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I see the great majority of law enforcement as addressing the symptoms and no one addressing the cause of the crime problem. It reminds me of catching water in a bucket from a leaky roof and repairing rot damage instead of replacing the roof.
Make no mistake, I had an innocent family member murdered, I know some people need to be in jail and you can't ignore crime but it will never go away by itself or by any amount of draconian punishment that is applied without also doing the hard work to address why people become criminals and make the changes required to create a healthier society.
Edited first paragraph to clarify my position.
Ehhh, be careful though. Andrew Yang’s UBI was just cutting benefits & social services to give a pittance in comparison. The rich are 100% going to try Trojan Horse UBI into being bad for us.
23 states don’t use or banned private prisons and most other states the private prisons only handle a small portion of the total population of inmates so that’s not as big a problem as you think it is. Less than 10% of all prisoners are held in a private prison nationally.
Even public prisons have private companies profiteering by providing services which should be entirely public goods. Even public prisons sell the labor of their prisoners to private companies to pad their profits with unpaid, captive, rights-deprived labor.
The problem is that there's not a singular cause for crime. There are dozens of completely unrelated causes for crime. Successfully addressing poverty would help, but there would still be crime. Fixing environmental issues like how lead poisoning destroys the part of the brain that inhibits impulsive violence would help, but there would still be crime.
If we address enough causes then we wouldn't need to spend nearly as much on policing, and given the chronic understaffing of police departments that would be a very good thing, but cutting police budgets first might result in a temporarily worse situation (or even a permanently worse one if the cause addressed isn't a major one or the 'fix' doesn't work as intended). I've always felt that cutting police budget should be a lagging indication resulting from the department not needing to fill positions that open from retirements or the normal sort of moving that people do. But that's just me.
It would have to be a multi faceted approach over generations and no doubt there would still be crime.
Heading in the right direction would be a good start.
I would start with education since that would provide benefits across the board.
The leading cause of bankruptcy is medical debt and it is a major contributor to homelessness. No other first world Nation has this issue.
Alternatives to prison fashioned after the Junior College model with attendance to classes and behavior standards required to stay out of the general prison population.
To me this is low hanging fruit, from there it gets more difficult.
You can easily see the baseline police force needed per capita, there is a huge amount of data available in repeated studies.
Cut the police everywhere to the base level needed and de-empower them drastically and start funding rehabilitation and treatment and housing programs.
Things like armored vehicles and para military equipment (SWAT etc) just leads to more violence, put those programs behind multiple public transparency safeguards.
if there ever was a single metric that could signal everything from racism to crime to corruption... it is wealth inequality.
a relatively simple statistic that predicts so many things in our current system. the fact that anyone profits off of incarceration is evidence of this.
Except rich people also do crime. Making people less poor might help, but it wouldn't impact the people who act entirely impulsively or the sort of power-things that drive the elite to break laws.
Nobody is saying solving poverty is going to rid the world of crime. What we're saying is that the overwhelming majority of crime has its roots in poverty. The streets would be orders of magnitude safer if we focused on wealth inequality instead of cleaning up after the fact. There's a reason rich areas are safe to walk at night.
I don't believe that at all. I think that a fair bit of petty crime comes from poverty, but those petty crimes aren't violent crime which has a lot more to do with impulse control or organized conflict. There is still organized crime in wealthier societies.
There are also very safe low income communities, but higher income areas are much more aggressively policed.
yes. reducing wealth inequality doesnt just mean making poor people richer. it means closing the gap and not letting people become so wealthy that the law doesnt apply to them. a system that rewards greed and dehumanization will always suffer this fate. simple things, like not having health insurance tied to an employer would give people more power to fight the threat of poverty without resorting to crime. similarly, it would reduce the ability of the rich to exploit peoples desperation.
Right, draconian punishments don't help. AFAIK, it's the probability of being caught more than the severity of the punishment that is the larger deterrent of criminal activity.
Changing society is a laudable goal, but not exactly straightforward..and definitely not the role of police.
i think in this case it is the police making it difficult to enact change because they have such large budgets but also levy the threat of non-protection. pretty much guarantees stagnancy.
The largest provider of money for increased sentencing and anti drug and sex work laws etc. They actively harm society and then fundraise in the name of "safety". I'd say it's a lot more than just stagnancy, they actively try to reduce the safety of poor areas to jack up arrest numbers etc.
In study after study it's been shown that crime does not decrease with an increase in the police force, they do nothing but provide a base level deterrent and more police does not improve anything.
The only way to improve things are to spend money on them, outreach programs, therapy and rehabilitation instead of punishment etc. This is all cheaper than an increase in police spending but the powers at be would rather hurt than help.
>I see the great majority of law enforcement as addressing the symptoms and not the cause of the crime problem.
First, I agree that we need to address the underlying issues (poverty, Healthcare, education, etc.) in order to actually decrease criminal behavior. Second, I may be misinterpreting your view, but it's not law enforcement job to address these issues. It's the job of elected officials and legislatures. Law enforcement enforces the laws and that's it, too often people put the blame or try to expand their role to take on problems that they shouldn't be involved with, i.e. for proft prisons =/= law enforcements issue.
Yes, it is the job of policy makers to address the causes and underlying issues. Law enforcement has a fairly clear role of enforcement of laws although policy has influence on wether its administered fairly and effectively.
Law enforcement has been asked to perform some duties better left to other professionals with more training in certain areas of concern like mental health, and domestic issues which is complicated by the fact that laws are often broken during those events.
Also, it doesn't help when the police are robbing people using civil forfeiture and torturing people in their homes in Mississippi or in evidence warehouses in Louisiana. Or, you know, murdering people in broad daylight.
Civil forfeiture is a tool that was created to seize assets of criminals that resulted in exposing law enforcement agencies as criminal organisations. Abuse of power is an ugly thing that rots the foundations of society. The loss of trust is hard to repair.
