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> Even more fundamental is the adversarial relationship that the culture of policing has developed with the public. The warrior mindset is at the root of so man

> Even more fundamental is the adversarial relationship that the culture of policing has developed with the public. The warrior mindset is at the root of so many of these problems. We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service. The problem is every time this is brought up, it's met with talk of how reform is possible, reform is the answer, you can't disband the police because $(blatantly_ridiculous_reason). The police in this country are unaccountable, in a literal sense. There is no mechanism to hold them accountable; what exists to do this is inefficient, inaccessible to most people who may need to use it, and also largely ineffective even in the rare cases it does work. And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons. Policing in the United States is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was always intended to do: abusing poor people in the interest of the owning class. You can't reform that which is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And if you hold officers accountable, then they won't overpolice minority neighborhoods, they won't beat people to death for sleeping in front of your buildings, they might hesitate to shoot someone in the back for stealing a $5 beer. I.e., they become less effective to the owning class. And that's why it doesn't happen. Until this cultural gap is resolved, where we acknowledge not just what is happening but why it's happening and that it's happening was the intended, desired outcome, we can't move forward on it.

treeman79 6y ago
Grew up in a city that disbanded its police department. Became a complete hellhole as calls to burglary, home invasion and death threats would take an hour or more for county sheriff. After numerous incidents sherif us told to get a gun; but gave a lot of warnings about how we would go to jail if we defended ourselves. Unless a very narrow range of criteria were met. Moved as far as way as possible.
- oblio 6y ago
  I don't think people are asking for abolishing the police force, but for restarting it with new or reformed people and with strong civilian oversight. Cops should go to jail for abuses.
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    People have literally been calling for just that here. The "replacements" as proposed are not by any stretch of thr imagination what you might call a "police force". Perhaps only coincidentally, the department is struggling to hire and crime- both violent and nonviolent- is up. My friend's workplace just finished reinstalling bullet proof glass due to the rise in shootings and rock throwings.
    - azernik 6y ago
      Depends who's suggesting a replacement. Camden literally just created a new police force from the ground up to replace the deeply abusive one they disbanded. It's hard to disentangle the union-busting function from the culture-changing function, since the two are so closely intertwined in the US.
      - zdragnar 6y ago
        Camden NJ, in 2013? They hired back most of the officers who were fired when the department became a division of the county police. They went through more training, psych profiling, and then put more officers on the streets and implemented a broken windows policy to get the murder rate under control, which later was rolled back after protests. That is nothing like what is being suggested here. The police haven't been abolished yet, but only because nobody can agree on what to have instead. Most common suggestions are to have neighborhood watch, plugs social workers to be dispatched for most crimes- unless a gun is held to someone's head, there are city board members suggesting that police shouldn't be dispatched at all. Even in cases of rape, they're saying that social workers are better suited to "deescalate if necessary and to deal with the emotional trauma". This is what the "abolish" advocates around here are pushing for- "abolish" not "start over with new offices in the same capacity as the old ones".
        azernik 6y ago
        The OP that all this is in response to is not advocating that, which you can tell by the fact that they don't use the word "abolish": > We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service There are indeed people who want to abolish the police. There are those who don't. That's why I said "depends who's suggesting a replacement": in this particular case the top-level comment was calling to create a police force with a different institutional culture, not to create some non-police institution. About Camden: a rebuilding of the department involved massive cultural change, selectively rehiring to weed out bad influences, recreating the hierarchy to put more civilian-friendly people on top, and breaking the back of the police union. Rebuilding an organization to do the same task from the ground up let's you accomplish that. You're still going to end up hiring from the same talent pool, but those individuals can behave very differently in a different organizational culture.
