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This is interesting given the protests. As I understand it, San Francisco is generally considered to be a very liberal and progressive city. The politicians are generally considered to be very liberal and progressive. These are the same groups, however, that want to defund the police. I don’t get it. You can want both police reform, and policing, but without the police there’s not really anyone capable, trained, or just available to confront dangerous criminals and individuals. It’s almost like a very radical group pushed for something and they went way too far, so now the more rational side is like whoa wait a second

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You're mixing issues.

The homelessness problem has been growing for the last 15 years (I mean, before that too, but I remember never being shocked in the early 2000s like I always am today), whereas the "Defund" thing is only in the last year.

The homelessness crisis is not caused by a lack of police enforcement.

True, but lack of police enforcement has led to greater numbers of homeless people acting without worry, setting up camps, pooping in the streets, vandalism, assault, robbery, etc. Greater police presence is an excellent deterrent for homeless misbehavior and crime. Otherwise there is no limitation on what those unhoused persons can do, thus exacerbating the problem. It may not have caused it, but the lack of police is certainly not helping it

> but lack of police enforcement has led to greater numbers of homeless people acting without worry, setting up camps, pooping in the streets, vandalism, assault, robbery, etc.

From my experience, homelessness is not affected by police presence/enforcement other than to force them into other areas. An unhoused person has to go somewhere, so using police to approach that simply pushes them in larger numbers into other areas, making it someone else's problem. That seems like a huge waste of resources.

Yes. I don’t think people realize police are expensive. You shouldn’t use them to “solve” problems unless you have no other means available. Police also aren’t terribly interested in the demoralizing work that gets put on their shoulders by a lack of investment in social infrastructure. Nobody becomes a cop to rip down a tent city.

There’s a sick irony that the very same people who are fighting “for” the police against the defund crowd also demand police officers perform tons of unnecessary grueling work the police themselves willingly admit they aren’t trained to handle.

I think for many people “Support the Police” really means only support their budget; not support them as human beings or public servants.

One of the principles of defund is to use more appropriate responders to things like homelessness. Police arresting homeless and moving them somewhere else is pointless. Having social workers who can get them into a shelter and maybe treatment could actually ameliorate the problem.

Whole lotta assumptions here. The biggest one is "Greater police presence is an excellent deterrent for homeless misbehavior and crime."

So much of what you said is, honestly, what a lot of homeless people need to do, just to survive. When you don't have safe, ready access to bathrooms, you go outside. When you don't have a job and can't get money, you steal to eat. When you are subject to this misery for long enough, you stop caring about what polite society cares about.

Police presence sure does deter this behaviour, but only where police are present. It doesn't _stop_ this behaviour, because it can't. Cops can't fix homelessness, they can only move it along somewhere else, turn it into some other neighborhood's problem.

If you really want to fix the problem, look at you and me. We don't crap outside, we don't steal, we're not making neighborhoods scary and dangerous (I assume). And why? Because our basic needs are met. We have food, water, shelter, sanitation, entertainment, employment. If you really want to fix the problem, THAT'S the problem you fix. Sadly, social programs for the homeless ("handouts") aren't nearly so politically popular as spending that money on policing, the legal system, and the prison system, despite being many orders more efficient.

There's lots of programs available in California. If you're not currently drunk or high, you can generally get a bed and food for a day at a shelter in most West Coast metropolitan environments. If you're in these shelters, there's jobs programs that can get you earning a modest paycheck quickly. Unfortunately there's a large and growing segment of unhoused that don't want this, though. They want to be able to drink, or use other drugs. And that makes them ineligble for most of these programs. So they set up camp, continue to decline in mental health due to stress, diet, drug use. And they spiral farther into the drain.

It's these people that need the strong hand of law enforcement to whip them into shape. It's for their own good, honestly, which bothers me as a big proponent of personal liberty and personal responsibility. But their options are either shape up, or slowly decline to a tragic death. A puppy who is not trained not to bite toddlers very well may end up getting euthanized. Sometimes strict enforcement is the morally just choice.

edit: my point is that both are needed. The options for the self motivated, and the guiding hand of arrest for those who cannot save themselves.

