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"Dissolve the organization and start over from scratch" is an under-used solution in American life, even in the private sector. Apparently Camden, NJ did a ver

"Dissolve the organization and start over from scratch" is an under-used solution in American life, even in the private sector. Apparently Camden, NJ did a version of this in 2013 with a fair amount of success: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/how-camden-new-jersey-reformed-its-police-department https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/how-camde...

jeffbee 6y ago
Indeed, Americans need to realize that almost everything about our society is a bad first draft, in need of prompt replacement. People reflexively defend existing institutions, but the more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving. Police departments might be a good place to start, but most American cities also need to address structural deficit, disposable built environments, persistent segregation, absurd jurisprudence, and more.
- chipperyman573 6y ago
  >but the more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving There is so much about America that is worth preserving. One easy example right off the top of my head is the law and culture that enables people to peacefully demonstrate like they are today. Even discussing the idea of doing this in many countries could get you killed - or worse! That's another amazing thing (again, just off the top of my head), in America the worst punishment we have is death, and even that is outlawed in many places. The idea of an internment camp[0][1] is not even considered. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps [1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/17/20861427/india-assam-citizenship-muslim-detention-camps https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/17/20861427/india-...
  - grecy 6y ago
    Scores of videos in the last week show police brutally beating regular citizens who have assembled peacefully. Recent events are proving the First Amendment sounds great on paper, but is utterly worthless when people actually try to exercise that right.
    - xu44 6y ago
      Let's just ignore the scores of videos of businesses being looted, cars being flipped, places set on fire or the killing of David Dorn.
      - yawaramin 6y ago
        Time to choose a priority: more important to stop the roadside executions of Black people by cops, or to stop 'looting'?
        xu44 6y ago
        Strawman
      - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
        What does that have to do with "Scores of videos in the last week show police brutally beating regular citizens who have assembled peacefully." Those are two different groups of people.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Sure, we don't _currently_ have internment camps, but we used to have them and the current president, when asked point blank by Time magazine, refused to rule out using WW2-style internment camps for muslims. So there's that. Freedom of expression is one of those things that I'd prefer to keep, but we can see that it is stronger on paper than in practice. In practice, if you gather in the capital city to bring your grievances to the government, unidentifiable mercenaries will gas you. And if you are a journalist reporting in front of your local police station some cop will shoot you in the head with "non-lethal" rubber ball, leaving you without eyes, or teeth. It is the institutions of American that need to be dismantled, because are an implementation that doesn't reflect the founding ideals of our country.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    > The idea of an internment camp is not even considered. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/us/ice-detention-coronavirus-violence-hunger-strikes/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/us/ice-detention-coronavirus-... https://www.insider.com/report-detention-centers-use-disinfectant-causing-bleeding-and-pain-2020-6 https://www.insider.com/report-detention-centers-use-disinfe... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-fac... https://archive.is/bxmYQ https://archive.is/bxmYQ [WaPo]
    - chipperyman573 6y ago
      Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws. While I vehemently disagree with these camps, there's no reason to assume a re-born America's laws would apply to people who are not citizens/legally accepted into its borders. A fix for these camps would be to guarantee the same protections we Americans enjoy to people who come here illegally, which can be accomplished using the current framework we have today.
      - cryptoz 6y ago
        > Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws Do you have a citation on that? I don't think that's true. ICE detains a lot of people here legally, including citizens. https://www.google.com/search?q=american+citizens+in+ice+detention https://www.google.com/search?q=american+citizens+in+ice+det... Regardless, ICE should be obeying international laws for human rights, which they are not. It seems to me that ICE is meant to intimidate entire groups of people regardless of their citizenship or legal status.
      - malnourish 6y ago
