21 ms·

Defund the Police meets the crime wave

192 points by hncurious 5y ago

dang 5y ago
I took the less baity title from the author's site: https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/defund-the-police-meets-the-crime https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/defund-the-police-m.... I didn't change the URL because this appears to be a more recent article on the same topic.
nverno 5y ago
Defunding the police, along with every other policy, applies well in some areas and poorly in others. When I was a kid, our town decided to defund the police, cutting the force from 3 to 1 officers IIRC. It made sense because there was no crime, and the townspeople didn't want to waste the money on police. All useful politics are local.
mercy_dude 5y ago
Bari doesn’t sound to me a genuine person. I have seen her first podcast with Joe Rogan where she sounded like a layperson with typical 21yr old understanding of sociology-political affair. Then she suddenly became pro free speech and anti establishment media. This is a person who has worked for NYT for gods sake.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  Just another entertainer grasping desperately for an audience large enough to justify an upper-middle class income's worth of ad revenue.
- blast 5y ago
  Leighton Woodhouse wrote the article.
ab_goat 5y ago
For anyone that likes podcasts, there's a good podcast (1h27m) on this topic: The Ezra Klein Show / Why Is Murder Spiking? And Can Cities Address It Without Police? / November 23, 2021 https://overcast.fm/+oiPWjrl3U https://overcast.fm/+oiPWjrl3U
keewee7 5y ago
Many comments here are pointing out that police haven't been defunded yet. But just threatening to defund a service will lower the quality of that service. The "Defund the police" movement has completely dominated the Internet and mainstream media so it wouldn't surprise me if many cops are moving to smaller towns or changing fields.
- starik36 5y ago
  Exactly right. If someone tells me that I'll be getting paid less next year (even if it's not going to happen), I will literally do the bare minimum not to get fired.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    Which is technically, illegal.
Bostonian 5y ago
The Democrats run the cities where this is happening. What are they going to do about it? Quoting the article: 'I recently finished reading “San Fransicko,” by Michael Shellenberger. I recommend it. The subtitle is provocative: “Why Progressives Ruin Cities.” But, as Shellenberger explains, he does not mean to imply that progressives always ruin the cities they govern. He’s just interested in the specific phenomenon of when progressives do ruin cities, and explaining why that happens. And progressives—I count myself as one of them—do ruin cities. Or, at least, they put in place policies that cause profound harm to the people living in them.'
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  [flagged]
- noduerme 5y ago
  I think we should start differentiating between Democrats and progressives. At least here in Portland, the differentiation is already complete. Basically everyone is a Democrat and most residents would like to have our police force back and see people prosecuted for property crimes. The city leadership is beholden to a radical fringe who aren't really even liberals so much as anarcho-communists.
  - commandlinefan 5y ago
    > differentiating between Democrats and progressives...a radical fringe Well, I don't see the moderate democrat leadership denouncing the radical fringe, either.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      This is roughly like saying that the Republicans in Congress aren't denouncing the Capitol rioters. My point about progressive cities is that a portion of the leadership is afraid of the extremists. Ted Wheeler, the Mayor of Portland, had to run his last election against an actual Stalinist who had very vocal supporters but ultimately not overwhelming numbers on her side. She catalyzed the average Dems to get out and vote for Wheeler, who no one really likes. So what I mean is there's a large silent majority of Dems, if not the leadership, who are rattled by the progressives' increasingly unhinged, illiberal program. Just as I think there's a bulk of Republicans who don't believe in attacking the Capitol.
r00fus 5y ago
Bari Weiss is hardly a neutral (or reasonable) voice. Flagged.
- _dain_ 5y ago
  this isn't wikipedia
- MonadIsPronad 5y ago
  In fairness, the article isn't written by Weiss.