- foolinaround 6y ago
  can you name your city?
- intended 6y ago
  Which city?
- xtian 6y ago
  According to the FBI, the national case clearance rate was 13.9% for burglary and 30.4% for robbery in 2018. That means that for the average US citizen who reports one of the crimes you mention there is a ~70-85% chance that the police will show up and accomplish exactly nothing. The highest case clearance rates were for violent crime and aggravated assault (45.5% and 52.5%, respectively). These crimes typically occur between people who already know each other, and yet it's basically a coin flip whether the police will deliver a case for prosecution.
  - nullc 6y ago
    The (positive) effect of law enforcement include more than just case clearance rates. Think about how attractive a crime is when you have a 0.01% chance of going to jail for it vs a 13.9% chance of going to jail. A clearance rate could be only a few percent and still be an effective deterrent if the marginal benefit of the crime over some other activity is enough worse than the punishment. Also consider that a significant fraction of all crimes is committed by a small portion of the population. Even if we fail to send someone to jail for 90% of crimes they commit, eventually they are caught and removed from the community, preventing their future crimes -- stopping all the crimes they would have otherwise committed. The end point here isn't necessarily jail-- either, if they're caught once and scared straight the same thing applies.
    - xtian 6y ago
      This is a convenient self-justifying fantasy. You're straight up saying that police could fail to do anything about 97% of crimes and it would still be worth it for cities to dump 30-50% of their yearly budgets into them because "think of how bad it might be otherwise!" Be honest: do you apply such lax standards of effectiveness to any other area of your life? Would you pay 30% of your salary to go to a hospital that historically only cured 3% of patients? If so I've got some miracle leeches you might be interested in next time you're feeling ill. It's insane to me that people would rather dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a pointless effort to try to terrorize communities into law-abidance rather than invest that money into addressing some of the material desperation and crises in mental health which would actually make our communities nicer to live in for everyone.
- zorpner 6y ago
  Please name the city. In the known examples of this practice, it has had positive effects, e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/25/camden-newark-new-jersey-police-reform https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/25/camden-newar... > Camden and Newark, two cities in New Jersey, are among those that have been held up as powerful examples of positive change. The two cities have seen structural reforms to their police departments and a steep drop in crime, both within the communities and inflicted by the police.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    Camden didn't "abolish" their police force. It was rolled up into the police force of the surrounding county, along with some other changes in how the department was run and organized Clearly it was an effective structural reform. But it does not constitute "police abolition" in a way that would be meaningful to police abolitionists. And Newark didn't even do that. They just started actually investigating police abuses and imposing actual consequences for abuse. If anything, it goes to show that you don't need police abolition to make an improvement. But you do need to make changes that amount to more than lip service.
- GoodJokes 6y ago
  Citations needed.
- aksjfnkajsnd 6y ago
  what city and when
- SimbaOnSteroids 6y ago
  Mind saying which city in specific? Googling only brings up Camden NJ as an example and from what I can tell things got really bad for a while then they rebuilt the police department. Which is, from what I understand, is what calls to disband the police really want. Ref: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disbanded-its-police-force-here-s-what-n1231677 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...
eggsmediumrare 6y ago
Disbanding the police sounds a lot nicer than taking away the livelihoods of thousands and thousands of parents, most of whom are not raging racist bastards.
kaczordon 6y ago
