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This is usually a sign of some perceived failure of the public option. Public schools in NY not delivering education some folks expect -> market starts for pri

This is usually a sign of some perceived failure of the public option. Public schools in NY not delivering education some folks expect -> market starts for private schools. Existing delivery service not able to do guaranteed same or next day delivery -> merchants and others will build out their own capacity. My guess is that as police are defunded (Minneapolis is getting rid of police department entirely) folks who can pay and see a role for security will probably contract for it. In the bay area this is already happening to a small degree. It used to be you could walk into a lot of office buildings freely, now pretty tight security in some downtown areas (ie, public security option / service options are very poor and not maintained). So we get elevator passes and lockouts, security person downstairs, turnstiles, bathrooms all got doors with RFID door locks.

throwaway15579 5y ago
I'm seeing the same thing in Seattle. Private security has become MUCH more common all over the city in the past few years. I even see apartment buildings hiring 24/7 private security that patrols the building and the street around the building as an amenity.
- slownews45 5y ago
  Overseas the end results if the police are totally defunded or weak is that you tend to end up with really strong differences / ghettos around places where there is and is not security. It's like gated communities on steroids, but starts to include office, mfg and other items like retail (which totally leave places with no security). Can result in shocking differences on both sides of the fence that usually separates these areas. Ironically the police then tend to follow along and provide better security to what are not better areas (if they have any capacity).
  - tpmx 5y ago
    Overseas where?
    - z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
      Everywhere? Have you not looked outside?
    - throwaway15579 5y ago
      This is how life is in basically every Central and South American city, in my experience. As soon as a family has some relatively small amount of wealth they will spend it on ultra-secure apartment buildings, tall walls around their house, razor-wire walls and fences, full coverage security cameras and intruder detection, etc.
      - tpmx 5y ago
        I saw jarring signs of that when I visited Mexico City in 2003 - I stayed with a business partner who lived in a walled community guarded by private guards openly carrying submachine guns. Can only imagine that the security has been dialed up a few notches by now. (The source of my confusion: I interpreted "overseas" in a quite literal way - I'm from Europe.)
        medium_burrito 5y ago
        Did you visit one of the armored car dealerships in Polanco? They are badass.
        tpmx 5y ago
        I did not. I think random violent carjackings had just started happening at scale. The guy who hosted me was getting a bit worried.
- cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
  Has been the case in the mayor's hood for years: https://laurelhurstcc.com/security/ https://laurelhurstcc.com/security/
  - Seattle3503 5y ago
    The mayor lives in a different neighborhood, but that one also has paid patrols iirc.
- medium_burrito 5y ago
  For the first time in my life I've seen private security in my neighborhood. We're in one of the poorer areas of the city (ie $1-2.5m houses), so perhaps people cannot afford to leave? I've always thought security on demand was a great idea- the real killer app in my mind is having a map online of which houses the private security company protects, so as to create an incentive for people who aren't paying to get protection as the thieves know what's ripe for the picking.
  - chasd00 5y ago
    how wold a private security company protect your house? If they were there in the driveway 24x7 then maybe. Once your house is robbed or being robbed if you have to call someone it's already too late. i was a victim of a home invasion and maybe 10 years later a violent crime. In both cases only after the real danger was over did a call for help happen. In the home invasion it ended when the gunman was forcing my roommate to the garage, my roommate opened the door, the gunman walked out, he then slammed/locked the door behind him and we hit the deck calling 911 In the second case i was jumped from behind and knocked nearly unconscious before being robbed. It took me a full 15min to get the brain fog cleared to even think what to do next. i don't see how an app is going to offer any protection at all. Maybe it speeds up reporting crime??
    - Cyberdog 5y ago
      The same way that police ostensibly protect houses; by being there, patrolling randomly, keeping an eye out for things that don't look right.
  - C19is20 5y ago
    >We're in one of the poorer areas of the city (ie $1-2.5m houses Is that 'poorer' measured in actual USD $, or old Italian lira or pesos or something? #wishiwaspoorthere.
    - medium_burrito 5y ago