  - terminatornet 5y ago
    it's hosted on her substack, so I think we can assume it's probably an opinion endorsed by her
  - pixelgeek 5y ago
    She thought it was good enough to host it.
mysecretaccount 5y ago
> Defund advocates often claim that police don’t actually prevent crimes, that they only bust the perpetrators after the fact. But that’s untrue. Police presence deters crime[citation provided]. Arresting career criminals takes them out of circulation. And, most important, effective policing bolsters a community’s faith in government-administered justice. Regardless of whether defunding is good/bad for crime, this is the core justification for existing funding in this article and it is quite thin. Edit: I am unclear on why this is getting downvoted. Almost nothing in that paragraph is adequately substantiated anywhere in the article. I am not married to any particular perspective on this topic, but remain unconvinced of the author's conclusion.
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  Why is it thin? There are several studies showing how policing reduces crime through a couple of measures. Intuitively it would make sense that locking up criminals would reduce crime (making them unable to commit more crime), that increasing the chance of a criminal getting locked up would reduce crime (via incentives), and just seeing more police officers around would reduce crime. I would be really surprised if for the past 1000 years, civilization was tricked into believing in a criminal justice system was necessary when in reality it wasn't. Are there any studies where they dramatically reduced police presence and crime wasn't affected?
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    People have been religious for thousands of years, it's easy for humans to believe things without evidence when it makes them feel better
    - JamesBarney 5y ago
      And you think we need a criminal justice system is one of those things?
      - netizen-936824 5y ago
giantg2 5y ago
Walking and spraying multiple houses... I was surprise there was no return fire, then I saw it was CA.
- pengaru 5y ago
  > I was surprise there was no return fire, then I saw it was CA. I'm in CA and am surrounded by neighbors with guns, for better or worse. If you think CA is devoid of gun owners you're sorely mistaken.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Not devoid, but lower prevalence with tighter restrictions. Quite a few have moved out over the years, or chosen not to move there in the first place. For example, approximately 1 in 10 adults in PA have a license to carry a firearm. Compared to about 70k CA CCW in a population of about 39M people (didn't find adults only). CA also mandates that guns be stored locked up and unloaded when not on their person. This can prevent some of the safes or lock boxes designed for rapid deployment.
  - baby 5y ago
    It depends where you are in CA, I specifically moved to a place where I would know people around me don't own guns (SF). I have a hard time seeing myself live anywhere where people are allowed to carry or buy guns liberally.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      > I have a hard time seeing myself live anywhere where people are allowed to carry or buy guns liberally. you're not safe from these people in SF unfortunately due to new jurisprudence around 2A post-heller.
      - gcheong 5y ago
        I’ve lived here (SF)for almost 20yrs and I have yet to see anyone open carry here unless they’re trying to make some political statement. Sure it could be that I just don’t see all the people that are carrying concealed but I do think there is much less of a gun carry culture here. As for ownership I know of one neighbor that has guns. I’m sure there are probably more but I imagine they’re kept mainly for recreational not defensive purposes much like how people kept guns in the small town I grew up in in Oregon before the whole “patriotic” gun toter culture became a thing.
MonadIsPronad 5y ago
Good article. Nice calm tone, interesting points. Seems like a good addition to the conversation.
aejnsn 5y ago
You get what you pay for.
- mejari 5y ago
  Except they're still paying for it and the police weren't defunded https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-the-police-budget-at-all https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t...
  - nerdponx 5y ago
    I can't speak for Oakland specifically. But when I see police departments with lots of fancy combat gear, but with minimal fitness standards and minimal training in things like unarmed combat, I can't help but feel like the people are not getting their tax money's worth.
  - literallyaduck 5y ago
    Threatening to defund the police generally lowers the quality of your existing police. Pretend you run a business and say you are cutting salaries. Employees will look for other jobs or just be demotivated in general. Couple that with an increasing hostile work environment, you have the situation at hand. Do you work as hard when you know management is gunning for your job?
    - alphabettsy 5y ago
      Who created the hostile work environment?
    - mejari 5y ago
      So the excuse is that the police are allowing shootings and other crimes because they aren't motivated enough? Because they might be held to a higher standard? Because they might not get their awesome new toys? Stop treating them like children. I'm amazed when people will go to any lengths to excuse the police.
