In the town I live in, the police has decided to not to respond to nonemergency calls. They put the blame on their budget being cut and #defundthepolice movement. As it turns out some smart reporters looked up numbers and the budget was reduced in 2020 but it was increased back significantly in 2021.
Anecdotally, I see a constable car hiding near a stop sign close to my home almost everyday and ticketing people who do a rolling stop. How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.
> How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.
To be honest, we all know it's because traffic fines are risk-free income, while chasing actual criminals is an expense. The invisible hand of the Free Market(tm) optimizes for income instead of effectiveness, because police departments don't have competition.
City council approved an increase in taxes, and used part of it to raise the APD budget [1]. This didn't translate into a more effective force, and the perception among citizens is that police has given up on misdemeanors or infractions.
Incidentally, one of my neighbours is an officer, and his major complaints are the lack of new recruits, which is odd since that is ultimately the department responsibility, and the inability to charge people with possession of weed, since the city has effectively decriminalise it.
Why is your neighbor complaining about not being able to charge people with possession of weed? If anything, you'd think that would make their job easier. I don't know about you, but I certainly appreciate anything that makes my job easier, all else remaining equal.
Denver, too. DPD budget is higher than ever before, and they can't be bothered to respond to calls like:
- non-lethal car accidents
- disturbances of the peace
- illegal drug selling/use in public spaces
- car thefts
- break-ins
Let alone deal with predatory towing, which has really taken off in town, too. With crime skyrocketing and housing costs higher than they've ever been, I really don't understand why anyone would want to live here any more.
Of course this also misses the entire point of #defundthepolice.
Back in the 80s social services were heavily cut under the Reagan administration, on the assumption that the police could serve that purpose instead. But the police are trained to deal with potentially violent criminals and applying those techniques to the homeless or mentally ill only makes the problem worse and leads to tragedy.
So the idea is you claw back the extra money the police departments need to handle cases like that (poorly) and greatly increase the funding for social workers and state mental health institutions.
In reality the second part is a huge amount of work to set up and few if any governments have really tried to take it seriously. Most have not even freed up the money from police departments, and a few that have ended up giving it right back when they realized how much extra work it was going to make for them.
The underlying theory is that if you fix the social safety nets then you won't need much of a police force, and in fact the social support programs are much cheaper than police and jails in the long run. But they are also "socialism" so we can't have that in this country.
It’s interesting that the cities who wanted to fire all cops and then ran them out of town with pitchforks are suddenly upset cops aren’t policing as much as they used to.
De-policing was the goal and that goal has been partly achieved. Now we all get to live with it until trust is restored.
> De-policing was the goal and that goal has been partly achieved. Now we all get to live with it until trust is restored.
I call this progress. There are many people who do not think the police are effective at their jobs, or even a net good to society. I say this as a white male who has never had a positive interaction with the police in his life. I hear about the "good" cops but I never meet them, and I've met a lot of terrible cops.
What I want is for the police to be held accountable to the public they are supposedly serving. Until we have that I am happy to see fewer of them because I do not believe they are serving the public, but are instead serving themselves (on the taxpayer's dime, no less).
I'd be interested if can you supply a good body of evidence to support the claim that significant, widespread de-policing has occurred in the US and it's effects. Mostly I've just seen opinion pieces that cherry pick numbers.
Their budgets are still bigger than ever. De-policing hasn't been achieved because most of the goal was to better utilize those resources. Police refusing to do the basics of their job and increasing their budget isn't a point in favor of their positions.
State constitutions should be updated to force all revenue and assets derived from fines to be distributed equally to all residents. That would distribute the benefits widely enough to remove the current incentives where fines line the pockets of local police and fund town operating budgets.
One state (North Carolina) does do something very similar, that keeps this kind of harassment largely in check [1]. By ensuring that all fines and forfeitures paid in a county must be used for that county's public schooling, they've essentially eliminated the incentive for cops to paper as many cars as they can.
ETA: This doesn't completely solve the problem, as the federal government provides some air cover to keep screwing people over, but it does do _something_
I can't believe this practice is so ubiquitous all over the world. It is such a clear cut case of conflict of interest and should be made a textbook example that ends all discussion but here we are. An organisation that apparently has no funds to do its job, spends all its funds in employing people to gather funds so that it can continue to keep paying salary to those people gathering funds.
I'm not sure that would help. From the picture and some other information, it seems a lot of this is to police Interstate 22, which runs past the town. My guess is the town sees fines from out-of-towners as a source of revenue, one that probably benefits the residents of the town proper.
This isn't a good thing, but it probably needs to be dealt at a state level, by passing laws preventing local officers from enforcing traffic laws on the interstate.
