This is a survey by a respected polling company with an overwhelming result that goes against what is clearly the preferred narrative of most people on this site. Naturally, the most upvotes comments are people countering it with anecdotes. I thought people here we were meant to be smart enough to avoid confirmation bias?
"It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions."
Not sure what "preferred narrative" you are referring too, but most black people think America has a "police problem". Define that however you like. Bunch of other polls from the same organization for those curious enough to dig deeper. Seek Higher Things friend.
One thing to keep in mind with open ended polling questions like this is that there is that the questions can shape the response. One interesting display of this is that most Americans don't believe that we should take race into account for college admissions, but most Americans also believe that affirmative action for minorities is beneficial.
I don't know what the preferred narrative here has been on the subject, but I think it's been obvious the vast majority of black folks never wanted police protection to disappear, and the lack of assurance in our interactions with police (confirmed by polls mentioned in the article) demonstrates that reform is something that would be strongly desired.
A conclusion based on those polls for affirmative action in college is that people support the general principle of getting more minorities into college, but do not support the current methods applied under affirmative action. When specifics are outlined for respondents the support drops.
This has less to do with the style of shaping the response by what kind of questions are made, and more to do with what the question is. Support for a concept is not the same as support for a specific action. If you ask people to choose between multiple of bad choices in order to achieve a common good then the goal is likely to have a significant higher support than any of the bad choices.
Although in this case, it doesn't look like they had bad intentions and they seem to have dug at least a little below the surface and drawn what seem like sensible conclusions. I wonder if more detailed results and the full list of questions are available somewhere.
> This is a survey by a respected polling company with an overwhelming result that goes against what is clearly the preferred narrative of most people on this site.
But...it doesn't do that at all. Both because the defund/dismantle/abolish narrative isn't dominant on the site, and because the framing of the survey sidesteps the structural law enforcement issues at the heart of that narrative entirely and asks merely whether people want police to spend the same, more, or less time in their neighborhoods, which isn't the issue at all.
It sounds like you're suggesting that people are making comments along the lines of "This poll must be wrong because all the black people I know think police presence should be reduced."
I scanned the first several posts and didn't see any comments like that. Someone mentioning their personal experience doesn't align with a result isn't suggesting the poll is wrong. Not everything is an argument. To me this suggests the data points could be distributed into homogeneous pockets, and a discussion of this possibility seems fair game.
Some comments raise questions about the experimental methods or muse about hidden nuance in the data, which also seem like fair discussion points for this forum.
This is fascinating because I am myself half black, lived in many communities of mixed demographics and never once heard a friend (of any race) say they want more police at all, ever.
The answer is the Black community isn't a monolith and has have swaths that support more police and others that support less. No conspiracy or cherry-picking.
And if you study a lot of opinion polling you'll notice, across all racial demographics, there tends to be a generational rift forming between the young and the old. Older generations likely remember the crime wave that took hold in the 80s and early 90s and its subsequent decline. And the younger generation lives under a larger, more aggressive police presence that was instituted since then.
If a person (not accusing you) only read the headline and not the article, they might get the wrong impression.
Here is a part that I think makes things clear:
"Bottom Line
It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions."
If we take the gallup and normalize it by social economic status then the result seems to pretty much align with a desire for more police presence at the lower end and less police presence at the higher end, which in turn reflect the crime rate at regions with higher social economics status vs low social economic status. This would unlikely surprise anyone here on HN.
But if you proxy social economic status with demographics then the result becomes political, and so people desire to find an different answer.
Of course, many people in the site see themselves as heroes because they joined the BLM protests during the pandemic. Their self awarded virtue would loose its shine if the data shows that the people they are demonstrating for aren't the victims they thought they were.
This was clear right from the outset too. Upper middle class white people in "nice" neighborhoods don't even interact with police.
I interacted with a police officer a grand total of 3 times in the last 20 years: one traffic citation, one traffic ticket (missing front plate on the car - deserved), and an officer stopped by after someone broke into our mailbox and asked if I'd press charges (I said I would, but they never found the perp).
Compare that to a bad neighborhood in e.g. Chicago or Detroit where the situation is worse than in Kabul, and without constant, heavy, aggressive police presence a lot more people will be murdered.
The belief that we do not need police and that a "social worker" is sufficient in e.g. Chicago is what someone has astutely called a "luxury belief", a modern equivalent of "let them eat cake". It comes from the tower so ivory, you can't look at it without hurting your eyes in broad daylight.
> The belief that we do not need police and that a "social worker" is sufficient
I think most people still believe that we need some policing. But that policing isn't solving the longer term problems. We know that sending people to prison has a tendency to turn people into criminals even if their original crime was minor (not everyone of course). So why is that our strategy for dealing for crime rather than tackling the underlying social and economic issues? There's good reason to think that crime levels would be reduced if half the police budget was put into social programs (specifically in the US where police budgets are ridiculous).
While social workers might be useful in Detroit, we are unlike Chicago in that we don't have a very heavy handed PD, but also one with significantly less funding and man power - we could use more funding to improve our abysmal response times in many neighborhoods.
However Detroit's PD still has bad cops even if they are miles ahead of other police departments, even though we could use more police in general - I don't think more "heavy handedness" or "aggressiveness" is useful or desired.
I bet you don't have a single poll to prove that. I think the truth is in the middle. Most of us think the police state has gone too far and needs to dial back the military and shoot first ask questions later mentality (and learn something from other countries). The police unions need to be taken down a couple of notches as well. I know very few people who want zero cops. I consider those people radicals and extremely short sighted. They along with just thugs are the ones burning down black communities and saying "riots aren't violence!"
> I thought people here we were meant to be smart enough to avoid confirmation bias?
I think that's actually impossible. I often try to check my confirmation bias, I can make myself consciously aware of it, but I can't undo it. Like an optical illusion, you can't unsee it. Like riding the bike, you can't unlearn it.
Aside: I think you can unlearn riding a bike to some extent - or any deeply ingrained actions; but it seems you need a similar activity. If you switch the gearing so you pedal backwards, and the handle bars to move opposite, then ride that bike until it becomes second nature (years probably) .. now get on a normal bike, you'll have to learn to ride it again. You've "unlearned".
I've had this experience recently with a video game: played for a decade, switched to another game for a few months, moved back to first game - unlearned the controls (instinct is to use controls of second game). Interestingly now I've re-learned my ability seems to have improved.
I think it works with optical illusions too: sort term as well, if my kids are anything to go by (they might have misreported seeing the illusion - eg lady in hat|hag with big nose).
N=1~, but across various activities. I'm a bit older, so brain plasticity is not what it used to be.
This shouldn't be a suprise. Some people like to pretend that higher crime rates in some areas is strictly due to higher police presence, but it's clearly not the case. I remember after the protests in Baltimore from FreddIe Gray, the police were told to have a much smaller presence, and not do as much proactive policing. It wasn't long before the people who actually live in those neighborhoods were complaining about the increasing crime rate due to a smaller police presence.