And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons. Please provide a source for this. No need to rewrite history. I believe most historians agree that American policing was based off of the London policing system: “The first police department in the United States was established in New York City in 1844 (it was officially organized in 1845). Other cities soon followed suit: New Orleans and Cincinnati (Ohio) in 1852; Boston and Philadelphia in 1854; Chicago and Milwaukee (Wis.) in 1855; and Baltimore (Md.) and Newark (N.J.) in 1857. Those early departments all used the London Metropolitan Police as a model.” If anything poor neighborhoods that have high crime need more police not less, there’s a reason Chicago and Detroit have problems and it’s not because of overpolicing. https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-United-States https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-...
- foob 6y ago
  From an article in Time [1]: The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.” In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves. From Wikipedia [2]: For approximately 150 years, union organizing efforts and strikes have been periodically opposed by police, security forces, National Guard units, special police forces such as the Coal and Iron Police, and/or use of the United States Army. Significant incidents have included the Haymarket Riot and the Ludlow massacre. The Homestead struggle of 1892, the Pullman walkout of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903 are examples of unions destroyed or significantly damaged by the deployment of military force. In all three examples, a strike became the triggering event. These aren't the only influences on modern policing in the US, but it's hard to argue that the history of US policing isn't deeply intertwined with slave patrols, union busting efforts, and more generally protecting the interests of the ruling class. [1] - https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/ https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States#Union_busting_with_police_and_military_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
Stratoscope 6y ago
> The warrior mindset is at the root of so many of these problems. We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service. Nearly ten years ago, Reason posted a comparison of police recruitment videos from Decatur, Georgia, and Newport Beach, California. They illustrate beautifully the two mindsets you describe. https://reason.com/2012/07/06/voting-with-your-feet-police-edition/ https://reason.com/2012/07/06/voting-with-your-feet-police-e... The videos don't play on that page any more, so here are direct links. Decatur: https://www.youtube.com/watch/cIgt8pmh7CU https://www.youtube.com/watch/cIgt8pmh7CU Newport Beach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_rKA6ROAVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_rKA6ROAVk
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> you can't disband the police because $(blatantly_ridiculous_reason). Most of us do not consider apprehension of violent criminals to be a “blatantly ridiculous reason.” > The police in this country are unaccountable, in a literal sense. There is no mechanism to hold them accountable; what exists to do this is inefficient, inaccessible to most people who may need to use it, and also largely ineffective even in the rare cases it does work. This is true. > And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons. This is false. > Policing in the United States is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was always intended to do: abusing poor people in the interest of the owning class. You can't reform that which is doing exactly what it was designed to do. This is a leftist talking point that is designed to avoid recognizing that abuse of authority is not a consequence of a specific country’s troubled history but a consequence of the existence of authority. They do this because they can, not because some oligarch somewhere wants them to. > And if you hold officers accountable, then they won't overpolice minority neighborhoods, they won't beat people to death for sleeping in front of your buildings, they might hesitate to shoot someone in the back for stealing a $5 beer. I.e., they become less effective to the owning class. And that's why it doesn't happen. It doesn’t happen because the ability to hold the police accountable is the same as the ability of the police to hold members of society accountable, i.e. coercion. And coercion always begets abuse. So your institution that holds the police accountable becomes the one who is responsible for people getting beat to death, etc, and the cycle continues because we can’t seem to come to terms with the idea that society shouldn’t recognize norms of differential status. > Until this cultural gap is resolved, where we acknowledge not just what is happening but why it's happening and that it's happening was the intended, desired outcome, we can't move forward on it. You’re never going to make any progress on this because you’re wrong about this being the desired outcome, and so any solution based on this premise is flawed.
