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Hello, everyone, I wanted to create a thread to discuss one of the main ideological battle lines in terms of our nations issue with policing and justice.
To start, I’ve noticed that many people feel that crime is a symptom of either poverty or personal trauma. In essence, people commit crime either because they are trying to get something they need to survive or they are dealing with personal trauma in their lives. People who tend to hold this view are often against forms of traditional criminal justice/law enforcement because it’s seen as simply punishing people for being poor or experiencing hurt, and thus punitive measures are seen as cruel by definition. Adding race into the picture, many people feel that due to our nation’s well documented history of discrimation and exploitation of Non-Europeans, that laws and the systems that enforce them are simply extensions of this history and thus are illegitimate. There seems to be a lot of voices who feel that if we simply addressed poverty and personal well being, that we can supplant traditional notions of criminal justice and instead focus on stopping crime at it’s “root”.
I admit that it’s a thought that seems grounded in compassion and empathy, and the idea that we can prevent people from going to jail or having their lives thrown away is something we should all work towards. I can definitely see how raising people’s incomes/standard of living would disincentivize crime on a day to day level, as well helping people to work through their inner demons such as conflict resolution, mental wellness, family counseling and the such.
...But here’s where it starts to go wrong: To put it bluntly, many criminal acts are bourne of either opportunity or impunity. My concern is once people know that there is no consequences to their actions, what kind of actions would they undertake? This seems ironic, but the Amy Cooper incident kinda shows why we cannot simply “Abolish Police” or be without a criminal justice system. Here was someone who didn’t have any claim to racial oppression or economic debasement who quite brazenly committed a heinous act.
So as a Conservative, I turn it over to my more left wing friends and ask in a spirit of enlightened debate: Why “Defund Police” rather than “Discipline Police”?
It just another way of expanding bureaucracy. Like "social workers" are going to get some homeless meth head junkie to stop screaming and breaking windows and pooping wherever they please. Police (as a general rule) are grossly overpaid, I'll give them that.
I came across this article and realized that there is something fundamentally wrong with the ways we, and the police approach conflicts.
While comparing police rules, regulation, expected behavior and conflict resolution in other developed, civilized countries it became clear that we definitely need a different way to train and teach police force to do their job.
However, I also realized that models described in the article couldn't apply to our society in the US. For that it's sadly way too late... https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...ritain/612820/
I came across this article and realized that there is something fundamentally wrong with the ways we, and the police approach conflicts.
While comparing police rules, regulation, expected behavior and conflict resolution in other developed, civilized countries it became clear that we definitely need a different way to train and teach police force to do their job.
However, I also realized that models described in the article couldn't apply to our society in the US. For that it's sadly way too late... https://www.theatlantic.com/internat...ritain/612820/
Training officers in de-escalation and conflict resolution would be a good start, I do however feel that one main goal should be having investigations and discipline of police forces be handled by a special civilian panel that both merits and enforces punishment of offending officers as well as being the main overseer of body cam footage.
I would be in favor of of defunding police by say, 20%, and using that money for job training, community centers, and something that is greatly lacking in many places, affordable housing.
I would be in favor of of defunding police by say, 20%, and using that money for job training, community centers, and something that is greatly lacking in many places, affordable housing.
Did you know that affordable housing is more expensive than running higher priced rentals. I am a landlord and I hate renting more affordable rents in a less well to do area. I go through hundreds of applications and few have credit scores above 620, majority are below 600. Once you find a decent tenant, they always pay rent late and often I simply accept rent each week.
I have no respect for providing affordable housing to less well to do folks because many got where they are because the lack of setting priorities. If you've late with paying rent 1/2 the times you shouldn't be going on vacations. No job training can help people that lack the motivation to do more and straighten up their finances.
Defunding the police actually hurts poor areas which have high crime. The well to do areas hardly need much policing. Where I live, the police are like your neighbor, they know you by face and they never give you any hard time because the town has little to no crime and we know each officer by face. This whole defunding the police will deeply affect low income areas.
I'm not falling for left wing nonsense anymore. Facts show that crime rates decline when you have more police. All these studies showing what police need to do are done by people who never spent a day doing police work. Here's a reasonable looking article in Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...ion-training1/
But the author is trained as a medical anthropologist. Imagine being a cop and having someone like that tell you how to do your job. We should be asking the POLICE what they need in order to reduce the number of people killed or injured. I bet none of these reformer 'armchair quarterbacks' have ever had to restrain someone who is out of control. I worked in a psych hospital and I can tell you it's not easy at all. It took 4 big 250 pound guys to restrain a 100 pound girl when she went manic in my cafe one day.
Let's also look at some basic statistics. Cops kill about 1000 people every year. Given the population of the US that's a 1 in 300,000 chance of being killed by a cop. About 50 cops get killed by criminals every year. The total number of cops is only 700,000 though. That means cops have a 1 in 14,000 chance of being killed. That means cops are 20 times more likely to be killed than kill someone! So why aren't we talking about THAT and how dangerous it is to be a cop?
As an NYC resident, I 100% think we can't do without the police. Not everyone is nice and reasonable. Not everyone is sane (or at least, non-violently insane). And we're all living on top of each other. Someone needs to be in charge of defusing conflicts, keeping order, and protecting those who can't protect themselves.
And even if a criminal has some reason for what they did, that doesn't help the victim any. Chances are, their victim is also poor/disadvantaged and that's how they ended up in harm's way. Just as an example, the people who get shot as bystanders are usually living in the neighborhoods with the most crime. Or another example, a friend who's self-employed was mugged recently. Why? She was in a train station in Manhattan at 9 PM, because she needs to give lessons to make ends meet. If she'd had the luxury of staying home, she would not have gotten robbed.
I do think we need to get rid of qualified immunity and other rules/court precedents that protect bad cops. They exist and they get away with a lot of things, and this should end. But I don't see why we can't hold them legally responsible without making police in general into villains. So I'm definitely in the "discipline the police" camp and not the "defund the police" camp.
As a so called "leftist" I don't think we should defund the police. I do know that where I once lived they were paid a lot so in cases like that, don't keep raising the pay. Yes, maybe use some of that money to train them differently, but realize that they can't be expected to do everything. They protect us and they put their lives on the line. How can we expect them to, for instance, come away from a potentially death threatening confrontation and run to their next call which is to calmly settle a domestic dispute, then go and chase someone who's stolen something and still maintain the same level of calm and control?
It's a stressful job. So help them learn to cope with the stress, give them some pointers as to how better to deal with people, but don't expect them to be police officers and social workers at the same time. That's what social workers are for.
I've give you a recent example that comes from where I currently live. It's an apartment complex and we have one troublesome neighbor. She's the type who screams and hollers at her neighbors for no reason, calls the police for no reason except to make them come over here so she can keep on screaming. (Thank goodness I don't live that close to her!)
For three years she's been threatening to take one of her neighbors to court. It's over nothing. It happens over and over and over again and couldn't the police be somewhere else doing their job rather than coming here to listen to this crazy lady scream?
Well, it may be due to the publicity about the police but something different happened last week when she called the police. They came over but they brought a social worker with them. The screaming stopped and the social worker sat and talked with this woman. The social worker is a specialist in dealing with people's problems and in finding answers for the person. I assume the social worker did a pretty good job because no one here has heard anything from this woman since that day.
Social workers can work wonders and it's not just this one case but they can probably mitigate the situation instead of being confrontational like a police officer would tend to be. It's not the police officer's job to be a social worker. So, yes, take a bit of the money and apply it to training and hiring more social workers. They can also work with families and they can get to the root of the problem to stop violence before it happens.
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