Well you can't just remove police and think everything is going to be okay.
The police abolitionist movement is calling for removing untrained, armed, and oftentimes extremely racist individuals from the streets and replacing them with social programs, housing, education, healthcare.
You can't just do 10% of the ask here and then be surprised when shit doesn't magically get better.
There are many people who are apologists for the police abolition movement (or whatever it should be called).
I’m sorry but it is quite obvious that a whole lot of people carrying around ACAB (all cops are bad) and “defund the police” signs don’t go along with the this-is-what-they-actually-mean explanations. They mean to have their message taken at face value.
I saw myself spraypainted on a Minneapolis building “actually defund the police”. it is hard to reinterpret all cops are bad as anything but the obvious, and it is quite popular.
>replacing them with social programs, housing, education, healthcare.
Unfortunately, this part is extremely vague and is missing a track record. So how it ends up in the real human world, is police funding gets cut and the funds get diverted into corrupt politicians' pockets. Like the Chicago mayor that successfully reduced police funding only to have a separate police detachment placed near her home.
Would it be accurate, then, to say that the "police abolitionist movement" does not want to abolish the police? If that is the case, why call it the police abolitionist movement? It seems like all that does is generate ill-will from people who are potential allies.
You cannot replace the police with social programs. What are you going to do when somebody breaks into your house, assaults you, robs you, kills someone? Call your social worker?
Canada had an experiment of removing policing for just one day. It did not go well at all.
The thing is they need more support for enforcement. The complaints you get from police are that a big chunk of the job is just racing from one call to the next, and flat out ignoring calls that don’t seem important enough because they’re forced to triage.
This is fascinating because I am myself half black, lived in many communities of mixed demographics and never once heard a friend (of any race) say they want more police at all, ever.
I guess I also don't know anybody who has done a gallup poll or anybody that knows anybody who has ever done a gallup poll in their lives so who knows?
Edit: I don't know how or where these are conducted, or their exact phrasing of their questions, but I'm very curious about that.
Because, some rural areas in America have a "posse" system where volunteers get to ride around armed, sometimes outfitted (by taxpayer money) with bulletproof vests and big stickers for their cars showing their semi-official affiliation with the police (or sheriff's department). On the record, they're only supposed to observe or report yet in practice I'd question why it's crucial in some places to outfit posses with bulletproof through taxpayer money in that case, especially in places that have a very low crime rate?
I only bring this up because if I wanted to tilt a poll, I'd ask folks in areas where this is a possibility, where asking about a reduction in police force implies an increase in these somewhat-sanctioned vigilantes. You wouldn't even have to include it in the question, you'd just have to ask somebody standing in the right spot.
From the article, the question asked was "Would you rather the police spend more time, the same amount of time or less time as they currently spend in your area?", and was "administered by web in English and conducted as part of the newly launched Gallup Center on Black Voices". There's more information on how Gallup conducts polls more generally here: https://www.gallup.com/174158/gallup-panel-methodology.aspx.
Having spent a lot of time in poor areas with heavy gang presence, the people I know tend to not be gleeful or chummy about the police, but they understand they serve a purpose and want to keep the peace in their neighborhoods. When you have police helicopters going over your house at night on a regular basis and every window on every house has bars, you have a very real, visceral connection with wanting to be safe. They understand that some young people get mixed up in gangs, and want to help them. Part of that is in keeping the peace. Especially when you have rival gangs shooting innocent people randomly in the streets just because of the color of their skin; the color of the skin of the rival gang. I can see how people in those areas would be hesitant about abolishing the police, or even drastically reducing numbers. You just want to raise your kids in peace.
I've taken the approach to anything with political implications that everything is more complicated than it seems, even after digging into the issue.
In this case, "Defund the Police" can mean a hundred different policy approaches from as simple as cut funding/staff/resources to as complex as redistributing that funding and resources to non-police support structures like social workers, mental health professionals, and the other roles that an omnibus police department handles.
In that sense, I don't support straight defunding of police. I do support redistributing funding/resources to new or expanded public health departments with a push for mental health and drug abuse support. But that needs to happen as part of a larger approach to decriminalization of drug possession/use (not selling/distributing, just possession/use), criminal justice reform where those convicted of such nonviolent crimes are released and record scrubbed, plus support for those to gain an education or employment without stigma. Ideally we can establish programs and tools to tackle the problems that led to a life of crime or drug abuse, focusing on reform.
That should also include immigration reform and the elimination of 'illegal' terms by expanding quotas and simplifying the process for citizenship. Cheaper education, child care, and medical care/prescriptions are also needed to reduce the burden on most working Americans so they can educate themselves, find better employment, and better care for themselves and their family. Ending food insecurity (which, by the way, it's insane the US even has) would be a solid start. People join gangs because they solve problems they face like wanting to belong, physical/financial security, etc. By working to resolve those issues for anyone in the states, immigrant or citizen, we can address the root cause not the symptoms.
Much more complicated that it seems, and that's not even getting into the various departments/programs/bills/etc required to progress that. This is also a heavily opinionated comment that clearly leans liberal and would face plenty of challenges from the current conservative side of US politics. But it would also be progress toward solving a series of issues that undermine freedom and peaceful society.
I don't think it's race related. I've moved to neighborhood that's relatively dangerous in Bay Area. It's close to really dangerous ones. I wouldn't mind 2-3x amount of police that currently is here. I don't think that others would mind it either just because they have darker skin color.
That sounds pretty awful. About a decade ago I spent some time in The Tenderloin in San Francisco (Turk and Hyde) and they had the most astounding open air drug market. It was constantly full of police but my friends were always able to purchase drugs. And violence was common. Unavoidable, even as perceived by those that spent more time there than I did.
Maybe the police cruising down the street two or three times more often might've changed that. That's an interesting point.
Edit: To clarify, no person I've ever met that lived in that area ever expressed a desire for more police. It was mostly things about housing and mental health care with that particular issue. I am specifically talking about my experience in the Tenderloin in this case.
Hidden under the counterintuitive headline is this tidbit: most Americans, especially Black Americans are not very confident police will treat them with courtesy and respect.
I don't see that as counterintuitive. People wouldn't call for or desire for more police so they could have more encounters with more courtesy or more respect — they'd want more police because they feel it increases their level of safety and the level of safety of the community.
A LEO can be incredibly discourteous to you while still keeping you safe, and you might reasonably accept the former to gain a greater sense of the latter.
I don't see anything counterintuitive - I don't call the cops for respectful conversation, and if my actions have got them called in, I don't expect respectful treatment.
Harsh maybe, but also true. Ideally they would be polite, but my interactions with police (here in Aus) are exclusively when something has gone wrong.
" never once heard a friend (of any race) say they want more police at all, ever."
I have never in my life heard anyone talk about having 'more or less police' - so why is it surprising that you haven't heard about it.
