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Comment by maybelsyrup | Hacker News Reader

> But nothing here will change.

It's hard but it's important to keep faith, and to keep working to change people's minds about police. Even your comment can make a difference: a place like HN is full of intelligent people who generally come here fairly open minded. Maybe your comment - the top one right now - can open someone's eyes to what cops really are. Stay in the fight!

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What would be a reasonable outcome?

Firing all of the current PD staff seems like a great first step. Trick is, do you hire more in their place, and how do you pick them?

No one seems willing to say it out loud, but the reason we can't fire all the police at once is that they will retaliate by looting and killing civilians. This was one of the mistakes the US made after invading iraq, and also a problem the roman empire kept running into in its later years.

Alternative: make all the cops give up all their guns. If they won't use them to protect the public, then their only use is to oppress the public.

The threat of violence against the populace they're meant to protect isn't a reason not to disband that police department.

It is however a reason to call in the FBI and, if necessary, deploy the Army so you can make anyone so inclined to rot in a prison cell.

Isn't this supposed to be where all those good men with guns we keep paying a blood-price for step in and shoot the bad men with guns?

The National guard is adequately equipped, trained and funded to put down an armed revolt of obese and unemployed police larpers.

The National Guard is however a state institution. You’d need the Texas Governor (in this case) to order it deployed. I V wouldn’t hold your breath. It’s more likely this is a job for the Feds.

So many parallels with the fall of the roman empire the USA has.

You can see for another example, San Fran's 1975 police riots, where the police went on strike, started assaulting both random members of the public as well as anyone from the courts trying to inform them of the court order that they needed to return to work, then left a bomb on the mayor's lawn that had a sign saying "don't threaten us" before it was detonated. All because of a push for integration that meant that a white cop's partner had a chance of being black.

In the case of Uvalde police, fire them all and cancel their pensions. Then have the gap in law enforcement covered by state troopers.

Finally, you bring each and every one of them up on any charges that can be filed against them.

The current argument is to slowly defund them and move that money to alternative services and police with a new culture not beholden to the current one. Many officers can move over, but slowly so the new culture doesn't get lost to the old one. Same way you modernize a company.

Why slowly? Firing everybody in any sort of leadership position would reduce their funding load by a substantial amount.

If they have guns issued to them, yet refuse use them even in an active shooter situation to protect the lives of innocent children being massacred, they probably don't need the guns for any situation. If police carrying all these unused guns around is any kind of liability (danger, theft) they should probably not be carrying them in the first place. (I'm okay with Police using them when the situation calls for it, but if they refuse to use them when the situation calls for it then they don't need them at all)

Something will change for sure: you'll have to surrender your legal guns.

"Just give away your guns. You don't need them for protection, you and your kids will be safe with the police" "Me? Oh it's different. See I need theses armed bodyguards with me and my kids. For security reasons you know!"

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