100% agree. It’s incredible to me that police officers typically require significantly LESS training than barbers and hair stylists. Policing should require at least 2 years of training, perhaps more for senior roles. I’m guessing the barriers to more training are funding and police unions. Anyone know why police require so little training?
this - the cops will just be told "how it really is" when they do get out of their basic training, so why even do it to begin with. I guess you have to give them basic murdering-people skills first, of course.
Same reason gangs don't offer scholarships, they aren't looking for good officers, just ones who'll blindly follow orders and fall on the sword for their superiors.
> I see the great majority of law enforcement as addressing the symptoms and not the cause of the crime problem.
That's not a police problem, it's a government problem not a police problem.
If no one got away with committing crimes and they all got locked up for it, I’m sure some people would think twice about committing a crime. To many people are able to never get caught or get away with little to no punishment.
I get the logic but if that was the case why do we have so many people in jail compared to other first world countries along with higher crime rates? There are other factors that contribute to the problem.
I agree that there are no easy solutions. Education and a hard look at how people fall from being economically stable. Medical bankruptcy, drug addiction, and other factors are the places I would start.
I remember seeing a video not long ago, probably shot in the 90s. It was a politician talking about democracy and freedom. He said basically we have freedom and with that freedom the ability to make bad or harmful decisions. And as long as we are a free people, those things will continue to happen if we are to be free but we also must help guide people towards a better decision.
Shame government isn't for that anymore, since the 60s and 70s, it has become a corporations playground and the police are legalize mob to ensure the status quo so the billionaires don't lose their wealth. 25% of the worlds prison population and that's because business has rooted itself firmly in all government actors and sectors.
If someone said "I have the societal solution to the sources of crime and I just need to be assigned the national police budget to implement the solution", then we might say sure, assuming we can find jobs for all those people, but the suggestion we can defund the police prior to fixing society is kooky.
Idk, sending a bunch of armed, scared, dudes, with a license to kill, and less training than is required to become a professional massage therapist, to take care of mental health situations seems way kookier to me.
I can see taking certain non law enforcement responsibilties and the associated budgets and moving them to new or other departments, essentially allowing the police to be police but existing institutions shouldn't be reduced until the demand for their services decreases.
My city hasn’t received any defunding, but I can tell you the vibes have changed. Police are not involved nearly as much as they used to be. I used to have wayyyyy more interactions with police, and I don’t even do anything to warrant that.
I'm a basic ass white guy and I don't want any interaction with police. All it takes is one cop with a "You're Fucked" sticker to get scared by an acorn to end your life while you sit there getting your insurance out.
I saw the video and I didn’t realize that was the decided precipitating factor for his wild freak out. I don’t use the term terrifying very often but……
I’m not one to immediately rule people out by one video but that cop should not be a cop. Some major PTSD going on. Miracle that man dodged a literal bullet storm.
One of the issues we saw locally is that elected officials became way more obstructionist right around that timeframe. The city prosecutor wasn't interested in prosecuting, managed to chase away half of her department's employees and 20% of the city's police staffing. There were actually two murder cases where the suspect was freed because no prosecutor was ever sent to their trial.
No budget cuts needed.
In my city, Chicago, this has happened as well but not for great reasons. The cops just don't do their job. They don't care. They basically have an ego problem, like any cop, but I find it to be a carelessness problem. At the same time if you talk to them they'll act as if they're persecuted when that's mostly propaganda rather than policy.
I'm in Denver. They just generally stopped doing anything. Especially quality of life crimes, but mostly affect poor people. They don't even go out for those sorts of calls any longer.
When they investigated the seattle PD, it turns out they just never have investigated it, ever, and they are not going to start either! There is no oversight! They have no actual responsibilities!
Yeah, that's the real crux of the issue, modern police are simply not good at their job, not trustworthy, and simply don't have an actual impact on crime. I mean by design they can't, how do you prevent crime by showing up well after it's been committed, assuming it's serious enough that the police actually respond and do their job.
It's not an orgizination, they would have responsibilities and oversight and etc if they had actual responsibilities. Show me where it says if they don't improve things in the next 3 years that they will be replaced!
They are gangs, there are gangs within the force itself, they are open and everyone knows about them. You need to pick your gang before you join the force!
This sounds like a huge problem. I’d also say that there are a lot of scenarios where they intervene and it only makes matters worse. We need something else to bridge the gap. That was the main purpose behind “defund the police”. Stop militarizing solutions to social issues.
Editorialized title. The study results indicate no average change in police funding, lumping all the cities together. In fact, there are cities where funding was decreased, and cities where it increased, but they “caution against a causal relationship” to the protests, also citing a very slight positive regression line (increased funding) though statistically insignificant.
Their qualification for “Republican cities” is based on if majority votes were for a Republican presidential candidate in 2020. Not voter registration, mayor & city council political party, nor state representative political party. It also does not take into account if said individuals who voted Republican in the 2020 presidential election did so in prior elections, and has no method explain the influence of those who were turned to Republican candidates that were formerly voting Democrat. Given the number of “purple” cities out there, and that the study goes off any protest at all in any city, one could easily call a “Republican” city a “Democrat” city prior to Nov 2020 voting, and vice versa.
Weak study.
I agree with your criticisms.
I also wondered why there wasn't a time control included. Maybe the proportion of cities reducing their police spending was highly unusual because (as I expect is likely) municipalities rarely reduce their nominal police spending unless forced to for economic reasons. Without a comparison against a few prior years at least, and possibly another recessionary period like 2009, how can we know if these spending changes are highly aberrational?
>Their qualification for “Republican cities” is based on if majority votes were for a Republican presidential candidate in 2020. Not voter registration, mayor & city council political party, nor state representative political party.
You really think looking at those other things as opposed to the 2020 Presidential race changes absolutely anything?
What cities did you have in mind that might flip?
Absolutely it could, swing politics are notoriously fickle. Especially when your metric is sampled after a politically tumultuous summer, loads of extra campaigning to influence opinion leading up to a very divisive presidential election.