In my state, it is the state police that have jurisdiction over all highways. For example, if you have a car accident, Based on where it is, the 911 people will dispatch the city, county or state police.
Missouri passed a law that required assets seized by the police to go to the education budget. Police responded by calling in the feds to do the seizing, who then give a kickback to the police. The federal government's name for this program is "Equitable Sharing"
the impact of these sorts of redirections is limited. in Maryland, casino revenue ostensibly funds schools. but if casino revenue drops for some reason (eg, covid), the deficit is made up elsewhere. funding for important state organs is always somewhat fungible.
if for some reason the revenue can't be made up elsewhere and the schools come to depend on revenue from fines/seizures, that still leaves the police department with a lot of leverage.
I have long thought that safety related fines should go to cover people harmed by those accidents. Hit by running a red light, receive some compensation from the red light ticket fund.
> Or there’s another resident who was one of 75 people that were given a ticket for simply using the left lane on the interstate.
"Simply using the left lane" is illegal unless you're actively passing someone. In my state it's one mile. If you haven't passed someone in the last mile, you need to be in the right lane. I know in some states it's a quarter mile, which at 65-75 seems a bit aggressive (basically saying you have to be going 15-20+ faster than the person you're passing just to safely get over in time).
But seriously, hanging out in the left lane is stupid and unsafe, regardless of your speed.
it should be illegal, but per TFA, was not at the time.
"She argued that she only drove in the left lane to pass other vehicles, and her ticket – on May 26, 2019 – came five months before Alabama’s Anti-Road Rage Act, a law making it illegal to drive in the left lane of an interstate for more than a mile and a half, went into effect."
I find it ironic but unsurprising that something called the Anti-Road Rage Act legislates against lane hoggers. Whilst I find lane hoggers annoying I think the responsibility for road rage is with the raging party, so I'd prefer an act that focused on those committing the road rage, not triggering it. What they've done here is victim blaming and naming a bill based on PR, not policy (also no surprise).
It really depends on the state laws [0]. It also really depends on the traffic patterns. In places like California where there are 7+ lane wide roads, the left lane is not so special (unless it's a HOV lane). If you've only got two lanes, it's more important to keep the left lane for passing, but when things are bumper to bumper, that doesn't make any sense.
Seems like it would be the opposite to me: If there are only 2 lanes, you need both for travel. But if you have 7 you can reserve some for speeders.
And in all my driving, I've yet to be overtaken legally on the left - they always speed in order to do it, which is illegal. So I'm not clear why "it's more important to keep the left lane for passing".
Just make the left lane "speed limit" lane, and the right lane slow lane. Meaning if you are going the speed limit you can stay in the left lane.
(This is a hot topic, I'm sure I'll get downvotes, I don't care about that, but I would appreciate replies more. Specifically about what's wrong with staying in the left lane if you are going the maximum legal speed.)
this is one of the few traffic laws that i wish were enforced vigorously everywhere (turn signals being another). it'd improve the flow of traffic, and to boot, keep people focused on driving rather than their phones.
I wish these laws were enforced where I live. Every day I deal with ridiculous situations like motorcyclists passing me on the left and right at the same time. If they crash into my car, the justice system will blame me for it because "cars are bigger and the bigger vehicle is responsible for the smaller vehicle". Makes absolutely no sense and it's so demoralizing.
no, it isn't. whenever you have more than one lane per direction on a limited access highway, the left lane is for passing only. it's not for people who find dealing with onramp traffic annoying.
How is it that in the US the police is such a deregulated entity? Almost anywhere I’ve been in the world the police worked the same nation or state wide, maybe the local police department of town A works a little different from that of town B but the core rules are many and the same for all of them.
Which historical, legal and cultural reasons bring to this situation where a small town can shape a police department so freely?
In the US there are multiple levels of law enforcement that generally have their own jurisdictions. At the national level, there is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to handle crimes that occur across state lines or large crime webs, like the Mafia. Then there are state-wide police, some states call them highway patrol, others state police. Probably the most famous are the Texas Rangers. These have the jurisdiction of the entire state.
Next down the line is the county Sheriff, typically for enforcing county-wide laws. In many areas that don't have a local police force, the county sheriff are the most local police force they have.
Finally there are city police like Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) or New York Police Department (NYPD). These departments handle crime and law enforcement within a city's limits. These range from very large like the above examples to small departments like this article.
Generally if a crime occurs within a city it's that city police that will investigate, if it is outside the city within a county it may be the county sheriff or state police, and across state lines, the federal government gets involved. Obviously this can cause some confusion or fighting over jurisdictions. On the flip-side a local police department can help the needs of the community specifically. For example, where I live we have a small police department that responds immediately if there is a problem when you call them. They often help elderly residents that are having trouble, will drive by your house when you're on vacation, etc. Depending on states and cities local laws, sheriffs and police chiefs may be hired or elected.
