ETA: Please give the pedantry a rest. Of course I know police corruption is criminal. That's not what the people talking about "crime" are talking about.
You understand that protection rackets will 'work' with government officials, right? That this is part of it? And they'll try to codify their existence as much as possible.
And even if it was completely legal, its very obviously bad, and that's why its illegal in the first place and we try to combat such outcomes, which is part of the point of the article.
I’m the Dirty Hippie Freak and I endorse this message.
I don't believe that there's ever been any other kind of cop. Certainly not outside of fiction. By prefixing the adjective "corrupt" though, you're certainly buying into it.
Have you never read the headlines where the entire police union tries to extort the entire city? "If we don't get enough cops on the street, bad things will happen". Hell, even more explicitly in Minneapolis after Floyd. Sometimes in the comments here there are hints of people extorting themselves with stuff like "if we didn't have cops, it'd be chaos!".
The linked shakedown is relatively mild by comparison. That feeling you feel is the same as when the tapeworm hooks its jaw pincers into the inside of your gut. But sure, let's just hope for a more gentle tapeworm.
Imagine a situation that you could plausibly find yourself in where you would feel the need to contact the police. It need not be a 911 call, though those are fine too. Imagine how that would go down... the time of day you contact them. Where you would be when it happened. How you would describe the situation to them.
In this scenario, what is it that they do to help?
Whatever you think happens in that situation, everything I've read over the decades I've been reading about this lead me to believe that there is nothing they would ever do to help anyone reliably/consistently.
If your bike was stolen, well fuck you. Why do you even bother to report that. They will neither recover it, nor ever punish the person who stole it.
If your home was burglarized, the same. With your car, they'll take the report at least so you can claim insurance, but they will be surly and do so only begrudgingly because if they fail to take those reports to any great degree, there will be a political shitstorm that eventually catches up with them.
Are you in fear of your life? They might show up and shoot you. Your dog's in even more danger.
Did you see one on the street and ask for directions because you were lost? In Baltimore, that can cause them to point guns at you, scream obscenities, and run you off (and this is considered by some to be a particularly fortunate outcome).
The least risky encounter for most of us, is when we're being ticketed, when they're just doing revenue collection.
From what I can tell, the outcomes I describe aren't atypical. They've always got more important things to investigate (big drug busts), so the crimes that you and I care about are ignored, and they don't seem to act as a deterrent in any meaningful way. You just have several social filters on your brain that allow you to maintain the illusion otherwise.
I think most people who want to "defund the police" plan to live in a place where the police haven't actually been defunded. "Defund the police" is a luxury belief.
1. They self-fund. All confiscated cash is for keeps. If they're not allowed to keep it by state law, they're welcome to call in feds who will do the bust and give them 80% as a finders fee. 2. They extort cities into not "defunding". They don't want it, and they play hardball.
> nd no one in their right mind, even on the ACAB side, wants police to go away entirely.
No one's ever accused me of being in my right mind, but I am asking quite seriously... what would happen if they did? I have reason to believe "not much, good or bad".
In the places where things are horrible, they'd remain horrible. When SF has no retail stores because they can't handle the shoplifting, that'd remain true. And in the suburbs where things are boring, things would stay boring. If your car is stolen, you'd still never get it back. If your bike was stolen, same. If your home was broken into, no one would be caught. And if you were murdered, your murder would go unsolved just like before.
And I don't know how anyone can not see that.
That being said, I’m all for attempting the experiment, preferably far from me.
They do plenty of things. And I'm glad I'm privileged enough that I never suffer them doing things.
No, I started the conversation out talking specifically about "the things they do what we would actually want them to do".
This is because, were they gone, we wouldn't have to worry about them doing "the things they do that we never want done to ourselves, or to anyone else".
You're just confused. It's a confusing subject. You're not used to thinking about these things, no one wants you to contemplate them too carefully.
It's bizarre. "Why can't that internet weirdo see that the police are awesome and society would fall apart if they were gone?" only works if you've not paid attention to what the police are doing because you get to be 50 miles away when they're doing it.
He's correct that if you remove police from a well-off suburb not much will happen, because they mainly do tickets and domestics, and who really cares if a couple is fighting?
But when police are removed from neighborhoods where crime is an issue, it immediately and directly affects those who live there, and not in a good way.
Like when those big inner cities become food deserts because the retail stores start locking up the toothpaste and cans of soup behind glass cabinets a few months before they close down entirely and move out?
You think that those places could get worse than they are, and that the cops (who don't do anything to stop any of these crimes as they happen, or to deter them in any way because they're too busy concentrating on the drug war that brings in confiscated cash they get to keep) somehow prevent things from becoming even worse?
It's difficult to reconcile the idea that you live on the same planet that I do, and that (presumably) you have done so for many years.
Like, you really believe that? Please tell me you don't. This must be a joke.
SF basically told their police to stop going after small time thieves after 2020. The result has been mass mobs of stores and a huge increase in theft. They voted for these polices to raise the bar at which someone can be prosecuted, so police do nothing.
