifies.

Not everyone works for an evil tech employer. HN certainly doesn't stand in solidarity with, say, facebook.

I don't disagree that this is not surprising; but no one really takes issue with the fact that the most of them are professional.

The issue is that the minority of bad cops are vigilantly protected.

The accountability for cops is almost non existant, and the power they hold is tremendous.

Anyone who genuinely thinks that the police aren't in many dimensions being "fairly demonized", seems to me, to be extremely likely to come from a well-to-do background.

I am white; spent my youth being a dirty hippy. I was endlessly harassed by cops who absoluted loved to wield their power to literally ruin your life.

As I've gotten older and more invisibly middle class, I no longer fear the police, but I have basically zero sympathy for them.

Once they stop protecting the bad cops, they will easily win over the hearts and minds of citizens.

>Guys, police are self-abolishing.

Do you think 2021 will end with less police in uniform than 2020? Do you think 2020 had less police in uniform than 2019?

Of course not. This is one of those "trend" stories that is basically inventing copy. Find isolated examples and propose a trend.

But if a police officer feels vilified or unfairly treated, blame the officers who grossly abuse the power society gave them, not the public. Blame unions and the knee-jerk circle-the-wagon attitude that defends these bad apples. If a group abides by and supports the bad apples, they are all bad apples.

>Do you think 2021 will end with less police in uniform than 2020? Do you think 2020 had less police in uniform than 2019?

In large cities run by liberal mayors/councils? I'm 100% certain.

>But if a police officer feels vilified or unfairly treated, blame the officers who grossly abuse the power society gave them, not the public. Blame unions and the knee-jerk circle-the-wagon attitude that defends these bad apples. If a group abides by and supports the bad apples, they are all bad apples.

No, they'll blame the abusers they see every day, quit, and won't police your streets. If you think they should be defunded/abolished/reduced anyway, it's a win-win.

Cops first. Seriously. If George Floyd (and countless other minorities who were unfairly demonized before and since) had gotten this respect, these protests, this demonization doesn't happen. Cops are the people in power, abusing that power. It is up to them to be the bigger people in this situation, to re-earn the trust they lost.

Also, this is an emotional reaction. A rational reaction would involve some sort of introspection, some sort of realization that there is a reason people feel the way they do.

> This is a completely rational reaction of people who feel they're being unfairly demonized as a group

That also explains the public backlash against police in the first place, doesn't it? We can't keep speaking with this perspective of police always being the good guys / bad guys and protesters / rioters always being the good guys / bad guys, otherwise we've just given up on any societal sense of right and wrong and all we're doing is picking sides to fight for the sake of it.

The problem is that police have very little accountability to the citizens they are policing. I live in Minneapolis which has been at the center of these controversies, and the closest citizens get to influencing police policy is by electing the mayor who appoints the police chief who then (in theory) sets the policies. In practice, even if we elect a reform-minded mayor who appoints a similarly-minded chief who sets good policy it's up to the officers to follow that policy and they often tend to just ignore policies that they do not like.

Additionally, the police officers who work in the city do not live in the city and are much whiter and more conservative than the city's overall population (reminder that Minneapolis's current representative in the House of Representatives is Ilhan Omar, a Somali immigrant who is one of the most progressive members of the House). It should not be a surprise that the citizens of Minneapolis do not like people with a different cultural background applying force against them, all while we pay six figure salaries to them through our tax dollars.

> despite most of them being professional and doing their jobs the best they can

I've gotta question your interactions with the police, if this is your stance. Maybe you live somewhere with a decent police force? But my experience is precisely the opposite of what you're describing here. I was arrested last year, during the George Floyd protests, for precisely nothing (I was recording the police beating a man in front of me). I was tackled to the ground by 3 police officers while my hands were over my head. Bloody and bruised, when I arrived at the police precinct, the ~20 officers standing out front mocked me, laughed at the fact that I was bloody. I said not one word.

Every officer I encountered that night was the antithesis of professional or "doing their best". They were goons and bullies.

With respect to the crime wave: crime is increasing across the US, regardless of political slant of the city. Crime is increasing in NYC, despite the NYPD being larger than the next 3 police forces in the US combined. Maybe raw spending / police presence isn't the only factor in crime statistics.

