7 ms·

There's a growing call to defund the police. Here's what it means

46 points by MilnerRoute 6y ago

mikece 6y ago
Let’s assume a city (or two?) decide to abolish their police force (which is what defunding would achieve). What then?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- cconover 6y ago
  Not for reform reasons, but Camden, NJ did exactly that in 2012: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2193971/Camden-police-disbanded-270-officers-fired-amid-budget-crunch.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2193971/Camden-poli... The county police became the de facto police department for Camden, which is a model for what would likely happen in any city: the police or sheriff’s department for the next largest jurisdiction encompassing the city would start policing the city.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Wait if the county police become your police if there's no other police department, then why does any city spend their taxes on their own police? And presumably if there's no county police the state police have jurisdiction.
    - cconover 6y ago
      > Wait if the county police become your police if there's no other police department, then why does any city spend their taxes on their own police? Policy-wise the motivations for retaining a city police department can be differences in crime between urban and suburban/rural areas, and population density & subsequent patrol officer density - and as a subset of that, response times. I would imagine that cities, and specifically the elected leaders, are also under significant pressure from police unions to retain their departments. Furthermore, disbanding a police department for any major city means that the county or state police department suddenly has to take on the workload of what was previously being done by hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of city police, and no department is prepared for that. > And presumably if there's no county police the state police have jurisdiction. There are many cities in the US that are outside of any county, and are their own incorporated entity on par in the hierarchy with the surrounding counties. As such the state police would be the most likely department to take over policing. Again though, that's a major resource burden and logistics problem; any feelings about the pros and cons of reduced police presence aside no policy maker is likely going to be comfortable with that kind of impact.
- Joeri 6y ago
  Private security. Everyone gets a private security contract with ex-cops, with an emergency number to call. The rich will be well-protected, the poor mostly left to fend for themselves. That won’t be better, it will be far worse, but it’s a thing people can do, so in the absence of other things to do, it may end up as the thing that is done. Desperate people do foolish things if they see no alternative.
  - throwaway894345 6y ago
    Imagine this on any significant scale. The richest become a law unto themselves. They become the de facto government by virtue of control over the largest armies. If you didn’t like the 1% before, why would you give them absolute power and the monopoly on violence?
  - disposekinetics 6y ago
    I don't want a world where I get police service as part of amazon prime, but it would still be better than a lawless world.
- chewz 6y ago
  It has been done in variouse degrees in Central Europe after revolution of 1989. Old structure has been disbanded, new formed under new leaders, policemen went through verification and many with record of violence has been let go. It had sent a signal that police is to serve civil society and not be part of oppresion apparatus. https://www.dcaf.ch/transforming-police-central-and-eastern-europe https://www.dcaf.ch/transforming-police-central-and-eastern-...
- egypturnash 6y ago
  Then every other city toying with the idea watches them for the next year or so. What does happen when you take a major chunk of the budget of a city and reallocate it from "beating the shit out of your poorer citizens" to "helping your poorer citizens"? What happens when you no longer have people roaming the streets looking for someone to accuse of a crime because they have a quota of arrests to fill? If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting, then other cities toying with the idea decide to follow suit. Eventually you even get to a place where even the rightwingers are proposing this in the slower-moving places, if marijuana legalization is any kind of model - I'm in a state with a very loose medical marijuana bill sitting on the Governor's desk that will be de facto recreational legalization, which was proposed and pushed through by Repubs, and that really kinda blows my mind.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Here's the problem: People are not angels. This applies to the police (as we're seeing). But it also applies to the non-police. They aren't angels, either. And in the absence of police, they aren't going to become angels. They're going to still beat their wives, they're going to still mug random strangers, they're going to still do protection rackets. And they may do even more of those things when they don't have to worry about being stopped. And then, the victims aren't angels, either. If they use a Second Amendment defense to those problems, they're not going to do it perfectly. They're going to do it in anger. They're going to do it with vigilante justice, hitting more people than they should, and hitting some of the wrong people. > If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting... In light of human nature, I'm not banking on the results being wonderful.
    - egypturnash 6y ago
      Well, it looks like Minneapolis is gonna make a go. https://theappeal.org/minneapolis-city-council-members-announce-intent-to-disband-the-police-department-invest-in-proven-community-led-public-safety/ https://theappeal.org/minneapolis-city-council-members-annou...
juanbyrge 6y ago
Yes we need to address the root causes of the crime problem: poverty, racism, and addiction. Many types of crimes (theft, drug dealing) are caused because people have been marginalized and have no other means of making money. This is to a large extent caused by racism. Also a lot of crime is related to addiction, which can lead to catastrophic consequences when handled by police.
- AtHeartEngineer 6y ago
  Also, financial education. Simple things like paying off your credit card before putting money into savings, when it's worth fixing your car or not, or just the basic principals behind how things are priced. I heard a lot about an item only costing X amount of money to make in materials, but the company was charging X*10 for it; many people never learn how and why things get priced the way they do.
- syshum 6y ago
  While poverty, racism, and addiction. are a factor, the root cause of crime is over criminalization of society [2] that creates a cycle of crime that once started it is very hard to escape from. The thousands upon thousands of sooo called "victimless" crime that it used to dump millions of people in to the criminal system which then society punishes for the rest of their lives by denying them opportunities in all segments of life from Jobs to Housing to access to government assistance. Often time people have "no other means of making money" due to this cycle of over criminalization, they were busted with a small amount of weed, from that point they were a "convicted criminal" where by many employers will deny them a job, schools will deny them admission, landlords will deny them housing, etc. We have a narrative in this nation that a Misdemeanor Conviction Is Not a Big Deal [1], this is a false narrative one that the legal system pushes because they often over charge individuals with felonies then "allow" them to plea out to a "lesser" misdemeanor to improve the efficiency of "justice". The biggest flaw in the system is that we have created so many criminal laws that we need to make the "justice system" an assembly line of contract negotiation [1] https://time.com/76356/a-misdemeanor-conviction-is-not-a-big-deal-right-think-again/ https://time.com/76356/a-misdemeanor-conviction-is-not-a-big... [2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/overcriminalization-of-america-113991 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/overcriminal...