"homeless people acting without worry, setting up camps, pooping in the streets" - otherwise known as existing

Dianne Feinstein ran for mayor in like 78 on a platform of solving homelessness. It's wayyyy older.

>The politicians are generally considered to be very liberal and progressive. These are the same groups, however, that want to defund the police. I don’t get it.

It's the fact that you see an issue like homelessness and think "this is what we pay the police for", that blinds you to the actual grievances of the protestors. Instead of actually addressing issue, most Americans have developed the crutch of just calling the police who have just opted to either move the issue or throw the homeless in jail. It's sort of frustrating that on Hacker News people haven't done anymore than surface level research into the grievances behind "defund the police". A lot of their argument seems to stem to the fact that many problems they face are relegated to police (who have the funding) when things like housing and mental health services should be funded instead.

San Francisco's problem (and, I'd argue the "true" motivation behind the restorative justice) is that the city can no longer afford to in-prison more people for basic offenses. The housing problem has now extended to prisons and I believe COVID exasperated that issue as people wanted to avoid having overcrowded prisons. That plus the massively reduced city traffic has had homeless people claim a lot of open spaces. At this point I don't think funding more police departments would put a dent in the issue.

A lot of so-called “crimes” are societal creations. It’s a crime to steal food: is it a crime to let someone go hungry? Actually if that someone is your child under 18, it is in fact a crime.

There are other crimes that aren’t even considered criminal nor even enforced. For example wage theft. You cannot get your boss arrested for clocking you out before you leave. Yet your boss can have you arrested for taking from the till.

Point is, most crimes are because of society structure. Lying on a sidewalk? Setting up a tent somewhere? Living in a car or rv?

In a better structured society there would be better support than calling the police. That’s the essence of “defund the police”.

For many people with well resourced families, allowing a child or family member to live in the street because they lost their job just wouldn’t happen. Generally most people get support from their families (and friends) in this way. But what about those that don’t have those resources? Well apparently “call the cops on them” is the American solution. Great.

What don’t you get? Policy makers are out over their skis believing in a utopia that runs contrary to human nature and economics. They can’t admit the physics of the problem so just keep insisting they haven’t gone far enough. Graft creeps in as it always does, corrupting the machinery that (even generously) may have originally been born with the best of intentions. Everyone is afraid of being labeled as intolerant or an asshole so nobody has the courage to call out the emperor’s lack of clothes - to say this isn’t working and needs radical correction to enforce some social norms and define acceptable behavior under penalty of imprisonment, labor, or some undesirable consequence for the offender. People are thus held prisoner by the group think and the social glare. It’s only worse now with social media enabling a cancel culture with very real and significant consequences.

> to say this isn’t working and needs radical correction to enforce some social norms and define acceptable behavior under penalty of imprisonment, labor, or some undesirable consequence for the offender

We should really be focusing on the underlying mental health issues rather than resorting to a base desire to crack skulls. One such example is opening up (humane) mental health institutions. For people who are out of their gourd but aren't your typical criminal case, these mental health institutions would exist for these people to go if they consistently prove to be a danger to themselves and/or others.

Who said anything about cracking skulls? Institutionalization is simply a manner of imprisonment, but it is still in that column. State-run institutions were shut down, but interestingly the amount of "institutionalized" people in the population remained much the same, they basically just moved into the prison system, which I think is arguably worse. But yeah, I'm all for addressing mental health and being more "liberal" with institutionalization. It's better than having crazy people cursing at kids on the street, threatening violence and creating public health hazards.

Cracking skulls is actually the more humane solution. If a city makes harsh examples of a few criminals, it dissuades many more potential criminals from ever getting started.

Allowing criminals and homeless to run rampant will lead to the rapid increases in both we have seen in SF. Then there still will be an inevitable backlash, and that will involve the cracking of far more skulls than would have happened by doing it early. If a city never enforces its laws, the criminals will crack far more innocent skulls.

You can't escape the cracking of skulls, you just choose who does the cracking and how many get hurt.