Culturally, the United States has been oriented towards local control and biased against federal control. The states traditionally have been very independent of the federal government. For example most state constitutions are very long compared to our relatively short national constitution. In the western part of the united states, as communities were developed and grew, the need for local law enforcement grew with those communities, often before they were really a part of a state or the federal government had any control. So the legacies of those localized police and law enforcement entities has lived on.
I'm less familiar with how Europe's or other countries' police came to be, but typically those countries are far smaller than the United States and generally have more centralized federal power, which means having a centralized police force makes more sense.
Anyway I feel there is something missing and I cannot exactly say what it is. Maybe it is simply something cultural that is not so easily graspable from those living somewhere else, it always feels so strange to me that a small town has so much freedom to shape its law enforcement so freely… for me a shared law across the state is the basis for equality, and to have a shared law you need to enforce it similarly.
And also even more local police departments such as campus police (on university campuses), or stuff like the BART police in the Bay Area (BART being the local commuter rail network).
Because the united states is designed politically and legally to be decentralized, giving large discretion to localities and states over how they run their rules and business.
For example, most people in jail are not in federal jail. Most people are served by local police. Rules on taxes vary county to county as needs vary county to county.
Yeah this is something I know and understand, I also appreciate this line of thought.
What I don’t understand is about police in particular, if police is “law enforcement”. I’d expect some laws to be national, then some laws to be state, then going down and down until we reach a single small town where something might be different from the next one but they should share many things… how is it that the enforcement part of those same laws is so subjective?
IMHO the law has two sides: the normative one, what it actually is, and the enforcement one, how it is applied to society. If the enforcement part is highly subjective we are distorting the law. It should be desirable to minimize the differences of enforcing the same law.
Is it something really appreciated by the population over there that the same law is applied very differently in the next town over simply because it decides to enforce it in a different manner?
That's true but largely irrelevant to this story - traffic laws are the same through the state.
The main thing in this is law enforcement discretion. There's no way the population would vote these malicious leaders in if the tickets were being given to residents. They are mostly hitting non-residents. This is very common near military bases. The law is the same, but they choose not to apply it to residents (and apparently make up violations too).
Hopefully people have dashcams, and record interactions on their phones. It sounds like they will end up losing much more in lawsuits than they are bringing in. Perhaps the FBI and DOJ will get involved due to rights and color of law violations.
This WaPo article has some good background, it puts the number of local police and sheriff depts at over 15,000, with 90% having less than 50 officers.
Looking at the map, I'm surprised that Google Maps/etc don't route around such abuse. For people that have no choice but to go through there, fine, but this seems like the kind of thing that would be worth driving an extra half hour to avoid. They already have "avoid toll roads", and this is worse.
The closest thing I can think of that they did was with Google Flights "basic economy" and similar fares (no carryon, etc) had a big red warning icon, most airlines ditched those types of fares within like a year.
I mean, ideally I'd like to be able to define my own don't-go-there areas, such as near airports or areas that smell bad, but having defaults that route traffic around areas like this seems good.
Legislating that traffic/etc fines go to a _state_ budget instead of local town budgets might solve this, but I imagine that would be very hard to pass, let alone survive lawsuits.
If we're looking to technological solutions, what about crowdsourcing some drones to drop Molotov cocktails on these criminals' houses? They could even be adorned with a Punisher logo to ironically take back the symbol. Pay off the underfunded fire department to just watch them burn. Cryptocurrency was supposed to be good for something, right?
Some notable points collected by a commenter on another site:
- "...just one of the 10 Brookside vehicles is painted with police striping, but nine others bear no emblems..."
- "...officers wear gray uniforms with no Brookside insignias."
- "The names of the officers were not listed on the tickets in secretive Brookside."
- "[the city budget] did not feature a breakout of the police department."
- "Asked in December how many officers were on staff, [the police chief] refused to say, citing “security” concerns..."
- "[The mayor and the police chief] said neither the town nor the police department relies on the revenue officers bring in. In fact, they said in November they didn’t know how that money is spent."
As others have pointed out, this sort of thing is not exactly rare, this is just a particularly egregious example of it. And this is after decades of attempts to 'reform' the police. When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community.
Sorry to say but who ever decided that the phrase "defund the police" is good or smart made a huge mistake. Or they may have deliberately picked a phrase that would upset and confuse a large number of people. It has split the political discord right down the middle and you will never get proper reform.
The phrase that should have been used is "reform the police" because it would get almost every one aboard even the police themselves. Nothing is perfect in this world and almost every one can think of a way to improve something.
This decade of attempt to reform the police most people didn't know or care about. This new movement could have brought it to light and get something done that everyone can agree on. Instead it turned into a left vs right shit show.
