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I believe that the rhetoric around defunding the police causes crime. If you accuse your own society of being evil, then it should come as no surprise that som

I believe that the rhetoric around defunding the police causes crime. If you accuse your own society of being evil, then it should come as no surprise that some take that as license to stop following its precepts. It's like how many left the church after the truth about the child abuse coverups came out. You cannot simultaneously say the justice system is biased and unfair, and then expect people to act justly. Doesn't matter how much you fund or don't fund your police. The most important kind of policing is that which every individual exercises over himself, based on his/her internalization of society's norms. If you undercut the internalized voice of society by calling people to question it unnecessarily, then you ought to expect poor behavior. So I'll say it again, the rhetoric around defunding the police/ACAB/etc is terrible. This has been studied over and over again, and shown to be correlated with a crime increase. As an aside, I think this is just another form of gaslighting. Take my city of Portland, for example. Although technically police funding hasn't been reduced very drastically, the city disbanded the gun violence reduction team, which was doing the on the ground work necessary to keep people safe. While the force wasn't defunded, they were castrated essentially. This team was formed to combat exactly the kinds of crimes we're seeing now, by charging the would-be perpetrators with the lesser crimes they commit before they kill people.

danShumway 5y ago
> I believe that the rhetoric around defunding the police causes crime. > As an aside, I think this is just another form of gaslighting. Do you have an explanation for why homicide rates starting trending upwards before George Floyd's death? I'm not trying to subtly gaslight you, I'm sure your subjective experience is your real subjective experience, but your subjective experience is not the full picture. The perspective you're giving me is that everything was fine until the protests, and the data doesn't hold that out. Portland's murder rate has been rising since at least 2015. Clearly the 2020 protests did not start that trend. And this isn't just Portland, we're talking about areas where police funding increased. We're talking about areas where crime rates spiked before bills were signed into law. On the subject that rhetoric is the cause, I consider the argument that crime increases are due to "loss of morale/respect" to be even more tenuous than the funding argument, and far less scientific. I have not seen data to back that argument up, and if you believe that social attitudes influence crime rates, then the psychological effects of lockdown are a far more obvious influencer of social attitudes. They also line up far better with the actual recorded crime trends. I think it requires a pretty big jump in logic to argue that a loss of an entire year of schooling, jobs, and a failure of social institutions to protect vulnerable people during a pandemic would have less effect on public morale and respect for institutions and laws than approximately two weeks of protest would. And again we run into the timing problems. Even when talking about people's subjective experiences, the timing of media campaigns and public outcry against police officers still seems to be offset from we started noticing crime increases. You want to talk about gaslighting, people are out here trying to tell me that the data I'm looking at from early 2020 either doesn't exist or that it's not relevant because they didn't personally notice the trend at that time. This is a kind of weird shift I've noticed where police-reform critics are jumping away from the mid-2020 argument that BLM is misrepresenting how prevalent police abuse is, over to an argument that unnuanced, reactive reporting about crime stats is good actually and people who are looking at the data just don't understand how everyone on the ground feels. To me, it all just feels like a lot of projection and inconsistent cherry picking. If you really genuinely believe that crime is caused by a lack of trust in social institutions, I can think of a half dozen plausible causes for that mistrust off the top of my head (including the very narratives that cities are lawless and crime isn't being punished) before I ever get to BLM coverage in the media -- and many of those potential causes will line up better with the reported stats we see from cities. But I'm supposed to just take it as a given that none of the other events of 2020/2021 matter and of course this is specifically BLM's fault.

danShumway 5y ago

> I believe that the rhetoric around defunding the police causes crime. > As an aside, I think this is just another form of gaslighting. Do you have an explanation for why homicide rates starting trending upwards before George Floyd's death? I'm not trying to subtly gaslight you, I'm sure your subjective experience is your real subjective experience, but your subjective experience is not the full picture. The perspective you're giving me is that everything was fine until the protests, and the data doesn't hold that out. Portland's murder rate has been rising since at least 2015. Clearly the 2020 protests did not start that trend. And this isn't just Portland, we're talking about areas where police funding increased. We're talking about areas where crime rates spiked before bills were signed into law. On the subject that rhetoric is the cause, I consider the argument that crime increases are due to "loss of morale/respect" to be even more tenuous than the funding argument, and far less scientific. I have not seen data to back that argument up, and if you believe that social attitudes influence crime rates, then the psychological effects of lockdown are a far more obvious influencer of social attitudes. They also line up far better with the actual recorded crime trends. I think it requires a pretty big jump in logic to argue that a loss of an entire year of schooling, jobs, and a failure of social institutions to protect vulnerable people during a pandemic would have less effect on public morale and respect for institutions and laws than approximately two weeks of protest would. And again we run into the timing problems. Even when talking about people's subjective experiences, the timing of media campaigns and public outcry against police officers still seems to be offset from we started noticing crime increases. You want to talk about gaslighting, people are out here trying to tell me that the data I'm looking at from early 2020 either doesn't exist or that it's not relevant because they didn't personally notice the trend at that time. This is a kind of weird shift I've noticed where police-reform critics are jumping away from the mid-2020 argument that BLM is misrepresenting how prevalent police abuse is, over to an argument that unnuanced, reactive reporting about crime stats is good actually and people who are looking at the data just don't understand how everyone on the ground feels. To me, it all just feels like a lot of projection and inconsistent cherry picking. If you really genuinely believe that crime is caused by a lack of trust in social institutions, I can think of a half dozen plausible causes for that mistrust off the top of my head (including the very narratives that cities are lawless and crime isn't being punished) before I ever get to BLM coverage in the media -- and many of those potential causes will line up better with the reported stats we see from cities. But I'm supposed to just take it as a given that none of the other events of 2020/2021 matter and of course this is specifically BLM's fault.