The polls is not about 'what someone was saying unsolicited' - it was about 'what they actually think'.
There's nothing surprising or funny about it.
"Because, some rural areas in America have a "posse" system where volunteers get to ride around armed, sometimes outfitted (by taxpayer money) with bulletproof vests and big stickers for their cars showing their semi-official affiliation with the police"
This has nothing to do with anything.
People want more or less police for the obvious reasons - also - despite the rhetoric, most Black communities are actually under policed, not over policed.
>I have never in my life heard anyone talk about having 'more or less police'
I've personally known quite a few homeless people (and been one!) that had been repeatedly displaced by police that spoke at length about how they'd prefer fewer police, since the demolition of homeless camps are often perceived as being for show or just something that happened because officers were bored and simply had nothing to do that day.
They perceived it as being for show since they'd often be able to reconstruct the camp the very next day and largely be left alone for weeks or even months afterward.
I also know a woman that had a seriously dangerous stalker that had friends in the local police that somehow had the clout to send officers to her home on a whim. She's been arrested multiple times without ever being convicted of anything, usually not even charged at all. One time, she was 5150'd (mandatory 72 hour psychiatric evaluation) while in the middle of serving cake at her son's birthday because the stalker (who was about 300 miles away on that day) called his buddies and said she'd threatened suicide. She was able to produce proof on the scene that she hadn't contacted him at all, but was taken in anyway.
She has personally expressed on many occasions that she wished the police stuck to a more strictly defined set of duties so that there would be less opportunity for an abuser to use his connections to use them as his own personal harassment squad, which includes a reduction in total numbers of police presence.
I suppose we just know different people!
Re: My thought about posses.
>This has nothing to do with anything.
I felt as though I explained the connection in the next paragraph, but I'm more than happy to explain in more detail how a person could in some situation prefer the presence of trained police than state-funded posses that have considerably less oversight and accountability. If you could clarify why you think this is incorrect, I am more than happy to discuss this further.
> most Black communities are actually under policed, not over policed.
Can you expand on this? I'd love more data on this point. If you're referencing the poll itself, you'll see that I already am skeptical about how it should be interpreted.
Thanks for asking! I maybe should have mentioned that I am speaking from a place of personal experience and also the experiences I've had relayed to me by my neighbors.
I've also heard normal terrible stories about the police everywhere I've lived, but this posse thing is relatively new to me so I thought it prudent to highlight as one example.
I currently live in a rural area where the sheriff's office provides bullet-proof vests using county funds, and has vowed to expand the program in the coming year. I am not aware of any training necessary to volunteer for the posse (the sheriff's office doesn't publish any clear guidelines about this.) All that I am aware of is that there are roughly ~30 officers total on this half of the county, and over 380 posse members according to published numbers.
I have heard of a few cases of posse volunteers following people around in an intimidating fashion (Despite no wrongdoing occurring on the part of the of those followed. Every bit of weird behavior on their part was focused on Hispanic people and young women.) There was no news of anyone being reprimanded or ejected from the posse.
As for community policing goes, I think that term may mean different things to different people. If by community policing you mean "possibly untrained, armed and armored people doing patrols with opaque rules and structure with limited accountability to the community, all on the taxpayer dime" it sounds somewhat similar to regular policing without having to pay salaries or pensions.
I do not find that to be a meaningful difference (aside from the significant savings) , and not something that I would endorse.
I don't know that fewer or more police either one is the answer. Better police, demilitarized, with better screening, better training, and a better focus on police work is what we need. Most of the things police are doing do not require police, and definitely don't require high-tension interactions between armed police and the public. We need social workers, clinical psychologists, trauma counselors, food security plans, and such. The police should be a last resort, not a first interaction with people struggling with a difficult situation.
I hated the police when I was younger and thought we'd be better with fewer police.
I don't believe that anymore. The emergence of body cameras are amazing because they show just how bad we're constantly being lied to. YouTubers like Donut Operator really opened my eyes.
I think back to my younger years and all the ways I've seen police go out of their way to do things they didn't need to. I've seem some do really shitty things too ... but overall, I think we need to remember they're human beings.
We're all just human beings, and most people join the police because they want to do the right thing. If many of these problem cities, police forces are composed of a large number of minorities too.
Especially during this time, let's try to remember we're all humans here.
“We're all just human beings, and most people join the police because they want to do the right thing.”
I think in theory this is the idea, but I think in reality it isn’t. I know four people I grew up with who became police and all four were not people I’d want to run into. One, in high school, stated that being a cop is the only job you can have where you are paid to beat people up (I argued boxing, not realizing he’d later be a cop). Another was the middle school bully. Another was a high school drug dealer — who I’m not sure ever stopped. And the one black guy I knew who became a cop was just a jerk.
Maybe coincidence, but I have a feeling that the profession attracts exactly the mindset you don’t want as a cop. But people who don’t have that mindset probably don’t want to be cops.
At the same time, if you look at the police-involved deaths per capita, our neighbors are countries like Iraq and Mali. Other nations in the developed world (and even many who are not) have rates that are far, far lower. The US clearly has something tragically wrong with its policing system.
> We're all just human beings, and most people join the police because they want to do the right thing
Many people join the police because the pay very well, they're some of the highest paid government employees, and often make more than software developers do. They'll also get a full pension with benefits after working for only 20 years.
I've never seen an EMT or a social worker destroy homeless people's belongings, but I've seen cops do it. People who want to do the right thing typically go into other fields than law enforcement.
I agree we are all humans. But as humans, we are strongly influenced by our environment, and I think the current system of policing has a number of fundamental issues that makes the flaws we share as humans worse.
1.) Positions of power can attract people who have a longing for power, who may not be well-adjusted, emotionally-healthy individuals.
2.) Policing is a dangerous job, and constant personal danger can lead to regression away from the ideals we hold as a society. Something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When one of the basic needs (personal safety) is compromised, everything above it on the pyramid becomes less stable.
3.) Policing is an adversarial job. This leads to a us vs them mentality and also contributes to the next problem
4.) Racism. Racism has been part of our culture for a long time. This means...
a.) some officers certainly will be coming into the force with racial biases to varying degrees, and
b.) the fact that the jobs pits them as adversaries against certain races of people more than others will makes these biases worse.
They’re human beings who happen to have gleefully committed Hundreds of violent crimes against citizens they’re supposed to protect, and they’re basically given free reign to do so.
Take the following - think about every single one of the human beings taking turns beating a completely subdued, incapacitated and probably unconscious person:
I could've picked from a few hundred similar clips, there's so many. And yet nothing will come of this. This conflict won’t ever be resolved until the police take responsibility for this sort of brutality. And they won’t, so it’ll periodically die down and simmer until another atrocity is committed and it’ll boil over again and again ad infinitum.