They had been trying to "reform" the Minneapolis police (where George Floyd was killed) for years, but the police union had successfully blocked even the most moderate changes. There are similar stories everywhere.
"Defund the police" is a good slogan because it makes it clear that you have to pick a side - the police have made it clear that "reform" is not going to be possible through cooperation. This isn't to say that there aren't plenty of individual officers who would support, or at least not obstruct, reform, but without destroying the existing institutions (police unions, primarily) that perpetuate the status quo, and disempowering the individuals who are committed to it, nothing is going to change.
Good lord yes. The second I heard the phrase "defund the police" I immediately had a vision of the conservative attack ads:
Open on an elderly woman, sitting quietly at home knitting. Suddenly we hear a window smash, and we see a burgler, in a ski mask and everything, attacking her window with an axe. She lets out a scream and runs for her landline. She dials 911, breathing heavily, and says "Hello, I need help-". But an automated voice on the other line cuts her off "we're sorry, due to recent funding changes, the operating hours of emergency services has been reduced. To leave a message, please stay on the line". As the voice drones on, we zoom in on the phone, hear a muffled scream, and the phone drops dramatically onto the floor. Fade to black, brought to you my Americans for a more American America.
... I mean seriously, the attack ad writes itself. I would honestly donate money every month to a nonprofit who's sole job was to find progressive activists, and run whatever shit they are saying through a focus group. I'm in favor of police reform and everything those activists are saying, but they need to get their shit together.
> The phrase that should have been used is "reform the police" because it would get almost every one aboard even the police themselves.
Yeah, that's the problem with "reform", it is so meaningless that the very police that need to be reformed are all for it!
This is not a system that can be fixed, a ludicrous percentage, maybe as high as 95%, of current police will need to find a new line of work for policing to be fixed in the US.
"Defund the police" was born out of the anger within the Black activist community post the events of the George Floyd shooting. It wasn't something that was run through a PR firm and focus group tested, it was very much a primal scream of "fuck the system and burn it to the ground" against the establishment in its entirety.
Obviously, it became problematic once it was assimilated by the very machine it was raging against, but it was never meant to be palatable to the mainstream or politically correct.
When I hear the phrase, to me it's more about shifting resources from punishment based (policing), to community development in historically underserved minority communities. The effects of redlining mean we still have many highly racially segregated cities. It's directly acknowledging and confronting that history, which is uncomfortable for a lot of white people.
One can support both public safety and community development, and it's win-win if helping raise people up out of poverty reduces the need for police presence.
(Disclaimer: I don't fully agree with the position but I felt it there is context collapse[0] happening that I want to push back against because I think context collapse is deeply poisonous to intelligent conversation.)
My understanding is "defund the police" is actually within the context that efforts to reform policing as an institution in america have broadly failed, so the only solution to try and make less-shitty police is to burn the institution to the ground and rebuild anew. In that context, "defund the police" makes total sense from the perspective of an activist who is agitating for a better system of community safety.
The phrase I would use, myself, is "abolish the police". "Defund the police" also adequately captures my view: "reform the police" does not. I do not want "proper reform."
There is clearly a need for some governmental mechanism for public safety: it's also clear that the police, as we know it are the wrong starting point, and if at all the existence of the police prevents crime, it's by coincidence.
(I also have no problem being partisan about my political views. They're political views! If you could get everyone of every political view to agree on something, it's probably ineffective. Standing up for specific strong viewpoints is a good thing.)
>Sorry to say but who ever decided that the phrase "defund the police" is good or smart made a huge mistake. Or they may have deliberately picked a phrase that would upset and confuse a large number of people.
I believe it was Black Lives Matter (an organisation whose name is literally a divisive statement) that coined that phrase, or at least popularised it.
To be honest with you, if you look at their actions, I'm not sure if the goal is to actually end police violence/abuse of power. If that did happen, all of these influential activists would suddenly be out of a "job".
The problem is, "reform" is an extremely vague term that can be stretched from "rebuild completely" to "issue receipts to every subject of a police stop so that PoC can prove discrimination".
"Defund"/"Abolish" are crystal clear in their meaning.
I've long suspected that the "defund" moniker was maliciously attached by the other side, as a way of shaping the narrative. "Rebuild" or "reform" would sound entirely too reasonable. If you just repeat the inflammatory term loud enough and often enough, it becomes the de facto name for something even if it's almost entirely wrong. And then you spend the rest of your career tearing down the strawman that you built. It's very profitable.
The phrase I would have used is "pass the Obama police reforms." "Reform the police" is perhaps too vague - reform means different things to different people and status quo keepers are often celebrated as "reformers". On the other hand, Obama wrote a list of seven explicit reforms that police departments should make. They really aren't that controversial. And, Obama was going through a popularity surge (as Trump was going through an unpopularity surge).
