I’m not surprised that just cutting the police raises violent crime, but the proposal at hand isn’t “fewer police but keep all other variables the same.” The argument is to replace the police with a whole suite of alternative measures - some of them preventative programs (e.g. providing free public housing, guaranteeing food security, etc), and some of them recovery programs (mental health counseling, social work, and so on).
Public housing has amplified crime, from Cabrini Green to Jordan Downs. People commit crime to get out of these places.
I noticed you didn’t respond to my post upthread. What do you do with a Ted Bundy in this brave new world? Counsel him?
Of course it should be perfectly possible to increase funding on those programs and still keep the number of police the same. In fact the number of police should be probably increased sharply in high-crime areas along with community policing techniques that increase levels of trust between residents and the police. There are 16000 murders every year in the US and the primary focus of police reform should be to reduce that number.
BTW I would like to see rigorous studies that show programs in public housing, food security etc lowering violent crime rates.
Didn’t we already do this? We have food stamps and section 8 housing. The crimes rates did not go down after that, they drastically increased. I’m not saying those programs were the cause, just that we’ve been there done that, and it didn’t help.
Well like you said there could other causal effects which is why I would like to see rigorous studies. But yes I would be skeptical that social programs reduce crime in any large way.
BTW this is a good articlewith a list of policies that reduce crime which appear to be based on good research. The six policies are:
a)Stricter alcohol policies
b)Hot-spot policing
c)Focused deterrent policing
d)Raising the age for school dropout
e)Behavioral intervention programs
f)Eliminate blighted housing
Two of these involve policing which is another reason why proposals to cut policing are especially idiotic.
I’m going to quote Mariame Kaba again:
(source)
In short, pointing out literally the worst serial killers is deflection, and buys into the cop propaganda that they’re the only ones keeping us from constantly being drowned in serial killers and murders. Yes, these exceptional circumstances happen, but the idea is that:
- Widespread funding of public health and safety programs, keeping everyone’s basic needs met, and early and well funded intervention in things like mental health keep will drastically lower the incidence rate of these people developing in the first place.
- These cases are vanishingly rare, and likely rarer with these new programs, to the point we can figure out how to handle it on a case by case basis. Maybe we’ll end up bringing prison back, but only for the like handful of people who absolutely cannot fit in a society at all. But 99.99999% of the imprisoned do not fit on that scale at all, and they’re more important than the tiny, tiny few that may truly need to be exiled or executed or imprisoned.
I need to do more research to look up some specific rebuttals, but I know one common citation is, in fact, the cops again. They have a tendency to patrol “projects” like areas and rabble-rouse and harass to pick up easy convictions. Especially when things like drugs are around, and we give people access to these spaces but not any supplementary care such as rehabilitative programs and mental health aid.
Another issue is that often this housing is frequently predicated on not “being a criminal” in some fashion, and people who do bad things are kicked out. One thing transformative justice is very clear on is that there is no such thing as “success”, there is no binary “reformed/not reformed.” People who do bad things are not magically better and are always at risk of slipping up and doing more harm (especially people with, e.g., drug issues), and we need to care for them through their fumbles as well, while still holding them accountable to the people and community they’ve harmed.
On top of that, these measures are frequently ill or defunded, and shot in the leg due to it. Many times the food stamps and such are not enough to live on, or the housing isn’t properly maintained by the city. Even if enough to live on, oftentimes only if you are extremely exacting about what you purchase, with almost no room for even a treat to make yourself happy now and then. Now I’m not arguing food stamps should guarantee steak and caviar, but it shouldn’t make people tense and miserable.
On top of that universal housing and food security means just that. Oftentimes these projects (ESPECIALLY food stamps) are plagued with means testing and “proving” you deserve these things and aren’t “gaming the system” somehow. Oftentimes this can result in people losing (or kneecapping) the ability to access these public resources while being materially worse off because they got surprise income or a million other tiny reasons. The solutions proposed involve dropping it and just letting everyone have access to the resources they need to survive and thrive. Yes - this means a b/millionaire can use food stamps or whatever. I think we should tax millionaires and billionaires into oblivion, of course, but if you want to do that reductio ad absurdum then, yes, I am indeed saying that Jeff Bezos is completely entitled to be provided food and housing.