We can empathise with the police all we want, but this will just keep happening until someone steps in and puts an end to it. I have NO idea what that would look like, I know that when Georgia (i.e. former USSR country) had problems with their police they completely disbanded it and set it up again. Hopefully there's a less disruptive route than that but I honestly do not know.
> I don't believe that anymore. The emergence of body cameras are amazing because they show just how bad we're constantly being lied to. YouTubers like Donut Operator really opened my eyes.
Definitely agree that body cameras can help to clarify a lot.
Would you mind sharing a bit about what sorts of lies you may've been referencing? Or how "Donut Operator" on YouTube may've been helpful?
I'm not sure if I fully understood what you were trying to say, but it sounds like you may have some neat perspective on the topic.
The result of that experiment seems to imply even random people being "promoted" to have power over others with little demonstrable accountability is a recipe for disaster.
From the dim recesses of my memory what I took away from Plato's Republic is that you never want those who seek power to receive it and only those who don't care about it "deserve" it. (Clearly a bit of an oxymoron)
> On this view, philosophers are the last people who should or would want to rule. The Republic turns this claim upside down, arguing that it is precisely the fact that philosophers are the last people who would want to rule that qualifies them to do so. Only those who do not wish for political power can be trusted with it.
> Thus, the key to the notion of the “philosopher king” is that the philosopher is the only person who can be trusted to rule well. Philosophers are both morally and intellectually suited to rule: morally because it is in their nature to love truth and learning so much that they are free from the greed and lust that tempts others to abuse power and intellectually because they alone can gain full knowledge of reality, which in Books V through VII of the Republic is argued to culminate in knowledge of the forms of Virtue, Beauty, and, above all, the Good. The city can foster such knowledge by putting aspiring philosophers through a demanding education, and the philosophers will use their knowledge of goodness and virtue to help other citizens achieve these so far as possible.
I am a fairly optimistic person and believe people are mostly good. I agree some and perhaps many people that become police officers do it because they wish to do good. However, at a minimum I think the job attracts a lot of bullies and people that enjoy having power over others. And I think there is such a code of support of the "thin blue line" that ostensibly "good cops" can't be good cops because they allow "bad cop" behavior by their inaction.
I'd fix it all tomorrow by making a law that all wrongful violence/death/etc. judgements come out of the police pension and fraternal order of police funds instead of a city's budget. I bet that code of "omerta" would end in a heartbeat.
The police execute public policy. I've seen a friend arrested for trying to simply delivery a letter to their representative calmly (amid a protest, but a calm one). Police can sometimes be individually bad, but often they are bad because they are part of a system that makes it so. If you are a "good" cop, you need to protect the bad cops or you get your ass handed to you and your career prospects cut. If you are a "good" cop and you are forced to kick people out of homes for being poor, lock up some dude forever for stealing a candy bar because of a three strikes law, or some such you're part of a system that values property and the safety of the well off over human dignity.
We do need some kind of forces for dealing with the occasional insane situation, but those happen rarely and public policy can be tailored to prevent many problems instead of being merely reactive and punitive. For example, poverty and lack of options cause social conflict, what if we did something about that instead of punishing people?
I'd like to see how this cuts by age. A lot of older folks I talk to see police very differently, and often say "You just don't know how things used to be before the police", which I think really misses what people are asking for ie: redistribution of grossly overbudgeted police departments to preventative measures like better schooling, community centers, and more subtle reactive measures like un-armed "police" (or whatever you want to call this new role).
I also wonder if the question were phrased differently (and more accurately representing what is actually being asked for), more like "Would you support an N% cut to police budgets, which would come from X part of the police budget, to support preventative measures like social services?", if we'd see a different response.
It’s hard to blame people for misunderstanding slogans that supposedly don’t mean what the plain meaning would suggest. Perhaps the young activists should say what they mean and mean what they say and then all those “older folks” might not miss the point.
> It’s hard to blame people for misunderstanding slogans that supposedly don’t mean what the plain meaning would suggest.
I find it very easy to blame people who are not willing to spend 10 seconds researching what a movement stands for. We can't say that it's okay to read three words on a sign, interpret it in your own context, and then blame the movement when you don't "understand" it. It's a slogan! What do you expect for a less-than-five-word sentence that people can unite under?
NYC tried unarmed “police” to handle minor moving violations and parking. It was a disaster. People bullied them, assaulted them, and/or ignored them.
The sad truth is that people respect police not because of the badge but because of the gun, and because of the threat of violence.
Many of the reform ideas being thrown around lately are ideas that places across the US have already tried.
I think people are saying photos and videos from Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Kenosha, WI. They’re thinking they’ll take their chances with the police than with arsonists and rioters.
Is there a source for this? If I search up "NYPD unarmed officer", I get a bunch of results regarding police violence on unarmed civilians, and if I search up "new york unarmed officer", I get a bunch of results relating to security guards.
This just sounds mad coming from a British person. Almost all of our police are unarmed and do a decent job, the only place police routinely carry guns are airports for obvious reasons and Northern Ireland which literally had a decades-long sectarian insurgency happen there. At least nominally, the British police operate under Peel's idea of "policing by consent" where police officers are merely citizens in uniform charged with keeping order rather than the more Continental (at the time) model of armed enforcers of royal/state power.
It's hard to genuinely respect someone when there's a gun-related power dynamic forcing you to. That's not respect, that's just the threat of force. It's probably too late for America to adopt Peel's principles of policing but it's not done us much harm.
> “You just don't know how things used to be before the police", which I think really misses what people are asking for ie: redistribution of grossly overbudgeted police departments to preventative
Or more likely they don’t think preventative measures work as well as you think they do.
Edit: Once you have seen acts of senseless violence - real cruel stuff - it is hard to believe that some people can be reliably rehabilitated.
Maybe that cruelty could have been nipped in the bud if they had received better care in the past - but that’s not a risk I would take with my community.
I think it'd also be productive to have community education on your rights and responsibilities with police.
You have rights, you don't have to do anything outside the law. But you do have to comply with lawful orders. If everybody understood these things, there would be much less trouble, fear, and violence.
Agreed! We should start by teaching police what lawful orders they're actually able to give, prevent them from lying about their powers and individuals' rights, and putting the ones who do intimidate people into relinquishing their rights in prison.
Often they're referring to New York in the 60s/70s. Of course, there were absolutely police back then. But they largely attribute the increase in their feeling of personal safety with a larger investment in police.
My town just had the sheriff for example. The sheriff had a small crew of 1-2 deputies and a secretary. When something really rough would happen, the sheriff would round up a crew. It was a really light group of people. Lots of differences between that, a militia, community policing, etc. Even today some rural communities are “policed” very differently. Now that same town has a standing police force of 40 officers, a K-9 unit, and they have fancy military vehicles. This is with a change from 5000->10000 in population.
This was all up until pretty recently (1940s-1950s) too.
The whole "defund the police" movement feels very much in line with the "Luxury beliefs" [1] idea that has been floating around for the past year or so.