I think such a slogan would have captured a solid 60-70% of the electorate, which the current "defund" rhetoric hovers around the high 30s.
> When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community.
All too often arguments against this interpret 'defund' at the farthest possible extreme, but no one is calling for an end of law enforcement.
The reality is that providing constant budget increases for better weapons, faster cars, additional staff, etc. is causing the police to become more militarized. The Military are a defense against enemies. As police become more militarized their enemy becomes the civilians who they are meant to protect and serve.
The actual idea is to defund police departments as they are structured today, and allocate that money instead to social and mental health programs as well as law enforcement with a foundation in de-escalation and transparency.
Of course there would still be law enforcement to maintain peace and safety, and it would be based on transparency and accountability.
> no one is calling for an end of law enforcement.
There are several comments in this discussion calling for abolishing the police. Whenever this topic gets brought up, it usually seems like half the people are defending "Defund the Police" by saying that no one wants to get rid of the police, and the other half are defending "Defund the Police" by telling people why the police should be abolished.
And people with political power are calling for the abolishing them as well. This is Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from last April:
> No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can't be reformed.
I'm not sure why people who want reform are so set on tying themselves to this slogan. If I starting chanting "Defund Public Schools!", I wouldn't expect anyone to interpret that as "remove bloat from school budgets and use the money to fund social services for the kids in order to lessen the burden on teachers and make public schools function better."
> "...just one of the 10 Brookside vehicles is painted with police striping, but nine others bear no emblems..."
What I'm struggling with here is that the article says they have 8 FTE officers plus additional part-time / volunteer officers... so why do they have so darn many cars? Or to put it another way - my town of 35,000 has 48 FTE positions, 5 of which weren't filled this past year. That's in line with other communities of similar size that I've observed. So it puts the size of this department in perspective - it's a vey large headcount for the size of the community, so it shouldn't be a surprise that they are taking action either out of boredom or because someone is on the take.
> When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community.
Some sure. Certainly not all. I don't even think most. If I'm wrong, then the meme itself needs better phrasing.
> We call for a national defunding of police. We demand investment in our communities and the resources to ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive.
But what does it mean to have “resources to … survive [and] thrive”? I would argue it implies a rethinking and rebuilding of policing based on the needs of the community, like GP claims. Another leftist might think it’s the anarchical approach. It’s vague, more or less intentionally
I should think that the number of people who want to completely do away with the police is vanishingly small. Actually, it's probably about 3 people.
It seems like the right in the USA are being deliberately pedantic about the phrase "defund the police", to make it sound like those on the left are crazy.
So you're dismissing the defund the police movement based on the phrasing and not knowing anything about it? What would be so harmful with learning about the thing you're speaking about with authority before doing so...?
You had a lot of interesting pieces and then diluted the impact of your statement by tying in "defunding the police" which is an overly fraught almost meaningless phrase at this point since it means almost something completely different to every person who hears it - which loses all its value.
I think most reasonable people can agree with your previous points that this is in fact a corrupted system. That was where you had the most power of your comment.
No, abolishing the police means getting rid of the police. You don’t get to redefine words with this sort of Doublespeak.
You wanted to capitalize on the thrill of saying something as bold as “Abolish the police” and then backpedal when it became convenient to take a more reasonable approach. It’s dishonest and it’s becoming a pattern after “Black Lives Matter” was called out for being similarly problematic. This isn’t limited to the left either. “Read my lips: no new taxes”, “Lock her up”, and “Build the wall” were likewise dishonest.
They might not get to “redefine words” but neither do you get to just change them to fit your point. The slogan used “defund” not ‘abolish”. “Defund” is somewhat ambiguous, indeed. That the initial slogan with “abolish” didn’t catch on actually helps to show that abolishment was not the intended meaning.
HW absolutely meant "No new taxes" when he said it. That doesn't make it dishonest, but it does illustrate why boxing yourself into dogmatic ideological stances is a bad move from a policy standpoint.
I also noticed that, and gave up reading at that point.
Maybe I'm cynical, but when people can't do the basic minimum to be understood... I don't feel any obligation to understand them.
Readit News
Anecdotally, I see a constable car hiding near a stop sign close to my home almost everyday and ticketing people who do a rolling stop. How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me.
To be honest, we all know it's because traffic fines are risk-free income, while chasing actual criminals is an expense. The invisible hand of the Free Market(tm) optimizes for income instead of effectiveness, because police departments don't have competition.
Exactly, with negligible exceptions every police force in the country has always had their budget increase.
City council approved an increase in taxes, and used part of it to raise the APD budget [1]. This didn't translate into a more effective force, and the perception among citizens is that police has given up on misdemeanors or infractions.
