6 ms·

The last 40 years of austerity politics in the US have starved the beast [0] so greatly that the only remaining public infrastructure that functions as it's int

by pizza 6y ago

The last 40 years of austerity politics in the US have starved the beast [0] so greatly that the only remaining public infrastructure that functions as it's intended to is policing. For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD. For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. It's something I've thought about a lot in the last few weeks. On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1]. > To test this, Ostrom worked with the Indianapolis government and her students to measure the quality of policing. Surprisingly, against common assumptions, they found that the smaller the police force, the more positively residents evaluated the police services they got. > "Increasing the size of [the police force] consistently had a negative impact on the level of output generated as well as on efficiency of service provision… smaller police departments … consistently outperformed their better trained and better financed larger neighbors.” > But why did this happen? To explain this, Elinor Ostrom argued that in small communities with small police forces, citizens are more active in community safety. Officers in smaller police forces also have more knowledge of the local area & more trust from people. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast [1] https://twitter.com/a_vansi/status/1270406823158468614 https://twitter.com/a_vansi/status/1270406823158468614

munk-a 6y ago
And this is exactly where the "Defund the Police" movement comes from and seems like an extremely good movement to pursue - shift that budget balance back in favor of specialized agencies that can better support social needs rather than forcing it all onto the police force. I really just wish it had gotten a better name since that title for the idea really divides people before they even open their minds.
- austincheney 6y ago
  Defunding the police is generally unpopular where I live. My big city is growing at about 22% decade over decade and will likely surpass San Jose in population over the next 10 years. It is also the lowest density big city in the US. In order to support the growing population the police force must continue to grow as well. The fastest growing area of the city is also the least policed. This not result of negligence from the city but just the geographic direction the city is growing towards and the funding limitations to meet the growing needs of the community. There are plans to put a precinct in my area of the city, which is strongly wanted, but it won’t happen if the police are defunded.
  - plussed_reader 6y ago
    What are the current home zoning vs planned updates/build for this area? San Jose has issue with single family units over dominating the area; the need for denser housing options hasn't abated, nor for the surrounding county and the greater bay area. That has to be planned with local Transpo options, and now you enter the quagmire of 4 transportation agencies systems in the South Bay at least across several modes.
    - austincheney 6y ago
      The land area of my big city is massive, so there is no risk of running out of land. The problem with that is the increases of traffic and commute times. The area where I live is also absolutely dominated by single family residences. Developers have been building 500+ houses per year in the 5 mile radius of my house over the last decade and space for more single family residences in this location is running out. Developers are turning from single family dwellings towards apartment complexes. The current residents in the area are strongly opposed to the development of multi family units that will only further congest already unbearable traffic conditions. The city had to widen roads to accommodate the rapidly growing population but keeps putting it off.
  - cvlasdkv 6y ago
    > In order to support the growing population the police force must continue to grow as well. Do you have a source for this claim? I mean we can all claim it is intuitive but just how many police, how "well funded", what equipment, and what jurisdiction?
    - austincheney 6y ago
      It’s based on participation of people in things like city council attendance, bond package votes, participation on local Facebook pages, and so forth. No, I don’t have actual numbers.
- knodi123 6y ago
  > since that title for the idea really divides people before they even open their minds. Hence the brilliant onion headline, "‘So, It Means Making The Police Lose Their Homes And Forcing Them To Get A Divorce?’ Says Nation Still Struggling To Understand How Defunding The Police Works" https://www.theonion.com/so-it-means-making-the-police-lose-their-homes-and-fo-1844042836 https://www.theonion.com/so-it-means-making-the-police-lose-...
- graeme 6y ago
  The US actually spends a low amount of money on policing compared to the EU, where police kill fewer people. Further, the US also has a low number of police officers. https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-police-vs-prisons-in-the-us-and-europe/ https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-poli...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... The defund the police narrative isn’t based on any actual examination of US police spending, or general public spending. The key issues are instead police unions, lack of police training in the US, impunity for police abuses, etc Cambridge NJ is often cited as a model of reform. But I am not sure they reduced spending. Instead they disbanded and reformed their police.
