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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

First of all, why do so many feel the need to polarize everything and turn it into a a partisan battle? We need less of this not more!

Second, police are local. Generally conservative opposition is to large federal government. This is a purely subjective take, I'm not taking sides.

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Neither is it helpful to pretend that there isn't a clear political divide in support for the police.

I don’t think there’s a meaningful divide in “support for the police.”

Maybe in pro police stickers and social media posts, but if you look at legislation and policy I think there’s clear support of police from the current party in power as well as the previous.

There's absolutely a meaningful divide along party-political lines on confidence in the police and belief that they are doing a good job in protecting the population from crime.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/13/republicans...

James Carville said, on PBS News Hour, that defunding the police was a losing strategy, which effectively told the voters where the establishment (even the left-leaning establishment) stands.

US politics are conservative. The "left" is middling-at-best.

There's also the concern of how police react to the "defund" movement. There have been a ton of accusations that the police slow down on purpose when their budgets get threatened because an increase in visible "crime" (in quotes because I don't think homelessness should be criminalized, but seems to be the underlying factor of a lot of what gets called crime near where I live) gets all sorts of people to call for an increase in funding.

In voters, but not in their political representatives, who are pretty unanimous.

I think the divide is PR to shepherd people into the Democratic party https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-squad-enables-pelosis-m...

What I meant is that both parties fund the police so it seems like pew polls don’t seem to affect policy much.

Biden literally pushed crime bills way back when. And I don’t have any hope that the democrats will pass any police reform given they control Congress and the executive. There’s such easy reform too that could be done by executive order like stopping police from purchasing military equipment or linking funding to reporting police violence stats.

Not really, support for reducing police is actually quite small among both liberals and conservatives. Only 25% of liberals want to reduce police in the US [1]. 34% want more police and 40% don't want either more or less.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-sha...

Pretty much both left and right support the police. Only some extremists don't. All those cities that defunded in the police in enthusiasm are busy refunding the police today.

It isn't helpful to pretend that the LAPD and NYPD are somehow the fault of conservatives. The fact is the largest police forces which receive the most criticism are mostly free of conservative input into how they are ran.

If you think city government "runs" the police forces in large cities, you may not be paying full attention. I invite you to look at what happened when, in late 2014, Bill de Blasio went on the record with the observation that he told his biracial son to be careful around the police.

Two police officers were killed (in completely unrelated circumstances) shortly afterwards, and the NYPD patrolman's union representative declared that the mayor "had blood on his hands". Subsequently, police officers at the funeral turned their back to the mayor and a massive bout of the "blue flu" affected the city, with arrests down 90% vs the previous year over the holiday period and into the new year.

Police unions also donate millions of dollars to state political candidates in order to diffuse oversight responsibilities of the NYPD.

Side Note: Both chambers of NY State government as well as the Governorship were in Democratic hands then.

I don't recall the exact dates those events took place but the New York state senate was not in democratic hands in 2014. Republicans won the majority in the 2014 general election. Prior to that, the IDC worked with the republicans and that coalition had control.

Even if democrats had been in control at the time what difference would that make? The GP was pointing out the police union and NYPD actively being against the people in civilian oversight roles.

Conservatives control the unions. Got it. Totally believable.

There are three major police unions in New York City. The Police Benevolent Association (which represents line officers), the Detectives' Endowment Association (detectives) and the Sergeants Benevolent Association (supervisory officers).

In 2020, the leader of the New York City Police Benevolent Association, Patrick Lynch, endorsed Trump in the presidential election, and appeared at the Republic National Convention to support him.

The Sergeants Benevolent Association also endorsed Trump; their leader at the time, Ed Mullins, appeared in an interview on Fox News with a QAnon mug, but has since left the position after his home was raided by the FBI. Prior to that, he was docked vacation time after he tweeted a screenshot of confidential police records concerning the mayor's daughter.

The Detectives' Endowment Association endorsed ... please attempt to suppress your surprise ... Trump as well.

In short: if your perspective is that police unions are run by liberals simply because they're unions, you are not paying attention to the facts.

You should probably look up the people in charge of the police unions in those cities (Chicago too) before making that statement.

Okay, conservatives control the unions. That's what you're going with? And also the unions are more powerful than the legislature.