ETA: For whatever it's worth, my case was immediately thrown out in court, and the officer who arrested me is under investigation for misconduct.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar hell. Not cool.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

As an observer from the other side of the northern border I have always been keen to see the US temper its general culture of "police worship" that seems very contrary to the interests of the general public. I have likewise been hoping to see the vast number of smaller forces consolidate into larger forces that might have better training & resources with less nepotism and petty corruption.

I feel a lot of sympathy for the officers referenced in the article and their personal stories seem very genuine and troubling.

I have no idea how to "solve" the more general problem that seems to be the thesis of the article. Anyone can see that the political valence of modern police forces in the US as expressed by their unions is now so hostile to a majority of the people being policed it seems entirely untenable. And in places like New York City that is despite the force getting better at reducing violent incidents with residents over the last decade or so. The very extreme bunker mentality expressed by police unions likewise make them bad-faith actors in any attempts to improve the relationships involved here.

The Newark success story seems like the solution: https://www.nj.com/news/2021/01/newark-cops-with-reform-didn...

Of course that sure makes it seem like my original position that "larger forces" would probably be better look quite incorrect, it would be hard to imagine implementing a reform like Newark's if a regional police force were in need of reform with multiple stakeholders across jurisdictions to convince and satisfy. I do think that I would really love some journalism that goes deep into what other forces think of the Newark reforms and the results at a union & officer level.

Back to the original article, some of the numbers here are bit misleading, I found this article:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/18/us/police-reform-year-of-reck...

"The retirement bubble is bursting

There's another, older, reason behind so many officers leaving the force: the 1994 Crime Control Act, a controversial law overseen by Joe Biden in the Senate and signed by Bill Clinton, which provided $7.6 billion in federal funding for tens of thousands of police officers.

"All these cops are coming up for retirement now," said Ivonne Roman, one of those so-called "Clinton Cops" who retired as police chief of Newark on April 1. "This past April alone 200 cops retired in Newark. This was always coming regardless of Covid or the protests.""

Nearly 10% of the officers in the US are apparently eligible for retirement in the US as of the end of 2020, and with the risks of COVID-19 I can see why you would see a large uptick in resignations regardless of any other circumstances. Not that this takes away from the very real experiences that other officers are finding pushing them out of the policing earlier than they would otherwise like.

Sounds like 'defund the police' is stupid, self-defeating sloganeering that makes no sense given what its apparent settled-upon meaning (only settled upon many months after becoming popular).

The meaning of "diverting funding to other resources" has been a consensus in the community for a very long time. It's only recently that "defund" has been conflated with "abolish," which has always been a very very small niche of the police reform community.

Is there a consensus committee that announces what 'the community' thinks? Because in my experience the community is quite divided on most topics and tends to come to a consensus using the literal meaning of words.

There is always a risk that people chanting "defund the police" mean they want to, simply and literally, defund the police. If they want something different they should be chanting that instead.

"There is always a risk"

I think there's an easy way to figure out what people mean when they chant a slogan. Talk to them.

"In my experience the community is quite divided on most topics and tends to come to a consensus using the literal meaning of words"

Well, even if your experience is correct, so what? Defunding the police -as it currently exists-, in its entirety, and directing those funds to different agencies, including what the current police would turn into, is still removing 100% of the funds from the existing organization and redirecting them. No one is arguing to remove that funding and then setting that money on fire.

> Talk to them.

They'll all have different opinions on what, in the detail, the phrase means. Large political crowds generally can't handle complex ideas.

That is why the slogan matters, it is the bit that coordinates what the goal is.

> Defunding the police -as it currently exists-, in its entirety, and directing those funds to different agencies...

There are a few options. Major ones include:

1) This project is renaming the police.

2) This project is changing what they do.

It probably isn't going to be 1, because then it wouldn't be worth the fuss. So the question is, which responsibilities of the police are we jettisoning here? Because the slogan suggests all of them. "Better funding for mental health" uses quite different syllables from "defund the police".

I'm sure there are people with some great ideas in the crowd. But the ones in charge might be the people who believe, literally, that the point here is to defund everything the police do. There is a real risk people mean what they say.

Our language is full of ambiguities, and this is one. Both interpretations are listed in the Cambridge dictionary.