Incidentally, one of my neighbours is an officer, and his major complaints are the lack of new recruits, which is odd since that is ultimately the department responsibility, and the inability to charge people with possession of weed, since the city has effectively decriminalise it.
[1] https://www.kut.org/austin/2021-08-12/austin-passes-4-5-bill...
- non-lethal car accidents - disturbances of the peace - illegal drug selling/use in public spaces - car thefts - break-ins
Let alone deal with predatory towing, which has really taken off in town, too. With crime skyrocketing and housing costs higher than they've ever been, I really don't understand why anyone would want to live here any more.
Back in the 80s social services were heavily cut under the Reagan administration, on the assumption that the police could serve that purpose instead. But the police are trained to deal with potentially violent criminals and applying those techniques to the homeless or mentally ill only makes the problem worse and leads to tragedy.
So the idea is you claw back the extra money the police departments need to handle cases like that (poorly) and greatly increase the funding for social workers and state mental health institutions.
In reality the second part is a huge amount of work to set up and few if any governments have really tried to take it seriously. Most have not even freed up the money from police departments, and a few that have ended up giving it right back when they realized how much extra work it was going to make for them.
The underlying theory is that if you fix the social safety nets then you won't need much of a police force, and in fact the social support programs are much cheaper than police and jails in the long run. But they are also "socialism" so we can't have that in this country.
Revenue.
De-policing was the goal and that goal has been partly achieved. Now we all get to live with it until trust is restored.
I call this progress. There are many people who do not think the police are effective at their jobs, or even a net good to society. I say this as a white male who has never had a positive interaction with the police in his life. I hear about the "good" cops but I never meet them, and I've met a lot of terrible cops.
What I want is for the police to be held accountable to the public they are supposedly serving. Until we have that I am happy to see fewer of them because I do not believe they are serving the public, but are instead serving themselves (on the taxpayer's dime, no less).
[1] https://jeremymarkovich.substack.com/p/why-north-carolina-do...
ETA: This doesn't completely solve the problem, as the federal government provides some air cover to keep screwing people over, but it does do _something_
This isn't a good thing, but it probably needs to be dealt at a state level, by passing laws preventing local officers from enforcing traffic laws on the interstate.
Guide to Equitable Sharing for State, Local, and Tribal Law Enforcement: https://www.justice.gov/criminal-afmls/file/794696/download
St. Charles, Missouri police have been coercing drivers into signing over millions of dollars of their assets without convictions or even charges:
https://reason.com/2019/12/30/missouri-cops-used-federal-loo...
if for some reason the revenue can't be made up elsewhere and the schools come to depend on revenue from fines/seizures, that still leaves the police department with a lot of leverage.
"Simply using the left lane" is illegal unless you're actively passing someone. In my state it's one mile. If you haven't passed someone in the last mile, you need to be in the right lane. I know in some states it's a quarter mile, which at 65-75 seems a bit aggressive (basically saying you have to be going 15-20+ faster than the person you're passing just to safely get over in time).
But seriously, hanging out in the left lane is stupid and unsafe, regardless of your speed.
"She argued that she only drove in the left lane to pass other vehicles, and her ticket – on May 26, 2019 – came five months before Alabama’s Anti-Road Rage Act, a law making it illegal to drive in the left lane of an interstate for more than a mile and a half, went into effect."
Emphasis my own
[0] https://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
And in all my driving, I've yet to be overtaken legally on the left - they always speed in order to do it, which is illegal. So I'm not clear why "it's more important to keep the left lane for passing".
Just make the left lane "speed limit" lane, and the right lane slow lane. Meaning if you are going the speed limit you can stay in the left lane.
(This is a hot topic, I'm sure I'll get downvotes, I don't care about that, but I would appreciate replies more. Specifically about what's wrong with staying in the left lane if you are going the maximum legal speed.)
But live in a suburb where the local beltway has 6 lanes in each direction - the left lane is basically just another lane.
How is it that in the US the police is such a deregulated entity? Almost anywhere I’ve been in the world the police worked the same nation or state wide, maybe the local police department of town A works a little different from that of town B but the core rules are many and the same for all of them.
Which historical, legal and cultural reasons bring to this situation where a small town can shape a police department so freely?
Generally if a crime occurs within a city it's that city police that will investigate, if it is outside the city within a county it may be the county sheriff or state police, and across state lines, the federal government gets involved. Obviously this can cause some confusion or fighting over jurisdictions. On the flip-side a local police department can help the needs of the community specifically. For example, where I live we have a small police department that responds immediately if there is a problem when you call them. They often help elderly residents that are having trouble, will drive by your house when you're on vacation, etc. Depending on states and cities local laws, sheriffs and police chiefs may be hired or elected.