humanrebar 6y ago
How else does a victim of domestic violence get a restraining order enforced or recover possessions from an unsafe home? I'm all for better funding for social work and food banks, but at some point, it seems hard to avoid armed officials providing safety. We just need them to actually do that. The alternatives in those particular situations (the neighborhood makes it work) looks a lot like vigilantism to me, which doesn't sound net safer. There's no particular requirement of equality or due process there, not even notionally.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > it seems hard to avoid armed officials Why on earth do they need to be armed? There is zero reason for a local police officer be carrying firearms. It's insane. Dis-arming all but specialist firearms officers should be the first step. I find it really frightening when I visit the US and all the police are armed to the teeth.
  - onei 6y ago
    I, much like I imagine you to be, grew up in a country where guns are restricted and rare. In the US, that's not the case and any attempts to restrict gun ownership meets huge political hurdles. Even if those restrictions are what other countries would deem to be common sense, e.g. Switzerland or New Zealand. I think it's all kinds of crazy to sell guns in supermarkets with next to no checks on who owns them, but I get why police would want to have guns in the US.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      Maybe criminals carry and use guns because they know the police have guns? Let's lower the stakes with what we do control - the police carrying guns.
      - hirundo 6y ago
        People carry guns either to impose their will on other people or to avoid having other people's will imposed on themselves. Neither of those motivations go away if the police stop carrying guns.
elicash 6y ago
It does seem weird that if I just want a report for insurance purposes, that the people that get sent out to help me get that paperwork carry guns. Edit: What's nice about cops versus, for instance, the Department of Motor Vehicles is that police make home visits. Maybe some of the boring stuff could be done by non-violent agencies that make home visits, like child protective services.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Seems like it would make more sense to change that aspect of the system rather than to defund the police altogether, no?
  - elicash 6y ago
    Not sure if you read the article, but different people mean different things by "defund the police." One thing that's obvious is that pretty much every police department is going to have some amount of defunding, due to state and local budget problems that are expected to arise due to decreased tax revenue. My concern is that not enough leaders will try to reimagine what gets built in its place, given those budget constraints. Not to say there isn't any consideration. Some people say that poverty, mental health issues or lack of quality education is a driver of crime and that we need to divert resources. Others, people like me, want to experiment to replace some of the things police do, study it, follow the evidence and maybe eventually build something entirely different. What I love about this debate is it's causing people to think about, often for the first time, why we've set it up this way.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
humanrebar 6y ago
Isn't part of the argument for gun control that policing is robust enough to provide superior safety?
- taborj 6y ago
  Yes. I've found a strange inconsistency with some of the people calling for the defunding of police - they were until very recently saying citizens didn't need guns because the police were always close by. Now they're saying the police are bad and we can take care of ourselves.
  - elicash 6y ago
    It's probably different people saying different things. First, folks who have been calling for prison abolition, for instance, tend to be anti-gun control because it's a tool that's used to put more black and brown people in prisons. A lot of these folks also call for defunding police. Second, this is different from saying "citizens don't need guns." That different argument is simply based on the idea that people are less safe when they have guns, not more safe. While some is due to accidents, much of it is suicides.
    - humanrebar 6y ago
      But what is the policy approach to protect law-abiding citizens from crazy exes and people who take an affinity to lynching? Saying "solve poverty" seems like both a huge leap in logic and frankly harder than "solving" crime. I appreciate the discord between current political alliances, but explaining that it exists seems to imply that major reductions in policing is not a fully considered plan.
      - elicash 6y ago
        You should read some books about prison abolition if you're interested in getting all the details about how it would work.
humanrebar 6y ago
I would like to see statistics on inconsistently or seldom enforced laws. Those seem to be a vector for corruption and should be considered for repeal. Minor drug crimes seem to fit this profile, but so do certain occupational regulations (certification to braid hair?). If we end up with fewer things for police to do, it sounds like a net win.
- hedora 6y ago
  If you’re a young black man in DC, you have a 75% chance of eventually winding up in prison. Country wide, on an average day, 10% of black men in their thirties are serving time in prison. This is mostly due to racial disparities in prosecution and sentencing than crime rates between races. Drug possession accounts for a significant fraction of the disparity: Whites use illegal drugs at a similar rate, but rarely go to prison for it. https://www.mic.com/articles/86519/19-actual-statistics-about-america-s-prison-system https://www.mic.com/articles/86519/19-actual-statistics-abou... http://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/racial-disparity/ http://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/racial-disparity/
sys_64738 6y ago
There are many items involved in this. Defunding things like SWAT and military vehicles for police forces is a reasonable thing to do as most of those police forces don't need these things. If you look at all these particular issues then what was the policing policy that caused them? I think you need to examine why those were executed to get a sense of how to not repeat those mistakes. You've also got to look inside a police force at the people that are police officers. There are a lot of less desirable personalities in there. I don't think throwing police forces to the wolves is the way to go as there are lots of good officers impacted by this. I think police need to evolve not be tossed aside to start from scratch and repeat the same mistakes.