  - logjammin 6y ago
    I think you mean Camden, NJ.
    - graeme 6y ago
      You’re right, thanks!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - munk-a 6y ago
    > The key issues are instead police unions, lack of police training in the US, impunity for police abuses, etc Police unions, poor training and qualified immunity are really serious issues - but ones that are intractable to fight for on the national stage due to political gridlock. Just breaking up the unions as they stand right now and enforcing transparent employment history for law enforcement would make worlds of difference, but the action can't be taken unilaterally by a particular district - that district can ensure that incident reports are preserved but officers moving into the district may have had their employment history purged. Defunding the police is an actual policy decision that can be made on a local scale to address issues of over policing and start reinvesting in crime prevention rather than punishment.
ptero 6y ago
It is tempting to blame the lack of funds for the problems in the US public infrastructure, but problematic management seems to play a much bigger role. Almost any public infrastructure project around me: paving local roads, repairing a bridge or doing the Big Dig takes much longer than planned and ends up with huge cost overruns. And is plagued by corruption, cronyism or incompetence (often, pick at least two). Yes, we should rebuild the infrastructure. If more money is required we should find it. But we should find a way that holds the bureaucrats accountable on both the costs and the schedule; otherwise we will be throwing good money after the bad. My 2c.
- asdfman123 6y ago
  Perhaps obstructionism and attacks on government as the problem -- instead of clearheaded, reasonable governance -- has destroyed the ability for government to provide solutions.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  That way would be: do what Germany did before the 90s and the privatization wave. Every city/county had their own "Bauhof" with a couple of construction workers and machines for all kinds of maintenance that a city had: snow plowing in the winter, pothole fillings and greenkeeping in the summer, pipe laying/maintenance, traffic lights and general lights maintenance, other infrastructure upkeep. Today much of this is mandatory outsourced to the lowest bidder, with no way of accounting for regionality or quality. To make it worse, cities and counties used to have capable public servants in architecture and supervision, which meant that for those projects where external help was needed (think construction of new projects) that work could be properly supervised and issues either prevented in the planning stage or caught during construction and remedied before that became too expensive. Nowadays, thanks to more and more budget cuts, pay in public service is a third to a half of the private sector which means that even if there were a budget no one would apply. In IT the situation is even more dire, which is why almost all major government IT projects fail, with the additional complexity that most IT projects have way too many stakeholders and no leadership. We as Western societies need to roll back that privatization mandate, at least for areas where it has obviously failed.
rayiner 6y ago
There is no austerity. Here is state-and-local spending as a percentage of GDP from 1970 to present: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-read-only/wp-content/uploads/sites/1294/2016/07/11210814/30_003.jpg https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-re... And here is GDP in 2010 dollars: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location... State and local governments went from spending 10% of $23,000 per person to 15% of $55,000 per person. Per-person state and local spending went up by a factor of 3.5, even after adjusted for inflation. With respect to public infrastructure specifically, there has been no austerity. For example, here is a graph of NYC subway ridership from 1970 to 2014: https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C414px&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%.... Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The system deteriorated the whole time leading to catastrophic failure in the last few years. The London transit system, by contrast, spends about $3.2 billion in capital expenditures to run a system that is very similar in terms of age, size, etc: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf. Despite spending half as much money, London has been able to significantly grow the network while keeping maintenance current and maintaining on-time performance. Honestly, invocations of "starve the beast" and "austerity" are nothing more than gaslighting. It's a cop-out for why our public services are so shitty, even though we spend vastly more on them than we used to spend.
- graeme 6y ago
  My favorite example: the American government spends more on health care than any other OECD government, for much less coverage. https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
  - tptacek 6y ago
x87678r 6y ago
> private education, private healthcare, privatized transit After defunding the police, they'll have private security as well.
- decebalus1 6y ago
  We already have that https://mynorthwest.com/152537/growing-number-of-seattle-neighborhoods-paying-for-private-police/ https://mynorthwest.com/152537/growing-number-of-seattle-nei...
cryptonector 6y ago