        There is ongoing legal debate on what aspects, including these very ones, of our constitution and laws apply to non residents.
      - def8cefe 6y ago
  - asjw 6y ago
    > One easy example right off the top of my head is the law and culture that enables people to peacefully demonstrate If you compare that right to any other country in the West, it doesn't look so peaceful and free.
  - glangdale 6y ago
    I can only assume you've awakened, Rip Van Winkle style, from a extended sleep - not only one so long you missed dozens of people getting severely assaulted by the police and hundreds of people being held for extended periods of time (>24 hours) without charge, but so long that you apparently also missed the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. You also missed Trump musing on the idea of Muslim internment camps, so "not even considered" is a long bow. We might also include "kids in cages" while we're at it. There are plenty other worse countries, but this seems like a rather low standard for a victory lap ("Freer than China! Less repressive than Belarus!").
- jsdevwork1 6y ago
  >the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving I would suggest living in a third or second world country without outside support. I had your same mindset, and did that for a few years. I could not wait to come back.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Actually it was living abroad in a third world nation that soured me on America. Bringing my children back to the USA was painful to me and disappointing to them.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - fastball 6y ago
      Which nation was this?
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Even so, the third world is not our standard. We’re ready for the version two improvements by virtue of the iterative process, and our own expectations for ourselves.
  - chinesempire 6y ago
    Have you ever really tried one for yourself? East Berlin used to be second World, but many of my American friends moved there because they were tired sick of being harassed by their own country brutality and would never go back. Even many African countries are safer than the US if you are black. On the other side, one of the most annoying kind of tourist you can find in my city, which is Rome in Italy, are Americans. They lack the basic notions about "respecting others cultures and habits"
    - jsdevwork1 6y ago
      I sure have, Venezuela. No water, constant power failures, gas at 8-12 USD per gallon (controlled by the military police$$$, though that is a recent development), minimum wage at 5USD per month. Food at international prices. Basically non-existent judicial system. Police brutality several notches above what you see in the US.
- RickJWagner 6y ago
  Not my America. It has problems, sure. But it's the place where people line up to get in. The place where multinationals that hire lots of international colleagues are headquartered. A super-power, and one that has good intent at least as much as any other super-power. I'm proud of my America, even if it does have warts (some of them ugly.) I have confidence we'll get better in the future.
- michaelbuddy 6y ago
  big surprise, somebody at hacker news who hates america and says none of it is worth preserving. And I guess I could say the same about every country in Africa. NOTHING WORTH PRESERVING. Oh look suddenly people have their eyes bulging out.
mikekhusid 6y ago
The Camden thing is going around a lot but to me it seems like they did a reorg and actually ended up hiring more police. https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justice/articles/camden-sees-crime-drop-over-past-decade https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justic...
- morgante 6y ago
  Realistically, that's what will come from "abolishing" the police. That's not necessarily a bad thing! A big problem with existing departments is decades of corruption, poor leadership, and entrenched policies. Tearing the department down and rebuilding it from scratch—even if you end up with a similar size as before—gives you the opportunity to remove the excesses/abuse. You can also do things like hiring more specialized positions and firing all the bad officers (because if the department is gone, the union can't protect them).
  - ethbro 6y ago
    > poor leadership, and entrenched policies This is underappreciated. It's hard to seriously change organizations in less than a decade when employees have long tenures. Opinions and behaviors are only truly malleable at the beginning of careers, and later change is fighting against the inertia of old timers' "Let me tell you how it's done." Which isn't only negative. Esprit de corps is what holds together people doing tough jobs for long careers. But if you want to say "No more of that. Now we're doing this" then a rebuild isn't a bad idea.
  - akudha 6y ago
    How would they go about doing this in practice? Are they going to fire the entire police force, and recruit new people from scratch? If that is the case, can the current cops apply? How would they make sure bad cops from the current force don't get recruited again? A simple first step would be to maintain a national level open registry of fired cops and bad behavior reports. At minimum, if a cop gets fired, then he can't go to the next county and get a job
