There's a growing call to defund the police. Here's what it means

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/us/what-is-defund-police-trnd/index.html

by MilnerRoute • 6 years ago

46 55 6 years ago

cnn.com

mikece• 6 years ago

Let’s assume a city (or two?) decide to abolish their police force (which is what defunding would achieve).

What then?

cconover3• 6 years ago

Not for reform reasons, but Camden, NJ did exactly that in 2012:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2193971/Camden-poli...

The county police became the de facto police department for Camden, which is a model for what would likely happen in any city: the police or sheriff’s department for the next largest jurisdiction encompassing the city would start policing the city.

chrisseaton8• 6 years ago

Wait if the county police become your police if there's no other police department, then why does any city spend their taxes on their own police? And presumably if there's no county police the state police have jurisdiction.

Joeri• 6 years ago

Private security. Everyone gets a private security contract with ex-cops, with an emergency number to call. The rich will be well-protected, the poor mostly left to fend for themselves.

That won’t be better, it will be far worse, but it’s a thing people can do, so in the absence of other things to do, it may end up as the thing that is done. Desperate people do foolish things if they see no alternative.

throwaway8943457• 6 years ago

Imagine this on any significant scale. The richest become a law unto themselves. They become the de facto government by virtue of control over the largest armies. If you didn’t like the 1% before, why would you give them absolute power and the monopoly on violence?

disposekinetics• 6 years ago

I don't want a world where I get police service as part of amazon prime, but it would still be better than a lawless world.

chewz• 6 years ago

It has been done in variouse degrees in Central Europe after revolution of 1989. Old structure has been disbanded, new formed under new leaders, policemen went through verification and many with record of violence has been let go.

It had sent a signal that police is to serve civil society and not be part of oppresion apparatus.

https://www.dcaf.ch/transforming-police-central-and-eastern-...

egypturnash2• 6 years ago

Then every other city toying with the idea watches them for the next year or so. What does happen when you take a major chunk of the budget of a city and reallocate it from "beating the shit out of your poorer citizens" to "helping your poorer citizens"? What happens when you no longer have people roaming the streets looking for someone to accuse of a crime because they have a quota of arrests to fill?

If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting, then other cities toying with the idea decide to follow suit.

Eventually you even get to a place where even the rightwingers are proposing this in the slower-moving places, if marijuana legalization is any kind of model - I'm in a state with a very loose medical marijuana bill sitting on the Governor's desk that will be de facto recreational legalization, which was proposed and pushed through by Repubs, and that really kinda blows my mind.

AnimalMuppet• 6 years ago

Here's the problem: People are not angels. This applies to the police (as we're seeing).

But it also applies to the non-police. They aren't angels, either. And in the absence of police, they aren't going to become angels. They're going to still beat their wives, they're going to still mug random strangers, they're going to still do protection rackets. And they may do even more of those things when they don't have to worry about being stopped.

And then, the victims aren't angels, either. If they use a Second Amendment defense to those problems, they're not going to do it perfectly. They're going to do it in anger. They're going to do it with vigilante justice, hitting more people than they should, and hitting some of the wrong people.

If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting...

In light of human nature, I'm not banking on the results being wonderful.

juanbyrge• 6 years ago

Yes we need to address the root causes of the crime problem: poverty, racism, and addiction. Many types of crimes (theft, drug dealing) are caused because people have been marginalized and have no other means of making money. This is to a large extent caused by racism. Also a lot of crime is related to addiction, which can lead to catastrophic consequences when handled by police.

AtHeartEngineer• 6 years ago

Also, financial education. Simple things like paying off your credit card before putting money into savings, when it's worth fixing your car or not, or just the basic principals behind how things are priced. I heard a lot about an item only costing X amount of money to make in materials, but the company was charging X*10 for it; many people never learn how and why things get priced the way they do.

syshum• 6 years ago

While poverty, racism, and addiction. are a factor, the root cause of crime is over criminalization of society [2] that creates a cycle of crime that once started it is very hard to escape from.

The thousands upon thousands of sooo called "victimless" crime that it used to dump millions of people in to the criminal system which then society punishes for the rest of their lives by denying them opportunities in all segments of life from Jobs to Housing to access to government assistance.

Often time people have "no other means of making money" due to this cycle of over criminalization, they were busted with a small amount of weed, from that point they were a "convicted criminal" where by many employers will deny them a job, schools will deny them admission, landlords will deny them housing, etc.

We have a narrative in this nation that a Misdemeanor Conviction Is Not a Big Deal [1], this is a false narrative one that the legal system pushes because they often over charge individuals with felonies then "allow" them to plea out to a "lesser" misdemeanor to improve the efficiency of "justice".

The biggest flaw in the system is that we have created so many criminal laws that we need to make the "justice system" an assembly line of contract negotiation

[1] https://time.com/76356/a-misdemeanor-conviction-is-not-a-big...

[2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/overcriminal...

humanrebar7• 6 years ago

How else does a victim of domestic violence get a restraining order enforced or recover possessions from an unsafe home? I'm all for better funding for social work and food banks, but at some point, it seems hard to avoid armed officials providing safety. We just need them to actually do that.

The alternatives in those particular situations (the neighborhood makes it work) looks a lot like vigilantism to me, which doesn't sound net safer. There's no particular requirement of equality or due process there, not even notionally.

chrisseaton8• 6 years ago

it seems hard to avoid armed officials

Why on earth do they need to be armed? There is zero reason for a local police officer be carrying firearms. It's insane. Dis-arming all but specialist firearms officers should be the first step.

I find it really frightening when I visit the US and all the police are armed to the teeth.

onei3• 6 years ago

I, much like I imagine you to be, grew up in a country where guns are restricted and rare.