Culturally, the United States has been oriented towards local control and biased against federal control. The states traditionally have been very independent of the federal government. For example most state constitutions are very long compared to our relatively short national constitution. In the western part of the united states, as communities were developed and grew, the need for local law enforcement grew with those communities, often before they were really a part of a state or the federal government had any control. So the legacies of those localized police and law enforcement entities has lived on.
I'm less familiar with how Europe's or other countries' police came to be, but typically those countries are far smaller than the United States and generally have more centralized federal power, which means having a centralized police force makes more sense.
Anyway I feel there is something missing and I cannot exactly say what it is. Maybe it is simply something cultural that is not so easily graspable from those living somewhere else, it always feels so strange to me that a small town has so much freedom to shape its law enforcement so freely… for me a shared law across the state is the basis for equality, and to have a shared law you need to enforce it similarly.
Thanks again :)
Just blows my mind.
For example, most people in jail are not in federal jail. Most people are served by local police. Rules on taxes vary county to county as needs vary county to county.
This is good and bad
What I don’t understand is about police in particular, if police is “law enforcement”. I’d expect some laws to be national, then some laws to be state, then going down and down until we reach a single small town where something might be different from the next one but they should share many things… how is it that the enforcement part of those same laws is so subjective?
IMHO the law has two sides: the normative one, what it actually is, and the enforcement one, how it is applied to society. If the enforcement part is highly subjective we are distorting the law. It should be desirable to minimize the differences of enforcing the same law.
Is it something really appreciated by the population over there that the same law is applied very differently in the next town over simply because it decides to enforce it in a different manner?
The main thing in this is law enforcement discretion. There's no way the population would vote these malicious leaders in if the tickets were being given to residents. They are mostly hitting non-residents. This is very common near military bases. The law is the same, but they choose not to apply it to residents (and apparently make up violations too).
Hopefully people have dashcams, and record interactions on their phones. It sounds like they will end up losing much more in lawsuits than they are bringing in. Perhaps the FBI and DOJ will get involved due to rights and color of law violations.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/05/08/most-police...
Legislating that traffic/etc fines go to a _state_ budget instead of local town budgets might solve this, but I imagine that would be very hard to pass, let alone survive lawsuits.
Some notable points collected by a commenter on another site:
- "...just one of the 10 Brookside vehicles is painted with police striping, but nine others bear no emblems..."
- "...officers wear gray uniforms with no Brookside insignias."
- "The names of the officers were not listed on the tickets in secretive Brookside."
- "[the city budget] did not feature a breakout of the police department."
- "Asked in December how many officers were on staff, [the police chief] refused to say, citing “security” concerns..."
- "[The mayor and the police chief] said neither the town nor the police department relies on the revenue officers bring in. In fact, they said in November they didn’t know how that money is spent."
As others have pointed out, this sort of thing is not exactly rare, this is just a particularly egregious example of it. And this is after decades of attempts to 'reform' the police. When people talk about defunding or abolishing the police, they refer to razing systems like this (or parts like this in larger departments) to the ground, rethinking and rebuilding based on the needs of the community.
The phrase that should have been used is "reform the police" because it would get almost every one aboard even the police themselves. Nothing is perfect in this world and almost every one can think of a way to improve something.
This decade of attempt to reform the police most people didn't know or care about. This new movement could have brought it to light and get something done that everyone can agree on. Instead it turned into a left vs right shit show.
"Defund the police" is a good slogan because it makes it clear that you have to pick a side - the police have made it clear that "reform" is not going to be possible through cooperation. This isn't to say that there aren't plenty of individual officers who would support, or at least not obstruct, reform, but without destroying the existing institutions (police unions, primarily) that perpetuate the status quo, and disempowering the individuals who are committed to it, nothing is going to change.
Open on an elderly woman, sitting quietly at home knitting. Suddenly we hear a window smash, and we see a burgler, in a ski mask and everything, attacking her window with an axe. She lets out a scream and runs for her landline. She dials 911, breathing heavily, and says "Hello, I need help-". But an automated voice on the other line cuts her off "we're sorry, due to recent funding changes, the operating hours of emergency services has been reduced. To leave a message, please stay on the line". As the voice drones on, we zoom in on the phone, hear a muffled scream, and the phone drops dramatically onto the floor. Fade to black, brought to you my Americans for a more American America.
... I mean seriously, the attack ad writes itself. I would honestly donate money every month to a nonprofit who's sole job was to find progressive activists, and run whatever shit they are saying through a focus group. I'm in favor of police reform and everything those activists are saying, but they need to get their shit together.
Yet we're here talking about it, repeating the phrase. So I disagree.
Yeah, that's the problem with "reform", it is so meaningless that the very police that need to be reformed are all for it!