  - aejnsn 5y ago
the_cat_kittles 5y ago
this article has no content. just show some contextualized statistics of how police funding correlates with crime. in seattle, it really hasnt from what ive seen. but if you have compelling numbers, go ahead
- WalterBright 5y ago
  Seattle crime statistics are misleading. It's been reported many times that since the police no longer even show up for shoplifting crimes, business owners no longer bother to report it. Nobody knows what the crime rate actually is as a result. But the accountants at the retail stores know, and they're raising prices, installing armored doors, or simply leaving the city. The local bank branch I patronize now sports an armed guard wearing body armor standing outside the door. It's only a block from the police station. Pretty sad.
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    > The local bank branch I patronize now sports an armed guard wearing body armor standing outside the door. It's only a block from the police station. Pretty sad. Well that's certainly a vote of confidence for the professionalism and effectiveness for the police.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      If you want more indications, on the Seattle side the bank branches have heavy armored glass completely separating them from customers. On the eastside, no such glass. These are branches of the same bank.
  - the_cat_kittles 5y ago
    spd total spending went up every year 2016 to 2020 i believe. doesnt that suggest the money isnt doing much?
    - sitkack 5y ago
      From my discussions with current SPD personnel, the SPD itself is doing a stop work protest. Money In doesn't mean Services Out (MISO), it only reaffirms the thuglike nature of our relationship with the police.
scrollbar 5y ago
I read most of the article, in which the author implies that defunding the police increases crime, and blames the people in charge of Oakland with this crime. Yet I recalled hearing that police budgets in Oakland were steady to up this year, despite the protests. A quick search seems to confirm this: https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-the-police-budget-at-all https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t... >Despite claims to the contrary, the Oakland City Council did not make any cuts to the police budget at all this year. In fact, Oakland police were allotted about $39 million more than in the previous two years, according to a KTVU analysis of city records. What did I miss?
- Invictus0 5y ago
  It's more than an implication, it's a direct statement: > As the surge in violence has become less theoretical to white, middle class residents, Oakland’s mayor has been afforded the political space to push to restore the funds that were cut from the police budget.
- reanimus 5y ago
  You're right on the mark. A lot of articles scare-mongering about defunding the police point to numbers in places that haven't seen any defunding (quite the contrary, many of them have had boosts to their budgets, as usual).
- wobblyasp 5y ago
  You missed the opportunity to push your narrative
- x1ph0z 5y ago
  > What did I miss Someone pushing their propaganda
- nerdponx 5y ago
  > What did I miss? Nothing. There is a narrative being pushed that tries to correlate Black Lives Matter, Defund The Police, etc. activity with increasing crime. That narrative might have some validity in some localized cases, but is clearly not universally causal.
adt2bt 5y ago
> They claim that, by taking money from police and putting it toward social programs, they can eliminate the need for heavy-handed policing in the first place. But the social programs are an afterthought. This feels like a strawman. I don't think it's surprising that there's a rise in crime when police are defunded, especially when those social programs aren't enacted. I think most reasonable progressives who support defunding the police also recognize the whole point is to shift investment away from punishment (police) into aid (social programs) to deter crime. It takes years for that to happen, and really needs to happen on a societal level to provide opportunities that otherwise 'career criminals' do not have which leads them down that path.
- JamesBarney 5y ago
  Are there any good comparisons on how much a dollar of policing vs a dollar of social programs deter crime?
  - schwartzworld 5y ago
    Is there any evidence that current police funding levels help to deter crime in any significant way whatsoever?
    - settrans 5y ago
      Is there any evidence that, on net, state welfare programs deter crime in any significant way?
      - Nostromos 5y ago
        It's been studied extensively and the research overwhelmingly shows that more generous welfare policies are associated with lower levels of crime. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047235220300623 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-13463-002 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-13463-002 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3509381 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3509381 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655778 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655778
drewwwwww 5y ago
i think it's worth pointing out giving the still semi-inflammatory nature of the headline, no serious advocate of defunding the police has ever suggested that simply doing that is the goal. the idea is to shift funding from cops walking around with guns killing people to things that actually prevent crime from happening, and as the piece points out, even in the few places that have actually reduced funding to police, that has not occurred in any significant way. it's a resource allocation argument, not an 'everything would be better if police instantly winked out of existence' argument.