What's not to get?

https://i.imgur.com/8xlOIW9.png

The whole point of defunding the police is to get the funding back to where it belongs.

https://citymonitor.ai/government/the-reality-of-us-city-bud... - The reality of US city budgets: Police funding eclipses most other agencies’

That cartoon unintentionally proves the point of those who oppose Defund: The author either intentionally or accidentally discards the stones marked "Theft", "Gang Violence", and "Domestic Violence." Who should response to a gang shooting, a theft, or someone in the middle of beating up their spouse/partner, if not the police?

Those things are, to at least some extent, caused by the things the artist is advocating doing a better job of fixing.

The whole point of the cartoon is that tackling the underlying causes of such issues might make them easier to fix.

I agree that addressing underlying causes would reduce those problems but it would take decades even if we went all in on fixing those things. What exactly do we do about them in the mean time?

Well, that's why the slogan's not "defund the police immediately", I guess.

That it'd take a while to make significant progress isn't a reason not to start.

Many people seem to take it to mean that. It even seems like some are trying to implement it that way. Catchy slogans tend to result in shitty implementations.

> Many people seem to take it to mean that.

Sure, just like no one actually knows what "critical race theory" actually means. A concerted effort to encourage these misunderstandings hardly helps.

“Defund the police” is a horrible slogan, no matter how accurately or inaccurately someone describes it. If you need to write a paragraph or two explaining what your slogan actually means, then you need to abandon it.

There has already been extensive spending in these areas and what do we have to show for it?

EDIT: While there's many factors that drive crime, crime was lower before the defund movements.

https://citymonitor.ai/government/the-reality-of-us-city-bud...

Compare with:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/19/alexandria-k...

Does this logic apply to policing, too?

> crime was lower before the defund movements

Remind me, did anything else happen in 2020 that might have had an impact on crime?

Good point. The rioting encouraged by politicians and the media happened in 2020.

Anything else happen that year?

Instead of being passive aggressive with this psuedo-scoratic bullshit, why don't you just say outright what you mean? You're talking about covid.

A global pandemic is a shitty excuse for these hyper-local phenomena. It's not covid; it's the voting public of San Francisco (and two or three other west coast cities) and the disastrous politicians they elect.

The crime spike @Justin_K alluded to was national, not hyper-local.

https://www.vox.com/22344713/murder-violent-crime-spike-surg...

A basehead is robbing the CVS again? Quick, send a social worker!

These comics (and the ones suggesting "defunding police" will lead to school funding) are essentially a trick because 1. reducing police funding won't lead to money going to those other places 2. half those things are done under the police department 3. the other half are much more expensive than police funding.

Affordable housing is a notable case of the last one, it's very very expensive to build in SF and nobody actually wants it. The reason people dislike "luxury housing" is that it actually exists, so they want "affordable housing" because they know it won't happen. When it actually shows up, they oppose it too.

It does demonstrate that anything presented in cartoon form is probably false, because the people drawing cartoons are not specialists in whatever the topic is. Basically Gell-Mann Amnesia.

> These comics (and the ones suggesting "defunding police" will lead to school funding) are essentially a trick because 1. reducing police funding won't lead to money going to those other places 2. half those things are done under the police department 3. the other half are much more expensive than police funding.

Evidence does not support your claims.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/19/alexandria-k...

Social workers, in conjunction with police, have resulted in a drop of repeat calls and cost less than hiring another officer.

This is "half those things are done under the police department". Defunding the police department would prevent this.

If you want to hire social workers, which is a good idea, say that instead.

You should look in to the defund proposals, then, because that's what they're typically advocating; moving these responsibilities (and their funding) out of the police department.

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

> "Defund the police" is a slogan that supports divesting funds from police departments and reallocating them to non-policing forms of public safety and community support, such as social services, youth services, housing, education, healthcare and other community resources.

I have, which is why I already responded to this with "reducing police funding won't lead to money going to those other places".

"Education" is a trick because the same taxes don't fund police (cities) and education (school districts). Making one go down wouldn't cause the other to go up, or even increase voter support for it.

