Defund the police is a great idea - to help Trump

Politics & Elections
101

I have no idea why you make this point or think that it is relevant in any way. It was 370 before the budget cuts. There were already tons of problems with the police force at that point.

In a period of 2 years, it went from 370 to 401. The fact that it briefly went down to 268 is of interest to note, but has nothing to do with the actual situation.

You are cherrypicking the date with the fewest officers on duty in order to make the increase look bigger than it actually was. It’s not “looking deep into the past” to go back another 6 months to use as a comparison. It’s using the basics of rationality and history.

102

I am picking the number of officers before the change vs after the change. Before the change- 268. It is right there in my cites.

After it= 413- again, that number is right there in my cites.

A fifty percent increase.

103

Okay, you insist on using the numbers of the police force after it was reduced by budget cuts. I have no idea why you think that that number is relevant in anyway, unless Camden only started having problems with its police force after the cuts.

Do you acknowledge, at least, that in January 2011, there were 370 officers on payroll, and in June of 2013, there were 401, making an increase of 31 officers over two and a half years?

Breaking a two and half year period in half and using the lowest number you can find within that time is not exactly a useful metric that has any use in this discussion.

I mean, as long as you are using the minimum number, why not just use 0? The entire police department was laid off, so at one point there were 0 officers, and that means an increase of 401. That has as much relevance as your cherrypicked numbers. You are trying to make the case that the police department of Camden increased substantially during the “abolishment”, but you have to do so by picking your times and numbers very carefully.

I really don’t understand your reasoning in doing this. What point are you trying to make?

104

…“pandering” with oversimplified slogans to the “lowest common denominator” is how we ended up with Black Lives Matters. There was push back on that term from the get-go, both from those on the right and those, like you on the left. “It shouldn’t be black lives matters. It should be all lives matter. It gives the right ammunition. They will use it against you.”

Here’s the thing about the world we live in today. They will use everything against you. Taking a knee. Peacefully protesting. Wearing a mask. Its a post-truth ideology, where “reality” is shaped not by objective truth but by appeals to emotion and personal belief.

Imagine if after Trayvon Martin was murdered and #blacklivesmatter started trending that the “progressive” pushback on the term was successful, then maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today. Because that really is what you are asking to happen here. Its a form of tone policing. You are pandering to the MAGA crowd, trying to predict how they react and responding accordingly. You are doing exactly what they want. You are letting them set the tone of the conversation, forcing the “defund the police” people to not only fight the MAGA crowd to get their message out there but people like you who think they understand what its all about but you don’t appear to really know anything at all.

We’ve all watched in horror over the last few weeks as police departments, outfitted like characters from a dystopian video game, collectively rioted in the streets in seemingly lawless manner. Minneapolis city councillors have claimed the police essentially run a “protection racket”, and when threatened with defunding they stopped responding timely to calls in their district. Public Defenders in New York talk about how a standard police tactic will be to arrest someone at the end of shift for the overtime, AKA “collars for dollars.”

Defund the police is a rallying call from a specific set of protestors who are focused on the belief that the police in America have become corrupted, ingrained with structural racism and misogyny that attracts both racists and misogynists, that police departments are dramatically overfunded, over militarised and essentially out-of-control. (and don’t #notallpolice me)

Changing the rallying cry changes the message. It dilutes it, sanitizes it, removes the power. It makes the so-called liberals more comfortable, because it means they don’t have to confront the reality of what is really going on. If you want to champion 'reform the police" then go ahead. But say it like you mean it. Because from what I can see it’s just “performance theatre” to me.

105

Right. If the concern is that a slogan or term may not be understood by others, then the concerned party’s efforts would be much more productive in explaining the term or slogan to those who may misunderstand than in complaining about it to those who have no power to change it.

106

Don’t “so called liberal” me.

Trump pandered to the racists and various deplorables from day one with his MAGA slogan. Because of that, he mobilized ignorance to the tune of 63M votes. It’s an empty promise but it will take years to overcome that kind of damage.

“Abolish the Police” is an equally empty promise that dog whistles the extreme left ideologues and anarchists. If you think it’s safe to mobilize ignorance on the left because you think you agree with them more than you do with the right, I think you’ll be sadly disappointed if it comes to pass. At least I hope you and others realize it before we all come to regret it.

Anyway, if a message relies on a magic word for its success or failure, it’s already failed. See: MAGA

Doubt there is anything I can say to you to convince you that the list of problems you itemized about the police is something that I agree with when I talk about dramatic and much overdue reform. I’m not just talking about putting lipstick on some pigs. (Sorry for the pun.)

107

Who are these people you’re talking about? It seems to me that the terms “defund” and “abolish” have all but been replaced by calls for “reform”. Perhaps I’m wrong.

108

Oh, problem solved then.

109

Not even close. But that’s only because we failed to use the magic words.