      This is American techbro poor, where rampant asset inflation has been occurring ever since the government has been more or less printing money, and now buying corporate bonds (BOJ of course is the ghost of economy future here, having done this since the late triassic). Not really a purely American problem- everybody else has this too- which is why young people are so pissed everywhere that they have no future.
- neither_color 5y ago
  I have latin american heritage and that's pretty how much it is in the old country for anyone who can afford it. I won't be surprised if in a few years barbed wire and glass shard fencing becomes more common. The sad thing is America is doing this to itself very willfully through some obvious policy failures while blaming abstract intangible forces like "capitalism."
throwkeep 5y ago
Indeed, defunding the police means the poor will be even less protected. The rich will always have their private security. And now they'll have a larger/cheaper labor force, with ex-police officers looking for a new job?
- ranma4703 5y ago
  This presumes that the police ever protected the poor, when the opposite is the case.
  - slownews45 5y ago
    In that case this could end up being a win-win situation it seems like. The poor get rid of the police in their neighborhoods and the folks who want more policing get it? We've had a fair bit of retail closing as the police are pulling back out of some areas.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      Poor people don’t want to get rid of police, they want to not be hassled by police. In the 90s when the NYPD started firing lazy/corrupt police commanders and cracking down on street crime, evicting families of drug dealers from public housing, and putting down pit bulls.. poor communities were very much in favor of what was happening. The tide shifted when the cops went all in on stupid metrics.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    Even for middle class people, the police are basically there to file the paperwork you need to file insurance claims. "Oh, somebody broke into your car and stole stuff? You shouldn't leave things lying around. We'll never catch the guy. Oh, you have video of the incident and know exactly who it is? Yeah, we can't really do anything with this. Oh you need to file a report for the insurance company? Fill this out and check back with us next month." I'm very much NOT surprised that people who've actually needed the police for something have decided to there needs to be a private alternative.
sneak 5y ago
> My guess is that as police are defunded (Minneapolis is getting rid of police department entirely) folks who can pay and see a role for security will probably contract for it. In the bay area this is already happening to a small degree. I think in a lot of major metros, even funded police aren't meeting people's needs. If we aren't getting what we're paying for, we should stop paying.
- Buttons840 5y ago
  I think a lot of people feel that way. Am I more likely to have a positive or negative interaction with police? I honestly don't know, and I'm white in a nice area. Crime is low and something like a burglary is extremely unlikely. I think police may be providing an unseen benefit to me by enforcing the law on others - I don't want vehicles doing 50 mph on my residential street, maybe they would without police? Or maybe they wouldn't? I'm not taking a side on this issue, but I do empathize with those who believe they are unlikely to ever benefit from police presence, and thus don't want to pay for police.
  - planet-and-halo 5y ago
    This is a major part of the problem in these debates. People don't measure or argue from what they can't see. We often imagine issues as scalars, when more often they are a single knob on a complex machine, most of which is invisible to even the best informed people.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Like all things, it’s a complex issue. Personally, I think the underlying issue is a lack of accountability. Address that, and many issues resolve themselves.
  - noofen 5y ago
    > I do empathize with those who believe they are unlikely to ever benefit from police presence, and thus don't want to pay for police. You're saying this like the majority these people have a net-positive impact on tax revenue. It's quite the opposite.
CerealFounder 5y ago
Minneapolis is not getting rid of the police department as a quick Google would happily show you. Its a fallacy to assume it is a failure of a public option when it just as easily can be that we've been marketed that we are vulnerable and unsafe. Almost all stats have TODAY being just about the safest moment for violent crime in the history of humanity. Dont confuse a change in peoples purchasing habits as a logical response to something intrinsic. Its barely ever correlated. edit: I actually reread and saw you said "perceived value," I agree with you, I just think its a tragedy people are so scared. Although SF seems to be really having a problem.
- lolbrels 5y ago
  Stretching the scope of violence over the entirety of human history is not a good metric considering the mass death and wars. Lowering the scope down to the past decade I would say an entire year of BLM riots, mass looting, firebombing courthouses, small business owners devastated...you catch my drift. I'm not sure whether your comment was just naïve or intentionally misleading to downplay what has been happening the past year or two. There is definitely a correlation between that and increased security presence on site at many locations. Especially when the police simply stood by in some instances while looters had free reign over entire city blocks gleefully snatching whatever they could. Disgusting.