Can you clarify: Are you asserting it's literally impossible, along the lines of being actively unconstitutional or impossible in some fashion, or that "well voters won't want to"?

Some things, like housing, are so expensive that canceling other projects wouldn't actually get them done. The solution is to find ways to make them cheaper.

Other things, like education, are actually unrelated because they're literally different tax districts (eg property vs sales tax) applied to different people. In that case you can't vote on defund + fund at the same time. But also, some people just don't like taxes, so if you put the defund one first they'll take it but not use it to fund anything new.

It turns out housing isn't actually that expensive to provide (SF's unusual housing market aside, for a moment), and solves an enormous number of these problems on its own. https://www.npr.org/2015/12/10/459100751/utah-reduced-chroni...

Yes, I agree. Putting homeless people in houses is the most effective thing you can do for them. (sometimes this means forcing them, unfortunately, but it works)

And many people think homeless people ended up there by doing too many drugs or other moral failures, but it's more like being homeless is really bad for your mental health and there's nothing else to do.

> The whole point of defunding the police is to get the funding back to where it belongs.

Then Reform the Police would have been a better marketing slogan compared to Defund the police.

Tax cuts so citizens can hire private security?

Police reform does not mean the police should not exist. It means the police should be reformed. So that is a strawman argument.

Equating police reform with being anti-police plays right into propaganda.

> Equating police reform with being anti-police plays right into propaganda.

The people who started "defund the police" literally do not want there to be police. Sometimes they want to become the police, except they want to be called community violence activists, or therapists, or something.

That was fine as a fringe position, but then a lot of other people took up the slogan and just declared that no, actually, it means totally different thing X but we're going to keep saying it.

…Anyway, nobody is actually trying to do this, except Republicans in congress when they tried to block state funding in the CARES Act, so it doesn't matter.

You're mixing up defund with abolition.

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

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

I'm not. They're the same thing, the slogan was invented by police abolitionists.

https://twitter.com/BlackVisionsMN/status/126614972305388339...

https://twitter.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1279148959139758080

It actually makes more sense this way, the confusion is when people who don't want to abolish the police still want to defund them.

"Some activists want both things means they can't be distinct proposals" is like claiming the FSF and libertarians are the same group because there's a lot overlap.

The issue is that "defund" would actually work for the original activists' goals (abolishment), so I respect it even if I'm not sure what the world would be like after it.

I don't think it helps anyone else's goals though. So I think they're mistaken to take it up. Also, it's easy to fight against (because your opponents can point to the abolitionists) and it makes you look bad to normal people (most people in the US like the police, including minorities, who are actually more socially conservative than white people).

To stop misconduct a better message would be to define those people as "not the police" by, like, making it possible to fire them.

Then they should say "reform the police" not "defund the police". If you "defund the police", they will cease to exist, since nobody will be paying them. It might or might not be what the "defund" people are actually want, but it is what they are saying, so it isn't really a strawman argument.

Personally, I assume people actually mean what they say, so I think it's more likely they just want to be "radical" and haven't thought things through at all (as OP pointed out).

>Then they should say "reform the police" not "defund the police". If you "defund the police", they will cease to exist, since nobody will be paying them.

Great idea, let's call the CEO of a grass roots protest and have their marketing department update the website copy. Do you realize what you are saying?

>Personally, I assume people actually mean what they say, so I think it's more likely they just want to be "radical" and haven't thought things through at all (as OP pointed out).

I think a very useful skill in life is being able to read past slogans and actually understand what people are asking for. Kaepernick was trying to create a message about police reform for 5 years now, and no one cared about that - only the kneeling bit. "Defund the police" is the only message that has stuck. If extremist messaging is what gets people talking about the problem then so be it. There is no CEO of protests that develops a finely tuned marketing message for what is essentially a populist movement.

> I think a very useful skill in life is being able to read past slogans and actually understand what people are asking for

I think a very useful skill in life is accurately communicating what you actually want to say so that the receiver understands your message. The responsibility of communicating is on the protestor--they are the ones trying to change things.