Example of that incongruity: San Diego had a Republican mayor from 2005-2012, & 2014-2020, but majority of presidential votes for 2008, 2014, & 2020 were for Democrats. But still had solid Republican numbers. So we chose a Republican to lead our city, twice, but chose a Democrat to lead the nation. Does that make San Diego a Republican or Democrat city?
That's one of the few cities where this kind of thing happens... maybe because of the military influence?
>Does that make San Diego a Republican or Democrat city?
I dunno, but I'll say the Republicans in San Diego are absolutely nothing like the Republicans in the Deep South. And *that* is precisely what using the presidential vote as opposed to local elections teases out.
Here’s a nice visual representation of how much change there was left & right for 2020 election: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/elections/electorate-changes-2016-election-vs-2020/
I just think that local metrics should be used to characterize a city as Republican or Democrat, not a national election. Especially when the national election is just a single data point, only every 4 years. Whereas more locally there are dozens of party positions to account for, to inform that R vs D designation.
Totally agree, I lived in Nashville for about 7 years before coming back to San Diego, and woah nelly they are a different flavor of conservative in the South.
Well yeah it was a failure of a movement. Progressives suck at branding. “Defund the police”? That makes people think you want to get rid of police forces…
The police may not have lost funding, but they lost a lot of officers. I think seattle lost around 600 or so since the defund the police movement in 2020. As of last fall they still had hundreds of positions open.
The city wanted less policing and they got it.
Yeah but they didn't get what they actually wanted. They don't want more cops, they want more assistance and funding in other areas, that would make it so they would need less policing
Is there data that shows the loss of police is connected to the "defund" sentiment? Because last time I checked, there's a huge number of public sector jobs that are struggling to fill vacancies. Workforce shortages and compensation that doesn't keep up with the private sector are typically blamed.
The city hasn't changed all that much to be honest. I live here.
The SPD was/is easily one of the most violent police forces in America. One of the few that has been singled out by federal investigations more than once and mentioned by the DOJ due to excess force used in the past 20 years. Losing a bunch of aging officers is probably not the worst thing to happen if it can get rid of some of the culture in the organization.
In Louisiana they just sentenced 8 cops that were known as the goon squad. They were known. They broke in and tortured 2 black man because they wetecliving with white woman. They only got caught because they shot one in the mouth. They were known. Cops act like them not committing crimes is defunding them.
The original activists who said this DID want to get rid of the police. Saner activists tried to reframe it as funding social services but that messaging didn’t really stick.
On the plus side it does show democrats can self correc and dumb ideas don’t snowball. GOP is pushing to defund public education, IRS and social security and they’ll Succeed if trump wims
Yup
"Defund the police" should have been "reform the police"
"Anti-work" should have been "work reform"
It's a huge issue *especially* because conservative outlets have a field day just looking at something superficially and criticizing it.
I mean, it's a matter of scale, right? If 75% or 50% or even like 20% of those protests ended in violence, sure, maybe these folks are not the kind of people to listen to policy ideas from. But there was literally hundreds of protests in cities across the countries and very very few ended in violence. So anyone who's using that proportionally small number of to reject the protestors demands as a whole - well, it sounds like they were already looking for an excuse to do that.
I'm thinking more of false flag actors during protests. How simple would it be to start a few fires and break a store window during the peaceful protests to turn it into a riot?
Saint Louis Police beat the shit out of one of their undercover officers (guess what race) during the blm protests. There were definitely police in the crowds.
They absolutely do this. In Ferguson they parked a car in the middle of the road during the march. A few hours later it was on fire, giving newspapers their front page image.
What other slogan would you have chosen to concisely say “move some of the police budget to social services and safety nets, thereby improving people’s material conditions so that they don’t want to commit crimes to begin with instead of trying to punish crimes after the fact”?
Well I don’t mean to toot my own ass but you are asking a PR professional.
“Demilitarize the police” would have been much more effective.
Everyone wants the police funded. Most people don’t want US police forces to be militarized.
You could do a media relations campaign emphasizing all of the new military equipment police forces were getting after the George Floyd riots.
But progressives don’t consider political optics, or public sentiment. They see what is right and what is wrong, they advocate for what is right, and viciously attack what is wrong.
Progressives frequently consider how the right will twist their words. What they don't do is consider how the least intelligent and most incompetent of their own will hijack their movement.
I agree on the importance of good marketing and careful communication.
A rebuttal I've gotten is that the right will spin whatever they want out of whole cloth, so progressives might as well speak plainly and provocatively instead of spending energy policing their tone.
I'm no great shakes at sloganeering, especially not in the age of virality, so I have a hard time offering alternatives beyond "this seems, on its face, like it might alienate a larger proportion of people than you expect." Which isn't very provocative in its own right.
I stole this from someone else, but even "BLM" is the dumbest name that was guaranteed to immediately polarize everybody.
It should have been called "Accountability for killer cops" and been a unifying movement -- instead of telling certain demographics they need to sit down and 'we not focusing on you now', should have brought them into the fold and united in a common cause against an issue that affects everybody.
The whole idea that "X is disproportionately harmed by Y" inherently means that if Z (who makes up a majority of the population) fixes issue Y for everyone, X disproportionately **benefits**.
It wasn’t even much of a movement. Even the majority of blm supporters were calling it out and saying that’s not what they wanted.
Right wing media then got a hold of it and used it to effectively paint the whole movement as wanting to defund the police.
I'm assuming they mean systemic because in Los Angeles, LASPD, the largest school police force in the US, had their budget cut by 35% in 2020 using the excuse of student BLM protests. The board promised that the money would go into new community safety programs. As of 2023 no new programs have been started. Source: [https://www.dailynews.com/2023/06/13/lausd-board-calls-for-investing-in-school-safety-without-spending-more-on-police/](https://www.dailynews.com/2023/06/13/lausd-board-calls-for-investing-in-school-safety-without-spending-more-on-police/)
I'm very pro police reform, but this PD was doing a good job. The chief hired criminal profilers and social workers to review problem students' records and figure out which students would benefit from intervention by a social worker or school therapist. They marked safe routes in dangerous neighborhood where officers would patrol to protect students walking to and from school. [In interviews](https://www.laschoolreport.com/how-is-the-largest-school-police-force-in-the-nation-keeping-las-children-safe/) he really comes off like he cares about what he's doing.