- lliamander 5y ago
  This past year has been markedly worse for many people than it was just a few short years ago.
zapita 5y ago
> Minneapolis is getting rid of police department entirely This is incorrect. The city council made a non-binding “pledge” to dismantle the police department. But according to the New York Times, the pledge "has been rejected by the city's mayor, a plurality of residents in recent public opinion polls, and an increasing number of community groups. Taking its place have been the types of incremental reforms that the city's progressive politicians had denounced." [1] The ideas behind “defund the police” are simply not popular in the US. A majority of Americans want a police department - but they want a police department that protects everyone equally. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-defund-police.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-d...
Spooky23 5y ago
Most of this is perceived bullshit. As the gap between working class and affluent people widens, you have a layer of professionals with money looking for stuff to do. Those folks have a tendency to want to separate themselves from the dirty masses. (Ie gated community) It’s what you did after you sell the family factory business in Ohio and move to Florida or wherever. Building security theatre was accelerated driven by 9/11 paranoia and federal standards.
- xeromal 5y ago
  Security is absolutely necessary in down towns. In LA, it is out of control. You can't even go inside a 711 without being harassed until they hired guards.
  - adjkant 5y ago
    Not my experience at all in the downtowns of NYC, Boston, Seattle, and SF. DTLA is a very unique downtown due to many factors specific to LA (mainly car culture taking away practical significance from the city center + the housing sprawl) and that doesn't generalize to most actual cities.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    > Security is absolutely necessary in down towns. In LA, it is out of control. You can't even go inside a 711 without being harassed until they hired guards. At which point the need was filled. No dystopic community mercenary forces were necessary.
    - xeromal 5y ago
      I think the idea of the citizen security force is for communities that don't have the money to afford security guards like the large buildings that can.
      - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        Currently, Citizen offers a subscription product called 'Protect', which costs $19.99 per month. Protect sends a user's location to a Citizen employee when it's turned on, can stream video to a 'Protect agent' when activated using a safeword, and is pitched to users as a 'digital bodyguard'. Protect also advertises 'Instant emergency response to your exact location' This seems like the idea is to supply a rent-a-thug to individuals, on-demand.
EvanAnderson 5y ago
Edging closer to "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" and the "Central Intelligence Corporation".
- danielodievich 5y ago
  Nice! I'd say these guys are going to be MetaCops and a soon to be discovered competitor will try to be Enforcers.
- exhilaration 5y ago
  Yes! Snow Crash is exactly what came to my mind when I read this article.
- neither_color 5y ago
  Well they did remove "America" from their logo so it's a step in that direction. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-14/the-cia-has-a-new-logo-can-its-re-branding-woo-millennials https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-14/the-ci...
- slickrick216 5y ago
  It’s great isn’t it. I can’t wait to pick out which name to call my burbclave. Going to get a full gargoyle gear set.
soared 5y ago
You’re misunderstanding the phrase “defund police”. This is what it looks like in practice: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/08/974941422/6-month-experiment-replacing-denver-police-with-mental-health-teams-dubbed-a-suc https://www.npr.org/2021/03/08/974941422/6-month-experiment-...
- remarkEon 5y ago
  And this is what it looks like at scale. https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts-doubt-over-c77 https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts...
- seieste 5y ago
  This article talks about a program designed to fix the "root" of crime and homelessness. Instead of arresting people, they'd call social workers. "Success" was measured by how many people were arrested and so the program "succeeded" because they responded to 750 calls but didn't arrest anyone. But is arrest really related to how well a program solves the root of the problem? It seems like a better measure would be something related to their actual goal. So why didn't they measure rate of property crime? Rate of homelessness? Poverty? Drug addiction? Supposedly these are the real causes of crime and homelessness. If they did actually measure those things, I think their evaluation of the program would be different [0] [1]. >> "Denver saw significant increases in most types of property crime in 2020. In comparison to the average of the previous four years, burglaries rose 23% in 2020, larceny rose 9%, auto theft rose 61% and theft from cars rose 39%, Denver police data shows." [0] [0] https://www.denverpost.com/2021/03/15/denver-property-crime-2020/ https://www.denverpost.com/2021/03/15/denver-property-crime-... [1] https://denver.cbslocal.com/2021/05/20/aurora-homeless-camping-ban-debate/ https://denver.cbslocal.com/2021/05/20/aurora-homeless-campi...