46 points by MilnerRoute 6y ago

mikece 6y ago

Let’s assume a city (or two?) decide to abolish their police force (which is what defunding would achieve). What then?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cconover 6y ago
Not for reform reasons, but Camden, NJ did exactly that in 2012: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2193971/Camden-police-disbanded-270-officers-fired-amid-budget-crunch.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2193971/Camden-poli... The county police became the de facto police department for Camden, which is a model for what would likely happen in any city: the police or sheriff’s department for the next largest jurisdiction encompassing the city would start policing the city.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Wait if the county police become your police if there's no other police department, then why does any city spend their taxes on their own police? And presumably if there's no county police the state police have jurisdiction.
  - cconover 6y ago
    > Wait if the county police become your police if there's no other police department, then why does any city spend their taxes on their own police? Policy-wise the motivations for retaining a city police department can be differences in crime between urban and suburban/rural areas, and population density & subsequent patrol officer density - and as a subset of that, response times. I would imagine that cities, and specifically the elected leaders, are also under significant pressure from police unions to retain their departments. Furthermore, disbanding a police department for any major city means that the county or state police department suddenly has to take on the workload of what was previously being done by hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of city police, and no department is prepared for that. > And presumably if there's no county police the state police have jurisdiction. There are many cities in the US that are outside of any county, and are their own incorporated entity on par in the hierarchy with the surrounding counties. As such the state police would be the most likely department to take over policing. Again though, that's a major resource burden and logistics problem; any feelings about the pros and cons of reduced police presence aside no policy maker is likely going to be comfortable with that kind of impact.
Joeri 6y ago
Private security. Everyone gets a private security contract with ex-cops, with an emergency number to call. The rich will be well-protected, the poor mostly left to fend for themselves. That won’t be better, it will be far worse, but it’s a thing people can do, so in the absence of other things to do, it may end up as the thing that is done. Desperate people do foolish things if they see no alternative.
- throwaway894345 6y ago
  Imagine this on any significant scale. The richest become a law unto themselves. They become the de facto government by virtue of control over the largest armies. If you didn’t like the 1% before, why would you give them absolute power and the monopoly on violence?
- disposekinetics 6y ago
  I don't want a world where I get police service as part of amazon prime, but it would still be better than a lawless world.
chewz 6y ago
It has been done in variouse degrees in Central Europe after revolution of 1989. Old structure has been disbanded, new formed under new leaders, policemen went through verification and many with record of violence has been let go. It had sent a signal that police is to serve civil society and not be part of oppresion apparatus. https://www.dcaf.ch/transforming-police-central-and-eastern-europe https://www.dcaf.ch/transforming-police-central-and-eastern-...
egypturnash 6y ago
Then every other city toying with the idea watches them for the next year or so. What does happen when you take a major chunk of the budget of a city and reallocate it from "beating the shit out of your poorer citizens" to "helping your poorer citizens"? What happens when you no longer have people roaming the streets looking for someone to accuse of a crime because they have a quota of arrests to fill? If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting, then other cities toying with the idea decide to follow suit. Eventually you even get to a place where even the rightwingers are proposing this in the slower-moving places, if marijuana legalization is any kind of model - I'm in a state with a very loose medical marijuana bill sitting on the Governor's desk that will be de facto recreational legalization, which was proposed and pushed through by Repubs, and that really kinda blows my mind.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Here's the problem: People are not angels. This applies to the police (as we're seeing). But it also applies to the non-police. They aren't angels, either. And in the absence of police, they aren't going to become angels. They're going to still beat their wives, they're going to still mug random strangers, they're going to still do protection rackets. And they may do even more of those things when they don't have to worry about being stopped. And then, the victims aren't angels, either. If they use a Second Amendment defense to those problems, they're not going to do it perfectly. They're going to do it in anger. They're going to do it with vigilante justice, hitting more people than they should, and hitting some of the wrong people. > If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting... In light of human nature, I'm not banking on the results being wonderful.
  - egypturnash 6y ago
    Well, it looks like Minneapolis is gonna make a go. https://theappeal.org/minneapolis-city-council-members-announce-intent-to-disband-the-police-department-invest-in-proven-community-led-public-safety/ https://theappeal.org/minneapolis-city-council-members-annou...