throwaway2037 6y ago
I understand your sentiment. Something is terrible broken in many police departments in the United States. It is appalling to see so many videos on YouTube of police violence where nothing happens to the police. Remember the video of the police person pushing over some old man trying to run away. Was that officer suspended or charged? I doubt it. That said, if you re-read your post from the perspective of someone living in Scotland, UK, it won't have the same impact. In theory, your thoughts should equally apply in the UK, but UK residents would probably disagree. I don't live in the UK, but I have some friends from various parts of the UK. There is such a different attitude about the police in the UK. Yes, they make mistakes, and there are a few bad apples. However, overall, there is respect. One of the key points is "police by consent". If you don't know about this concept in UK policing, I strongly recommend you Google a bit to read about it. Basically: The attitude of police is that they need to tread lightly in a community because they "police by consent". I know HN has many UK readers, so I would appreciate some comments about this! A deeper question to ask might be: Why have some US police forces descended so much (so little public trust) versus other police forces in the UK? In particular, from my non-resident view, it seems Scotland police have a very strong, if imperfect, relationship with their communities. What could US police forces learn from their UK counterparts? A few years ago, a New York Times journalist followed some US police who traveled to Scotland. They observed how the local police were trained and how they behaved during patrols and arrests. In short: Very differently! On a positive note: It is also worth looking at the Los Angeles police department. In the 1990s, it was one of the worst in the United States for community trust and police violence. After the Rodney King incident and riots that followed, there was a huge effort to "clean-up" the police force. The police leaders actively sought to rebuild ties with community and religious leaders. I have read multiple news and magazine articles about this relationship. When something bad happens in LA that might trigger inter-ethnic/religious tension, the LA police immediately reach-out to community leaders. They have public and private meetings to discuss the issue. My point: The community has a voice and feels heard. Yes, it is not perfect, but it demonstrates that real change is possible.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  It's very simple: Some police officers want to maintain a safe and secure neighborhood, others just like having power and want to engage in military cosplay but real. The police departments that maintain an effective community rapport are also going to be the ones that actively spend budgeted time and money weeding out the second class of cop. If you aren't vigilant about it, your PD will be chock full of the military cosplay types. Why? Well, a lot of the latter types are... well, I'm not going to say the nickname, since it's quite offensive in the UK (less so in the US). But they will often bounce from PD to PD. Once they wind up getting on the wrong end of an internal affairs investigation, they'll usually just resign to avoid punishment, move to another town, and sign up there. There's plenty of underfunded PDs that really aren't going to stick their nose up at bad cops.
wernercd 6y ago
> you can't disband the police because $(blatantly_ridiculous_reason). "ridiculous reasons" like crime, murder, violence and protecting people. Stupid people use those reasons to keep police so that they do silly things like... stay alive and safe. Meanwhile... you talk about riciculousness then talk nonsense about "slave patrols"... (and "union busting") Where's your stance on police from states that fought slavery and for freedom? Your comments about holding police accountable are reasonable... but they are surrounded by calling other people ridiculous while spewing your own crazy. We can talk about improving the system to hold police accountable without the crazy.
serjester 6y ago
Have you ever considered doing a police ride along? Where I live you can spend an entire day side by side with a cop. My experience showed me some of the horrendous things they have to deal with. There’s some genuinely dangerous people out there - I can’t imagine living somewhere without armed resistance to deal with it. With that said it’s critical officers form a relationship with the community they’re policing. That’s what good policing is and unfortunately the drug war has made it difficult.