> The whole "defund the police" movement feels very much in line with the "Luxury beliefs"
Why do you believe this? It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
> It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
While that sounds great on paper, nothing the schools do is going to make a difference if the family support at home isn't there. You can't just throw money at the problem to make it better.
Anecdotal, but my sister used to work as a teacher & reading specialist in poorer areas. Per my last conversation with her on this topic, she said maybe 20% of the kids have a solid backing from family for education. The rest she had interacted with for one reason or another were a mix of parents who told her it was her job to teach and they wouldn't do that at home; another group of parents that were too drunk/drugged out to even answer the phone or call back; and another that would just swear at her for bothering them at home. All of her co-workers had similar accounts of this happening.
Kids that did want to learn in class were bullied for "acting white" and there were physical fights occurring weekly. She didn't teach high school, she taught 4/5th grade.
For us to make any progress with poorer schools there needs to be a community focus on education, having respect for each other, and having respect for the law. If you grow up for 18 years in an environment without those then nothing matters long term and we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.
If the movement were "Demilitarize the police", then yes, that is absolutely something I could be in favor of.
As it stands, "Defund the police" is to me a weasel word version of "Abolish the police" and I honestly do think people are just being coy when they claim not to see that.
It isn’t, it only shows you know absolutely nothing about police budgets, and your well intentioned but incredibly naive attempt at social engineering using completely untested ideas will get more people killed.
This is tosh. If the idea is to defund the surplus, then the police will effectively maintain the exact same level of presence as already displayed.
Basically, with your suggestion, nothing will change, other than police garages. That's clearly not what the protestors want, and as such, we can immediately discard your assertion.
Why do you believe that? Isn't it possible that in high crime areas it would make more sense to focus on the police first, so that everybody, including school counselors, is not too afraid to go to work?
Wow, what an amazing article. I never thought of it this way. But it matches what I've noted in many people.
Super interesting concept. Thanks for this mental mode of seeing this phenomena. I'm going to really think it over. Even if I end up rejecting it in favor of some other mental mode, it's still an amazingly interesting lens for looking at recent events.
> Another luxury belief is that religion is irrational or harmful. Members of the upper class are most likely to be atheists or non-religious. But they have the resources and access to thrive without the unifying social edifice of religion. Places of worship are often essential for the social fabric of poor communities. Denigrating the importance of religion harms the poor.
Since when is human rationality “luxury”? This article just shot itself in the foot.
I'm not so sure it did. The social fabric point is something that even comes up in HN discussions. Religion and religious activities are things that connect strangers and communities. That helps build social trust. With religion gone there isn't much positive that tends to replace it among poor purple.
I wonder if this is 81% of black Americans, or "81% of black Americans who had both the time and inclination to fill out a targeted web survey/ answer a landline phone call related to policing"
I know polls claim to correct for this, but if even the census, mandated by the constitution and backed by federal law and billions of dollars, can significantly under-count black and Latino Americans, I'd be curious to see how well Gallup can do.
All this said, I DO think the majority of people (regardless of their relative melanin levels) would like to see more police in their neighborhoods, with the giant caveat that it's more than simple numbers in most people's minds.
Be wary on conflating a general desire for more police with specific acceptance of current policing.
> 81% of black Americans who had both the time and inclination to fill out a targeted web survey/ answer a landline phone call
Well, yes, that's basically how every poll works. The pollsters come up with what they think is a representative sample population, they send out surveys, some people respond, some don't.
Notably, saying yes to more police does not imply being happy with the police. It implies merely seeing more police as at least marginally less likely to do harm than the criminals they'd displace.
Unfortunately, The whole defund the police movement is going to backfire on the Democrats. Safety is pretty important in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If Democrats get branded as the anti-police party they are going to lose move votes then they are going to gain by the vocal minority opinion.
No question - trump is the absolute worst republican you could run it seems. Short run I don't think republicans have a chance.
But feeling / being safe is CRITICAL to folks - they will accept dictatorships to gain safety. The whole abolish ICE / defund the police type platform seems a loser long run for the dems. I'm surprised Biden didn't make a stronger statement distancing himself form this. The violence is really toxic.
I'm a reliable dem voter and significant dem donor this cycle, but if you actually live or have lived in "tough" neighborhoods with higher crime (ie, have had your car broken into multiple times, stolen, experienced violence) then you really do start to prioritize safety.
Yes, safety is important. George Floyd should have been able to feel safe. Breonna Taylor should have been safe in her bed. Who's violence are we talking about here? What does high crime neighborhoods have to do with police not killing people wantonly?
It always annoys me when some random unelected, unselected person or people purport to speak on behalf of a community. Half the time the self appointed spokesperson isn’t even in the relevant community.
Readit News
"It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions."
Not sure what "preferred narrative" you are referring too, but most black people think America has a "police problem". Define that however you like. Bunch of other polls from the same organization for those curious enough to dig deeper. Seek Higher Things friend.
* https://news.gallup.com/poll/316247/black-americans-police-e...
* https://news.gallup.com/poll/315962/americans-say-policing-n...
I don't know what the preferred narrative here has been on the subject, but I think it's been obvious the vast majority of black folks never wanted police protection to disappear, and the lack of assurance in our interactions with police (confirmed by polls mentioned in the article) demonstrates that reform is something that would be strongly desired.
This has less to do with the style of shaping the response by what kind of questions are made, and more to do with what the question is. Support for a concept is not the same as support for a specific action. If you ask people to choose between multiple of bad choices in order to achieve a common good then the goal is likely to have a significant higher support than any of the bad choices.
An excellent illustration of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA&t=28s
Although in this case, it doesn't look like they had bad intentions and they seem to have dug at least a little below the surface and drawn what seem like sensible conclusions. I wonder if more detailed results and the full list of questions are available somewhere.
But...it doesn't do that at all. Both because the defund/dismantle/abolish narrative isn't dominant on the site, and because the framing of the survey sidesteps the structural law enforcement issues at the heart of that narrative entirely and asks merely whether people want police to spend the same, more, or less time in their neighborhoods, which isn't the issue at all.
I scanned the first several posts and didn't see any comments like that. Someone mentioning their personal experience doesn't align with a result isn't suggesting the poll is wrong. Not everything is an argument. To me this suggests the data points could be distributed into homogeneous pockets, and a discussion of this possibility seems fair game.
Some comments raise questions about the experimental methods or muse about hidden nuance in the data, which also seem like fair discussion points for this forum.
newbie789 6 hours ago [–]
This is fascinating because I am myself half black, lived in many communities of mixed demographics and never once heard a friend (of any race) say they want more police at all, ever.
And if you study a lot of opinion polling you'll notice, across all racial demographics, there tends to be a generational rift forming between the young and the old. Older generations likely remember the crime wave that took hold in the 80s and early 90s and its subsequent decline. And the younger generation lives under a larger, more aggressive police presence that was instituted since then.