In the US, that's not the case and any attempts to restrict gun ownership meets huge political hurdles. Even if those restrictions are what other countries would deem to be common sense, e.g. Switzerland or New Zealand.

I think it's all kinds of crazy to sell guns in supermarkets with next to no checks on who owns them, but I get why police would want to have guns in the US.

throwaway8943457• 6 years ago

Probably because of the relatively easy access to guns in the US. Statistically you have a 0.00029% chance of being shot and killed by a police officer in a given year, and that rate falls to 0.00001% if you aren’t armed and it probably falls another two orders of magnitude if you obey the law. The likelihood that you will be killed in a car accident in the US in a given year is 0.01% or 1000-100000 times more likely than being shot/killed by police. Two things can be true: the American system is imperfect and the American system is still relatively safe.

humanrebar7• 6 years ago

I didn't say all officers need weapons. But domestic violence calls are notably dangerous, with high tempers and intoxicated people involved. Irrational violence should be anticipated in those situations.

Officers writing parking violations might not need firearms, but traffic stops are also dangerous as individuals with outstanding warrants might be desperate to avoid arrest. Also, intoxicated people are famously bad drivers.

hedora2• 6 years ago

Do the police currently actually do any of those things for most victims of domestic violence?

Police can’t enforce restraining orders when the victim doesn’t have $10K’s to hire a lawyer to go to court and get the order in the first place. Getting such orders is hit or miss from what I’ve heard, even if you have the cash.

Instead, sand an unarmed social worker to recover the items. If the abuser escalates, or the social worker witnesses abuse, send the police to arrest the abuser and prosecute them for assault. Now, the prosecution has an unbiased witness to help them win their case.

90% of the time, the abuser won’t escalate, and the police won’t need to drive out. Repeat the exercise for all routine police actions. (Heck, we even have armed police enforcing playground rules in many schools.)

Having done that, and having eliminated 90% of the police’s workload, cut their budget 80%, and hold what’s left of the department to a much higher standard.

humanrebar7• 6 years ago

I am doubtful that one or two social workers removing a child from a risk-filled home will be a generally safe procedure. At a minimum, they will need to protect themselves, and at some point we're talking about an armed, possibly violent (the abuser might see it as legal kidnapping) officer of the law.

A 10% rate of violence is huge, especially when irrationality and domestic abuse is involved. If armed police are reduced dramatically in number, will they be able to respond in ten minutes?

elicash4• 6 years ago

It does seem weird that if I just want a report for insurance purposes, that the people that get sent out to help me get that paperwork carry guns.

Edit: What's nice about cops versus, for instance, the Department of Motor Vehicles is that police make home visits. Maybe some of the boring stuff could be done by non-violent agencies that make home visits, like child protective services.

throwaway8943457• 6 years ago

Seems like it would make more sense to change that aspect of the system rather than to defund the police altogether, no?

elicash4• 6 years ago

Not sure if you read the article, but different people mean different things by "defund the police." One thing that's obvious is that pretty much every police department is going to have some amount of defunding, due to state and local budget problems that are expected to arise due to decreased tax revenue. My concern is that not enough leaders will try to reimagine what gets built in its place, given those budget constraints.

Not to say there isn't any consideration. Some people say that poverty, mental health issues or lack of quality education is a driver of crime and that we need to divert resources. Others, people like me, want to experiment to replace some of the things police do, study it, follow the evidence and maybe eventually build something entirely different.

What I love about this debate is it's causing people to think about, often for the first time, why we've set it up this way.

humanrebar7• 6 years ago

Isn't part of the argument for gun control that policing is robust enough to provide superior safety?

taborj• 6 years ago

Yes. I've found a strange inconsistency with some of the people calling for the defunding of police - they were until very recently saying citizens didn't need guns because the police were always close by. Now they're saying the police are bad and we can take care of ourselves.

elicash4• 6 years ago

It's probably different people saying different things.

First, folks who have been calling for prison abolition, for instance, tend to be anti-gun control because it's a tool that's used to put more black and brown people in prisons. A lot of these folks also call for defunding police.

Second, this is different from saying "citizens don't need guns." That different argument is simply based on the idea that people are less safe when they have guns, not more safe. While some is due to accidents, much of it is suicides.

humanrebar7• 6 years ago

I would like to see statistics on inconsistently or seldom enforced laws. Those seem to be a vector for corruption and should be considered for repeal. Minor drug crimes seem to fit this profile, but so do certain occupational regulations (certification to braid hair?). If we end up with fewer things for police to do, it sounds like a net win.

hedora2• 6 years ago

If you’re a young black man in DC, you have a 75% chance of eventually winding up in prison. Country wide, on an average day, 10% of black men in their thirties are serving time in prison.

This is mostly due to racial disparities in prosecution and sentencing than crime rates between races. Drug possession accounts for a significant fraction of the disparity: Whites use illegal drugs at a similar rate, but rarely go to prison for it.

https://www.mic.com/articles/86519/19-actual-statistics-abou...

http://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/racial-disparity/

sys_64738• 6 years ago

There are many items involved in this. Defunding things like SWAT and military vehicles for police forces is a reasonable thing to do as most of those police forces don't need these things. If you look at all these particular issues then what was the policing policy that caused them? I think you need to examine why those were executed to get a sense of how to not repeat those mistakes. You've also got to look inside a police force at the people that are police officers. There are a lot of less desirable personalities in there. I don't think throwing police forces to the wolves is the way to go as there are lots of good officers impacted by this. I think police need to evolve not be tossed aside to start from scratch and repeat the same mistakes.

There's a growing call to defund the police. Here's what it means

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