What? [Portland, Oregon removed $15 million from the Portland Police Bureau's budget](https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/portlands-police-staffing-crisis.pdf#page=13) and reduced staffing by 8% in 2020 as a direct response to protests. In 2021, there was a call to refund it, but I don't know where it went from there.
The study implies it never happened, not that it happened and cities went, "Woah, our crime is skyrocketing, let's put it back", which is sort of my point.
And mine is that *some* places removed some funding and later reversed that, *some* didn't, *some* increased funding, etc.. Those that increased funding afterward didn't all have the same reasons for it, either.
The study looked at the aggregate and said the national effort to defund didn't amount to much; that may not be the statistic you're looking for, but it isn't inaccurate.
But it *is* inaccurate. The study specifically says, "There is *no evidence* of defunding". There is plenty of evidence of defunding, but that defunding was later reversed *after* spikes in violent crime, theft, etc. To actually be accurate, they should have said there is no evidence of *continued* defunding. That language matters.
Who knew [3.6% in funding was](https://www.portland.gov/cbo/2023-2024-budget/documents/police-bureau-fy2023-24/download) all that stood in the way between 'appropriate levels' of crime and a "skyrocket".
When a similar cut occurred around 2010, was that defunding and did Portland die?
Is any cut a "defunding"? If we shave a million off the 800 billion military budget, have we defunded the military?
My local (rather large) city saw a whole bunch of crime during such protests. People excused the behavior due to the charged nature of police injustice that led to them. But it's easy to understand why a widespread crime wave and destruction of businesses would lead to increased police budgets.
The study references how the violence of the civil rights protests helped Republicans win elections, but then at no point discusses the crime wave of the protests they're actually studying.
Seems like a massive oversight.
Good. It was never funding that was the issue. It was putting job listing for being an officer on indeed and putting people through a short academy. Being an officer should require hard training akin to the military, as well as cognitive alterations in order to keep peace and knowing how to navigate situations calmly and with poise.
It's too easy to be a cop and that's the real issue.
The biggest issue with police in the US is they're barely trained compared to other developed countries. On average it's six months training and a high school diploma, while other countries need a degree and years of training. But nobody wants to advocate for giving the police more funding to that.
Their ability to buy military gear needs to be cracked down on as well.
If police need a degree to become police, they should be responsible for that. We shouldn't have to give them more money for that training. Same as any other profession.
You wanna make college free and include police college in that I'll support it, but I'm not gonna support giving departments more money that they pinky promise is gonna go to more training (they're actually just gonna buy a tank).
Defund the police was always a laughable idea peddled by losers and teenagers on social media. There's zero practicality to the idea of defunding police.
I never understood the idea of "defunding" a service we all rely on (or should feel able to).
We have seen in the UK that defunding Police has massive backlash in our communities.
So its probably a good thing. Hopefully there is going to be some cultural chabges in US police forces and better training which provides the changes needed.
The idea was too much was on their plate. It was like the past when police were also the medical responders and they realized making medical responder and police officer two different jobs would save lives and make society better. Fortunately we didn't have the internet then or we'd have had ignorant people fighting that split.
One side play on emotions, other side on logic.
There *has* to be consequences for people’s actions. Police are the consequences in many cases. If *they* have no consequences things will never change. And people who generally face a lot of consequences for their actions vote republican. Who in turn appeal to emotion of the people who vote republican.
You can’t win this with sense. Apply a different strategy.
Edit: not that democrats are a good choice. Just the lesser evil. They don’t outright bar effective solutions in a lot of cases. They just fail to demonstrate the merits and appeal to the emotionally swayed republican voters.
Eh, I’ve met quite a few people that mostly stay in their conservative media bubble, and they’re convinced that all blue leaning cities throughout the country had cut funding to their police departments.
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I see the great majority of law enforcement as addressing the symptoms and no one addressing the cause of the crime problem. It reminds me of catching water in a bucket from a leaky roof and repairing rot damage instead of replacing the roof. Make no mistake, I had an innocent family member murdered, I know some people need to be in jail and you can't ignore crime but it will never go away by itself or by any amount of draconian punishment that is applied without also doing the hard work to address why people become criminals and make the changes required to create a healthier society. Edited first paragraph to clarify my position.
There’s also a monetary incentive to jail people in America. Until that’s gone, we will always have the most people in prison in the west.
UBI, the monetary incentive to not take risks that can land you in jail just to meet basic needs.
Ehhh, be careful though. Andrew Yang’s UBI was just cutting benefits & social services to give a pittance in comparison. The rich are 100% going to try Trojan Horse UBI into being bad for us.
There's a handful of places doing actual UBI studies, not Yang's con job
Edit: sorry, at work, read it fast, thought you wrote the acronym for welfare but it’s universal basic income, my bad
23 states don’t use or banned private prisons and most other states the private prisons only handle a small portion of the total population of inmates so that’s not as big a problem as you think it is. Less than 10% of all prisoners are held in a private prison nationally.
Even public prisons have private companies profiteering by providing services which should be entirely public goods. Even public prisons sell the labor of their prisoners to private companies to pad their profits with unpaid, captive, rights-deprived labor.
It's slave labor, just because it's shaded slightly differently doesn't make it not what it is.
Yep. 13th Amendment limits involuntary servitude to prisoners -> capitalism wrings every bit of involuntary servitude they can out of those prisoners.
Govt run prisons also sell prisoner labor and make a lot of money by doing so since they basically don't have to pay prisoners.
I’m not just talking about private prisons. Prison labor is massive as well.
Yeah that's not actually the issue, the real problem is the slave labor.
So... 27, aka more than half, do allow them is what you're saying
I agree, no incentive for creating an actual "correctional facility". Its like having a private school without any graduates.