  - objectivetruth 5y ago
    If the current social model is "poor social services AND criminalization with its attendant burdens" and the new model is "poor social services," then it seems the cost savings from not arresting, processing, and incarcerating these folks would be enough of a success. For a homeless person, the benefits of not having a cop beat you up and throw all your meager possessions away is probably very valuable, if hard for us to quantify. Not jailing the homeless doesn't imply that they're responsible for an increase in crime, nor should it alone be expected to solve homelessness as a problem in any quantity.
newacct583 5y ago
This is sort of weirdly spun. In fact in Seattle we saw exactly what happens when a bunch of local yahoos decide to try to police themselves. How exactly do you think this is going to turn out differently than the CHAZ/CHOP fiasco, except in the clothing choices of the security people?
- lliamander 5y ago
  CHAZ folks were explicitly of the mindset of tearing down existing institutions in order to build a glorious future. Those folks seem to only be good at the first part. Simply wanting to preserve one's life, liberty, and property and live in relative commity with one's neighbors does not generally lead to excessive violence and destruction.
  - newacct583 5y ago
    This is just yarn spinning. Stuff you like is good. Stuff you don't like is bad, and you fit the adjectives to the story. I dare say those hippies in Seattle were fans of your Lockian ideal too, they just used different words. And likewise trying to replace police with this private goon squad[1] looks an awful lot like "tearing down existing institutions" to people like me who think it's a shit idea. That's not an argument, essentially. Words don't make truth. Either this trick is going to make people safer or it's going to get someone killed. [1] See what I did there? Words are fun!
    - lliamander 5y ago
      > I dare say those hippies in Seattle were fans of your Lockian ideal too Please don't confuse me for a student of Locke. > And likewise trying to replace police with this private goon squad[1] looks an awful lot like "tearing down existing institutions" to people like me who think it's a shit idea. Building UPS or Fedex is not the same thing as destroying USPS.
swearwolf 5y ago
At least on the West Coast of the U.S. it seems to me like there’s been a big change over the past ten years or so in what kinds of security events could happen in a given public space. These days it feels like anything is possible. We’ve had homeless people tailgate employees into the office building where I work. One tried to move into the handicapped bathroom stall. Another started grabbing things from people’s desks in an unoccupied area. After Portland began allowing overnight camping on public property under the Safe Sleep program, a small patch of land across from our office became a campsite pretty quickly, as did the sidewalks on adjacent streets. Some of the people who were camping there were pretty unstable, so you never really knew what to expect. In that same period of time, also on the West Coast, we’ve seen a shift towards a more lenient model of policing and prosecuting. The idea is to not laden people who are already struggling with homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, or all three with legal problems that arise from those situations. It’s a laudable effort, and a noble goal, but it has meant that people who get arrested for something like auto theft or burglary are quickly released. Sometimes you’ll read in the news about a person who’s been arrested for a serious crime like murder, and the article will mention dozens and dozens of other arrests for things like burglary, assault or theft. The police know this, so they often don’t bother following up on property crimes. That system as a whole can really make the major West Coast cities feel pretty lawless sometimes, but people don’t really like to talk about it in social settings because it’s hard to talk about problems like that without being misconstrued as a reactionary conservative. But if you get them taking one on one, and they feel like they can trust you, the frustrations come pouring out. So I’m not that surprised that there’s a company trying to capitalize on that sentiment, horrifying as it is. I’ve been feeling for a while now that given the current trajectory of things, a vigilante backlash was likely to become inevitable.
- alentist 5y ago
  What exactly is "horrifying" to you about not wanting to live in a crime-ridden community?
  - swearwolf 5y ago
    Nothing. That desire isn’t horrifying. Vigilante justice is.
slices 5y ago
Minneapolis is not getting rid of its police department. There may be one or more options on the ballot this fall to make the department report to someone different, and/or to remove the current minimum number of officers, but even those are yet to be resolved.
- slownews45 5y ago
  There was a VERY public commitment to get rid of the police department.