    - 6y ago
fullshark 6y ago
> (They were initially nonunion but have since unionized.) Fascinating parenthetical. Sounds like they dissolved the city PD organization and expanded the county PD. I don't know what Minneapolis plans here.
Natsu 6y ago
When it comes to code, I thought the consensus was strongly against that because it tends to introduce more problems than it solves.
- Recursing 6y ago
  I think a lot of it comes from opinion pieces such as this one https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... which makes incredibly confident and general statements from a very small sample size, while there are many success stories of successful complete rewrites Also, "Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years." https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715.pdf
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > Also, "Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years." That's hardly point in favor, given Google's "reputation" for long-term support and stability, and the sheer amount of engineers that they can throw at literally every problem.
- woofie11 6y ago
  I think consensus is that it depends on the code. There's a consensus against pointless rewrites, but that's different.
arcadeparade 6y ago
It didn't work so well in Iraq.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  That hardly seems comparable.
  - throw1234651234 6y ago
    It's directly comparable. It didn't work so well in Ukraine either, which has an educated, Western society. They disbanded and "rebuilt" their police force to step away from Russian influences. Corruption came back, but in the meantime, a lot of operation efficiency was lost. Swapping out a police department is much like swapping out a dev team - you are losing a LOT of tribal knowledge, and you have few guarantees that the new dev team won't make their own, potentially different, mistakes. They also lack experience in the domain.
    - guerrilla 6y ago
      In neither case did they do anything that police abolitionists are asking for.
      - throw1234651234 6y ago
        Right, what they are asking for is oversight on budget and practices, except that doesn't sound nearly as exciting as "abolish the police departments!". If they are actually asking to abolish the police departments, that's painfully naive.
        guerrilla 6y ago
        No, that's not what police abolitionists are asking for. That's what police reformists are asking for. These are not the same. I posted another comment on this post with plenty of references if you want to read up on the difference.
pyuser583 6y ago
We dissolve things a lot. Building them is another matter entirely. It’s possible the PD will be rebuilt in a nicer form, but that’s not guaranteed. It’s just as likely the PD will be absorbed into the County Sheriff. Is the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office better?
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > Is the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office better? Probably, at least in the case of the specific precinct that killed George Floyd. https://www.startribune.com/third-precinct-served-as-playground-for-renegade-cops/571076562/ https://www.startribune.com/third-precinct-served-as-playgro... > One officer kicked a handcuffed suspect in the face, leaving his jaw in pieces. Officers beat and pistol-whipped a suspect in a parking lot on suspicion of low-level drug charges. Others harassed residents of a south Minneapolis housing project as they headed to work, and allowed prostitution suspects to touch their genitals for several minutes before arresting them in vice stings. > These and more substantiated incidents, detailed in court records and police reports, help explain a saying often used by fellow cops to describe the style of policing practiced in the Third: There’s the way that the Minneapolis Police Department does things, and then there’s the way they do it “in Threes.”
- woofie11 6y ago
  I live in an area with a bad police department. I've never seen our police care about crime. To be frank, I'm not sure how I'd be any worse off without them. I suspect we need some of the higher-end investigative units (e.g. detectives who solve murders and similar), but the run-of-the-mill police units seems like a waste of my taxpayers dollars. I'd support disbanding our police in an instant. They're very highly compensated too.
- castratikron 6y ago
  At least you can vote for the sheriff. Normal people have no say in who is the police union president.
riazrizvi 6y ago
Consequences - we missed you.
Nightshaxx 6y ago
Camden had the most violent crime in 2019 [1], but are around the 12th highest population in NJ in 2017 [2]. They are the 10th most dangerous city in the country [3] as of 2020 according to neighborhood scout. The FBI ranked it #1 in 2012. [4] Yep, sure seems like a success story.... [1] https://nj1015.com/the-10-most-violent-cities-in-new-jersey-and-the-least/ https://nj1015.com/the-10-most-violent-cities-in-new-jersey-... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_New_Jersey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_Ne... https://www.newjersey-demographics.com/cities_by_population https://www.newjersey-demographics.com/cities_by_population [3] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/blog/top100dangerous https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/blog/top100dangerous [4] https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2012/10/compared_to_cities_over_50000.html https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2012/10/compared_to_cities_...