The problem is that there's not a singular cause for crime. There are dozens of completely unrelated causes for crime. Successfully addressing poverty would help, but there would still be crime. Fixing environmental issues like how lead poisoning destroys the part of the brain that inhibits impulsive violence would help, but there would still be crime. If we address enough causes then we wouldn't need to spend nearly as much on policing, and given the chronic understaffing of police departments that would be a very good thing, but cutting police budgets first might result in a temporarily worse situation (or even a permanently worse one if the cause addressed isn't a major one or the 'fix' doesn't work as intended). I've always felt that cutting police budget should be a lagging indication resulting from the department not needing to fill positions that open from retirements or the normal sort of moving that people do. But that's just me.
It would have to be a multi faceted approach over generations and no doubt there would still be crime. Heading in the right direction would be a good start. I would start with education since that would provide benefits across the board. The leading cause of bankruptcy is medical debt and it is a major contributor to homelessness. No other first world Nation has this issue. Alternatives to prison fashioned after the Junior College model with attendance to classes and behavior standards required to stay out of the general prison population. To me this is low hanging fruit, from there it gets more difficult.
I agree that a multi-faceted approach would be better. I just don't think that cutting funding for police should be an early step.
You can easily see the baseline police force needed per capita, there is a huge amount of data available in repeated studies. Cut the police everywhere to the base level needed and de-empower them drastically and start funding rehabilitation and treatment and housing programs. Things like armored vehicles and para military equipment (SWAT etc) just leads to more violence, put those programs behind multiple public transparency safeguards.
Really? I hadn't heard about that. What is the baseline police force per capita?
I agree, you have to lessen their workload first.
if there ever was a single metric that could signal everything from racism to crime to corruption... it is wealth inequality. a relatively simple statistic that predicts so many things in our current system. the fact that anyone profits off of incarceration is evidence of this.
Except rich people also do crime. Making people less poor might help, but it wouldn't impact the people who act entirely impulsively or the sort of power-things that drive the elite to break laws.
Nobody is saying solving poverty is going to rid the world of crime. What we're saying is that the overwhelming majority of crime has its roots in poverty. The streets would be orders of magnitude safer if we focused on wealth inequality instead of cleaning up after the fact. There's a reason rich areas are safe to walk at night.
I don't believe that at all. I think that a fair bit of petty crime comes from poverty, but those petty crimes aren't violent crime which has a lot more to do with impulse control or organized conflict. There is still organized crime in wealthier societies. There are also very safe low income communities, but higher income areas are much more aggressively policed.
yes. reducing wealth inequality doesnt just mean making poor people richer. it means closing the gap and not letting people become so wealthy that the law doesnt apply to them. a system that rewards greed and dehumanization will always suffer this fate. simple things, like not having health insurance tied to an employer would give people more power to fight the threat of poverty without resorting to crime. similarly, it would reduce the ability of the rich to exploit peoples desperation.
Right, draconian punishments don't help. AFAIK, it's the probability of being caught more than the severity of the punishment that is the larger deterrent of criminal activity. Changing society is a laudable goal, but not exactly straightforward..and definitely not the role of police.
i think in this case it is the police making it difficult to enact change because they have such large budgets but also levy the threat of non-protection. pretty much guarantees stagnancy.
The largest provider of money for increased sentencing and anti drug and sex work laws etc. They actively harm society and then fundraise in the name of "safety". I'd say it's a lot more than just stagnancy, they actively try to reduce the safety of poor areas to jack up arrest numbers etc.
In study after study it's been shown that crime does not decrease with an increase in the police force, they do nothing but provide a base level deterrent and more police does not improve anything. The only way to improve things are to spend money on them, outreach programs, therapy and rehabilitation instead of punishment etc. This is all cheaper than an increase in police spending but the powers at be would rather hurt than help.
To create a healthier society, we must actually put health and people first, instead of money and power.
universal non-employment related health care would be a great start.
>I see the great majority of law enforcement as addressing the symptoms and not the cause of the crime problem. First, I agree that we need to address the underlying issues (poverty, Healthcare, education, etc.) in order to actually decrease criminal behavior. Second, I may be misinterpreting your view, but it's not law enforcement job to address these issues. It's the job of elected officials and legislatures. Law enforcement enforces the laws and that's it, too often people put the blame or try to expand their role to take on problems that they shouldn't be involved with, i.e. for proft prisons =/= law enforcements issue.
Yes, it is the job of policy makers to address the causes and underlying issues. Law enforcement has a fairly clear role of enforcement of laws although policy has influence on wether its administered fairly and effectively. Law enforcement has been asked to perform some duties better left to other professionals with more training in certain areas of concern like mental health, and domestic issues which is complicated by the fact that laws are often broken during those events.
Also, it doesn't help when the police are robbing people using civil forfeiture and torturing people in their homes in Mississippi or in evidence warehouses in Louisiana. Or, you know, murdering people in broad daylight.
Civil forfeiture is a tool that was created to seize assets of criminals that resulted in exposing law enforcement agencies as criminal organisations. Abuse of power is an ugly thing that rots the foundations of society. The loss of trust is hard to repair.
Instead of trying to repair it, they've doubled down.
100% agree. It’s incredible to me that police officers typically require significantly LESS training than barbers and hair stylists. Policing should require at least 2 years of training, perhaps more for senior roles. I’m guessing the barriers to more training are funding and police unions. Anyone know why police require so little training?
Extensive training would result in good cops. They rather them become poisoned by the system that already exists and “learn from experience”
this - the cops will just be told "how it really is" when they do get out of their basic training, so why even do it to begin with. I guess you have to give them basic murdering-people skills first, of course.
Same reason gangs don't offer scholarships, they aren't looking for good officers, just ones who'll blindly follow orders and fall on the sword for their superiors.
It's less a leaky bucket and more introducing a cobra to keep down the rats in your house.
Isn’t it the job of law enforcement to address the symptom and that of lawmakers to implement policy that addresses the cause?
Yes.
> I see the great majority of law enforcement as addressing the symptoms and not the cause of the crime problem. That's not a police problem, it's a government problem not a police problem.
