** Minneapolis lawmakers vow to disband police department in historic move. **
It remains to be seen if this is just political showmanship or whether it is actually going to happen. Assuming the latter for the sake of debate, what “alternative model” of law enforcement can one possibly have to enforce the law?
They should use Camden NJ as a model – Camden NJ disbanded their PD in 2013, and built a new department from the ground up, and it’s been extremely succesful:
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crime-in-camden/549542/
Other places have tried this. They don’t literally have no cops; it’s a way of reducing and reforming the police department. There ill be police officers in Minneapolis, but fewer of them, doing things cops specifically should be doing.
Cops are overused, and most cities have too many of them. They are reflexively sent to deal with things that really should be dealt with by other types of professionals. You need detectives to investigate major crimes and traffic cops to stop dangerous drivers, but do you really need armed cops sent to do wellness checks? To respond to medical emergencies? To be enforcers in high schools?
I kind of roll my eyes when I hear the word “disband”, but I guess they’re just trying to emphasize their commitment to a radical redesign.
Cue right-wing OUTRAGE!
Is that what people have in mind when they talk about “defund the police”? Could it also be tried with, say, failing public schools?:dubious:
Anyway community policing sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea though I would like to see statistically rigorous evidence that it actually decreases crime.
Abolish/Defund the police are still terrible slogans and a pure gift for the Republicans who are jumping all over it.
Actually I am wondering if some mayors and governors might use this crisis as a financial play, to put pressure on police unions and maybe disband some departments and hire officers at a lower pay like Camden. In some ways it’s like a private equity firm taking over a company. Hell now that Mitt Romney has gone all woke and marched with BLM, they might hire him as a consultant.
Anything other than the status quo would have Republicans jumping all over/distorting the fucking hell out of it no matter what it’s called.
What, scrapping the whole current system and starting from scratch? I’ve been saying for a while that that’s the only hope for fixing the Cleveland Public Schools.
As I understand it, the purpose of the Camden model was to increase the number of police officers while reducing salary/benefits (to accommodate the new hires in the budget).
What they did was dissolve the police force, create a new one, immediately rehire almost all of the police officers at lower salaries, and hire something like 100 new officers. In the immediate aftermath, people felt like the increased police presence (made possible by the increased number of police) was helping the crime rate. See here for a 2014 discussion of the Camden situation. Your cite, similarly, credits “more officers with lower pay”.
It may be the case that increased police presence reduces crime rates. And it may be the case that a surplus of police officers allows each officer to take the time to build community relationships.
But I am surprised to learn that “disband/defund the police department” might plausibly be viewed as a call for a department to increase the size of the police force (and keep all the current officers) by giving them lower pay and fewer benefits.
The Camden model looks interesting though I am pretty sure it’s not what left-wing activists actually want.
Mrs. L and I visited Philadelphia as tourists at Thanksgiving 2018. We weren’t sure how rough the streets were going to be but we felt remarkably safe the whole time. Reason: there were plenty of police around. It wasn’t like squads massing for a riot that’s about to break out; they were visible, friendly, and it was reassuring. Mrs. L tried to give some of them $5 gift cards to Dunkin’ so they could get a coffee (man, it was COLD outside!) but they said they couldn’t accept them. IDK if they were imitating their neighbors in Camden, but we loved our time there.
Every problem in the US seems to have the police as a solution.
Police departments have essentially asserted themselves not as agencies that are accountable to the public but rather that they are more like local militias. Through police unions, they have argued that their number one job is to come home alive, and that we should accept that accidentally killing people in custody or bystanders or people who share a residence is just unavoidable collateral damage.
Mayors, city councils, state legislatures, federal investigators, and other parties have lacked the political will to rectify the problem of police misconduct. It just might be time to use the nuclear option and for people to fire the whole fucking department and rebuild a new police force that operates according to new principles. Good institutions should be supported, damaged institutions need to be reformed, and completely damaged and harmful institutions need to be completely razed and rebuilt from the ground up.
PR stunt to make headlines.
iiandyiiii, Camden, shouldn’t be the model.
It will be interesting to see what Minneapolis actually does. With a population of a half million, in a metro area of over 3 million, if they truly have no police department, chaos will ensue.
When I hear the word “disband” it makes me think of the classic Simpsons epsiode “The PTA Disbands!”
It’s atrocious messaging. Terrific idea, awful sales job. It’s akin to selling soft drinks with ads saying “Drink acid!”
They’re not going to have NO police department; they’re going to disband it and reform it in a way that will make it more accountable to the public.
Yes, I’m sure that some officers who are used to policing however the fuck they please are going to be incensed, but if it’s done right, there’s an opportunity for some positive change.
Throwing people in jail doesn’t reduce crime over the long term. We’re at the point where even the most right wing of red state governors are actually the ones championing the reforms in this area.
In a similar vein, law enforcement departments that aggressively police their communities instead of actually cooperating with them are not helping to improve their communities. As we’ve seen, even if we take at face value the idea that there are statistical reductions in crime, they are building up resentments that don’t appear in the data - and those resentments eventually explode into the open, which is what we’ve seen over the last two weeks.
I. too. Perhaps they are referring to how much the chief and his pals made.
What they should be saying is disband the police union. That is what worked in Camden. So many benefits, it would make it easier to get rid of bad cops, it makes it possible to hire cops at a lower salary so you can have more, and it saves the city money.
Misplaced responsibility. The police department doesn’t determine when people are put in jail or prison. It is the prosecutors office and judges.