The truth is: clarity require lots of words, and that makes a terrible slogan. Most people react stronger to a slogan than a nuanced discussion, so the messy slogans will remain.

That doesn’t mean a bad slogan like Defund the police isn’t just divisive, ill-advised, and harmful.

There's nothing activists can do that won't be labeled "divisive, ill-advised, and harmful". See how Martin Luther King Jr. was portrayed in the 1960s, for example.

https://twitter.com/BerniceKing/status/1300196044693741574

That's the trope, but it's also completely wrong. It was, after all, MLK and not Malcolm X who achieved so much of the progress in the 1960s. And it was the Log Cabin Republicans, not HRC, that won the fight for gay marriage. Advancements for minority groups are better facilitated by building bridges than by burning them.

MLK was regularly accused of burning bridges at the time, as I've demonstrated in the link.

You posted a Twitter link to one caricature cartoon in an unnamed paper.

It is dishonest to say you've "demonstrated" that anything happened "regularly."

And it is dishonest to conflate the entirety of the time elapsed - it's indisputably clear who has the better historical reputation.

And it is dishonest to suggest that a false allegation of X is moral justification to begin doing X.

This is pretty trivial to research.

https://time.com/5099513/martin-luther-king-day-myths/

> In the 1960s, the vast majority of white people, South and North, disapproved of the movement’s tactics. In a May 1961 Gallup survey, only 22% of Americans approved of what the Freedom Riders were doing, and 57% of Americans said that the “sit-ins at lunch counters, freedom buses, and other demonstrations by Negroes were hurting the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the South.” Just before the March on Washington, Gallup found only 23% of Americans had favorable opinions of the proposed civil rights demonstration.

> Lest we see this as Southerners skewing the national sample, in 1964—a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act—a New York Times poll found a majority (57%) of New Yorkers said the civil rights movement had gone too far. “While denying any deep-seated prejudice,” the Times reported, “a large number of those questioned used the same terms to express their feelings. They spoke of Negroes’ receiving ‘everything on a silver platter’ and ‘reverse discrimination’ against whites.” Fifty-four percent of those surveyed felt the movement was going “too fast.” Nearly half said that picketing and demonstrations hurt the Negro cause, and 80% opposed school pairings to promote school desegregation in New York City public schools.

"You're being divisive!" has long been the cry of the status quo. The arguments made against BLM and Defund - including the "it's communism!" stuff; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/Little_R... - are very, very familiar.

> "You're being divisive!" has long been the cry of the status quo. The arguments made against BLM and Defund - including the "it's communism!" stuff;

Just because a complaint has been heard before doesn’t mean it’s wrong, indeed it could just as easily mean it’s being said again because it is valid.

Dismissing people who have a valid criticism as ‘the status quo’ to be ignored, is by definition divisive.

It is the literal opposite of inclusive behavior.

> Dismissing people who have a valid criticism...

I'm not inclined to assume "BLM is communism!" as valid criticism. Bad faith actors work really hard to derail conversations about racism and police reform; at a certain point, you have to dismiss the same age-old arguments that've been made and debunked at every step along the way.

See also: All the anti-miscegenation arguments that turned into anti-gay marriage arguments that turned into anti-trans ones, with basically just a find/replace for the term used.

Returning to the point at hand, I believe I've sufficiently demonstrated that MLK's sterling reputation is a more recent phenomenon, and at the time of his actual actions he was being treated and discussed similarly to how many activists are today.

Isn’t this begging the question? “Dismissing criticism of divisiveness is by definition divisive!”

Look up what people thought of MLK at the time. There were no bridges. He described white moderates as a bigger stumbling block to racial justice than the KKK.

When he was murdered, he had a disapproval rating of 75% [1]. People accused him of being a communist. The FBI literally attempted to blackmail him into committing suicide [2].

The widespread admiration for him over the past few decades is a result of the shameless whitewashing of his legacy. In that regard, Malcolm X was far more successful — his image has not been co-opted by people to oppose the very ideals for which he fought.

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/04/04/martin-lut...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...

Of course it doesn't. But it does show how hard it is to come up with slogans. Can you think of a 'synonym' that isn't divisive, ill advised or harmful in any way? That's a high bar.

Maybe slogans are just a damaging way to do politics?