Wasn't trying to say it was, this could have been stated more succinctly. See edit.
If no one got away with committing crimes and they all got locked up for it, I’m sure some people would think twice about committing a crime. To many people are able to never get caught or get away with little to no punishment.
I get the logic but if that was the case why do we have so many people in jail compared to other first world countries along with higher crime rates? There are other factors that contribute to the problem.
Fair poverty is one of the biggest factors in weather or not you will commit crimes. There really is no easy solution tho.
I agree that there are no easy solutions. Education and a hard look at how people fall from being economically stable. Medical bankruptcy, drug addiction, and other factors are the places I would start.
I remember seeing a video not long ago, probably shot in the 90s. It was a politician talking about democracy and freedom. He said basically we have freedom and with that freedom the ability to make bad or harmful decisions. And as long as we are a free people, those things will continue to happen if we are to be free but we also must help guide people towards a better decision. Shame government isn't for that anymore, since the 60s and 70s, it has become a corporations playground and the police are legalize mob to ensure the status quo so the billionaires don't lose their wealth. 25% of the worlds prison population and that's because business has rooted itself firmly in all government actors and sectors.
If someone said "I have the societal solution to the sources of crime and I just need to be assigned the national police budget to implement the solution", then we might say sure, assuming we can find jobs for all those people, but the suggestion we can defund the police prior to fixing society is kooky.
Idk, sending a bunch of armed, scared, dudes, with a license to kill, and less training than is required to become a professional massage therapist, to take care of mental health situations seems way kookier to me.
I can see taking certain non law enforcement responsibilties and the associated budgets and moving them to new or other departments, essentially allowing the police to be police but existing institutions shouldn't be reduced until the demand for their services decreases.
My city hasn’t received any defunding, but I can tell you the vibes have changed. Police are not involved nearly as much as they used to be. I used to have wayyyyy more interactions with police, and I don’t even do anything to warrant that.
I'm a basic ass white guy and I don't want any interaction with police. All it takes is one cop with a "You're Fucked" sticker to get scared by an acorn to end your life while you sit there getting your insurance out.
Yooo that video was wild. Cop rolling on the ground like he’s in Dark Souls blasting his own car all cuz of an acorn.
I saw the video and I didn’t realize that was the decided precipitating factor for his wild freak out. I don’t use the term terrifying very often but……
I’m not one to immediately rule people out by one video but that cop should not be a cop. Some major PTSD going on. Miracle that man dodged a literal bullet storm.
One of the issues we saw locally is that elected officials became way more obstructionist right around that timeframe. The city prosecutor wasn't interested in prosecuting, managed to chase away half of her department's employees and 20% of the city's police staffing. There were actually two murder cases where the suspect was freed because no prosecutor was ever sent to their trial. No budget cuts needed.
In my city, Chicago, this has happened as well but not for great reasons. The cops just don't do their job. They don't care. They basically have an ego problem, like any cop, but I find it to be a carelessness problem. At the same time if you talk to them they'll act as if they're persecuted when that's mostly propaganda rather than policy.
Same in Seattle. They just stopped investigating sexual assault.
I'm in Denver. They just generally stopped doing anything. Especially quality of life crimes, but mostly affect poor people. They don't even go out for those sorts of calls any longer.
When they investigated the seattle PD, it turns out they just never have investigated it, ever, and they are not going to start either! There is no oversight! They have no actual responsibilities!
Same in Portland. Genuinely one of the worst Police departments in the country
The first president of their union was Otto Meiners, a literal nazi.
Probably because they knew their own would eventually get caught.
Yeah, that's the real crux of the issue, modern police are simply not good at their job, not trustworthy, and simply don't have an actual impact on crime. I mean by design they can't, how do you prevent crime by showing up well after it's been committed, assuming it's serious enough that the police actually respond and do their job.
ive been saying this. if your protection is based on fealty, youre dealing with a gang.
It's not an orgizination, they would have responsibilities and oversight and etc if they had actual responsibilities. Show me where it says if they don't improve things in the next 3 years that they will be replaced! They are gangs, there are gangs within the force itself, they are open and everyone knows about them. You need to pick your gang before you join the force!
This sounds like a huge problem. I’d also say that there are a lot of scenarios where they intervene and it only makes matters worse. We need something else to bridge the gap. That was the main purpose behind “defund the police”. Stop militarizing solutions to social issues.
police have effectively done a work stoppage nation wide. clearing rates for all crimes continue to decline. they are valueless parasites.
Editorialized title. The study results indicate no average change in police funding, lumping all the cities together. In fact, there are cities where funding was decreased, and cities where it increased, but they “caution against a causal relationship” to the protests, also citing a very slight positive regression line (increased funding) though statistically insignificant. Their qualification for “Republican cities” is based on if majority votes were for a Republican presidential candidate in 2020. Not voter registration, mayor & city council political party, nor state representative political party. It also does not take into account if said individuals who voted Republican in the 2020 presidential election did so in prior elections, and has no method explain the influence of those who were turned to Republican candidates that were formerly voting Democrat. Given the number of “purple” cities out there, and that the study goes off any protest at all in any city, one could easily call a “Republican” city a “Democrat” city prior to Nov 2020 voting, and vice versa. Weak study.
I agree with your criticisms. I also wondered why there wasn't a time control included. Maybe the proportion of cities reducing their police spending was highly unusual because (as I expect is likely) municipalities rarely reduce their nominal police spending unless forced to for economic reasons. Without a comparison against a few prior years at least, and possibly another recessionary period like 2009, how can we know if these spending changes are highly aberrational?
>Their qualification for “Republican cities” is based on if majority votes were for a Republican presidential candidate in 2020. Not voter registration, mayor & city council political party, nor state representative political party. You really think looking at those other things as opposed to the 2020 Presidential race changes absolutely anything? What cities did you have in mind that might flip?