> The last 40 years of austerity politics in the US Wikipedia[0] says that "[austerity] is a set of political-economic policies that aim to reduce government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases, or a combination of both." That strikes me as a correct definition of 'austerity'. But we've not had any spending cuts in real terms or in terms of GDP. Nor have we had tax increases for the past "40 years" -- sure, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama raised taxes, but Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Trump cut taxes. Yes, reducing budget deficits has been a stated goal of most Presidents since 1980, but that's mostly been lip service. None bothered to actually try. President Clinton did manage to reduce the deficit, but not because he wanted or tried to, but because of the unexpected revenue growth caused by the unexpected economic growth caused by the unexpected IT revolution. > For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD. What was that in 1980? Was there a step in this, say, around 1996? Did it go up in 1996 when Federal funding for 100,000 new police officers dried up? I.e., did President Bill Clinton's well-meaning 100,000 police officer initiative have unintended consequences? > On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1]. I don't doubt this! We saw in Ferguson, MO, that the police was giving out an inordinate number of traffic fines every year! It's almost... exactly as if... they were paying themselves with that -- a terrible corruption. As I recall the number of citizens in NYC who have fines in arrears is staggering. Police department funding via fines is a form of corruption, and strongly indicative of police departments being too large. And the invention of civil asset forfeiture (in the 80s, IIRC), and the rise in its use (in the mid-90s, IIRC), also seems like police (and prosecutors) paying themselves with poor people's assets. And it is invariably the poor who have been hardest hit by civil asset forfeiture. The police have to be sized appropriately to: - investigate and close most cases - support investigations appropriately - provide a minimum of neighborhood police presence to deter crime and build a rapport with the community Also, police need to be sized appropriately for dealing with civil disturbances, though here calling on neighboring districts when needed can help reduce the size of police force needed. The police departments of most large U.S. cities are almost certainly oversized at present. One of the first steps in remediating some of iniquities of our system should be to end police department funding via fines and civil asset forfeiture (by simply ending civil asset forfeiture -- as clearly unconstitutional a practice as any). In some States fine revenue is shared with the State, but perhaps the amounts of the fines should go down and the percentage that goes to the issuing jurisdiction should go down significantly. At the very least the parameters of traffic violation fining need fine-tuning. Once the police can only be funded by general revenue of the local town/city, and the towns/cities cannot fund themselves with fines / civil asset forfeitures, we'll see a proper reconsideration of police funding. I.e., the police need to be not so much defunded as right-funded, and today that would generally mean spending less on police. I'm not sure that in 1993 it was the case that the police needed to be funded more, though I'd be happy to see evidence to the contrary. Crime rates did go down significantly in the 90s, but those extra ~80,000 new police officers are not the only cause of that, and probably not even a major cause at all. The main cause of the fall in crime rates in the 90s seems to have been demography. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity
toast0 6y ago
> For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD. > For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. Education isn't part of LA City government, education comes from school districts which are not funded or controlled by cities in California (if any Mayoral candidate in California other than SF tells you they're going to fix the schools, they're either lieing or unaware of the job of their office; SF is an exception because they are a combined city and county and school districts are supervised by the counties in which they reside) Same with healthcare and transit --- those agencies are separate from cities too, so city funds don't go there.
refurb 6y ago
40 years of austerity? Last I checked federal, state and local budgets are several-fold bigger than 40 years ago, even accounting for inflation.
metrokoi 6y ago
>On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than letter ones Likely a large portion of what they saw was a product of racial and political demographics. Whites are a larger percent of rural populations than cities. [0] White people on average rate police much better than non-whites. [1] Of course whites may rate police better because they live in rural areas, but the gap in satisfaction between whites and blacks is too great to be accounted for by more whites living in rural areas. Also rural people are more likely to be conservative and conservative people rate police much higher. Rural officers are in less danger in rural areas, so they may not need to be as alert and forceful because they know their lives are not in danger as much. [0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/06/27/census-shows-nonmetropolitan-america-is-whiter-getting-older-and-losing-population/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/06/27/census-... [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confidence-gap-in-police-performance/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confid...