110

The point is- Camden didnt "defund the police’ to get rid of corrupt cops. It was a simply to get out of a onerous contract (which is why they only had 268, and why that number is important). "The simple answer is that it was a budget crunch. Camden had a severe budget deficit and was not getting the state aid that it thought it was going to get. And in 2011, they were forced to lay off hundreds of city employees. In 2011, they laid off 163 police officers, which was almost half of the police force. "

They simply turned over policing to the county, something quite a few small towns out here in CA do all the time- without being used as some sort of example of why "defund the police’ could work.

And the new police force was larger- since they didnt have the onerous contracts- and mostly the same officers. And this wasnt by the will of people, it wasnt to clean up a corrupt dept or anything like that- it was simply to get out of a contract during a budget crunch.

Finally the citizens of Camden were very unhappy with their new force. It was whiter, didnt live in Camden to a large extent, and wasted their energies on minor and annoying arrests. " In reality, Camden’s police restructuring was deeply undemocratic and involved a doubling-down on “broken windows” policing strategies that increased excessive-force complaints."

So:

  1. Not due to corruption.

  2. Due entirely to a budget crunch

  3. More Officers, not less, and many of the same officers " the same team with new jerseys..

  4. More and more unpopular policing, including more excessive-force complaints.

  5. The reduction is crime was due to a nationwide crime reduction: " But crediting the crime reduction to the new police force is highly questionable."

In no way at all is this an example of a successful ‘defund the police’, as you claimed. It is possibly the very worst example anyone can think of.

111

No one understands the term . It is either impossible to explains- or- if you prefer- it has a thousand explanations, most of them contradictory.

112

I tried to say that in another thread but was told that I simply just want cops to keep beating people. If I understand what is being proposed, I may very well be on board.

Let’s just take this, for example. Let’s assume for the purposes of argument that we repeal the tinted window laws and the bells and lights on bicycles. I think we would all agree that it is only appropriate that a driver has functioning lights on his car, no? For quality of life purposes, we do want some semblance of public order even though these “disorderly conduct” statutes invite subjective enforcement and are vague, but let’s just leave that one aside.

So what do we do when we find a driver has a brake light out under the new and improved system? You would agree that as a general rule we can’t just let it go (sure, if an officer is on his way to a kidnapping in progress he prioritizes)? If we just let it go, then why have the law? Do we want people saying to hell with it and not maintaining their car lights? The law is there for safety purposes and not harassment purposes.

I’ve seen this argument a lot. Pick your minor law. Car lights, littering, turnstile jumping, public urination, public drinking, etc. I don’t think you would say that we don’t enforce them at all. But if we let them go sometimes, then there is the accusation of selective racial enforcement. How do we enforce these laws under the new system?

Is it community policing? If Officer Bob on the beat tells the first guy to dump out his booze he’s drinking on the street, then any time he writes a citation, it is because Officer Bob is playing favorites. What if Officer Bob has told a person to dump out his booze three times now, so he writes him a citation the fourth time. Then the person doesn’t appear to contest the citation. Should there be no arrest warrant for failing to appear? Should Officer Bob send an alcohol counselor? What if the guy listens to the counselor yet continues to drink on the street?

I’m asking these questions because none of the high-minded police reforms I see address them at all. In my attempt to research this and get answers and ask for links, I am told that I must just want people to keep getting beaten. But you can’t expect me or anyone else to get on board with a proposal when you cannot even define the proposal, point to any success stories, and explain the unintended consequences.

113

…what if Officer Bob only asks the Black man to dump out his booze he’s drinking on the street, but never writes out tickets for the white people doing exactly the same thing? In 2019 90% of tickets for jay-walking were issued to Black and Hispanic people. At the height of stop and frisk in 2012 55% of those stopped and frisked were Black, 32% were Latinx, only 10% were White, and 89% of all stops were of innocent people.

Does this make any kind of sense to you?

In Ferguson the Federal government concluded that Black residents routinely "had their constitutional rights violated through unjustified arrests, traffic stops and other actions carried out by a racially biased police department".

Why have none of the “high-minded police reforms” addressed your strawman argument? Because it’s a strawman argument, thats why. It isn’t about “minor laws.” It’s about those minor laws being used as a pretext to target black people and people of colour. Laws in place for safety purposes are a good thing. But the evidence is clear that often those laws are being used for “harassment purposes”, and that is what those “high-minded police reforms” are all about.

114

Still not sure why you are insistent on using a number that was during the middle of the transition, rather than the numbers before the transition and after, but it’s a minor point anyway. The point is that they did not have a substantially larger force than they had had historically. A brief dip, is IMHO irrelevant to the actual situation.

You are also ending your history in 2014, when there were quite a number of problems. If you look at the force today, you see that it does pretty well with community relations and not brutalizing its citizens. Does the fact that they had a long road to get here negate their example, or does it give an idea of what to follow and what to avoid?

See, the problem here is that that is not what I claimed. I said it was an example to look at to see what they did both right and wrong. Your continued misunderstanding of this point that I have reiterated a few times is getting to be more than a bit disappointing.