- mjevans 5y ago
  'Defund' is far more inflammatory than alternative phrasing. RE-form the Police -- this is a movement I can more readily support and I hope is self descriptive and accurate. Police departments have become alienated from communities because they are no longer about the mission to protect and serve the common people and the commons; they have instead become yet another type of organization using violence for control. The videogame Crackdown got that right many years ago. As horrid as the Japanese justice system is about the presumption of guilt; their practice of neighborhood officers and community involvement seem like positive traits that should be copied in the USA and elsewhere as one facet of improving the positive interaction of peace officers and the community.
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    > RE-form the Police -- this is a movement I can more readily support and I hope is self descriptive and accurate. What this is missing here from "defund the police" is that part of the point of that slogan is to take responsibility (and, yes, funding) for some duties away from police entirely and give them to new organizations that have more limited scope and much more limited use of force. A prime example here is parking enforcement, which is often performed by the police despite having no particular need for the legal monopoly on violence that comes with police officers.
- bellyfullofbac 5y ago
  ... with a sadly very stupid title. One that gets an instant angry reaction from "the other side" instead of a discussion. Even Obama says that much: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-defund-the-police-slogan/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-defund-the-police-slogan/ . You even have to write this comment to explain "Actually, the idea behind those 3 words are..." If I were in charge of naming the idea, I'd suggest something like "Get Rid of Thug Cops!". Focus on how cops are supposed to be part of society instead of prison guards. Focus on the fact that e.g. Western European police get multiple years of education. Even the UK has a problem, since the lying thieving government has been squeezing budgets for the last decade, the police have been underfunded there and it's harder to do the "be a part of society" part of policing. But it's incredible how a protest slogan has been morphed by "the other side" into "this is actually happening, and look at all the results", when, as many have said, no actual defunding is happening.
fatcat500 5y ago
The people who support defunding the police have never felt genuine fear from being victimized by crime. It's only after the crime, when you're thinking about how someone else had the hubris to threaten your life, thinking about how you could have died, or worse, if your loved ones had been with you, that they could have died, that you begin to wade yourself into a deep and abiding anger. I used to feel sympathy for criminals. Especially seeing how many of them have led rough lives, having been raised by bad parents, in horrible environments, having been led by others to delinquency as youth, then into crime as adults. However, once you have been victimized, this sympathy vanishes. It does not matter how bad you've had it -- violence is never justified. Any person who resorts to violence instantly loses all justification. It is only the rich who can afford to stroke their moral ego in such an egregious manner. It is the poor and the middle class who pay with their lives for this sanctimony.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > The people who support defunding the police have never felt genuine fear from being victimized by crime. A lot of them felt more than once genuine fear from being victimized by crime committed by the police. Which, of course, is almost never reported as a crime by whoever survives it.
- reanimus 5y ago
  I dunno man, both me and my mom have been mugged before and the police didn't help. Same with when my car was broken into and someone tried to break my front door lock. People make this argument all the time but I fail to see how the police have helped any time I've experienced any actual crime, not to mention so many others. That's not even getting into the politics of who can call the police and how the police react differently to situations, either.
  - Corrado 5y ago
    Yeah, I personally know people who were mugged at gunpoint and the police did nothing. The assailant is on social media and the victims provided the police with their account names. Nothing was done.
  - 5y ago
endymi0n 5y ago
The knee-jerk reaction of "defund the police" to the power abuses of police officers struck me as deeply weird from the beginning. It made me wonder whether the right NOR the left had any clue left as what the role of a police force in a democracy was actually supposed to be — or whether that battle cry _really_ originated from the same forces trying to split the US society: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/14/russia-us-politics-social-media-facebook https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/14/russia-us-po... Like, there would have been lots of great claims: "Train police", "Restructure Police", "Rebuild Police"... but what's a single good argument to "Defund Police" other than wanting to go back to anarchy?