What this tells me is that the rioters do not represent the people.
Here is a part that I think makes things clear:
"Bottom Line
It's not so much the volume of interactions Black Americans have with the police that troubles them or differentiates them from other racial groups, but rather the quality of those interactions."
If we take the gallup and normalize it by social economic status then the result seems to pretty much align with a desire for more police presence at the lower end and less police presence at the higher end, which in turn reflect the crime rate at regions with higher social economics status vs low social economic status. This would unlikely surprise anyone here on HN.
But if you proxy social economic status with demographics then the result becomes political, and so people desire to find an different answer.
"many people?" How many? "Self awarded virtue?" Who is doing this?
I interacted with a police officer a grand total of 3 times in the last 20 years: one traffic citation, one traffic ticket (missing front plate on the car - deserved), and an officer stopped by after someone broke into our mailbox and asked if I'd press charges (I said I would, but they never found the perp).
Compare that to a bad neighborhood in e.g. Chicago or Detroit where the situation is worse than in Kabul, and without constant, heavy, aggressive police presence a lot more people will be murdered.
The belief that we do not need police and that a "social worker" is sufficient in e.g. Chicago is what someone has astutely called a "luxury belief", a modern equivalent of "let them eat cake". It comes from the tower so ivory, you can't look at it without hurting your eyes in broad daylight.
I think most people still believe that we need some policing. But that policing isn't solving the longer term problems. We know that sending people to prison has a tendency to turn people into criminals even if their original crime was minor (not everyone of course). So why is that our strategy for dealing for crime rather than tackling the underlying social and economic issues? There's good reason to think that crime levels would be reduced if half the police budget was put into social programs (specifically in the US where police budgets are ridiculous).
However Detroit's PD still has bad cops even if they are miles ahead of other police departments, even though we could use more police in general - I don't think more "heavy handedness" or "aggressiveness" is useful or desired.
You’re making a strong statement here so you’re getting a lot of responses, but it’s completely vague so people just have to guess what you mean.
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I think that's actually impossible. I often try to check my confirmation bias, I can make myself consciously aware of it, but I can't undo it. Like an optical illusion, you can't unsee it. Like riding the bike, you can't unlearn it.
I've had this experience recently with a video game: played for a decade, switched to another game for a few months, moved back to first game - unlearned the controls (instinct is to use controls of second game). Interestingly now I've re-learned my ability seems to have improved.
I think it works with optical illusions too: sort term as well, if my kids are anything to go by (they might have misreported seeing the illusion - eg lady in hat|hag with big nose).
N=1~, but across various activities. I'm a bit older, so brain plasticity is not what it used to be.
The police abolitionist movement is calling for removing untrained, armed, and oftentimes extremely racist individuals from the streets and replacing them with social programs, housing, education, healthcare.
You can't just do 10% of the ask here and then be surprised when shit doesn't magically get better.
I’m sorry but it is quite obvious that a whole lot of people carrying around ACAB (all cops are bad) and “defund the police” signs don’t go along with the this-is-what-they-actually-mean explanations. They mean to have their message taken at face value.
I saw myself spraypainted on a Minneapolis building “actually defund the police”. it is hard to reinterpret all cops are bad as anything but the obvious, and it is quite popular.
Unfortunately, this part is extremely vague and is missing a track record. So how it ends up in the real human world, is police funding gets cut and the funds get diverted into corrupt politicians' pockets. Like the Chicago mayor that successfully reduced police funding only to have a separate police detachment placed near her home.
Canada had an experiment of removing policing for just one day. It did not go well at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray-Hill_riot
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I guess I also don't know anybody who has done a gallup poll or anybody that knows anybody who has ever done a gallup poll in their lives so who knows?
Edit: I don't know how or where these are conducted, or their exact phrasing of their questions, but I'm very curious about that.
Because, some rural areas in America have a "posse" system where volunteers get to ride around armed, sometimes outfitted (by taxpayer money) with bulletproof vests and big stickers for their cars showing their semi-official affiliation with the police (or sheriff's department). On the record, they're only supposed to observe or report yet in practice I'd question why it's crucial in some places to outfit posses with bulletproof through taxpayer money in that case, especially in places that have a very low crime rate?
I only bring this up because if I wanted to tilt a poll, I'd ask folks in areas where this is a possibility, where asking about a reduction in police force implies an increase in these somewhat-sanctioned vigilantes. You wouldn't even have to include it in the question, you'd just have to ask somebody standing in the right spot.
In this case, "Defund the Police" can mean a hundred different policy approaches from as simple as cut funding/staff/resources to as complex as redistributing that funding and resources to non-police support structures like social workers, mental health professionals, and the other roles that an omnibus police department handles.
In that sense, I don't support straight defunding of police. I do support redistributing funding/resources to new or expanded public health departments with a push for mental health and drug abuse support. But that needs to happen as part of a larger approach to decriminalization of drug possession/use (not selling/distributing, just possession/use), criminal justice reform where those convicted of such nonviolent crimes are released and record scrubbed, plus support for those to gain an education or employment without stigma. Ideally we can establish programs and tools to tackle the problems that led to a life of crime or drug abuse, focusing on reform.
That should also include immigration reform and the elimination of 'illegal' terms by expanding quotas and simplifying the process for citizenship. Cheaper education, child care, and medical care/prescriptions are also needed to reduce the burden on most working Americans so they can educate themselves, find better employment, and better care for themselves and their family. Ending food insecurity (which, by the way, it's insane the US even has) would be a solid start. People join gangs because they solve problems they face like wanting to belong, physical/financial security, etc. By working to resolve those issues for anyone in the states, immigrant or citizen, we can address the root cause not the symptoms.
Much more complicated that it seems, and that's not even getting into the various departments/programs/bills/etc required to progress that. This is also a heavily opinionated comment that clearly leans liberal and would face plenty of challenges from the current conservative side of US politics. But it would also be progress toward solving a series of issues that undermine freedom and peaceful society.
Maybe the police cruising down the street two or three times more often might've changed that. That's an interesting point.
Edit: To clarify, no person I've ever met that lived in that area ever expressed a desire for more police. It was mostly things about housing and mental health care with that particular issue. I am specifically talking about my experience in the Tenderloin in this case.
A LEO can be incredibly discourteous to you while still keeping you safe, and you might reasonably accept the former to gain a greater sense of the latter.
Harsh maybe, but also true. Ideally they would be polite, but my interactions with police (here in Aus) are exclusively when something has gone wrong.
I have never in my life heard anyone talk about having 'more or less police' - so why is it surprising that you haven't heard about it.
The polls is not about 'what someone was saying unsolicited' - it was about 'what they actually think'.
There's nothing surprising or funny about it.
"Because, some rural areas in America have a "posse" system where volunteers get to ride around armed, sometimes outfitted (by taxpayer money) with bulletproof vests and big stickers for their cars showing their semi-official affiliation with the police"
This has nothing to do with anything.