I understand it just fine. If you don’t understand it, your options are to either listen, or to complain that you can’t understand it. If you spend all your time complaining that you can’t understand it, you will never have the 30 seconds of free time that it would take to actually understand it.

And yes, it does mean different things to different people. Does a flag have no meaning because it means different things to different people?

There is a consensus position on what it means, and that has been pointed out a number of times to you, and that is essentially, “Reform the police, but reform has been tried before, so we need something far more drastic.”

It also is a negotiating starting point. The police and their defenders tell the public that there is no wiggle room. That the police will either do the jobs the way they are doing them now, or not at all. Well, some communities are fed up with that type of protection racket extortion, and say that if those are their options, then they will take the abolishment option over maintaining the status quo.

It is, in essence, a call to re-examine our social services, and to build them up with the needs of the community in mind, rather than adapting the community to the culture that the police have decided to impose upon them.

It’s not really all that complicated, and the main reason why I have seen people struggle to understand is because they work very hard to not understand.

115

If you claimed that no one understands the term to a person who does understand the term, and then argued that they did not, then your motives for arguing that someone else doesn’t understand something that they just explained to you could become suspect.

What do you mean by “let it go”?

Are you setting up a true dichotomy here, where the options are either to brutalize a person for having a brake light out or not enforce the law at all? I disagree, there are many things that can happen here that do not need force to get compliance.

The problem is is that Officer Bob is not the right person to deal with this situation. The fact that you even complain that Officer Bob does not have the right tools and resources to deal with a guy having a peaceful drink without resorting to violence should tell you this.

I’ve seen all of this addressed, quite thoroughly. I’m sure that if my desire was to not understand any of it, and instead complain to those who do, then I could have avoided seeing it, too.

116

Forget it k9bfriender, it’s Dopetown.

117

Because that number is critical for understanding why Camden did what they did- they had to cut back their force drastically due to budget problems. That is WHY Camden let the county take over. Nothing to do with corruption.

And so? All they did was get back to where they were before. In no way did they improve. The goal was never to improve, it was to save budget $$. It had nothing whatsoever to do with reforming the police.

How can you understand a term that means either: abolish all police, reform the police, or cut some bloat from the budget? Those things are totally contradictory.

YOU may think there is a “consensus” but there isnt. Got a cite for everyone agreeing on what it means?

Camden is not a example of anything at all to do with “defund the police”. The police were not “defunded”, or reformed, or abolished- they just went from City to County.

118

You’ve criticized my response without addressing it at all.

  1. What is the definition of the term since you understand it and are supposedly the spokesperson for the group as your understanding is the correct one?

  2. Nobody is talking about “brutalizing” a person for having a brake light out, so I don’t know where that even came from. Nobody is talking about using “force.” Thousands of citations are issued every year for brake light violations and the driver goes about his merry way. Under the new system, who enforces brake light infractions?

  3. Officer Bob isn’t the right guy? Okay, I thought we were talking about community policing with Bob on the beat. Obviously I was wrong; that’s the reason for my inquiries. So who does? And if a community doesn’t want to have people having a “peaceful drink” in public (which is almost every community in the country, a few tourist destinations excepted) then what do they do? And again, nobody is talking about “violence” to issue a public drinking citation.

  4. NOBODY has addressed this. That’s Dr. Deth’s complaint as well. Nobody has said what this new system will entail. You can dismiss my questions all you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are strawmanning this by saying that “violence” is necessary to enforce minor crimes and have not said who will enforce them.

119

Millions of parking violations are given out everyday without police.
The same for health code violations
Building code violations.
OSHA issues safety violations daily.
Doctors and Lawyers and all kinds of business people have their licences examined.

You’re supposedly a lawyer, haven’t you noticed that courtrooms are filled to capacity with cases that don’t involve the police at all?
Is it so hard to imagine that traffic violations or public decency violations could likewise be handled without the police?

120

We have no choice but to reform the police system in this country. There has been a dangerous tolerance of police abuse for a long time now, which is something that threatens everyone’s security but impacts people of color disproportionately.

Up-thread, QS made the comment that slogans are how we got MAGA, and I disagree with that. We got MAGA because a large portion of this country doesn’t understand how people with whom they rarely come into contact live, and doesn’t seem to care. We got MAGA because we’ve grown up in a post 9/11 state in which we value security over freedom. We got MAGA because we don’t value equality, and we believe that people who are poor deserve to be. We got MAGA because we believe that anyone with a criminal history of any kind, particularly if they’re people of color, are a waste and should be condemned to a life of imprisonment and police harassment. It’s all interrelated.

If we can’t raise the bar in terms of what we expect from the police, then we shouldn’t complain when someone like Donald Trump violates the Constitution, bribes foreign officials, creates a kleptocracy, tells bold face lies to the public every day, and threatens to cheat at election time, and threatens to refuse to leave office even if he loses. If that’s what passes for ‘democracy,’ then we get the government we deserve.

Make no mistake about it: the United States of America is a dying democracy, and there is a very direct connection between what we tolerate from the police and political outcomes. Changing police culture has everything to do with changing the political culture in our society.