6 ms·

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

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.
  - pydry 6y ago
    If a company was struggling to hire and incapable of performing its primary function it gets wound up. Why should the same logic not apply to police forces? Moreover, the threat of this happening would help whip a lot of other forces into shape.
    - zdragnar 6y ago
      In the case of this city, it is more like a company is having a hard time hiring QA testers because the COO and all the directors have been publicly saying for months that they plan on firing all the testers and making the engineers do their own QA instead, because bugs are a code problem and engineers know code better, and if only we didn't have QA there wouldn't be any bugs in the first place.
- sneak 6y ago
  > I don't think people are asking for abolishing the police force Yes, we are. That's what "abolish police" means. Could we please abolish the police force? They do far more harm than good.
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...

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.
- pydry 6y ago
  If a company was struggling to hire and incapable of performing its primary function it gets wound up. Why should the same logic not apply to police forces? Moreover, the threat of this happening would help whip a lot of other forces into shape.
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    In the case of this city, it is more like a company is having a hard time hiring QA testers because the COO and all the directors have been publicly saying for months that they plan on firing all the testers and making the engineers do their own QA instead, because bugs are a code problem and engineers know code better, and if only we didn't have QA there wouldn't be any bugs in the first place.
sneak 6y ago
> I don't think people are asking for abolishing the police force Yes, we are. That's what "abolish police" means. Could we please abolish the police force? They do far more harm than good.

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...