by pizza 6y ago

munk-a 6y ago

And this is exactly where the "Defund the Police" movement comes from and seems like an extremely good movement to pursue - shift that budget balance back in favor of specialized agencies that can better support social needs rather than forcing it all onto the police force. I really just wish it had gotten a better name since that title for the idea really divides people before they even open their minds.

austincheney 6y ago
Defunding the police is generally unpopular where I live. My big city is growing at about 22% decade over decade and will likely surpass San Jose in population over the next 10 years. It is also the lowest density big city in the US. In order to support the growing population the police force must continue to grow as well. The fastest growing area of the city is also the least policed. This not result of negligence from the city but just the geographic direction the city is growing towards and the funding limitations to meet the growing needs of the community. There are plans to put a precinct in my area of the city, which is strongly wanted, but it won’t happen if the police are defunded.
- plussed_reader 6y ago
  What are the current home zoning vs planned updates/build for this area? San Jose has issue with single family units over dominating the area; the need for denser housing options hasn't abated, nor for the surrounding county and the greater bay area. That has to be planned with local Transpo options, and now you enter the quagmire of 4 transportation agencies systems in the South Bay at least across several modes.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    The land area of my big city is massive, so there is no risk of running out of land. The problem with that is the increases of traffic and commute times. The area where I live is also absolutely dominated by single family residences. Developers have been building 500+ houses per year in the 5 mile radius of my house over the last decade and space for more single family residences in this location is running out. Developers are turning from single family dwellings towards apartment complexes. The current residents in the area are strongly opposed to the development of multi family units that will only further congest already unbearable traffic conditions. The city had to widen roads to accommodate the rapidly growing population but keeps putting it off.
- cvlasdkv 6y ago
  > In order to support the growing population the police force must continue to grow as well. Do you have a source for this claim? I mean we can all claim it is intuitive but just how many police, how "well funded", what equipment, and what jurisdiction?
  - austincheney 6y ago
    It’s based on participation of people in things like city council attendance, bond package votes, participation on local Facebook pages, and so forth. No, I don’t have actual numbers.
knodi123 6y ago
> since that title for the idea really divides people before they even open their minds. Hence the brilliant onion headline, "‘So, It Means Making The Police Lose Their Homes And Forcing Them To Get A Divorce?’ Says Nation Still Struggling To Understand How Defunding The Police Works" https://www.theonion.com/so-it-means-making-the-police-lose-their-homes-and-fo-1844042836 https://www.theonion.com/so-it-means-making-the-police-lose-...
graeme 6y ago
The US actually spends a low amount of money on policing compared to the EU, where police kill fewer people. Further, the US also has a low number of police officers. https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-police-vs-prisons-in-the-us-and-europe/ https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-poli...? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... The defund the police narrative isn’t based on any actual examination of US police spending, or general public spending. The key issues are instead police unions, lack of police training in the US, impunity for police abuses, etc Cambridge NJ is often cited as a model of reform. But I am not sure they reduced spending. Instead they disbanded and reformed their police.
- logjammin 6y ago
  I think you mean Camden, NJ.
  - graeme 6y ago
    You’re right, thanks!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- munk-a 6y ago
  > The key issues are instead police unions, lack of police training in the US, impunity for police abuses, etc Police unions, poor training and qualified immunity are really serious issues - but ones that are intractable to fight for on the national stage due to political gridlock. Just breaking up the unions as they stand right now and enforcing transparent employment history for law enforcement would make worlds of difference, but the action can't be taken unilaterally by a particular district - that district can ensure that incident reports are preserved but officers moving into the district may have had their employment history purged. Defunding the police is an actual policy decision that can be made on a local scale to address issues of over policing and start reinvesting in crime prevention rather than punishment.

