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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

I live just west of Minneapolis with my wife in a house that's been in my family for generations.

I don't want to leave but the continuous stream of car jackings, home invasions, petty theft and seemingly random acts of violence have me rethinking this.

Calls to defund the police sound pretty tone deaf when your elderly neighbor is assaulted in their own home and robbed.

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Police budgets are at their highest levels in history, and yet crime is up. The correlation just isn't there. Wasting money on police isn't solving this problem, which is why you are seeing the calls to move our funds elsewhere.

Also worth noting that MPD engaged in a work stoppage last summer, which may have had an impact on crime. https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/10/20/mpd-cop-says-office...

Nationwide, crime has been on a downward trend for decades. Yes, there are spots where it flares up. And COVID appears to have caused a marked increase in some crimes. But, overall, the US hasn't suddenly degenerated into a state of lawlessness.

https://www.bbc.com/news/57581270

FBI crime stats for Minneapolis proper don't look that much higher than the last 20 years, and considering that the metro population has almost doubled since 1990 you have to discount them per-capita. Are you sure it's not just that you are reading too much Nextdoor?

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2021/07/27/violent-crime-surge...

https://www.axios.com/local/twin-cities/2021/12/09/st-paul-h...

Homicides I tend to discount because homicide victims aren't randomly selected. Anyway this is right in line with what I just said; saying that a rapidly-growing metro exceeded a nominal crime stat from 26 years ago is not that meaningful.

Robberies are something I do watch because the victims are pretty much random.

Crime stats are often on a delay.

I occasionally see people in Portland cite 2019’s crime stats as proof that things are fine and that you’re just bigoted against homeless people or whatever.

Portland didn’t get the 2020 numbers from the FBI until late September 2021, which at that point showed an 80% increase.

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-2021-homicid...

Now we’re at nearly 80 homicides (if we haven’t crossed that, it will likely be this weekend) so far in 2021, breaking the 90s record.

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-2021-homicid...

For a while the narrative as that crime was much less serious than is being portrayed in the news. In major American cities, that trend has reversed.

Counterpoint: we live in Edina, a nicer suburb just south of Minneapolis proper. No real crime except for a single hit-and-run by an out-of-towner in the last two years.

Walking distance to two grocery stores, several restaurants, and two malls. Affordable utilities and rent.

There was a carjacking at the lunds in Edina two days ago.

https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/edina-carjacking-v...

I've been out of town the past few days, so I'm not surprised I didn't hear about that yet.

The circumstances are particularly shocking. A violent carjacking in broad daylight at an upscale grocery? The perpetrators must be a special brand of stupid.

Hi, neighbor!

Hi! Fancy meeting another Edina person here, haha.

Oversimplified, inflammatory statements like "defund the police" and "ACAB" gain a lot more traction composted to more measured statements like, "We believe in maintaining a secure society for everyone and not just certain preferred communities, which isn't possible with the current policing and social care system. We need massive, decisive, and prompt reform that doesn't involve funneling more and more of the city budget directly to the police dept, and if we can't have that then we'd rather re-start from the ground up and police ourselves than sit by while the situation worsens."

Doesn't have the same ring, you know?

Those oversimplified phrases gain traction by provoking an emotional response, but that cuts both ways.

"Defund the police" was very easy to interpret as "abolish the police." It was a gift to the other side of the argument, and to that side's candidates in the 2020 election. Overall it looks like it backfired as a slogan politically, and no major police departments have actually been reformed.

If all your slogan achieves is making your own side feel better, while it alienates moderates and gives easy talking points to your opponents, it's a bad slogan and you shouldn't be proud of it.

How exactly is a community going to police itself?

Look at the marches(if you can, they're rarely shown on any kind of media) every time a 5 year old is murdered from a stray drive by shooting bullet in chicago...thousands of people in the community come out against it, and...nothing happens.

By your average person being dangerous. Put it this way, would you rather break into a Texas house or a California house?

As a Chicagoan I can assure you, the police aren't doing anything about it either. Everyone realizing that the police are stealing money from us is a large reason why defund the police is so popular. Lived here my entire life, met plenty of cops, have never found a single one to be pleasant let alone effective. Everyone you meet here has similar stories.

Pay them more to keep failing to provide protection? The cops extort you (the tax payer) by playing with your safety for the sake of inflating the budget.

Police in the US are under no obligation to protect the citizenry. SCOTUS has reaffirmed that over and over again.

For anyone interested, there's a great Radiolab episode about this:

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/no-sp...

The point of the calls to defund the police is that the assault and robbery is a symptom of a wider systemic problem. Arresting and jailing the people who committed that particular assault and robbery is like taking a painkiller when you've got a gut wound. Sure, it'll let you ignore the pain for a while longer, but you're not addressing the real core of the problem.

Seem being the key word. The messaging is poor, the idea has quite a bit of merit.

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