treeman79 6y ago

Grew up in a city that disbanded its police department. Became a complete hellhole as calls to burglary, home invasion and death threats would take an hour or more for county sheriff. After numerous incidents sherif us told to get a gun; but gave a lot of warnings about how we would go to jail if we defended ourselves. Unless a very narrow range of criteria were met. Moved as far as way as possible.

oblio 6y ago
I don't think people are asking for abolishing the police force, but for restarting it with new or reformed people and with strong civilian oversight. Cops should go to jail for abuses.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  People have literally been calling for just that here. The "replacements" as proposed are not by any stretch of thr imagination what you might call a "police force". Perhaps only coincidentally, the department is struggling to hire and crime- both violent and nonviolent- is up. My friend's workplace just finished reinstalling bullet proof glass due to the rise in shootings and rock throwings.
  - azernik 6y ago
    Depends who's suggesting a replacement. Camden literally just created a new police force from the ground up to replace the deeply abusive one they disbanded. It's hard to disentangle the union-busting function from the culture-changing function, since the two are so closely intertwined in the US.
    - zdragnar 6y ago
      Camden NJ, in 2013? They hired back most of the officers who were fired when the department became a division of the county police. They went through more training, psych profiling, and then put more officers on the streets and implemented a broken windows policy to get the murder rate under control, which later was rolled back after protests. That is nothing like what is being suggested here. The police haven't been abolished yet, but only because nobody can agree on what to have instead. Most common suggestions are to have neighborhood watch, plugs social workers to be dispatched for most crimes- unless a gun is held to someone's head, there are city board members suggesting that police shouldn't be dispatched at all. Even in cases of rape, they're saying that social workers are better suited to "deescalate if necessary and to deal with the emotional trauma". This is what the "abolish" advocates around here are pushing for- "abolish" not "start over with new offices in the same capacity as the old ones".
      - azernik 6y ago
        The OP that all this is in response to is not advocating that, which you can tell by the fact that they don't use the word "abolish": > We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service There are indeed people who want to abolish the police. There are those who don't. That's why I said "depends who's suggesting a replacement": in this particular case the top-level comment was calling to create a police force with a different institutional culture, not to create some non-police institution. About Camden: a rebuilding of the department involved massive cultural change, selectively rehiring to weed out bad influences, recreating the hierarchy to put more civilian-friendly people on top, and breaking the back of the police union. Rebuilding an organization to do the same task from the ground up let's you accomplish that. You're still going to end up hiring from the same talent pool, but those individuals can behave very differently in a different organizational culture.
foolinaround 6y ago
can you name your city?
intended 6y ago
Which city?
xtian 6y ago
According to the FBI, the national case clearance rate was 13.9% for burglary and 30.4% for robbery in 2018. That means that for the average US citizen who reports one of the crimes you mention there is a ~70-85% chance that the police will show up and accomplish exactly nothing. The highest case clearance rates were for violent crime and aggravated assault (45.5% and 52.5%, respectively). These crimes typically occur between people who already know each other, and yet it's basically a coin flip whether the police will deliver a case for prosecution.
- nullc 6y ago
  The (positive) effect of law enforcement include more than just case clearance rates. Think about how attractive a crime is when you have a 0.01% chance of going to jail for it vs a 13.9% chance of going to jail. A clearance rate could be only a few percent and still be an effective deterrent if the marginal benefit of the crime over some other activity is enough worse than the punishment. Also consider that a significant fraction of all crimes is committed by a small portion of the population. Even if we fail to send someone to jail for 90% of crimes they commit, eventually they are caught and removed from the community, preventing their future crimes -- stopping all the crimes they would have otherwise committed. The end point here isn't necessarily jail-- either, if they're caught once and scared straight the same thing applies.
  - xtian 6y ago
    This is a convenient self-justifying fantasy. You're straight up saying that police could fail to do anything about 97% of crimes and it would still be worth it for cities to dump 30-50% of their yearly budgets into them because "think of how bad it might be otherwise!" Be honest: do you apply such lax standards of effectiveness to any other area of your life? Would you pay 30% of your salary to go to a hospital that historically only cured 3% of patients? If so I've got some miracle leeches you might be interested in next time you're feeling ill. It's insane to me that people would rather dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a pointless effort to try to terrorize communities into law-abidance rather than invest that money into addressing some of the material desperation and crises in mental health which would actually make our communities nicer to live in for everyone.
zorpner 6y ago
Please name the city. In the known examples of this practice, it has had positive effects, e.g.: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/25/camden-newark-new-jersey-police-reform https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/25/camden-newar... > Camden and Newark, two cities in New Jersey, are among those that have been held up as powerful examples of positive change. The two cities have seen structural reforms to their police departments and a steep drop in crime, both within the communities and inflicted by the police.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  Camden didn't "abolish" their police force. It was rolled up into the police force of the surrounding county, along with some other changes in how the department was run and organized Clearly it was an effective structural reform. But it does not constitute "police abolition" in a way that would be meaningful to police abolitionists. And Newark didn't even do that. They just started actually investigating police abuses and imposing actual consequences for abuse. If anything, it goes to show that you don't need police abolition to make an improvement. But you do need to make changes that amount to more than lip service.
GoodJokes 6y ago
Citations needed.
aksjfnkajsnd 6y ago
what city and when
SimbaOnSteroids 6y ago
Mind saying which city in specific? Googling only brings up Camden NJ as an example and from what I can tell things got really bad for a while then they rebuilt the police department. Which is, from what I understand, is what calls to disband the police really want. Ref: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disbanded-its-police-force-here-s-what-n1231677 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...