ptero 6y ago

It is tempting to blame the lack of funds for the problems in the US public infrastructure, but problematic management seems to play a much bigger role. Almost any public infrastructure project around me: paving local roads, repairing a bridge or doing the Big Dig takes much longer than planned and ends up with huge cost overruns. And is plagued by corruption, cronyism or incompetence (often, pick at least two). Yes, we should rebuild the infrastructure. If more money is required we should find it. But we should find a way that holds the bureaucrats accountable on both the costs and the schedule; otherwise we will be throwing good money after the bad. My 2c.

asdfman123 6y ago
Perhaps obstructionism and attacks on government as the problem -- instead of clearheaded, reasonable governance -- has destroyed the ability for government to provide solutions.
mschuster91 6y ago
That way would be: do what Germany did before the 90s and the privatization wave. Every city/county had their own "Bauhof" with a couple of construction workers and machines for all kinds of maintenance that a city had: snow plowing in the winter, pothole fillings and greenkeeping in the summer, pipe laying/maintenance, traffic lights and general lights maintenance, other infrastructure upkeep. Today much of this is mandatory outsourced to the lowest bidder, with no way of accounting for regionality or quality. To make it worse, cities and counties used to have capable public servants in architecture and supervision, which meant that for those projects where external help was needed (think construction of new projects) that work could be properly supervised and issues either prevented in the planning stage or caught during construction and remedied before that became too expensive. Nowadays, thanks to more and more budget cuts, pay in public service is a third to a half of the private sector which means that even if there were a budget no one would apply. In IT the situation is even more dire, which is why almost all major government IT projects fail, with the additional complexity that most IT projects have way too many stakeholders and no leadership. We as Western societies need to roll back that privatization mandate, at least for areas where it has obviously failed.

rayiner 6y ago

There is no austerity. Here is state-and-local spending as a percentage of GDP from 1970 to present: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-read-only/wp-content/uploads/sites/1294/2016/07/11210814/30_003.jpg https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/courses-images-archive-re... And here is GDP in 2010 dollars: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location... State and local governments went from spending 10% of $23,000 per person to 15% of $55,000 per person. Per-person state and local spending went up by a factor of 3.5, even after adjusted for inflation. With respect to public infrastructure specifically, there has been no austerity. For example, here is a graph of NYC subway ridership from 1970 to 2014: https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C414px&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%.... Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The system deteriorated the whole time leading to catastrophic failure in the last few years. The London transit system, by contrast, spends about $3.2 billion in capital expenditures to run a system that is very similar in terms of age, size, etc: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf. Despite spending half as much money, London has been able to significantly grow the network while keeping maintenance current and maintaining on-time performance. Honestly, invocations of "starve the beast" and "austerity" are nothing more than gaslighting. It's a cop-out for why our public services are so shitty, even though we spend vastly more on them than we used to spend.

graeme 6y ago
My favorite example: the American government spends more on health care than any other OECD government, for much less coverage. https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
- tptacek 6y ago

x87678r 6y ago

> private education, private healthcare, privatized transit After defunding the police, they'll have private security as well.

decebalus1 6y ago
We already have that https://mynorthwest.com/152537/growing-number-of-seattle-neighborhoods-paying-for-private-police/ https://mynorthwest.com/152537/growing-number-of-seattle-nei...