throwaway15579 5y ago

I'm seeing the same thing in Seattle. Private security has become MUCH more common all over the city in the past few years. I even see apartment buildings hiring 24/7 private security that patrols the building and the street around the building as an amenity.

slownews45 5y ago
Overseas the end results if the police are totally defunded or weak is that you tend to end up with really strong differences / ghettos around places where there is and is not security. It's like gated communities on steroids, but starts to include office, mfg and other items like retail (which totally leave places with no security). Can result in shocking differences on both sides of the fence that usually separates these areas. Ironically the police then tend to follow along and provide better security to what are not better areas (if they have any capacity).
- tpmx 5y ago
  Overseas where?
  - z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
    Everywhere? Have you not looked outside?
  - throwaway15579 5y ago
    This is how life is in basically every Central and South American city, in my experience. As soon as a family has some relatively small amount of wealth they will spend it on ultra-secure apartment buildings, tall walls around their house, razor-wire walls and fences, full coverage security cameras and intruder detection, etc.
    - tpmx 5y ago
      I saw jarring signs of that when I visited Mexico City in 2003 - I stayed with a business partner who lived in a walled community guarded by private guards openly carrying submachine guns. Can only imagine that the security has been dialed up a few notches by now. (The source of my confusion: I interpreted "overseas" in a quite literal way - I'm from Europe.)
      - medium_burrito 5y ago
        Did you visit one of the armored car dealerships in Polanco? They are badass.
        tpmx 5y ago
        I did not. I think random violent carjackings had just started happening at scale. The guy who hosted me was getting a bit worried.
cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
Has been the case in the mayor's hood for years: https://laurelhurstcc.com/security/ https://laurelhurstcc.com/security/
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  The mayor lives in a different neighborhood, but that one also has paid patrols iirc.
medium_burrito 5y ago
For the first time in my life I've seen private security in my neighborhood. We're in one of the poorer areas of the city (ie $1-2.5m houses), so perhaps people cannot afford to leave? I've always thought security on demand was a great idea- the real killer app in my mind is having a map online of which houses the private security company protects, so as to create an incentive for people who aren't paying to get protection as the thieves know what's ripe for the picking.
- chasd00 5y ago
  how wold a private security company protect your house? If they were there in the driveway 24x7 then maybe. Once your house is robbed or being robbed if you have to call someone it's already too late. i was a victim of a home invasion and maybe 10 years later a violent crime. In both cases only after the real danger was over did a call for help happen. In the home invasion it ended when the gunman was forcing my roommate to the garage, my roommate opened the door, the gunman walked out, he then slammed/locked the door behind him and we hit the deck calling 911 In the second case i was jumped from behind and knocked nearly unconscious before being robbed. It took me a full 15min to get the brain fog cleared to even think what to do next. i don't see how an app is going to offer any protection at all. Maybe it speeds up reporting crime??
  - Cyberdog 5y ago
    The same way that police ostensibly protect houses; by being there, patrolling randomly, keeping an eye out for things that don't look right.
- C19is20 5y ago
  >We're in one of the poorer areas of the city (ie $1-2.5m houses Is that 'poorer' measured in actual USD $, or old Italian lira or pesos or something? #wishiwaspoorthere.
  - medium_burrito 5y ago
    This is American techbro poor, where rampant asset inflation has been occurring ever since the government has been more or less printing money, and now buying corporate bonds (BOJ of course is the ghost of economy future here, having done this since the late triassic). Not really a purely American problem- everybody else has this too- which is why young people are so pissed everywhere that they have no future.
neither_color 5y ago
I have latin american heritage and that's pretty how much it is in the old country for anyone who can afford it. I won't be surprised if in a few years barbed wire and glass shard fencing becomes more common. The sad thing is America is doing this to itself very willfully through some obvious policy failures while blaming abstract intangible forces like "capitalism."