People want more or less police for the obvious reasons - also - despite the rhetoric, most Black communities are actually under policed, not over policed.
>I have never in my life heard anyone talk about having 'more or less police'
I've personally known quite a few homeless people (and been one!) that had been repeatedly displaced by police that spoke at length about how they'd prefer fewer police, since the demolition of homeless camps are often perceived as being for show or just something that happened because officers were bored and simply had nothing to do that day.
They perceived it as being for show since they'd often be able to reconstruct the camp the very next day and largely be left alone for weeks or even months afterward.
I also know a woman that had a seriously dangerous stalker that had friends in the local police that somehow had the clout to send officers to her home on a whim. She's been arrested multiple times without ever being convicted of anything, usually not even charged at all. One time, she was 5150'd (mandatory 72 hour psychiatric evaluation) while in the middle of serving cake at her son's birthday because the stalker (who was about 300 miles away on that day) called his buddies and said she'd threatened suicide. She was able to produce proof on the scene that she hadn't contacted him at all, but was taken in anyway.
She has personally expressed on many occasions that she wished the police stuck to a more strictly defined set of duties so that there would be less opportunity for an abuser to use his connections to use them as his own personal harassment squad, which includes a reduction in total numbers of police presence.
I suppose we just know different people!
Re: My thought about posses.
>This has nothing to do with anything.
I felt as though I explained the connection in the next paragraph, but I'm more than happy to explain in more detail how a person could in some situation prefer the presence of trained police than state-funded posses that have considerably less oversight and accountability. If you could clarify why you think this is incorrect, I am more than happy to discuss this further.
> most Black communities are actually under policed, not over policed.
Can you expand on this? I'd love more data on this point. If you're referencing the poll itself, you'll see that I already am skeptical about how it should be interpreted.
I see no indication that they are provided any equipment.
No weapons, no "bulletproof vests", nada.
Whether or not they have to pay for the required training is unclear.
Also -- and I ask out of genuine curiosity -- how is this not aligned with the idea of community-based policing?
I currently live in a rural area where the sheriff's office provides bullet-proof vests using county funds, and has vowed to expand the program in the coming year. I am not aware of any training necessary to volunteer for the posse (the sheriff's office doesn't publish any clear guidelines about this.) All that I am aware of is that there are roughly ~30 officers total on this half of the county, and over 380 posse members according to published numbers.
I have heard of a few cases of posse volunteers following people around in an intimidating fashion (Despite no wrongdoing occurring on the part of the of those followed. Every bit of weird behavior on their part was focused on Hispanic people and young women.) There was no news of anyone being reprimanded or ejected from the posse.
As for community policing goes, I think that term may mean different things to different people. If by community policing you mean "possibly untrained, armed and armored people doing patrols with opaque rules and structure with limited accountability to the community, all on the taxpayer dime" it sounds somewhat similar to regular policing without having to pay salaries or pensions.
I do not find that to be a meaningful difference (aside from the significant savings) , and not something that I would endorse.
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I don't believe that anymore. The emergence of body cameras are amazing because they show just how bad we're constantly being lied to. YouTubers like Donut Operator really opened my eyes.
I think back to my younger years and all the ways I've seen police go out of their way to do things they didn't need to. I've seem some do really shitty things too ... but overall, I think we need to remember they're human beings.
We're all just human beings, and most people join the police because they want to do the right thing. If many of these problem cities, police forces are composed of a large number of minorities too.
Especially during this time, let's try to remember we're all humans here.
I think in theory this is the idea, but I think in reality it isn’t. I know four people I grew up with who became police and all four were not people I’d want to run into. One, in high school, stated that being a cop is the only job you can have where you are paid to beat people up (I argued boxing, not realizing he’d later be a cop). Another was the middle school bully. Another was a high school drug dealer — who I’m not sure ever stopped. And the one black guy I knew who became a cop was just a jerk.
Maybe coincidence, but I have a feeling that the profession attracts exactly the mindset you don’t want as a cop. But people who don’t have that mindset probably don’t want to be cops.
Many people join the police because the pay very well, they're some of the highest paid government employees, and often make more than software developers do. They'll also get a full pension with benefits after working for only 20 years.
I've never seen an EMT or a social worker destroy homeless people's belongings, but I've seen cops do it. People who want to do the right thing typically go into other fields than law enforcement.
1.) Positions of power can attract people who have a longing for power, who may not be well-adjusted, emotionally-healthy individuals.
2.) Policing is a dangerous job, and constant personal danger can lead to regression away from the ideals we hold as a society. Something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When one of the basic needs (personal safety) is compromised, everything above it on the pyramid becomes less stable.
3.) Policing is an adversarial job. This leads to a us vs them mentality and also contributes to the next problem
4.) Racism. Racism has been part of our culture for a long time. This means... a.) some officers certainly will be coming into the force with racial biases to varying degrees, and b.) the fact that the jobs pits them as adversaries against certain races of people more than others will makes these biases worse.
Take the following - think about every single one of the human beings taking turns beating a completely subdued, incapacitated and probably unconscious person:
https://twitter.com/abelinasabrina/status/128144812054337126...
I could've picked from a few hundred similar clips, there's so many. And yet nothing will come of this. This conflict won’t ever be resolved until the police take responsibility for this sort of brutality. And they won’t, so it’ll periodically die down and simmer until another atrocity is committed and it’ll boil over again and again ad infinitum.
We can empathise with the police all we want, but this will just keep happening until someone steps in and puts an end to it. I have NO idea what that would look like, I know that when Georgia (i.e. former USSR country) had problems with their police they completely disbanded it and set it up again. Hopefully there's a less disruptive route than that but I honestly do not know.
Definitely agree that body cameras can help to clarify a lot.
Would you mind sharing a bit about what sorts of lies you may've been referencing? Or how "Donut Operator" on YouTube may've been helpful?
I'm not sure if I fully understood what you were trying to say, but it sounds like you may have some neat perspective on the topic.
The result of that experiment seems to imply even random people being "promoted" to have power over others with little demonstrable accountability is a recipe for disaster.
From the dim recesses of my memory what I took away from Plato's Republic is that you never want those who seek power to receive it and only those who don't care about it "deserve" it. (Clearly a bit of an oxymoron)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/philosopher-king
> On this view, philosophers are the last people who should or would want to rule. The Republic turns this claim upside down, arguing that it is precisely the fact that philosophers are the last people who would want to rule that qualifies them to do so. Only those who do not wish for political power can be trusted with it.
> Thus, the key to the notion of the “philosopher king” is that the philosopher is the only person who can be trusted to rule well. Philosophers are both morally and intellectually suited to rule: morally because it is in their nature to love truth and learning so much that they are free from the greed and lust that tempts others to abuse power and intellectually because they alone can gain full knowledge of reality, which in Books V through VII of the Republic is argued to culminate in knowledge of the forms of Virtue, Beauty, and, above all, the Good. The city can foster such knowledge by putting aspiring philosophers through a demanding education, and the philosophers will use their knowledge of goodness and virtue to help other citizens achieve these so far as possible.