Jesus, do your research (and not on left wing Twitter lol)
But this is one of my most sincere postings, I'm being serious, and I'm trying to point out something that others have trouble discerning and recognizing.
I can see how it would be more comfortable for you if you could think me a troll.
> You continue to paint any pushback as some bad faith,
You should ask yourself why your good faith is so bad for everyone. "I'm just doing what I've always done" is lame.
I've taught my children from a young age that we must never come to the attention of the police. That they are not friends or heroes. That, should they show up and we can't just disappear back into the background... whatever bad things might have been happening are likely to get worse.
That if, for instance, someone is trying to murder them, they must handle it themselves. That if we are stolen from, our belongings are gone for good.
You though, you're welcome to continue to live in your illusions, and god help you if those ever melt away like fog on a sunny day.
> The fact of the matter is most people trust most police,
Most birds think the spider-tailed viper is a convenient meal. Their consensus in the matter isn't very inspiring though.
But I will also answer the question you posed (in the form of an unfinished short story from a few years ago that I dropped because I realized I was doing more telling than showing (also because it's kind of terrible):
Last paragraph is the most important part. Hence, "containment board."
Your views are extremely myopic. Low-income neighborhoods around me are asking for MORE police because of how things have gotten. It's literally only suburban people who are insulated from crime that are saying dumb things like "defund the police"
A friendly officer drove 10 minutes to pull out a slim jim and unlock my car for me. I thanked him. Normal stuff.
A lady's car broke down in an intersection. A police car put their lights on to keep us safe while 3 or 4 random people pushed the car to safety.
I often call dispatch to report accidents, debris on the road, or anything else that would warrant police help.
I have friends who have been tied up in the legal system with drugs and similar crimes around here. When they sober up, they admit that the cops have a hard job and treated them respectfully.
They protect. They serve.. it's honestly very simple. Not all police are lazy/corrupt/ego-driven maniacs. Not around here anyway.
Minneapolis is a very "young" city. It's only now getting actual generations of people that lived and grew up in the city, it used to be a city where all the suburbs people moved into the city. The first run "suburbs" are still actually suburbs, so you drive about five miles and you are in a suburb, while if you're in downtown Chicago, you have to go like 30 miles before you run into suburbs-like existence.
>They protect. They serve.. it's honestly very simple. Not all police are lazy/corrupt/ego-driven maniacs. Not around here anyway.
They are not, but departments are unwilling to get rid of the bad ones most of the time.
You can assume they're not white. (Or that they've experienced economic insecurity.)
The other guy's comment where he's telling his feel good stories, they serve more as a sort of mythology about heroic cops that people tell themselves, they're not even proper anecdotes. He wants to believe, so he tells us some stories, and it doesn't much matter if they're true. They're what you want to hear.
But if you care to check out the reality, go see what they're doing about burglaries in some hotspot. Go ask someone with a stolen bike or car what treatment they do get. Go check on where the resources, time, and manpower are spent. It's not on any of the crimes you care about. But I suppose a cop doing the AAA thing for free somehow makes up for that.
If I had been the one to call the police in any of those situations, I would expect that they did what they did, which was show up and provide a threatening presence to decrease the risk of further uncontrolled violence.
I don't mean to phrase this as an emotionally hostile reaction to your idea. Sometimes people hide their reasons for thinking something and then bring them out after drawing the person they're arguing with out into the open. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm merely pointing out that sometimes I need a situation to be dealt with by violent people with resources, and that's what they do.
I agree with you that they won't help with break-ins or with bicycle theft. But I would like them to be able to, because I don't like break-ins or bicycle theft and I'd like the people who to that to be put in "societal time out". This would require an agent permitted to detain someone with violence to investigate and catch people committing bicycle theft and break-ins.
I am almost certain that qualifies as "crime".
> about corrupt police shaking down small business owners under threat of losing their business license.
would be a crime...
That just means the DA's likely in on it and the criminality is systemic. Doesn't mean the activity becomes legal.
What we really need in this country is a way to prosecute which bypasses the DA since this type of thing seems to be becoming more common.
This is precisely why DAs are elected officials. It's supposed to work this way, in theory. The people vote in the officials who enforce the laws in the manner they wish. In practice, DA elections seem totally ignored.
The problem is lack of voting and civic engagement.
The last time this was discussed was in 1982, with an 8-1 decision that strengthened qualified immunity.
If a DA comes out and says "hey, I'm investigating a racket that is put on by local cops" those local cops (and their union) will fight tooth and nail to remove that DA, no matter how effective their other investigations are. If that AG or DA is out of a job, and try to spill the beans, they can be threatened, or ignored outright by local media or other prosecutors who have legitimate reasons to not rock the boat.
Organized corruption begets more organized corruption.
They want you to think like that because it’s good for business…and since our prison population exceeds that of Russia or any other country (per capita), it appears that business is good…
Systemic corruption is endemic in the US, but that’s very different from individual FBI agents taking bribes.