- compscistd 6y ago
  Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but good stats. From #1 ranked dangerous country in 2012, a disbandment in 2013, and #10 today seems at least somewhat successful to me
  - waiseristy 6y ago
    Not sure how a steady decline in crime over a 10 year span is a failure! https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justice/articles/camden-sees-crime-drop-over-past-decade https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justic...
    - therealdrag0 6y ago
      Hasn't crime declined in a lot of places though? What's the control?
- Nightshaxx 6y ago
  Third most crime in 2019* whoops
- rland 6y ago
baybal2 6y ago
Google up how Georgia completely disbanded its police, and remade it from scratch: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4849472 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=484947...
CivBase 6y ago
I think firing the police force and starting from scratch is plenty reasonable, given the things I've heard. However, this reform sounds like it goes further and will change how law enforcement is handled in Minneapolis at a fundamental level. It's blowing away the entire organization, not just the staff. I'll be very interested in how this works out for them and how similar the new solution ends up being to the old one. I suspect it won't be as different as many commenters are suggesting. Have they released any details about how they expect the new solution to be different?
centimeter 6y ago
Camden is in the top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate, according to the googling I just did. Not a great recommendation there.
- aesthesia 6y ago
  But this was true of Camden before its police reform as well. From the linked article: > He led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25.
  - CivBase 6y ago
    Wouldn't that suggest that the problem hasn't been solved? That there is some other issue? I'm not familiar with Camden or the reforms, so maybe there are other metrics by which things have improved. However, "top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate" is an awfully condemning statistic.
    - newen 6y ago
      > He led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25. That's significant improvement. Waiting until you can "solve crime" seems unproductive.
      - CivBase 6y ago
        There is a pretty big difference between "solving crime" and reducing crime rate to a more typical level.
        newen 6y ago
        The city had already started out with an extremely high crime rate and it dropped significantly after the PD was disbanded and remade. It hasn't gotten to typical levels but I don't think people are expecting magical results here. People want a useful police that treat them with respect and that doesn't use any opportunity to terrorize them and murder them. You know, like the police in every other first world country.
rhegart 6y ago
A lot more crime happens, nobody reports it though. Just like in the Bay Area for car thefts. Very underreported because we are discouraged from making reports and after the 3rd break in, don’t even bother reporting. Everyone using Camden as a success on Social media is mistaken. Poor people hurt the most, while rich and upper middle class likely never has to call the police
- antoncohen 6y ago
  Armed police roaming the streets don't solve car break-ins. I specifically mentioned car break-ins in my comment below[1]. I want the police department as we know it to be disbanded so we can have real solutions to real problems. No one is saying stop solving crimes. Minneapolis may disband their police department, and get out of the union contract. But they aren't going to stop solving crimes. The lack of crimes being solved currently is explicitly mentioned as a reason for disbanding current police department, and looking for smarter solutions. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23451939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23451939
  - masonic 6y ago
    Armed police who are specifically ordered to not interdict fleeing property criminals (the rule of engagement for most Bay Area police departments) and not respond to break-ins at all, even for fingerprints certainly won't solve car break-ins. So, you end up with stupid posturing shit, like having two units sit in their cars with lights flashing, stationary, in one mostly-empty parking lot a night, like SCPD does by the Chili's on El Camino near Lawrence.
- dsjoerg 6y ago
  Do you have a source/link about Camden?
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
We could use this approach with Google and Facebook.
wdr1 6y ago
Milton Friedman said one of the most important aspect of capitalism, more than the profit motive, was that bad companies are allowed to fail & better company can fill the need.
- mcv 6y ago
  But bad companies keep getting bailed out.