eggsmediumrare 6y ago

Disbanding the police sounds a lot nicer than taking away the livelihoods of thousands and thousands of parents, most of whom are not raging racist bastards.

kaczordon 6y ago

And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons. Please provide a source for this. No need to rewrite history. I believe most historians agree that American policing was based off of the London policing system: “The first police department in the United States was established in New York City in 1844 (it was officially organized in 1845). Other cities soon followed suit: New Orleans and Cincinnati (Ohio) in 1852; Boston and Philadelphia in 1854; Chicago and Milwaukee (Wis.) in 1855; and Baltimore (Md.) and Newark (N.J.) in 1857. Those early departments all used the London Metropolitan Police as a model.” If anything poor neighborhoods that have high crime need more police not less, there’s a reason Chicago and Detroit have problems and it’s not because of overpolicing. https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-United-States https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-...

foob 6y ago
From an article in Time [1]: The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.” In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves. From Wikipedia [2]: For approximately 150 years, union organizing efforts and strikes have been periodically opposed by police, security forces, National Guard units, special police forces such as the Coal and Iron Police, and/or use of the United States Army. Significant incidents have included the Haymarket Riot and the Ludlow massacre. The Homestead struggle of 1892, the Pullman walkout of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903 are examples of unions destroyed or significantly damaged by the deployment of military force. In all three examples, a strike became the triggering event. These aren't the only influences on modern policing in the US, but it's hard to argue that the history of US policing isn't deeply intertwined with slave patrols, union busting efforts, and more generally protecting the interests of the ruling class. [1] - https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/ https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_the_United_States#Union_busting_with_police_and_military_force https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...

Stratoscope 6y ago

> The warrior mindset is at the root of so many of these problems. We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service. Nearly ten years ago, Reason posted a comparison of police recruitment videos from Decatur, Georgia, and Newport Beach, California. They illustrate beautifully the two mindsets you describe. https://reason.com/2012/07/06/voting-with-your-feet-police-edition/ https://reason.com/2012/07/06/voting-with-your-feet-police-e... The videos don't play on that page any more, so here are direct links. Decatur: https://www.youtube.com/watch/cIgt8pmh7CU https://www.youtube.com/watch/cIgt8pmh7CU Newport Beach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_rKA6ROAVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_rKA6ROAVk

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

> you can't disband the police because $(blatantly_ridiculous_reason). Most of us do not consider apprehension of violent criminals to be a “blatantly ridiculous reason.” > The police in this country are unaccountable, in a literal sense. There is no mechanism to hold them accountable; what exists to do this is inefficient, inaccessible to most people who may need to use it, and also largely ineffective even in the rare cases it does work. This is true. > And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons. This is false. > Policing in the United States is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was always intended to do: abusing poor people in the interest of the owning class. You can't reform that which is doing exactly what it was designed to do. This is a leftist talking point that is designed to avoid recognizing that abuse of authority is not a consequence of a specific country’s troubled history but a consequence of the existence of authority. They do this because they can, not because some oligarch somewhere wants them to. > And if you hold officers accountable, then they won't overpolice minority neighborhoods, they won't beat people to death for sleeping in front of your buildings, they might hesitate to shoot someone in the back for stealing a $5 beer. I.e., they become less effective to the owning class. And that's why it doesn't happen. It doesn’t happen because the ability to hold the police accountable is the same as the ability of the police to hold members of society accountable, i.e. coercion. And coercion always begets abuse. So your institution that holds the police accountable becomes the one who is responsible for people getting beat to death, etc, and the cycle continues because we can’t seem to come to terms with the idea that society shouldn’t recognize norms of differential status. > Until this cultural gap is resolved, where we acknowledge not just what is happening but why it's happening and that it's happening was the intended, desired outcome, we can't move forward on it. You’re never going to make any progress on this because you’re wrong about this being the desired outcome, and so any solution based on this premise is flawed.