throwkeep 5y ago

Indeed, defunding the police means the poor will be even less protected. The rich will always have their private security. And now they'll have a larger/cheaper labor force, with ex-police officers looking for a new job?

ranma4703 5y ago
This presumes that the police ever protected the poor, when the opposite is the case.
- slownews45 5y ago
  In that case this could end up being a win-win situation it seems like. The poor get rid of the police in their neighborhoods and the folks who want more policing get it? We've had a fair bit of retail closing as the police are pulling back out of some areas.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Poor people don’t want to get rid of police, they want to not be hassled by police. In the 90s when the NYPD started firing lazy/corrupt police commanders and cracking down on street crime, evicting families of drug dealers from public housing, and putting down pit bulls.. poor communities were very much in favor of what was happening. The tide shifted when the cops went all in on stupid metrics.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Even for middle class people, the police are basically there to file the paperwork you need to file insurance claims. "Oh, somebody broke into your car and stole stuff? You shouldn't leave things lying around. We'll never catch the guy. Oh, you have video of the incident and know exactly who it is? Yeah, we can't really do anything with this. Oh you need to file a report for the insurance company? Fill this out and check back with us next month." I'm very much NOT surprised that people who've actually needed the police for something have decided to there needs to be a private alternative.

sneak 5y ago

> My guess is that as police are defunded (Minneapolis is getting rid of police department entirely) folks who can pay and see a role for security will probably contract for it. In the bay area this is already happening to a small degree. I think in a lot of major metros, even funded police aren't meeting people's needs. If we aren't getting what we're paying for, we should stop paying.

Buttons840 5y ago
I think a lot of people feel that way. Am I more likely to have a positive or negative interaction with police? I honestly don't know, and I'm white in a nice area. Crime is low and something like a burglary is extremely unlikely. I think police may be providing an unseen benefit to me by enforcing the law on others - I don't want vehicles doing 50 mph on my residential street, maybe they would without police? Or maybe they wouldn't? I'm not taking a side on this issue, but I do empathize with those who believe they are unlikely to ever benefit from police presence, and thus don't want to pay for police.
- planet-and-halo 5y ago
  This is a major part of the problem in these debates. People don't measure or argue from what they can't see. We often imagine issues as scalars, when more often they are a single knob on a complex machine, most of which is invisible to even the best informed people.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Like all things, it’s a complex issue. Personally, I think the underlying issue is a lack of accountability. Address that, and many issues resolve themselves.
- noofen 5y ago
  > I do empathize with those who believe they are unlikely to ever benefit from police presence, and thus don't want to pay for police. You're saying this like the majority these people have a net-positive impact on tax revenue. It's quite the opposite.

CerealFounder 5y ago

Minneapolis is not getting rid of the police department as a quick Google would happily show you. Its a fallacy to assume it is a failure of a public option when it just as easily can be that we've been marketed that we are vulnerable and unsafe. Almost all stats have TODAY being just about the safest moment for violent crime in the history of humanity. Dont confuse a change in peoples purchasing habits as a logical response to something intrinsic. Its barely ever correlated. edit: I actually reread and saw you said "perceived value," I agree with you, I just think its a tragedy people are so scared. Although SF seems to be really having a problem.

lolbrels 5y ago
Stretching the scope of violence over the entirety of human history is not a good metric considering the mass death and wars. Lowering the scope down to the past decade I would say an entire year of BLM riots, mass looting, firebombing courthouses, small business owners devastated...you catch my drift. I'm not sure whether your comment was just naïve or intentionally misleading to downplay what has been happening the past year or two. There is definitely a correlation between that and increased security presence on site at many locations. Especially when the police simply stood by in some instances while looters had free reign over entire city blocks gleefully snatching whatever they could. Disgusting.
lliamander 5y ago
This past year has been markedly worse for many people than it was just a few short years ago.

zapita 5y ago

> Minneapolis is getting rid of police department entirely This is incorrect. The city council made a non-binding “pledge” to dismantle the police department. But according to the New York Times, the pledge "has been rejected by the city's mayor, a plurality of residents in recent public opinion polls, and an increasing number of community groups. Taking its place have been the types of incremental reforms that the city's progressive politicians had denounced." [1] The ideas behind “defund the police” are simply not popular in the US. A majority of Americans want a police department - but they want a police department that protects everyone equally. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-defund-police.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-d...