juanbyrge 6y ago

Yes we need to address the root causes of the crime problem: poverty, racism, and addiction. Many types of crimes (theft, drug dealing) are caused because people have been marginalized and have no other means of making money. This is to a large extent caused by racism. Also a lot of crime is related to addiction, which can lead to catastrophic consequences when handled by police.

AtHeartEngineer 6y ago
Also, financial education. Simple things like paying off your credit card before putting money into savings, when it's worth fixing your car or not, or just the basic principals behind how things are priced. I heard a lot about an item only costing X amount of money to make in materials, but the company was charging X*10 for it; many people never learn how and why things get priced the way they do.
syshum 6y ago
While poverty, racism, and addiction. are a factor, the root cause of crime is over criminalization of society [2] that creates a cycle of crime that once started it is very hard to escape from. The thousands upon thousands of sooo called "victimless" crime that it used to dump millions of people in to the criminal system which then society punishes for the rest of their lives by denying them opportunities in all segments of life from Jobs to Housing to access to government assistance. Often time people have "no other means of making money" due to this cycle of over criminalization, they were busted with a small amount of weed, from that point they were a "convicted criminal" where by many employers will deny them a job, schools will deny them admission, landlords will deny them housing, etc. We have a narrative in this nation that a Misdemeanor Conviction Is Not a Big Deal [1], this is a false narrative one that the legal system pushes because they often over charge individuals with felonies then "allow" them to plea out to a "lesser" misdemeanor to improve the efficiency of "justice". The biggest flaw in the system is that we have created so many criminal laws that we need to make the "justice system" an assembly line of contract negotiation [1] https://time.com/76356/a-misdemeanor-conviction-is-not-a-big-deal-right-think-again/ https://time.com/76356/a-misdemeanor-conviction-is-not-a-big... [2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/overcriminalization-of-america-113991 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/overcriminal...

humanrebar 6y ago

How else does a victim of domestic violence get a restraining order enforced or recover possessions from an unsafe home? I'm all for better funding for social work and food banks, but at some point, it seems hard to avoid armed officials providing safety. We just need them to actually do that. The alternatives in those particular situations (the neighborhood makes it work) looks a lot like vigilantism to me, which doesn't sound net safer. There's no particular requirement of equality or due process there, not even notionally.