I am a fairly optimistic person and believe people are mostly good. I agree some and perhaps many people that become police officers do it because they wish to do good. However, at a minimum I think the job attracts a lot of bullies and people that enjoy having power over others. And I think there is such a code of support of the "thin blue line" that ostensibly "good cops" can't be good cops because they allow "bad cop" behavior by their inaction.
This is a powerful article on that topic: https://www.theroot.com/maybe-there-are-no-good-cops-1790856...
I'd fix it all tomorrow by making a law that all wrongful violence/death/etc. judgements come out of the police pension and fraternal order of police funds instead of a city's budget. I bet that code of "omerta" would end in a heartbeat.
We do need some kind of forces for dealing with the occasional insane situation, but those happen rarely and public policy can be tailored to prevent many problems instead of being merely reactive and punitive. For example, poverty and lack of options cause social conflict, what if we did something about that instead of punishing people?
I also wonder if the question were phrased differently (and more accurately representing what is actually being asked for), more like "Would you support an N% cut to police budgets, which would come from X part of the police budget, to support preventative measures like social services?", if we'd see a different response.
I find it very easy to blame people who are not willing to spend 10 seconds researching what a movement stands for. We can't say that it's okay to read three words on a sign, interpret it in your own context, and then blame the movement when you don't "understand" it. It's a slogan! What do you expect for a less-than-five-word sentence that people can unite under?
The sad truth is that people respect police not because of the badge but because of the gun, and because of the threat of violence.
Many of the reform ideas being thrown around lately are ideas that places across the US have already tried.
I think people are saying photos and videos from Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and Kenosha, WI. They’re thinking they’ll take their chances with the police than with arsonists and rioters.
It's a pretty sad realization that perhaps the reason we have such violent police is, in part, because we have such a violent society.
It's hard to genuinely respect someone when there's a gun-related power dynamic forcing you to. That's not respect, that's just the threat of force. It's probably too late for America to adopt Peel's principles of policing but it's not done us much harm.
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Or more likely they don’t think preventative measures work as well as you think they do.
Edit: Once you have seen acts of senseless violence - real cruel stuff - it is hard to believe that some people can be reliably rehabilitated.
Maybe that cruelty could have been nipped in the bud if they had received better care in the past - but that’s not a risk I would take with my community.
It's ironic that this is exactly how many feel about the police themselves.
You have rights, you don't have to do anything outside the law. But you do have to comply with lawful orders. If everybody understood these things, there would be much less trouble, fear, and violence.
My town just had the sheriff for example. The sheriff had a small crew of 1-2 deputies and a secretary. When something really rough would happen, the sheriff would round up a crew. It was a really light group of people. Lots of differences between that, a militia, community policing, etc. Even today some rural communities are “policed” very differently. Now that same town has a standing police force of 40 officers, a K-9 unit, and they have fancy military vehicles. This is with a change from 5000->10000 in population.
This was all up until pretty recently (1940s-1950s) too.
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[1] https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...
Why do you believe this? It seems to me that reinvesting budgets spent on surplus humvees on more/better school counselors is a perfectly reasonable goal.
While that sounds great on paper, nothing the schools do is going to make a difference if the family support at home isn't there. You can't just throw money at the problem to make it better.
Anecdotal, but my sister used to work as a teacher & reading specialist in poorer areas. Per my last conversation with her on this topic, she said maybe 20% of the kids have a solid backing from family for education. The rest she had interacted with for one reason or another were a mix of parents who told her it was her job to teach and they wouldn't do that at home; another group of parents that were too drunk/drugged out to even answer the phone or call back; and another that would just swear at her for bothering them at home. All of her co-workers had similar accounts of this happening.
Kids that did want to learn in class were bullied for "acting white" and there were physical fights occurring weekly. She didn't teach high school, she taught 4/5th grade.
For us to make any progress with poorer schools there needs to be a community focus on education, having respect for each other, and having respect for the law. If you grow up for 18 years in an environment without those then nothing matters long term and we end up in the vicious cycle of poverty, crime, imprisonment, broken families and even more kids going through the same thing.
If the movement were "Demilitarize the police", then yes, that is absolutely something I could be in favor of.
As it stands, "Defund the police" is to me a weasel word version of "Abolish the police" and I honestly do think people are just being coy when they claim not to see that.
The level of "defund" people are advocating for varies pretty wildly.
Yes, reallocating budget is perhaps a reasonable thing.
A non trivial number of the protesters are advocating for complete elimination of the police though.
Oddly enough, I'd expect the widespread riots that have continued all summer long will have the exact opposite effect in the medium to long term.
they clearly mean defund when they say defund. Many other activists feel the same. why say defund when you mean something else.
Your comment is based on a false assumption. Demilitarizing the police would be a great idea! But the idea of defunding presumes excess funds.
Data on funding amounts are a bit harder to come by but they generally show the US has less police funding than Europe per capita.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
Basically, with your suggestion, nothing will change, other than police garages. That's clearly not what the protestors want, and as such, we can immediately discard your assertion.
Super interesting concept. Thanks for this mental mode of seeing this phenomena. I'm going to really think it over. Even if I end up rejecting it in favor of some other mental mode, it's still an amazingly interesting lens for looking at recent events.
Since when is human rationality “luxury”? This article just shot itself in the foot.
Most people's interpretation of "human rationality" is little more than a religion of its own.
I know polls claim to correct for this, but if even the census, mandated by the constitution and backed by federal law and billions of dollars, can significantly under-count black and Latino Americans, I'd be curious to see how well Gallup can do.
All this said, I DO think the majority of people (regardless of their relative melanin levels) would like to see more police in their neighborhoods, with the giant caveat that it's more than simple numbers in most people's minds.
Be wary on conflating a general desire for more police with specific acceptance of current policing.
Well, yes, that's basically how every poll works. The pollsters come up with what they think is a representative sample population, they send out surveys, some people respond, some don't.
Where the system is weakest is in the questions asked, as explained by Yes Prime Minister
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0ZZJXw4MTA
I can't see the tables gallup produced to make their claim, without those I can't see why it's of any interest.
That's a very low bar to clear.
But feeling / being safe is CRITICAL to folks - they will accept dictatorships to gain safety. The whole abolish ICE / defund the police type platform seems a loser long run for the dems. I'm surprised Biden didn't make a stronger statement distancing himself form this. The violence is really toxic.
I'm a reliable dem voter and significant dem donor this cycle, but if you actually live or have lived in "tough" neighborhoods with higher crime (ie, have had your car broken into multiple times, stolen, experienced violence) then you really do start to prioritize safety.
I wouldn't be surprised to see Trump re-elected.