cryptonector 6y ago

> The last 40 years of austerity politics in the US Wikipedia[0] says that "[austerity] is a set of political-economic policies that aim to reduce government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases, or a combination of both." That strikes me as a correct definition of 'austerity'. But we've not had any spending cuts in real terms or in terms of GDP. Nor have we had tax increases for the past "40 years" -- sure, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama raised taxes, but Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Trump cut taxes. Yes, reducing budget deficits has been a stated goal of most Presidents since 1980, but that's mostly been lip service. None bothered to actually try. President Clinton did manage to reduce the deficit, but not because he wanted or tried to, but because of the unexpected revenue growth caused by the unexpected economic growth caused by the unexpected IT revolution. > For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD. What was that in 1980? Was there a step in this, say, around 1996? Did it go up in 1996 when Federal funding for 100,000 new police officers dried up? I.e., did President Bill Clinton's well-meaning 100,000 police officer initiative have unintended consequences? > On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1]. I don't doubt this! We saw in Ferguson, MO, that the police was giving out an inordinate number of traffic fines every year! It's almost... exactly as if... they were paying themselves with that -- a terrible corruption. As I recall the number of citizens in NYC who have fines in arrears is staggering. Police department funding via fines is a form of corruption, and strongly indicative of police departments being too large. And the invention of civil asset forfeiture (in the 80s, IIRC), and the rise in its use (in the mid-90s, IIRC), also seems like police (and prosecutors) paying themselves with poor people's assets. And it is invariably the poor who have been hardest hit by civil asset forfeiture. The police have to be sized appropriately to: - investigate and close most cases - support investigations appropriately - provide a minimum of neighborhood police presence to deter crime and build a rapport with the community Also, police need to be sized appropriately for dealing with civil disturbances, though here calling on neighboring districts when needed can help reduce the size of police force needed. The police departments of most large U.S. cities are almost certainly oversized at present. One of the first steps in remediating some of iniquities of our system should be to end police department funding via fines and civil asset forfeiture (by simply ending civil asset forfeiture -- as clearly unconstitutional a practice as any). In some States fine revenue is shared with the State, but perhaps the amounts of the fines should go down and the percentage that goes to the issuing jurisdiction should go down significantly. At the very least the parameters of traffic violation fining need fine-tuning. Once the police can only be funded by general revenue of the local town/city, and the towns/cities cannot fund themselves with fines / civil asset forfeitures, we'll see a proper reconsideration of police funding. I.e., the police need to be not so much defunded as right-funded, and today that would generally mean spending less on police. I'm not sure that in 1993 it was the case that the police needed to be funded more, though I'd be happy to see evidence to the contrary. Crime rates did go down significantly in the 90s, but those extra ~80,000 new police officers are not the only cause of that, and probably not even a major cause at all. The main cause of the fall in crime rates in the 90s seems to have been demography. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity

toast0 6y ago

> For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD. > For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. Education isn't part of LA City government, education comes from school districts which are not funded or controlled by cities in California (if any Mayoral candidate in California other than SF tells you they're going to fix the schools, they're either lieing or unaware of the job of their office; SF is an exception because they are a combined city and county and school districts are supervised by the counties in which they reside) Same with healthcare and transit --- those agencies are separate from cities too, so city funds don't go there.

refurb 6y ago

40 years of austerity? Last I checked federal, state and local budgets are several-fold bigger than 40 years ago, even accounting for inflation.

metrokoi 6y ago

>On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than letter ones Likely a large portion of what they saw was a product of racial and political demographics. Whites are a larger percent of rural populations than cities. [0] White people on average rate police much better than non-whites. [1] Of course whites may rate police better because they live in rural areas, but the gap in satisfaction between whites and blacks is too great to be accounted for by more whites living in rural areas. Also rural people are more likely to be conservative and conservative people rate police much higher. Rural officers are in less danger in rural areas, so they may not need to be as alert and forceful because they know their lives are not in danger as much. [0] https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/06/27/census-shows-nonmetropolitan-america-is-whiter-getting-older-and-losing-population/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2017/06/27/census-... [1] https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confidence-gap-in-police-performance/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/09/29/the-racial-confid...