It’s also a long game thing, that if we have these programs in place as people grow up for all classes of people, the rate of crime will lower over multiple generations as insecurity gets better and people are never damaged by poverty and violence and such in the first place.
Okay, not Ted Bundy. Let’s say I come home from work early and find my wife in bed with another man. I kill them both.
Counseling or something similar? No punishment? Just something to keep me from doing that again?
I’ll read your article tomorrow because I’m getting ready to go to sleep, but I would just note that all of those require policing. Really every policy that you can think of would require policing because some people will drink in public, drop out of school, tell their behavioral counselors to fuck off, and not repair their property.
When that happens, you have to send someone, let’s maybe not call them police, but someone with coercive power to force them to not drink in public, to go to school, to listen to their counselors, or to repair their property.
It’s great to say that we are going to send Jimmy the 22 year old who shoplifts to counseling or other experts to make him stop shoplifting, but what if he doesn’t show up to his appointments and continues to shoplift? At what point do we stop the effort? And as I said above, we already do this. What is different under the new and improved method?
Yes that’s a valid point. Pretty much every policy requires some policing though also more trust between the police and the community.
Those are against organized crime and armed uprisings (Naxalites) like the case in Manipur. They dont happen on a regular basis.
But even if you want to include these numbers, then including 433 makes the 1 in 10 million number go utpo 4 in 10 million - still ** far far below the 46 in 10 million number** for the USA.
Even if you add the 1528 numbers of the armed uprising in Manipur, the number adds up to 16 per 10 million people.
It is a lot below the USA number.
That Op-Ed is basically a highly persuasive, full-page advert for Donald Trump. To the people who wept and rent their garments over Tom Cotton’s editorial; this is the real danger.
Missed the edit window: Just FYI - I support the Times’ right to publish this editorial just as much as I supported their right to publish Cotton’s.
:rolleyes:
The condescension stands because clearly you did not read that I do not agree with the absolute 
point of view of that editorial.
Deal with the points rather than the straw man, for those who don’t know, basically a straw man is showing positions an opponent does not have that are easier to dismiss while thinking that others will not notice that the position I have is not the same as that “fellow traveler”.
No, sorry, because that 433 is in ONE state of 18, in one short period.
We simply dont know the extent of these killing as India doesnt count them as police shooting.
Yep, the Right are already seizing upon this to scare people into voting for trump.
The author is either:
- Secretly working for the GOP
OR - A idiot.
Because even AOC isnt talking abolish the police.
One thing to be aware, that was AFAIK the opinion of an activist, not a Democrat in congress, Cotton was and as many in the SDMB have noticed before: We are supposed to listen to some of the ideas of the absolutists and keeping them out of power. Not to vote for them.
It’s not a strawman if people are actually arguing for it. The topic of the fucking thread is “Abolish the police?”
Since we’ve established that you are not actually advocating for abolishing the police - have you considered that you are not the only person in the thread, and that my posts are perhaps directed at people other than you?
Because I can’t tear my eyes away from this train wreck, I want to point out another bit of idiocy in the linked article:
The fact that the United States has an incredibly effective and efficient law enforcement system is itself a deterrent to crime. People know that they will be tracked down and punished if they commit a crime, and the more serious the crime, the more determined the police will be in doing so. So the fact that the police don’t actually spend that much time tracking down criminals is evidence that the system works, and shouldn’t be used to justify cutting their funding. This is a little bit like saying “Why am I spending so much money on fire insurance, my house has never burned down?”
No, that’s called nutpicking
Can you point out in this thread that is calling for a literal abolishment of all law enforcement, so we know who your posts are directed to?
It works great for those who are protected and not bound. Not so great for those who are bound without protection.
A better analogy than yours would be, “Why do I care that the firefighters are burning down your house? They keep mine from catching on fire!”