Spooky23 5y ago

Most of this is perceived bullshit. As the gap between working class and affluent people widens, you have a layer of professionals with money looking for stuff to do. Those folks have a tendency to want to separate themselves from the dirty masses. (Ie gated community) It’s what you did after you sell the family factory business in Ohio and move to Florida or wherever. Building security theatre was accelerated driven by 9/11 paranoia and federal standards.

xeromal 5y ago
Security is absolutely necessary in down towns. In LA, it is out of control. You can't even go inside a 711 without being harassed until they hired guards.
- adjkant 5y ago
  Not my experience at all in the downtowns of NYC, Boston, Seattle, and SF. DTLA is a very unique downtown due to many factors specific to LA (mainly car culture taking away practical significance from the city center + the housing sprawl) and that doesn't generalize to most actual cities.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  > Security is absolutely necessary in down towns. In LA, it is out of control. You can't even go inside a 711 without being harassed until they hired guards. At which point the need was filled. No dystopic community mercenary forces were necessary.
  - xeromal 5y ago
    I think the idea of the citizen security force is for communities that don't have the money to afford security guards like the large buildings that can.
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      Currently, Citizen offers a subscription product called 'Protect', which costs $19.99 per month. Protect sends a user's location to a Citizen employee when it's turned on, can stream video to a 'Protect agent' when activated using a safeword, and is pitched to users as a 'digital bodyguard'. Protect also advertises 'Instant emergency response to your exact location' This seems like the idea is to supply a rent-a-thug to individuals, on-demand.

EvanAnderson 5y ago

Edging closer to "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong" and the "Central Intelligence Corporation".

danielodievich 5y ago
Nice! I'd say these guys are going to be MetaCops and a soon to be discovered competitor will try to be Enforcers.
exhilaration 5y ago
Yes! Snow Crash is exactly what came to my mind when I read this article.
neither_color 5y ago
Well they did remove "America" from their logo so it's a step in that direction. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-14/the-cia-has-a-new-logo-can-its-re-branding-woo-millennials https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-14/the-ci...
slickrick216 5y ago
It’s great isn’t it. I can’t wait to pick out which name to call my burbclave. Going to get a full gargoyle gear set.

soared 5y ago

You’re misunderstanding the phrase “defund police”. This is what it looks like in practice: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/08/974941422/6-month-experiment-replacing-denver-police-with-mental-health-teams-dubbed-a-suc https://www.npr.org/2021/03/08/974941422/6-month-experiment-...

remarkEon 5y ago
And this is what it looks like at scale. https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts-doubt-over-c77 https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts...
seieste 5y ago
This article talks about a program designed to fix the "root" of crime and homelessness. Instead of arresting people, they'd call social workers. "Success" was measured by how many people were arrested and so the program "succeeded" because they responded to 750 calls but didn't arrest anyone. But is arrest really related to how well a program solves the root of the problem? It seems like a better measure would be something related to their actual goal. So why didn't they measure rate of property crime? Rate of homelessness? Poverty? Drug addiction? Supposedly these are the real causes of crime and homelessness. If they did actually measure those things, I think their evaluation of the program would be different [0] [1]. >> "Denver saw significant increases in most types of property crime in 2020. In comparison to the average of the previous four years, burglaries rose 23% in 2020, larceny rose 9%, auto theft rose 61% and theft from cars rose 39%, Denver police data shows." [0] [0] https://www.denverpost.com/2021/03/15/denver-property-crime-2020/ https://www.denverpost.com/2021/03/15/denver-property-crime-... [1] https://denver.cbslocal.com/2021/05/20/aurora-homeless-camping-ban-debate/ https://denver.cbslocal.com/2021/05/20/aurora-homeless-campi...
- objectivetruth 5y ago
  If the current social model is "poor social services AND criminalization with its attendant burdens" and the new model is "poor social services," then it seems the cost savings from not arresting, processing, and incarcerating these folks would be enough of a success. For a homeless person, the benefits of not having a cop beat you up and throw all your meager possessions away is probably very valuable, if hard for us to quantify. Not jailing the homeless doesn't imply that they're responsible for an increase in crime, nor should it alone be expected to solve homelessness as a problem in any quantity.