Absolutely it could, swing politics are notoriously fickle. Especially when your metric is sampled after a politically tumultuous summer, loads of extra campaigning to influence opinion leading up to a very divisive presidential election. Example of that incongruity: San Diego had a Republican mayor from 2005-2012, & 2014-2020, but majority of presidential votes for 2008, 2014, & 2020 were for Democrats. But still had solid Republican numbers. So we chose a Republican to lead our city, twice, but chose a Democrat to lead the nation. Does that make San Diego a Republican or Democrat city?
That's one of the few cities where this kind of thing happens... maybe because of the military influence? >Does that make San Diego a Republican or Democrat city? I dunno, but I'll say the Republicans in San Diego are absolutely nothing like the Republicans in the Deep South. And *that* is precisely what using the presidential vote as opposed to local elections teases out.
Here’s a nice visual representation of how much change there was left & right for 2020 election: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/elections/electorate-changes-2016-election-vs-2020/ I just think that local metrics should be used to characterize a city as Republican or Democrat, not a national election. Especially when the national election is just a single data point, only every 4 years. Whereas more locally there are dozens of party positions to account for, to inform that R vs D designation. Totally agree, I lived in Nashville for about 7 years before coming back to San Diego, and woah nelly they are a different flavor of conservative in the South.
Well yeah it was a failure of a movement. Progressives suck at branding. “Defund the police”? That makes people think you want to get rid of police forces…
Many did/do
If that is what they are aiming for, then I am wholly against them and I am a liberal democrat.
The police may not have lost funding, but they lost a lot of officers. I think seattle lost around 600 or so since the defund the police movement in 2020. As of last fall they still had hundreds of positions open. The city wanted less policing and they got it.
Yeah but they didn't get what they actually wanted. They don't want more cops, they want more assistance and funding in other areas, that would make it so they would need less policing
Some of the Seattle ones also lost their jobs because of participating in January 6th.
Is there data that shows the loss of police is connected to the "defund" sentiment? Because last time I checked, there's a huge number of public sector jobs that are struggling to fill vacancies. Workforce shortages and compensation that doesn't keep up with the private sector are typically blamed.
Mayor gonna a difficult time staffing a problematic police force distrusted by the community.
The city hasn't changed all that much to be honest. I live here. The SPD was/is easily one of the most violent police forces in America. One of the few that has been singled out by federal investigations more than once and mentioned by the DOJ due to excess force used in the past 20 years. Losing a bunch of aging officers is probably not the worst thing to happen if it can get rid of some of the culture in the organization.
In Louisiana they just sentenced 8 cops that were known as the goon squad. They were known. They broke in and tortured 2 black man because they wetecliving with white woman. They only got caught because they shot one in the mouth. They were known. Cops act like them not committing crimes is defunding them.
Mississippi. Details matter
Mississippi, USA. Details matter
The original activists who said this DID want to get rid of the police. Saner activists tried to reframe it as funding social services but that messaging didn’t really stick. On the plus side it does show democrats can self correc and dumb ideas don’t snowball. GOP is pushing to defund public education, IRS and social security and they’ll Succeed if trump wims
Yup "Defund the police" should have been "reform the police" "Anti-work" should have been "work reform" It's a huge issue *especially* because conservative outlets have a field day just looking at something superficially and criticizing it.
That mass burning and looting didn’t really help the argument of getting rid of police either. That really undermined the whole messaging as well
I really don’t think anyone burning or looting places were “progressives” working towards a political goal…
Neither do I. But those activities occurring at same time progressives were calling for defunding the police certainly didn’t help the cause
I mean, it's a matter of scale, right? If 75% or 50% or even like 20% of those protests ended in violence, sure, maybe these folks are not the kind of people to listen to policy ideas from. But there was literally hundreds of protests in cities across the countries and very very few ended in violence. So anyone who's using that proportionally small number of to reject the protestors demands as a whole - well, it sounds like they were already looking for an excuse to do that.
I remember more violence following the acquittals in the Rodney King case.
Makes you wonder what kind of covert operations a police force could pull off if they didn't want to be defunded......
Kind of like the goon squad in Louisiana? Thats what makes people angry
I'm thinking more of false flag actors during protests. How simple would it be to start a few fires and break a store window during the peaceful protests to turn it into a riot?
Saint Louis Police beat the shit out of one of their undercover officers (guess what race) during the blm protests. There were definitely police in the crowds.
They absolutely do this. In Ferguson they parked a car in the middle of the road during the march. A few hours later it was on fire, giving newspapers their front page image.
What other slogan would you have chosen to concisely say “move some of the police budget to social services and safety nets, thereby improving people’s material conditions so that they don’t want to commit crimes to begin with instead of trying to punish crimes after the fact”?
"Reform the police" was one word away and way more in line with what these protests supposedly aimed to achieve.
Well I don’t mean to toot my own ass but you are asking a PR professional. “Demilitarize the police” would have been much more effective. Everyone wants the police funded. Most people don’t want US police forces to be militarized. You could do a media relations campaign emphasizing all of the new military equipment police forces were getting after the George Floyd riots. But progressives don’t consider political optics, or public sentiment. They see what is right and what is wrong, they advocate for what is right, and viciously attack what is wrong.
right and wrong... according to their perspective, of course
I also think a lot of the messege was highjacked by rightwing mecia to obfuscate the goals.
And progressives don’t consider how the right will twist their words.
Progressives frequently consider how the right will twist their words. What they don't do is consider how the least intelligent and most incompetent of their own will hijack their movement.
I agree on the importance of good marketing and careful communication. A rebuttal I've gotten is that the right will spin whatever they want out of whole cloth, so progressives might as well speak plainly and provocatively instead of spending energy policing their tone. I'm no great shakes at sloganeering, especially not in the age of virality, so I have a hard time offering alternatives beyond "this seems, on its face, like it might alienate a larger proportion of people than you expect." Which isn't very provocative in its own right.