- Zigurd 5y ago
  "Train police", "Restructure Police", have been tried, and that has just inflated police budgets. That last one "Rebuild police" has not been tried. Many PDs need that. From the ground up. One applicant at a time. Carefully screened and lavishly trained.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > there would have been lots of great claims: "Train police", "Restructure Police", "Rebuild Police"... but what's a single good argument do Defund Police other than going back to anarchy? I believe it's a reaction to police forces now having military gear when it should be totally unnecessary. In many places police officers don't even need guns. Maybe spending less money in militaria and more in training would be a consequence of not having to fund military equipment, supplies, and maintenance. It'd, at least, limit the violent options police has when they are going to engage a suspect.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Oftentimes they are given this military gear for pretty much free. When is the last time you've even seen SWAT deployed that made you think "I wish they didn't deploy SWAT?"
    - r00fus 5y ago
Abroszka 5y ago
I thought violence is up almost everywhere in the US compared to previous years. It would be interesting to see whether this increase correlates with police funding or not. My bet would be no.
- mattnewton 5y ago
  Police funding is also not significantly reduced basically anywhere in the US afaict - in fact, it increased in Oakland, though not by as much as police chiefs had hoped and as a slightly smaller percentage of the overall city budget due to increases elsewhere. https://oaklandside.org/2021/06/25/oakland-2021-2023-budget-defund-police-alternatives-violence-prevention/ https://oaklandside.org/2021/06/25/oakland-2021-2023-budget-... Separately, the article links to this source[0] when talking about how progressives are "ruining cities", arguing that progressives have successfully pushed for decreases police budgets despite violent crime increases. But the article linked shows increases in police budgets by percentage of the overall budget. There are real instances of yoy "cuts" but they seem to occur with disproportionately larger cuts elsewhere across the budget, which does not support the hypothesis that progressives are defending the police; it shows that when cutting budgets we still prioritize policing. [0] https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-the-crime-wave-hits-your-family https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-the-crime-wave-hits-yo... Obviously crime is Oakland is too high, what happened to the author shouldn't happen anywhere. These experienced incidents are an important barometer on whether or not what we measure statistically is working to describe reality. We need good metrics prescribe the cure. However, it doesn't follow to me that the issue was caused by lower police budgets looking at how police budgets changed, and I am not convinced that there a progressive voting block to blame yet.. Maybe the morale issue is related, but the budget seems like a red herring.
  - nsriv 5y ago
    Exactly this, I've seen so much made of local budgets giving less to PD's in percentage terms, which is disingenuous in the era of increased municipal spending during COVID.
Trias11 5y ago
To solve violent crime we just need to give citizens ability to protect themselves. Try to rob me or hurt my family - be carried away in a body bag. Yet that goes against some politicians narrative.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > Try to rob me or hurt my family - be carried away in a body bag. If the criminal expects you to be armed, they'll just shoot first, before you even have the chance to reach your weapons. Remember they have the surprise on their side. This expectation should by itself increase violent crime and turn violent crimes that wouldn't be.
  - Trias11 5y ago
    That's what conceal weapons permits are for. Criminals won't know and every attempt to do stupid thing might mean the end of them. If wanabe robbers expect citizens to be armed and legally able to protect themselves and their loved ones - they will think twice if it worth dying for $100.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      They don't have to know. They just assume and kill everyone before they have a chance to defend themselves. From their point of view, it's simple and neat. Remember it's always them surprising their victims, not the other way around.
      - kragen 5y ago
        Dunno, when I was growing up, around 01990, there was a bank robbery in my town where one of the bank customers shot the robbers dead. Bank robbery is already a pretty bad career choice but it gets worse in a hurry when mass-murdering the customers is a prerequisite.
        rbanffy 5y ago
plorkyeran 5y ago
This is one of many articles which are trying to suggest that we cut police budgets and then crime went up, but the first half of that never actually happened. Oakland's police budget is the highest it's ever been and was not cut in 2020. The article it links to as a source for police budgets being cut has the headline "Cities Say They Want to Defund the Police. Their Budgets Say Otherwise.", and shows that police budgets as a percentage of major city budgets slightly _increased_.
felistoria 5y ago
The police departments can get 100 billion a year and it won't matter when the DA just lets criminals walk after they are arrested. I think that is one of the main factors in the rise of crime and violence. The Waukesha tragedy is a good example of this.