newacct583 5y ago

This is sort of weirdly spun. In fact in Seattle we saw exactly what happens when a bunch of local yahoos decide to try to police themselves. How exactly do you think this is going to turn out differently than the CHAZ/CHOP fiasco, except in the clothing choices of the security people?

lliamander 5y ago
CHAZ folks were explicitly of the mindset of tearing down existing institutions in order to build a glorious future. Those folks seem to only be good at the first part. Simply wanting to preserve one's life, liberty, and property and live in relative commity with one's neighbors does not generally lead to excessive violence and destruction.
- newacct583 5y ago
  This is just yarn spinning. Stuff you like is good. Stuff you don't like is bad, and you fit the adjectives to the story. I dare say those hippies in Seattle were fans of your Lockian ideal too, they just used different words. And likewise trying to replace police with this private goon squad[1] looks an awful lot like "tearing down existing institutions" to people like me who think it's a shit idea. That's not an argument, essentially. Words don't make truth. Either this trick is going to make people safer or it's going to get someone killed. [1] See what I did there? Words are fun!
  - lliamander 5y ago
    > I dare say those hippies in Seattle were fans of your Lockian ideal too Please don't confuse me for a student of Locke. > And likewise trying to replace police with this private goon squad[1] looks an awful lot like "tearing down existing institutions" to people like me who think it's a shit idea. Building UPS or Fedex is not the same thing as destroying USPS.

swearwolf 5y ago

At least on the West Coast of the U.S. it seems to me like there’s been a big change over the past ten years or so in what kinds of security events could happen in a given public space. These days it feels like anything is possible. We’ve had homeless people tailgate employees into the office building where I work. One tried to move into the handicapped bathroom stall. Another started grabbing things from people’s desks in an unoccupied area. After Portland began allowing overnight camping on public property under the Safe Sleep program, a small patch of land across from our office became a campsite pretty quickly, as did the sidewalks on adjacent streets. Some of the people who were camping there were pretty unstable, so you never really knew what to expect. In that same period of time, also on the West Coast, we’ve seen a shift towards a more lenient model of policing and prosecuting. The idea is to not laden people who are already struggling with homelessness, mental illness, drug addiction, or all three with legal problems that arise from those situations. It’s a laudable effort, and a noble goal, but it has meant that people who get arrested for something like auto theft or burglary are quickly released. Sometimes you’ll read in the news about a person who’s been arrested for a serious crime like murder, and the article will mention dozens and dozens of other arrests for things like burglary, assault or theft. The police know this, so they often don’t bother following up on property crimes. That system as a whole can really make the major West Coast cities feel pretty lawless sometimes, but people don’t really like to talk about it in social settings because it’s hard to talk about problems like that without being misconstrued as a reactionary conservative. But if you get them taking one on one, and they feel like they can trust you, the frustrations come pouring out. So I’m not that surprised that there’s a company trying to capitalize on that sentiment, horrifying as it is. I’ve been feeling for a while now that given the current trajectory of things, a vigilante backlash was likely to become inevitable.

alentist 5y ago
What exactly is "horrifying" to you about not wanting to live in a crime-ridden community?
- swearwolf 5y ago
  Nothing. That desire isn’t horrifying. Vigilante justice is.

slices 5y ago

Minneapolis is not getting rid of its police department. There may be one or more options on the ballot this fall to make the department report to someone different, and/or to remove the current minimum number of officers, but even those are yet to be resolved.

slownews45 5y ago
There was a VERY public commitment to get rid of the police department.