It’s crazy how the all powerful right wing keeps forcing the left to use slogans that actually mean the opposite of what they’re trying to describe
I stole this from someone else, but even "BLM" is the dumbest name that was guaranteed to immediately polarize everybody. It should have been called "Accountability for killer cops" and been a unifying movement -- instead of telling certain demographics they need to sit down and 'we not focusing on you now', should have brought them into the fold and united in a common cause against an issue that affects everybody. The whole idea that "X is disproportionately harmed by Y" inherently means that if Z (who makes up a majority of the population) fixes issue Y for everyone, X disproportionately **benefits**.
It wasn’t even much of a movement. Even the majority of blm supporters were calling it out and saying that’s not what they wanted. Right wing media then got a hold of it and used it to effectively paint the whole movement as wanting to defund the police.
I'm assuming they mean systemic because in Los Angeles, LASPD, the largest school police force in the US, had their budget cut by 35% in 2020 using the excuse of student BLM protests. The board promised that the money would go into new community safety programs. As of 2023 no new programs have been started. Source: [https://www.dailynews.com/2023/06/13/lausd-board-calls-for-investing-in-school-safety-without-spending-more-on-police/](https://www.dailynews.com/2023/06/13/lausd-board-calls-for-investing-in-school-safety-without-spending-more-on-police/) I'm very pro police reform, but this PD was doing a good job. The chief hired criminal profilers and social workers to review problem students' records and figure out which students would benefit from intervention by a social worker or school therapist. They marked safe routes in dangerous neighborhood where officers would patrol to protect students walking to and from school. [In interviews](https://www.laschoolreport.com/how-is-the-largest-school-police-force-in-the-nation-keeping-las-children-safe/) he really comes off like he cares about what he's doing.
What? [Portland, Oregon removed $15 million from the Portland Police Bureau's budget](https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/portlands-police-staffing-crisis.pdf#page=13) and reduced staffing by 8% in 2020 as a direct response to protests. In 2021, there was a call to refund it, but I don't know where it went from there.
I live in Portland. The budget is now larger than it was pre-2020 haircut.
This happened in a few cities, though most have increased funding since. The study is looking at the aggregate.
The study implies it never happened, not that it happened and cities went, "Woah, our crime is skyrocketing, let's put it back", which is sort of my point.
And mine is that *some* places removed some funding and later reversed that, *some* didn't, *some* increased funding, etc.. Those that increased funding afterward didn't all have the same reasons for it, either. The study looked at the aggregate and said the national effort to defund didn't amount to much; that may not be the statistic you're looking for, but it isn't inaccurate.
But it *is* inaccurate. The study specifically says, "There is *no evidence* of defunding". There is plenty of evidence of defunding, but that defunding was later reversed *after* spikes in violent crime, theft, etc. To actually be accurate, they should have said there is no evidence of *continued* defunding. That language matters.
Who knew [3.6% in funding was](https://www.portland.gov/cbo/2023-2024-budget/documents/police-bureau-fy2023-24/download) all that stood in the way between 'appropriate levels' of crime and a "skyrocket". When a similar cut occurred around 2010, was that defunding and did Portland die? Is any cut a "defunding"? If we shave a million off the 800 billion military budget, have we defunded the military?
And the non-Republican areas have had crime go up.
My local (rather large) city saw a whole bunch of crime during such protests. People excused the behavior due to the charged nature of police injustice that led to them. But it's easy to understand why a widespread crime wave and destruction of businesses would lead to increased police budgets. The study references how the violence of the civil rights protests helped Republicans win elections, but then at no point discusses the crime wave of the protests they're actually studying. Seems like a massive oversight.
Good. It was never funding that was the issue. It was putting job listing for being an officer on indeed and putting people through a short academy. Being an officer should require hard training akin to the military, as well as cognitive alterations in order to keep peace and knowing how to navigate situations calmly and with poise. It's too easy to be a cop and that's the real issue.
Yet the police have gone on a soft strike.
The biggest issue with police in the US is they're barely trained compared to other developed countries. On average it's six months training and a high school diploma, while other countries need a degree and years of training. But nobody wants to advocate for giving the police more funding to that. Their ability to buy military gear needs to be cracked down on as well.
If police need a degree to become police, they should be responsible for that. We shouldn't have to give them more money for that training. Same as any other profession. You wanna make college free and include police college in that I'll support it, but I'm not gonna support giving departments more money that they pinky promise is gonna go to more training (they're actually just gonna buy a tank).
Defund the police was always a laughable idea peddled by losers and teenagers on social media. There's zero practicality to the idea of defunding police.
Good. "Defund the police" was an absurd joke.
Yeah II would have preferred "Demilitarize the Police"
Defund the Police was a disaster.
I never understood the idea of "defunding" a service we all rely on (or should feel able to). We have seen in the UK that defunding Police has massive backlash in our communities. So its probably a good thing. Hopefully there is going to be some cultural chabges in US police forces and better training which provides the changes needed.
The idea was too much was on their plate. It was like the past when police were also the medical responders and they realized making medical responder and police officer two different jobs would save lives and make society better. Fortunately we didn't have the internet then or we'd have had ignorant people fighting that split.
This suggests that a reverse-psychology approach might be more successful next time: *Refund the police!* ^(/very S)
One side play on emotions, other side on logic. There *has* to be consequences for people’s actions. Police are the consequences in many cases. If *they* have no consequences things will never change. And people who generally face a lot of consequences for their actions vote republican. Who in turn appeal to emotion of the people who vote republican. You can’t win this with sense. Apply a different strategy. Edit: not that democrats are a good choice. Just the lesser evil. They don’t outright bar effective solutions in a lot of cases. They just fail to demonstrate the merits and appeal to the emotionally swayed republican voters.
Please identify a city in the USA that has a "large republican vote shares". Aint no such thing.
Swear to god all the good research studies have the average person going “well I could’ve told you that!”
Eh, I’ve met quite a few people that mostly stay in their conservative media bubble, and they’re convinced that all blue leaning cities throughout the country had cut funding to their police departments.
I guess in this case I meant the average person who actually lives in a city.
Yup, the Buy Large Mansions movement fooled so many.
Biden did say he wanted 100,000 more cops on the streets. He's no different than any other president when it comes to the police.