jeffbee 6y ago

Indeed, Americans need to realize that almost everything about our society is a bad first draft, in need of prompt replacement. People reflexively defend existing institutions, but the more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving. Police departments might be a good place to start, but most American cities also need to address structural deficit, disposable built environments, persistent segregation, absurd jurisprudence, and more.

chipperyman573 6y ago
>but the more I've thought about it over the years, the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving There is so much about America that is worth preserving. One easy example right off the top of my head is the law and culture that enables people to peacefully demonstrate like they are today. Even discussing the idea of doing this in many countries could get you killed - or worse! That's another amazing thing (again, just off the top of my head), in America the worst punishment we have is death, and even that is outlawed in many places. The idea of an internment camp[0][1] is not even considered. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps [1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/17/20861427/india-assam-citizenship-muslim-detention-camps https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/17/20861427/india-...
- grecy 6y ago
  Scores of videos in the last week show police brutally beating regular citizens who have assembled peacefully. Recent events are proving the First Amendment sounds great on paper, but is utterly worthless when people actually try to exercise that right.
  - xu44 6y ago
    Let's just ignore the scores of videos of businesses being looted, cars being flipped, places set on fire or the killing of David Dorn.
    - yawaramin 6y ago
      Time to choose a priority: more important to stop the roadside executions of Black people by cops, or to stop 'looting'?
      - xu44 6y ago
        Strawman
    - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
      What does that have to do with "Scores of videos in the last week show police brutally beating regular citizens who have assembled peacefully." Those are two different groups of people.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Sure, we don't _currently_ have internment camps, but we used to have them and the current president, when asked point blank by Time magazine, refused to rule out using WW2-style internment camps for muslims. So there's that. Freedom of expression is one of those things that I'd prefer to keep, but we can see that it is stronger on paper than in practice. In practice, if you gather in the capital city to bring your grievances to the government, unidentifiable mercenaries will gas you. And if you are a journalist reporting in front of your local police station some cop will shoot you in the head with "non-lethal" rubber ball, leaving you without eyes, or teeth. It is the institutions of American that need to be dismantled, because are an implementation that doesn't reflect the founding ideals of our country.
- throwanem 6y ago
  > The idea of an internment camp is not even considered. https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/us/ice-detention-coronavirus-violence-hunger-strikes/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/22/us/ice-detention-coronavirus-... https://www.insider.com/report-detention-centers-use-disinfectant-causing-bleeding-and-pain-2020-6 https://www.insider.com/report-detention-centers-use-disinfe... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-facilities/593239/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/border-fac... https://archive.is/bxmYQ https://archive.is/bxmYQ [WaPo]
  - chipperyman573 6y ago
    Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws. While I vehemently disagree with these camps, there's no reason to assume a re-born America's laws would apply to people who are not citizens/legally accepted into its borders. A fix for these camps would be to guarantee the same protections we Americans enjoy to people who come here illegally, which can be accomplished using the current framework we have today.
    - cryptoz 6y ago
      > Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws Do you have a citation on that? I don't think that's true. ICE detains a lot of people here legally, including citizens. https://www.google.com/search?q=american+citizens+in+ice+detention https://www.google.com/search?q=american+citizens+in+ice+det... Regardless, ICE should be obeying international laws for human rights, which they are not. It seems to me that ICE is meant to intimidate entire groups of people regardless of their citizenship or legal status.
    - malnourish 6y ago
      There is ongoing legal debate on what aspects, including these very ones, of our constitution and laws apply to non residents.
    - def8cefe 6y ago
- asjw 6y ago
  > One easy example right off the top of my head is the law and culture that enables people to peacefully demonstrate If you compare that right to any other country in the West, it doesn't look so peaceful and free.
- glangdale 6y ago
  I can only assume you've awakened, Rip Van Winkle style, from a extended sleep - not only one so long you missed dozens of people getting severely assaulted by the police and hundreds of people being held for extended periods of time (>24 hours) without charge, but so long that you apparently also missed the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. You also missed Trump musing on the idea of Muslim internment camps, so "not even considered" is a long bow. We might also include "kids in cages" while we're at it. There are plenty other worse countries, but this seems like a rather low standard for a victory lap ("Freer than China! Less repressive than Belarus!").
jsdevwork1 6y ago
>the more I've realized there's almost no aspect of American life worth preserving I would suggest living in a third or second world country without outside support. I had your same mindset, and did that for a few years. I could not wait to come back.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Actually it was living abroad in a third world nation that soured me on America. Bringing my children back to the USA was painful to me and disappointing to them.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - fastball 6y ago
    Which nation was this?
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Even so, the third world is not our standard. We’re ready for the version two improvements by virtue of the iterative process, and our own expectations for ourselves.
- chinesempire 6y ago
  Have you ever really tried one for yourself? East Berlin used to be second World, but many of my American friends moved there because they were tired sick of being harassed by their own country brutality and would never go back. Even many African countries are safer than the US if you are black. On the other side, one of the most annoying kind of tourist you can find in my city, which is Rome in Italy, are Americans. They lack the basic notions about "respecting others cultures and habits"
  - jsdevwork1 6y ago
    I sure have, Venezuela. No water, constant power failures, gas at 8-12 USD per gallon (controlled by the military police$$$, though that is a recent development), minimum wage at 5USD per month. Food at international prices. Basically non-existent judicial system. Police brutality several notches above what you see in the US.
RickJWagner 6y ago
Not my America. It has problems, sure. But it's the place where people line up to get in. The place where multinationals that hire lots of international colleagues are headquartered. A super-power, and one that has good intent at least as much as any other super-power. I'm proud of my America, even if it does have warts (some of them ugly.) I have confidence we'll get better in the future.
michaelbuddy 6y ago
big surprise, somebody at hacker news who hates america and says none of it is worth preserving. And I guess I could say the same about every country in Africa. NOTHING WORTH PRESERVING. Oh look suddenly people have their eyes bulging out.

mikekhusid 6y ago

The Camden thing is going around a lot but to me it seems like they did a reorg and actually ended up hiring more police. https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justice/articles/camden-sees-crime-drop-over-past-decade https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justic...

