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Comment by infamouscow | Hacker News Reader

Defund the police was a stupid idea. Nobody wants to do a job where they could get shot in the face during a traffic stop and still be demonized by society for it. So you're stuck with only the bad cops until they retire. After those cops retire, you're screwed and only have yourselves to blame. People warned about this happening and were dismissed.

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Like "bus drivers"? You must drive at 3a.m. and pick strangers and sometimes go through isolated areas. A few years ago here in Argentina they had the money in a big box in a manual or automated machine, so it was an easy jackpot. Now we pay with an special card, so the profit of the thieve is stealing money/cellphones from the passengers. We hate most of them, because they drive not very carefully and pass red light and other stuff.

> Nobody wants to do a job where they could get shot in the face during a traffic stop and still be demonized by society for it.

I heavily doubt that's what they're being "demonized" for.

While I agree with you high level, I heard an argument on a podcast yesterday which resonated with me, which is that we don’t really talk about public safety solutions outside of the police. No problem has ever been solved by taking money away from it, but maybe we should look at the list of jobs covered by police and figure out which of those jobs could be handled by a different/new department. Not everything the police does require guns. Instead of defund the police let’s fund public safety solutions that don’t involve law enforcement.

The idea that mental health will get properly funded is (sadly) laughable. And I live someone where public healthcare is supposedly a thing.

I never know how to conceptualize my feelings about these things, do you sort of try to talk about and spread ideas about what should happen or what's realistic. Part of what is embedded in the idea that police is the only public safety effort we talk about is that it's the only solution that's politically feasible. shrug?

> Instead of defund the police let’s fund public safety solutions that don’t involve law enforcement.

This is literally what "defund the police" meant, just that the unfortunate naming caused people to do that thing where you read the headline and not the body. The initial push for "defund police" was to remove their responsibility for mental health calls and things of that nature and send specially-trained personnel to deal with that who had training to de-escalate and help those folks, without needing guns and such.

It is not 'literally' what it means, because it's missing the important distinction of _not defunding the police_. Any definition of defund the police involves something along the lines of "divesting funds from police departments"(wikipedia) Yes I get your point about how defund the police was misinterpreted, by everyone and how really it's a great policy meant to do all the things I mentioned. But we should fund public safety without touching police budgets.

It is named unfortunately because there are people who are absolutely literal about wanting what the name clearly says, and then maybe people who maybe aren't 100% on board with it but are okay with using piggy-backing off it to achieve their goals and aren't going to get in the way of it as long as their own goals are also achieved. To pretend otherwise is naive at best.

Your point touches on the crux of the problem. How to achieve safe and peaceful communities is not a mystery. Humans have been doing the civilization thing for thousands of years.

The problem is people who think that we have been doing it wrong and should stop what we have done for thousands of years, and wave their hands at mysterious other solutions.

What you're saying we've 'solved' safety? What does this even mean? Scale changes things. What works for 10 people doesn't work for 1000, 10,000, 100,000. Also - You're saying there's nothing new to learn? Also, how to achieve safe and peaceful communities seems like a huge mystery. I'm bewildered by your comment but look forward to being educated.

This just looks like more conflation and a bad faith interpretation of what most people meant when they said “defund the police”.

CampaignZero.org is a good example of the policies desired to reduce violence caused by police on the population they police. Obviously not everyone agrees on what defund means, but that is why there are so many bad faith interpretations.

I personally have a really difficult time seeing US police as an institution that has justice as their highest priority:

(1) There are several departments that depend on civil asset forfeiture for more than 50% of their department revenue.

(2) NYPD kept arguing that Stop and Frisk took guns off the streets despite the dismal percentage of stops yielding an arrest and a complete ignorance of the trust damage caused in the communities where any young male could be interpreted to make “furtive movements”.

(3) The instructors for police use of force teach officers to assume the worst of every contact with any person, causing predictable lack of trust with non police. These instructors are generally pretty suspect.

(4) Police repeatedly interfere with people filming them while in public and in uniform. I haven’t heard any argument for this position that withstands scrutiny. It just looks like “we don’t like oversight” and “we fear a situation that causes accountability”.

(5) Police unions and systems that protect officers from accountability for their own actions. Beat cops tend to look at Internal Affairs cops with disdain. They push legislators for LEOBoR laws that give police additional protections from investigations that they don’t want to give to non-police. Cops scream about political prosecutions when a cop is arrested (and almost none are convicted) but are quiet when they arrest people on tenuous evidence.

(6) It doesn’t matter if 95% of those in uniform are strict law abiding, boring, non-corrupt, courteous, etc (I estimate that percentage is only accurate during training but the percentage falls off quickly the longer they are on the job) the rest are defended and kept on the job. Those corrupt officers and the “chain of command” and the culture of “cops versus civilians” means that lots of otherwise “good” cops end up being corrupted by the actions they choose to take to look away from extralegal/illegal actions. I have seen how this works in my family.

(7) Tolerance and normalization of violence on the riot lines. Usually when police have a large presence in riot gear, there are multiple departments contributing personnel and their id badges aren’t visible. Individual officers are almost never prosecuted for excessive force on the riot lines.

(8) Police almost exclusively get to set the publicly disclosed narrative after an act of violence. The police PR officer is trained to exclusively release information that helps the officers involved and the department. They purposefully will elide information that may incriminate or increase legal liability for the department.

(9) Asymmetric accountability. Officers have a department, a union, and a government jurisdiction to be accountable for them. Police aren’t willing to let the same court system they contribute to dole out their personal accountability. They like to see themselves as deserving more protection than the civilians they arrest.

(10) Cops wives/families are ridiculously entitled and corrupt when it comes to avoiding citations, tickets, and arrests. They trade in reputation and avoid using the legal paperwork. Arrests for the, not for me.

Source: I have a cop in my family so I both care about his well being and I am a citizen and tax payer so I care about my fellow citizens losing trust in the institution.

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