> Both interpretations are listed in the Cambridge dictionary.

That is due to a change that was made in the last year. [1]. Historically, that dictionary has defined defund as "to stop providing the money to pay for something". The change to the Cambridge dictionary entry was made recently in response to the "defund the police" discussions, so we can't use the newly changed meaning as always having meant to "divert some money".

  [1] https://web.archive.org/web/2020*/dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/defund

And, indeed, the Cambridge dictionary appears to be bizarrely focused on the use of 'defund' in the context of us military/police defunding.

They've obviously written the definition in light of US political events. Pretty weird. It doesn't make sense to define words in context of current political events, they are supposed to have more staying power than that.

Thanks so much for providing that context! Amazing to be able to see meaning changing in real-time.

I would prefer language meaning to be more static, it irritates me to hear people using "literally" to mean "really" but we must accept change. It's easier to put on shoes than to carpet the whole world.

> Is there a consensus committee that announces what 'the community' thinks?

Science-based activism typically does have a tactic of discussing within “committees” called peer-reviewed journals that which is considered the consensus and that which is not for that journal’s “community”.

But it's a reason to choose your words carefully.

"Defund the Police" is very easy to interpret as "abolish" or "practically abolish". Which means it's very easy to twist even the less extreme politicians' and activists' meaning toward that end. This sets them up for abuse from their opposition who then cost them possible supporters.

The fact is, many people on the right wouldn't mind if police were a little less of a daily presence in their lives. They also have family members and friends with mental health issues and don't want to see them (or their caregivers) shot in the street because the first response is the armed police instead of medical or social services. They also don't want a gas cannister shot into their infant or toddler's bed.

But a phrase like "Defund the Police" is so easily turned to use the meaning of the most extreme speakers, who really do mean something closer to "Abolish the Police" than "Redistribute funds from the police to deal with the causes of societal issues instead of (just) the results". Once that's done, you've essentially lost and the more moderate voices who mean the latter and not the former get discredited in many people's view. They're saying one thing with, to those individuals at least, a very clear meaning which is at odds with what the moderates claim they mean.

Sitting member of Congress: "No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can't be reformed."

https://mobile.twitter.com/RashidaTlaib/status/1381745303997...

Sitting member of Congress: "We can’t reform this."

https://mobile.twitter.com/AyannaPressley/status/13817027443...

Activist with 475k followers whose name is currently: "DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE"

https://mobile.twitter.com/BreeNewsome

Ben & Jerrys: "This system can’t be reformed."

https://twitter.com/benandjerrys/status/1381743962558504969

When activists say they want to abolish the police, they “100%” mean they want no more police, Noor says.

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/07/17/black-lives-matte...

NYT op ed: "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

Highlighting "a very very small niche" of politicians/activists isn't really debunking the "a very very small niche of the police reform community" claim.

I like Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, but they can hardly be claimed to be the mainstream portion of Congress, or even Congressional Democrats.

Perhaps they should have chosen a slogan where the dictionary definition differs from the opinion of "a very very small niche".

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/defun...

"to stop providing money or as much money to pay for something"

It's easy to make someone look reasonable if you ignore their unreasonable statements.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/aboli...

"to put an end to something, such as an organization, rule, or custom"

I'm not sure we're discussing the same thing.

Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib are police abolitionists. They're also quite unusual in Congress in this position.

"Defund the police" and "abolish the police" aren't the same thing. That's the point.

The entire point of the slogan is that it can reasonably be interpretted as both a call for measured reform and a demand for radical change. Activists switch between these interpretations at will.

Also, within activist circles, the most radical interpretation always wins. You're on HN and so you claim you want to "divert resources" but within "ACAB circles," the winning argument is always the most radical (prison abolition, prison = slavery, police are modern slave catchers, violence against police is justified). This pull to the extremes is what disturbs me about radical movements. It's possible that these movements have a positive effect when they interact with moderates and some kind of compromise is struck but the movements themselves are quite scary.

It's a slogan that's perfect for using in a motte-and-bailey way.

Fringe congressmen and an op-ed written by a fringe organizer aren't really evidence of what the common consensus is.

No True Scotsman defense incoming, as people pretend that a “very very small niche” is what it means when high-profile congressional members put forth positions that are not vigorously denounced by the media and their political allies.