This is not a system that can be fixed, a ludicrous percentage, maybe as high as 95%, of current police will need to find a new line of work for policing to be fixed in the US.
Obviously, it became problematic once it was assimilated by the very machine it was raging against, but it was never meant to be palatable to the mainstream or politically correct.
One can support both public safety and community development, and it's win-win if helping raise people up out of poverty reduces the need for police presence.
My understanding is "defund the police" is actually within the context that efforts to reform policing as an institution in america have broadly failed, so the only solution to try and make less-shitty police is to burn the institution to the ground and rebuild anew. In that context, "defund the police" makes total sense from the perspective of an activist who is agitating for a better system of community safety.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse
There is clearly a need for some governmental mechanism for public safety: it's also clear that the police, as we know it are the wrong starting point, and if at all the existence of the police prevents crime, it's by coincidence.
(I also have no problem being partisan about my political views. They're political views! If you could get everyone of every political view to agree on something, it's probably ineffective. Standing up for specific strong viewpoints is a good thing.)
I believe it was Black Lives Matter (an organisation whose name is literally a divisive statement) that coined that phrase, or at least popularised it.
To be honest with you, if you look at their actions, I'm not sure if the goal is to actually end police violence/abuse of power. If that did happen, all of these influential activists would suddenly be out of a "job".
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage...
"Defund"/"Abolish" are crystal clear in their meaning.
I think such a slogan would have captured a solid 60-70% of the electorate, which the current "defund" rhetoric hovers around the high 30s.
In reality, the single issue should have been around qualified immunity. Get rid of that and the ducks will fall into line.
All too often arguments against this interpret 'defund' at the farthest possible extreme, but no one is calling for an end of law enforcement.
The reality is that providing constant budget increases for better weapons, faster cars, additional staff, etc. is causing the police to become more militarized. The Military are a defense against enemies. As police become more militarized their enemy becomes the civilians who they are meant to protect and serve.
The actual idea is to defund police departments as they are structured today, and allocate that money instead to social and mental health programs as well as law enforcement with a foundation in de-escalation and transparency.
Of course there would still be law enforcement to maintain peace and safety, and it would be based on transparency and accountability.
There are several comments in this discussion calling for abolishing the police. Whenever this topic gets brought up, it usually seems like half the people are defending "Defund the Police" by saying that no one wants to get rid of the police, and the other half are defending "Defund the Police" by telling people why the police should be abolished.
And people with political power are calling for the abolishing them as well. This is Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib from last April:
> No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can't be reformed.
I'm not sure why people who want reform are so set on tying themselves to this slogan. If I starting chanting "Defund Public Schools!", I wouldn't expect anyone to interpret that as "remove bloat from school budgets and use the money to fund social services for the kids in order to lessen the burden on teachers and make public schools function better."
[1] https://twitter.com/rashidatlaib/status/1381745303997534216?...
What I'm struggling with here is that the article says they have 8 FTE officers plus additional part-time / volunteer officers... so why do they have so darn many cars? Or to put it another way - my town of 35,000 has 48 FTE positions, 5 of which weren't filled this past year. That's in line with other communities of similar size that I've observed. So it puts the size of this department in perspective - it's a vey large headcount for the size of the community, so it shouldn't be a surprise that they are taking action either out of boredom or because someone is on the take.
So each FTE gets to use a top-of-the-line new SUV as a take-home vehicle.
Some sure. Certainly not all. I don't even think most. If I'm wrong, then the meme itself needs better phrasing.
The meme lives in the gray space of non-specifism, where every person for or against imposes their preferred meaning
If you go to a somewhat authoritative source such as https://blacklivesmatter.com/defundthepolice/ then you get
> We call for a national defunding of police. We demand investment in our communities and the resources to ensure Black people not only survive, but thrive.
But what does it mean to have “resources to … survive [and] thrive”? I would argue it implies a rethinking and rebuilding of policing based on the needs of the community, like GP claims. Another leftist might think it’s the anarchical approach. It’s vague, more or less intentionally
It seems like the right in the USA are being deliberately pedantic about the phrase "defund the police", to make it sound like those on the left are crazy.
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I think most reasonable people can agree with your previous points that this is in fact a corrupted system. That was where you had the most power of your comment.
I mean, don't we have a right to face our accuser in court? Can't do that if their name is not on the ticket.
You wanted to capitalize on the thrill of saying something as bold as “Abolish the police” and then backpedal when it became convenient to take a more reasonable approach. It’s dishonest and it’s becoming a pattern after “Black Lives Matter” was called out for being similarly problematic. This isn’t limited to the left either. “Read my lips: no new taxes”, “Lock her up”, and “Build the wall” were likewise dishonest.