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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

>> 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.

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.

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'

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?

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.

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