Firstly, I’ve heard plenty of people say they mean abolish.

Second, it still makes no sense. I am a very strong supporter of violence intervention, mental health services, restorative justice, etc.

But police are and poorly trained. Defunding them will lead to more problems.

We need to fund police training, and create alternative services.

The ‘defund the police’ mantra is clearly just a polite version of FTP.

> has been a consensus in the community

If the community wants more support from outside themselves, pick a better slogan

Yes, it would help, but a provocative slogan also has its own merits. It usually serves to highlight the very culture it is criticizing. If those criticized took even just one minute to think about it or talk to somebody they disagree with instead of reading from news sources and forums that are highly angry and cherry-picking, then they would easily realize what their "enemies" want. In this way, a provocative slogan exposes these people. However, provocation almost never has more upsides than downsides. But one of the vanishingly few cases where it's hard to blame somebody for resorting to it happens to be where any individuals within your government are using their power to mistreat, unjustly imprison, beat, or kill you, and where there is a large group of politically extreme citizens cheering for that.

Feel free to use whatever slogans you want, and I'll feel free to ignore you

Defund literally means, "prevent from continuing to receive funds." So, when people hear "defund the police" they rightly take that to mean "stop funding the police".

I don't know what community you refer to, since many people who I've seen call for defunding of the police want the police abolished.

I'd rather "de-fang the police" than defund them. The problems people complain about aren't budget issues, they are behavior issues: Excessive use-of-force, Escalation instead of de-escalation, Casually committing crimes on the job due to immunity, Racial bias, and the culture of good officers covering for bad ones. These can be reformed while still recognizing the positive role a well behaved and well funded police force plays in communities.

The comment you are referring is quoting from the article where officers mention being thrown into situations they aren't trained for (mental health episodes, etc). Defunding the police literally calls for taking from the enormous budget police have, and using it to fund personnel, like say EMS, to be trained to handle these scenario's. That sounds like a win for everyone.

This comment ignores all previous events to 2020.

Ferguson was deeply studied; an average of 3 warrants per citizen. International attention has been coming to America's police tactic for at least 30 years.

It seems like most of the people still arguing about what it means are the far edges on either side, or simply those interested in slandering people with the opposite political identity. However, their noise is a permanent source of confusion on many topics, and we should strive to not allow them to affect rational conversation.

I've never liked this phrase. It sets up the wrong conflict. Police vs. Everybody Else.

It's obvious that society needs a police force. But it's also obvious to me that American policing is in need of serious reform. When your slogan targets the general concept of "Police" it gives the bad (many aspects of modern American policing) coverage to hide under the good (the concept of having police at all)

It's why the common retort to this line of rhetoric is "Well, when your house gets broken into you'll need us" - Yes, but when I call the cops I don't want to have to worry about my dog getting shot, or a SWAT team coming to my door armed to the teeth, improperly trained and trigger happy.

Efforts should be focused around reformation, not blanket just hating cops. "Defund the police" just sounds overly punitive. I wouldn't want to do that job either if I felt like everybody hated me.

Please don't post in the flamewar style or call names on HN. It makes discussions more predictable and nastier.

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Good.

When one of the two major political parties and their friends in the mainstream media decide to team up and demonize an entire profession...

They did a plenty fine job demonizing themselves. A generation of police trained to be militarized against our own citizens and unaccountable to the law, covering each other's misdeeds up with routine impunity?

Maybe it's time to rethink how this country does policing. And sometimes that takes a changing of the guard.

Not even an ACAB type. I've had several run ins with the police, some positive, some negative. Some of them were extremely friendly and helpful. Others were power hungry and lied through their teeth in court. The profession as we've made it can unfortunately attract people for different reasons, both white knights and bullies.

Mass resignations are a natural and probably necessary step towards actual reform.

If only we could get congresspeople and Supremes to resign en masse too. This country is long overdue for massive social upheaval.

> When one of the two major political parties and their friends in the mainstream media decide to team up and demonize an entire profession...

Setting aside as presumably unproductive the discussion of whether Democrats are actually demonizing the police, I think it's fair to say that especially Trump-era Republicans did and do their share of demonizing.

Maybe they can try a really dangerous job next, like delivering pizzas.

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