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Comment by keyme | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure this has nothing to do with all the "defund the police" bullshit from a while ago.

How many police departments were actually “defunded” and how does that correlate with the topic of this article?

Even if they weren’t directly defunded, they were probably demoralized, and likely lost good staff during the ‘ACAB’ period. Would you really want to remain a cop when ‘all cops’ are suddenly so viciously hated by so many in the media, politics, and activism?

It's one of the safest, best paid jobs you can get with few skills and minimal training. If they're so fragile they can't take the paycheck and deal with a little criticism, they have no business walking around with a gun and the force of law behind them.

In 2018, 106 police officers died on duty (roughly even split of feloniously killed vs accidental). There are other more dangerous jobs, but to describe policing as one of the safest _on a forum full of office workers_ is disingenuous.

The police had to choose between "being liked by the public" and "being able to murder members of the public without consequence" and chose option B in almost every single case.

Those protests, and the political activism generally, are just a symptom.

Every single person in the US has seen multiple videos of police violence, lies, and various other abuses. A mix of widespread cameras, and the police being increasingly flagrant with some abuses, has radically reshaped people's opinions.

Even if no one protested, seeing trust crater is to be expected.

While we're obviously seeing more widespread distribution of footage of the worst incidents via social media, isn't it likely that policing has actually improved over the last couple of decades, as the genuinely bad cops are increasingly likely to be caught on camera now that there's hundreds of millions of smartphones, dashcams, bodycams, CCTV cameras, etc out there?

At least for body cameras, the research I've seen suggests small or no effects on number of incidents: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/research-body-worn-camer...

The cameras do presumably need to be paired with police departments of prosecutors willing to do anything, which doesn't seem to be guaranteed.

You're making the assumption that without social media outrage, that that catching a cop doing bad things on video matters, or us evidence of some crime.

They aren't. The cops won't go after their own, and the politicians will only respond to public pressure.

Video footage makes it easier to get public outrage, but it's still the public outrage that has to do the work to hold cops accountable

Law enforcement officers are given privileges (social and legal) while they are on duty (and other informally while off duty) that other citizens do not have. They should be held to a much higher standard in return for those privileges. And true, many of those privileges are likely necessary in order for them to fulfill their law enforcement duties.

But it's not the media and politicians who are shooting unarmed civilians, or killing people in their custody. You can see many of the videos for yourself, often recorded by the officers' own body cameras. It's horrifying. The disregard for the decency and humanity of others is on display for anyone to see, unfiltered. The fact that it happens at all and the officers themselves aren't outraged by it is an outrage in and of itself. One bad apple spoils the bunch. If you can't trust one police officer, you can't trust any of them. And we can see for ourselves how they can so often get away with what would be a murder charge for anyone else.

Why would it?

Many people suspected "defund the police" would lead to an increase in crime, and said so. Often risking their reputation to do so, and being accused of racism, heresy, deviation-ism, and so on.

Now that crime has risen in the past couple years, it's amazing how many people never said "defund the police" and when confronted with the evidence that they did say that "din't mean it that way."

I remember defund the police narratives. However despite these defund the police talks the majority of police budgets in the US continue to rise the last few years.

The performance of police, like of most professions, is highly impacted by morale. The defund narrative painted police work as inherently racist and oppressive, which obviously effected morale.

I don’t have any specific data, but it seems intuitive and cops themselves are talking about it. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009578809/cops-say-low-moral... and a bit here https://www.manhattan-institute.org/verbruggen-depolicing-al...

Defund the police came out of specific incidents, normally resulting in deaths, which are now being covered by police body cams and filming. From my own perspective the morale being affected is tied to the usually narratives of what happened in the incidents no longer being backed up by what the camera shows. Defund is the wrong word in my opinion though - if this was another professional job it would be more police training. We shouldn’t see indigents of a traffic stop resulting in the death of a driver with multiple police involved. Or why can I ask someone who lives in the woods come up with multiple names of people killed by the police that were unarmed - I’m sorry the morale is down and that it affects job performance but it can’t be that we expect to have multiple unarmed people killed a year as a normal part of the job.

They should consider not brutalising random people if they'd like people to be nicer to them.

That's moving the goalposts.

People wanted to defund police. Police budgets stayed flat or went up. Crime increased.

Maybe we should try defunding police.

How do you know it was "defund the police" and not COVID upending our world?

> "defund the police" [...] "din't mean it that way."

That was definitely a confusing time when multiple people meaning different things were using this slogan.

> Many people suspected "defund the police" would lead to an increase in crime, and said so. [...] Now that crime has risen in the past couple years

This probably looks like a "gotcha" to the average person not paying attention, but AFAIK not a single police department was defunded. In fact many had budget increases, including political support from President Biden himself.

The implication that somebody is backtracking on the slogan because defunding (which never happened) caused a crime surplus is rather hilarious misinformation.

Now deal with the fact that crime and police budgets both went up.

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