I don't think that the extremist language had anything to do with getting people talking about the problem. George Floyd's death is what got people talking about it. Seems to me the more radical people are advocating "defund the police" as a solution. If they really want police reform, why not just say that? They wouldn't alienate everyone who thinks that is a silly idea. So tactically it is a major blunder because they've needlessly lost support. Why would someone who disagrees with "defund the police" as a solution risk working with them--what if they actually believe what they say?

> If extremist messaging is what gets people talking about the problem then so be it.

This cuts both ways. Can I assume that you're good with the right wingers' extremism, too? And how are you going to keep it from escalating? They still aren't listening, better make the statement louder, maybe in blood this time? Extremism begets extremism.

I am pretty opposed to extremism, and I think a large part of the problem in the US is that the only voices are the extreme ones shouting really loud. A group of friends driven by loud, extreme voices is dysfunctional, and larger groups are no different.

Besides, reacting to a problem with extremes doesn't solve the problem, it only changes what problem you have. Historically it usually changes for the worst.

What you are asking for is for people to protest more nicely and to have a co-ordinated message. Ignoring the impossible ask of trying to get a single message from a decentralized movement, people have been asking for police reform. Black Lives Matter is founded on police reform. The original michael brown events was in 2014. I explicitly brought up Kapernick because he's been asking for reform in 2016! It's not until people starting saying defund did the message change from "well can we just have reform instead"?

Protests have always been extreme and riots has been historically the best vehivle of change for the proletariat. People on the ground are rarely going to be amazing orators in explaining what they need and for a underprivileged group, being reasonable has never worked. You have WSPU escalating to violence for Women's Suffrage in the UK. You have the troubles in Ireland. You have the underbelly of the violent race riots in MLK's marches.

And how do you keep it from escalating? By solving the underlying grievances people have. Most people don't turn to white supremacy through a pure ideological belief that the "white race" is superior. They start with system problems - increasing health costs, increasing housing costs and lack of upwards mobility, and in their search of their solutions they find someone who tells them what they want to hear.

At the end of the day when you have people rioting in the streets the time for "rational" discourse has long passed. The people who are most loudly chanting defund the police have been trying to reform for almost _10 years_.

The more useful skill in life is to take written statements at face value. Otherwise a more valuable life lesson will be learned when you challenge a written contract in court.

Even slogans must be taken at face value, e.g. the Jews in Europe who could have escaped Nazism in the early phase, but waited too long because “they can’t be serious…just read past the slogans, it will all pass.” Godwin’s “law” notwithstanding…just one egregious example among many.

Not suggesting SF is at this stage, but a blasé attitude to what is actually being said in these situations has had severe consequences in the recent past. If you say “defund the police”, you better mean “defund the police” because any mature adult excepting your parents (maybe your grandparents) are going to interpret it as abolishing/crowdsourcing(?) the police. If you don’t mean that, then don’t say that. If it’s just unclear, than stop saying it and say something clearer. It’s the responsible thing to do.

Late in Timothy Leary’s life he was giving his standard spiel and he was surrounded by the usual burnouts and psychedelic enthusiasts who were being unusually silly, naive and annoying. A friend commented to him “Does it ever seem to you that all the neurons you killed off over the years have reincarnated into these people?” You wonder about the homeless being the karmic hair shirt some older SF folks wear to repent for their misspent youth/adulthood or accidentally winning the housing lottery. There but for the grace of tech dollars and Daddy’s money go I.

PS: Doesn’t it seem the cities most bought into these political fads are also those with the most self-indulgent parenting styles? Might be worth a study.

The police can only effectively deal with the homeless the way LA did in Echo Park -- by kicking them out. Then it becomes an issue for somewhere else.

Considered to be progressive by whom? Like most of what passed for “progressive” in California, it’s generally a narrow set of issues to which the label might apply. A lot of SF is now dominated by the tech industry which is almost libertarian in its views, but for a narrow slice of identity politics.

"Defund the police" is mostly a shorthand for "federalize the police". Some people with little political power might interpret it literally, but they're not really calling the shots.

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