morgante 6y ago
Realistically, that's what will come from "abolishing" the police. That's not necessarily a bad thing! A big problem with existing departments is decades of corruption, poor leadership, and entrenched policies. Tearing the department down and rebuilding it from scratch—even if you end up with a similar size as before—gives you the opportunity to remove the excesses/abuse. You can also do things like hiring more specialized positions and firing all the bad officers (because if the department is gone, the union can't protect them).
- ethbro 6y ago
  > poor leadership, and entrenched policies This is underappreciated. It's hard to seriously change organizations in less than a decade when employees have long tenures. Opinions and behaviors are only truly malleable at the beginning of careers, and later change is fighting against the inertia of old timers' "Let me tell you how it's done." Which isn't only negative. Esprit de corps is what holds together people doing tough jobs for long careers. But if you want to say "No more of that. Now we're doing this" then a rebuild isn't a bad idea.
- akudha 6y ago
  How would they go about doing this in practice? Are they going to fire the entire police force, and recruit new people from scratch? If that is the case, can the current cops apply? How would they make sure bad cops from the current force don't get recruited again? A simple first step would be to maintain a national level open registry of fired cops and bad behavior reports. At minimum, if a cop gets fired, then he can't go to the next county and get a job
  - 6y ago

fullshark 6y ago

> (They were initially nonunion but have since unionized.) Fascinating parenthetical. Sounds like they dissolved the city PD organization and expanded the county PD. I don't know what Minneapolis plans here.

Natsu 6y ago

When it comes to code, I thought the consensus was strongly against that because it tends to introduce more problems than it solves.

Recursing 6y ago
I think a lot of it comes from opinion pieces such as this one https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... which makes incredibly confident and general statements from a very small sample size, while there are many success stories of successful complete rewrites Also, "Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years." https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1702.01715.pdf
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > Also, "Most software at Google gets rewritten every few years." That's hardly point in favor, given Google's "reputation" for long-term support and stability, and the sheer amount of engineers that they can throw at literally every problem.
woofie11 6y ago
I think consensus is that it depends on the code. There's a consensus against pointless rewrites, but that's different.

arcadeparade 6y ago

It didn't work so well in Iraq.

ceejayoz 6y ago
That hardly seems comparable.
- throw1234651234 6y ago
  It's directly comparable. It didn't work so well in Ukraine either, which has an educated, Western society. They disbanded and "rebuilt" their police force to step away from Russian influences. Corruption came back, but in the meantime, a lot of operation efficiency was lost. Swapping out a police department is much like swapping out a dev team - you are losing a LOT of tribal knowledge, and you have few guarantees that the new dev team won't make their own, potentially different, mistakes. They also lack experience in the domain.
  - guerrilla 6y ago
    In neither case did they do anything that police abolitionists are asking for.
    - throw1234651234 6y ago
      Right, what they are asking for is oversight on budget and practices, except that doesn't sound nearly as exciting as "abolish the police departments!". If they are actually asking to abolish the police departments, that's painfully naive.
      - guerrilla 6y ago
        No, that's not what police abolitionists are asking for. That's what police reformists are asking for. These are not the same. I posted another comment on this post with plenty of references if you want to read up on the difference.

pyuser583 6y ago

We dissolve things a lot. Building them is another matter entirely. It’s possible the PD will be rebuilt in a nicer form, but that’s not guaranteed. It’s just as likely the PD will be absorbed into the County Sheriff. Is the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office better?

ceejayoz 6y ago
> Is the Hennepin County Sheriff's Office better? Probably, at least in the case of the specific precinct that killed George Floyd. https://www.startribune.com/third-precinct-served-as-playground-for-renegade-cops/571076562/ https://www.startribune.com/third-precinct-served-as-playgro... > One officer kicked a handcuffed suspect in the face, leaving his jaw in pieces. Officers beat and pistol-whipped a suspect in a parking lot on suspicion of low-level drug charges. Others harassed residents of a south Minneapolis housing project as they headed to work, and allowed prostitution suspects to touch their genitals for several minutes before arresting them in vice stings. > These and more substantiated incidents, detailed in court records and police reports, help explain a saying often used by fellow cops to describe the style of policing practiced in the Third: There’s the way that the Minneapolis Police Department does things, and then there’s the way they do it “in Threes.”
woofie11 6y ago
I live in an area with a bad police department. I've never seen our police care about crime. To be frank, I'm not sure how I'd be any worse off without them. I suspect we need some of the higher-end investigative units (e.g. detectives who solve murders and similar), but the run-of-the-mill police units seems like a waste of my taxpayers dollars. I'd support disbanding our police in an instant. They're very highly compensated too.
castratikron 6y ago
At least you can vote for the sheriff. Normal people have no say in who is the police union president.

riazrizvi 6y ago

Consequences - we missed you.