Alternative hypothesis. The executive and legislative branches of government in these areas have completely screwed up law enforcement over the last few years but successfully ran a scapegoat campaign to blame the police.

The unions are absolutely more powerful than the executive. That's true of basically every government union. Teacher, cops, road workers, etc. Not just functionally, but politically.

Your hypothesis would have to be based on some type of facts. HOW did those branches screw up policing? What policies did they enact that changed the shape of policing in their cities, and how did those changes "screw things up".

Keeping in mind that crime rates, even today, are at historic lows.

Conservatives control those police departments even though conservatives have effectively no power over the civilian government in those cities. Just look at the outcomes of union leadership elections. The difficulty of effective civilian oversight over police departments is basically the root cause of all policing problems in America.

Large cities would probably be well-served by copying the US constitution's solution to this problem by making the Mayor also the Chief of Police (or something similar). After all, NYC/LA are larger than the US was in 1776, and, in terms of size, those PDs are the same order of magnitude as the Continental Army.

> Large cities would probably be well-served by copying the US constitution's solution to this problem by making the Mayor also the Chief of Police (or something similar). After all, NYC/LA are larger than the US was in 1776, and, in terms of size, those PDs are the same order of magnitude as the Continental Army.

An interesting approach that I haven't come across before. Do you know of any legal/constitutional/poli-sci analyses of this solution for cities or greater-metropolitan-areas?

What do you even mean by control? The legislature makes the laws the and the mayor often appoints the police commissioner. Just because the job often appeals to conservatives doesn't mean they get to set policy, law, and not get fired if they piss off the mayor or city government.

So far I'm not convinced there is other than the one manufactured in the media. Far left attempts at revamping police have largely failed from what I have seen (ex. Minneapolis, which is a rather left leaning city). But I'd love to see actual evidence to the contrary. As in cases where police defunding/change has actually been voted in/implemented in the U.S.

Defund the police is a loser of a political campaign and really does not make sense. Democrats are targeting the far left with that and losing the middle. What makes sense is reducing the power of police unions to essentially negotiate police powers and an increase of independent police oversight and use of force investigations. Mandate body cameras, and force them to release them promptly via public information requests, no exceptions. Get rid of qualified immunity.

Edit: With that said I am pro police and think they perform a vital role in society. They do a job very few people want to and deal with the worst of us. I just don't want them to have immunity from the very laws they are supposed to enforce.

"Defund the police" is a far-left position that people tried (and failed) to get Democrats as a whole to accept. I find it weird that people keep getting the cause-and-effect there backwards.

Leftist ideas don't get very far in US politics because our "left" party is pretty centrist. Every time something "socialist" gets passed (like the ACA), it's super watered-down by folks from both parties and often stripped of key provisions (as is the case with the ACA) that made it at least somewhat workable.

If anywhere did defund the police, aside from police tactics to prevent that (see my other post in this conversation), it would only work if the social services were stepped-up to work toward crime-prevention (instead of crime-punishment, which is what police do), which isn't generally talked about in conjunction with defunding the police because "defund the police and replace it with a not-racist crime-prevention strategy involving community and social engagement and support" doesn't roll of the tongue.

Did the Heritage Foundation Invent ObamaCare?

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/did-the-heritage-foundati_b_5...

That's interesting, but what does it have to do with what I commented above? That comment got a few downvotes, and I don't really understand the connection between what I said and this article, but that usually means I'm not understanding something.

If you could clarify, I'd really appreciate that.

Their branding is all about being the protectors of individual freedom. Sure, they want government power concentrated toward the local end of the spectrum, but they also—say—they want less government power in general.

Individual freedom is championed more by libertarians than by Republicans as a whole, especially on matters such as policing, criminal justice, recreational drugs, immigration, and LGBT issues. The Libertarian Party does not have a strong presence in the two-party dominated U.S., so many libertarians in the U.S. subscribe to a major party (Republican or Democratic) that emphasizes the libertarian positions they are most interested in, at the cost of opposing other libertarian positions they consider a lower priority. Far from ideal, but some believe it is the best option in the short term until this two-party system evolves into something better.

What have I polarized? If one group is openly for more police regulation and one is not, then its already politicized. Calling for less polarization does not fix this? Your point is very much a strawman.

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