throwaway2037 6y ago

I understand your sentiment. Something is terrible broken in many police departments in the United States. It is appalling to see so many videos on YouTube of police violence where nothing happens to the police. Remember the video of the police person pushing over some old man trying to run away. Was that officer suspended or charged? I doubt it. That said, if you re-read your post from the perspective of someone living in Scotland, UK, it won't have the same impact. In theory, your thoughts should equally apply in the UK, but UK residents would probably disagree. I don't live in the UK, but I have some friends from various parts of the UK. There is such a different attitude about the police in the UK. Yes, they make mistakes, and there are a few bad apples. However, overall, there is respect. One of the key points is "police by consent". If you don't know about this concept in UK policing, I strongly recommend you Google a bit to read about it. Basically: The attitude of police is that they need to tread lightly in a community because they "police by consent". I know HN has many UK readers, so I would appreciate some comments about this! A deeper question to ask might be: Why have some US police forces descended so much (so little public trust) versus other police forces in the UK? In particular, from my non-resident view, it seems Scotland police have a very strong, if imperfect, relationship with their communities. What could US police forces learn from their UK counterparts? A few years ago, a New York Times journalist followed some US police who traveled to Scotland. They observed how the local police were trained and how they behaved during patrols and arrests. In short: Very differently! On a positive note: It is also worth looking at the Los Angeles police department. In the 1990s, it was one of the worst in the United States for community trust and police violence. After the Rodney King incident and riots that followed, there was a huge effort to "clean-up" the police force. The police leaders actively sought to rebuild ties with community and religious leaders. I have read multiple news and magazine articles about this relationship. When something bad happens in LA that might trigger inter-ethnic/religious tension, the LA police immediately reach-out to community leaders. They have public and private meetings to discuss the issue. My point: The community has a voice and feels heard. Yes, it is not perfect, but it demonstrates that real change is possible.

kmeisthax 6y ago
It's very simple: Some police officers want to maintain a safe and secure neighborhood, others just like having power and want to engage in military cosplay but real. The police departments that maintain an effective community rapport are also going to be the ones that actively spend budgeted time and money weeding out the second class of cop. If you aren't vigilant about it, your PD will be chock full of the military cosplay types. Why? Well, a lot of the latter types are... well, I'm not going to say the nickname, since it's quite offensive in the UK (less so in the US). But they will often bounce from PD to PD. Once they wind up getting on the wrong end of an internal affairs investigation, they'll usually just resign to avoid punishment, move to another town, and sign up there. There's plenty of underfunded PDs that really aren't going to stick their nose up at bad cops.

wernercd 6y ago

> you can't disband the police because $(blatantly_ridiculous_reason). "ridiculous reasons" like crime, murder, violence and protecting people. Stupid people use those reasons to keep police so that they do silly things like... stay alive and safe. Meanwhile... you talk about riciculousness then talk nonsense about "slave patrols"... (and "union busting") Where's your stance on police from states that fought slavery and for freedom? Your comments about holding police accountable are reasonable... but they are surrounded by calling other people ridiculous while spewing your own crazy. We can talk about improving the system to hold police accountable without the crazy.

serjester 6y ago

Have you ever considered doing a police ride along? Where I live you can spend an entire day side by side with a cop. My experience showed me some of the horrendous things they have to deal with. There’s some genuinely dangerous people out there - I can’t imagine living somewhere without armed resistance to deal with it. With that said it’s critical officers form a relationship with the community they’re policing. That’s what good policing is and unfortunately the drug war has made it difficult.