Nightshaxx 6y ago

Camden had the most violent crime in 2019 [1], but are around the 12th highest population in NJ in 2017 [2]. They are the 10th most dangerous city in the country [3] as of 2020 according to neighborhood scout. The FBI ranked it #1 in 2012. [4] Yep, sure seems like a success story.... [1] https://nj1015.com/the-10-most-violent-cities-in-new-jersey-and-the-least/ https://nj1015.com/the-10-most-violent-cities-in-new-jersey-... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_New_Jersey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_in_Ne... https://www.newjersey-demographics.com/cities_by_population https://www.newjersey-demographics.com/cities_by_population [3] https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/blog/top100dangerous https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/blog/top100dangerous [4] https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2012/10/compared_to_cities_over_50000.html https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2012/10/compared_to_cities_...

compscistd 6y ago
Not sure if you’re being sarcastic, but good stats. From #1 ranked dangerous country in 2012, a disbandment in 2013, and #10 today seems at least somewhat successful to me
- waiseristy 6y ago
  Not sure how a steady decline in crime over a 10 year span is a failure! https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justice/articles/camden-sees-crime-drop-over-past-decade https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justic...
  - therealdrag0 6y ago
    Hasn't crime declined in a lot of places though? What's the control?
Nightshaxx 6y ago
Third most crime in 2019* whoops
rland 6y ago

baybal2 6y ago

Google up how Georgia completely disbanded its police, and remade it from scratch: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4849472 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=484947...

CivBase 6y ago

I think firing the police force and starting from scratch is plenty reasonable, given the things I've heard. However, this reform sounds like it goes further and will change how law enforcement is handled in Minneapolis at a fundamental level. It's blowing away the entire organization, not just the staff. I'll be very interested in how this works out for them and how similar the new solution ends up being to the old one. I suspect it won't be as different as many commenters are suggesting. Have they released any details about how they expect the new solution to be different?

centimeter 6y ago

Camden is in the top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate, according to the googling I just did. Not a great recommendation there.

aesthesia 6y ago
But this was true of Camden before its police reform as well. From the linked article: > He led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25.
- CivBase 6y ago
  Wouldn't that suggest that the problem hasn't been solved? That there is some other issue? I'm not familiar with Camden or the reforms, so maybe there are other metrics by which things have improved. However, "top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate" is an awfully condemning statistic.
  - newen 6y ago
    > He led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25. That's significant improvement. Waiting until you can "solve crime" seems unproductive.
    - CivBase 6y ago
      There is a pretty big difference between "solving crime" and reducing crime rate to a more typical level.
      - newen 6y ago
        The city had already started out with an extremely high crime rate and it dropped significantly after the PD was disbanded and remade. It hasn't gotten to typical levels but I don't think people are expecting magical results here. People want a useful police that treat them with respect and that doesn't use any opportunity to terrorize them and murder them. You know, like the police in every other first world country.

rhegart 6y ago

A lot more crime happens, nobody reports it though. Just like in the Bay Area for car thefts. Very underreported because we are discouraged from making reports and after the 3rd break in, don’t even bother reporting. Everyone using Camden as a success on Social media is mistaken. Poor people hurt the most, while rich and upper middle class likely never has to call the police

antoncohen 6y ago
Armed police roaming the streets don't solve car break-ins. I specifically mentioned car break-ins in my comment below[1]. I want the police department as we know it to be disbanded so we can have real solutions to real problems. No one is saying stop solving crimes. Minneapolis may disband their police department, and get out of the union contract. But they aren't going to stop solving crimes. The lack of crimes being solved currently is explicitly mentioned as a reason for disbanding current police department, and looking for smarter solutions. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23451939 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23451939
- masonic 6y ago
  Armed police who are specifically ordered to not interdict fleeing property criminals (the rule of engagement for most Bay Area police departments) and not respond to break-ins at all, even for fingerprints certainly won't solve car break-ins. So, you end up with stupid posturing shit, like having two units sit in their cars with lights flashing, stationary, in one mostly-empty parking lot a night, like SCPD does by the Chili's on El Camino near Lawrence.
dsjoerg 6y ago
Do you have a source/link about Camden?

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

We could use this approach with Google and Facebook.

wdr1 6y ago

Milton Friedman said one of the most important aspect of capitalism, more than the profit motive, was that bad companies are allowed to fail & better company can fill the need.

mcv 6y ago
But bad companies keep getting bailed out.