chrisseaton 6y ago
> it seems hard to avoid armed officials Why on earth do they need to be armed? There is zero reason for a local police officer be carrying firearms. It's insane. Dis-arming all but specialist firearms officers should be the first step. I find it really frightening when I visit the US and all the police are armed to the teeth.
- onei 6y ago
  I, much like I imagine you to be, grew up in a country where guns are restricted and rare. In the US, that's not the case and any attempts to restrict gun ownership meets huge political hurdles. Even if those restrictions are what other countries would deem to be common sense, e.g. Switzerland or New Zealand. I think it's all kinds of crazy to sell guns in supermarkets with next to no checks on who owns them, but I get why police would want to have guns in the US.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Maybe criminals carry and use guns because they know the police have guns? Let's lower the stakes with what we do control - the police carrying guns.
    - hirundo 6y ago
      People carry guns either to impose their will on other people or to avoid having other people's will imposed on themselves. Neither of those motivations go away if the police stop carrying guns.

elicash 6y ago

It does seem weird that if I just want a report for insurance purposes, that the people that get sent out to help me get that paperwork carry guns. Edit: What's nice about cops versus, for instance, the Department of Motor Vehicles is that police make home visits. Maybe some of the boring stuff could be done by non-violent agencies that make home visits, like child protective services.

throwaway894345 6y ago
Seems like it would make more sense to change that aspect of the system rather than to defund the police altogether, no?
- elicash 6y ago
  Not sure if you read the article, but different people mean different things by "defund the police." One thing that's obvious is that pretty much every police department is going to have some amount of defunding, due to state and local budget problems that are expected to arise due to decreased tax revenue. My concern is that not enough leaders will try to reimagine what gets built in its place, given those budget constraints. Not to say there isn't any consideration. Some people say that poverty, mental health issues or lack of quality education is a driver of crime and that we need to divert resources. Others, people like me, want to experiment to replace some of the things police do, study it, follow the evidence and maybe eventually build something entirely different. What I love about this debate is it's causing people to think about, often for the first time, why we've set it up this way.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

humanrebar 6y ago

Isn't part of the argument for gun control that policing is robust enough to provide superior safety?

taborj 6y ago
Yes. I've found a strange inconsistency with some of the people calling for the defunding of police - they were until very recently saying citizens didn't need guns because the police were always close by. Now they're saying the police are bad and we can take care of ourselves.
- elicash 6y ago
  It's probably different people saying different things. First, folks who have been calling for prison abolition, for instance, tend to be anti-gun control because it's a tool that's used to put more black and brown people in prisons. A lot of these folks also call for defunding police. Second, this is different from saying "citizens don't need guns." That different argument is simply based on the idea that people are less safe when they have guns, not more safe. While some is due to accidents, much of it is suicides.
  - humanrebar 6y ago
    But what is the policy approach to protect law-abiding citizens from crazy exes and people who take an affinity to lynching? Saying "solve poverty" seems like both a huge leap in logic and frankly harder than "solving" crime. I appreciate the discord between current political alliances, but explaining that it exists seems to imply that major reductions in policing is not a fully considered plan.
    - elicash 6y ago
      You should read some books about prison abolition if you're interested in getting all the details about how it would work.

humanrebar 6y ago

I would like to see statistics on inconsistently or seldom enforced laws. Those seem to be a vector for corruption and should be considered for repeal. Minor drug crimes seem to fit this profile, but so do certain occupational regulations (certification to braid hair?). If we end up with fewer things for police to do, it sounds like a net win.

hedora 6y ago
If you’re a young black man in DC, you have a 75% chance of eventually winding up in prison. Country wide, on an average day, 10% of black men in their thirties are serving time in prison. This is mostly due to racial disparities in prosecution and sentencing than crime rates between races. Drug possession accounts for a significant fraction of the disparity: Whites use illegal drugs at a similar rate, but rarely go to prison for it. https://www.mic.com/articles/86519/19-actual-statistics-about-america-s-prison-system https://www.mic.com/articles/86519/19-actual-statistics-abou... http://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/racial-disparity/ http://www.sentencingproject.org/issues/racial-disparity/

sys_64738 6y ago

There are many items involved in this. Defunding things like SWAT and military vehicles for police forces is a reasonable thing to do as most of those police forces don't need these things. If you look at all these particular issues then what was the policing policy that caused them? I think you need to examine why those were executed to get a sense of how to not repeat those mistakes. You've also got to look inside a police force at the people that are police officers. There are a lot of less desirable personalities in there. I don't think throwing police forces to the wolves is the way to go as there are lots of good officers impacted by this. I think police need to evolve not be tossed aside to start from scratch and repeat the same mistakes.