- rboes 5y ago
  That's the problem here in the Seattle area. First the DA won't charge for many crimes and if they do the judges often don't sentence appropriately
  - felistoria 5y ago
    Yeah I'm in the Portland area. It is not going well...
- Fervicus 5y ago
  Things like Proposition 47 doesn't help either. [1] [2] [1] 2014 California Proposition 47: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47 [2] It’s Time for Californians to Recognize that Prop. 47 Criminal Justice Reform Failed: https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2021/06/16/its-time-for-californians-to-recognize-that-prop-47-criminal-justice-reform-failed/ https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2021/06/16/its-time-for-...
le_epic_throw 5y ago
Sorry, but I haven't seen any evidence for a "crime wave" in 2020-2021. FBI stats show a slight uptick in violent crimes. These rates haven't been seen since... gasp ... 2017. If police-civilian interactions really decreased 80% (as quoted in the article), and in exchange violent crime only raised 5.6% [0], personally that shows even dramatic reductions in police presence don't lead to complete "anarchy". I fear, given the increasing discussion around this crime """wave""", that some disastrous "tough on crime" policies are going to be (re)introduced in the coming years. [0]https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...
- eigenrick 5y ago
  That data doesn't show 2021. It only goes up to 2020. You don't have to try very hard to find data that supports a massive uptick in violent crime in 2021. Dozens of cities have reported all-time-high murder rates. Even cities like Philedelphia, which was already pretty high to begin with. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/27/us-murder-rate-increase-2020 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/27/us-murder-ra... I don't think it is due to defunding the police, however. As has been pointed out, murder rates are up in large cities, and small towns, both Red and Blue. There is a simple explanation: Nobody is getting incarcerated, because of COVID requirements in jails. In my hometown, which is not a major metro area, a friend of mine (who lives inside city limits) even had a cow stolen. When discussing this with the police officer, the officer's remark was "crime is up over a thousand percent" because "they can't incarcerate anyone" because of covid. They would book people, but the jails are at max capacity, so they don't even do time. They get "booked and released". https://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-the-covid-19-crisis-struck-and-washington-jails-emptied-out/ https://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-the-covid-19-crisis-str...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - crooked-v 5y ago
    Also, COVID as an ongoing thing isn't great for anybody's mental health in general. I suspect there's some similarity to how crime rates go up during heat waves.
unethical_ban 5y ago
This should probably be flagged, but I've thought about creating an HN clone where people could put some kind of code in their profile to validate their identity, to have these kinds of conversations with the same handle they use here, while keeping HN clean and tech friendly.
deleted 5y ago
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terminatornet 5y ago
> I have seen the unraveling over the past year in my own neighborhood. In October, about three blocks from my house, a neighbor was shot and killed in a home invasion. About a mile south in the same month, a 15-year-old girl was shot to death in an act of road rage. And just a few weeks ago, a little more than a half-mile west of me, another teenager was fatally shot. What exactly would police have done in any of these situations to prevent them from happening? > They claim that, by taking money from police and putting it toward social programs, they can eliminate the need for heavy-handed policing in the first place. But the social programs are an afterthought. What matters most to these activists is tearing down the cops, not building up the tattered neighborhoods those cops are charged with protecting. Progressives in the US want an increased federal minimum wage and guaranteed healthcare for everyone. Studies seemed to show mixed results on whether or not this will result in a decrease in overall crime, but now seems like the time to try.
- thegrimmest 5y ago
  > What exactly would police have done in any of these situations to prevent them from happening? They would have arrested and imprisoned the perpetrators, who are more than likely to have long criminal histories, after their first offence. People don't often go from zero to armed home invasion. > Progressives in the US want... I'm not sure any of this will work if there's insufficient order as to prevent smash-and-grab robberies and shootings from being a daily occurence. I don't suppose these people are stealing to eat or pay for healthcare. Dollars are best spent incarcerating violent people a la Japan, rather than paying them and hoping they behave themselves. Living in a peaceful society is a right afforded only to those who remain nonviolent.
  - confidantlake 5y ago
    The US has an incarceration rate nearly 20 times that of Japan.
    - thegrimmest 5y ago
      Why do you think that is? Would you be willing to accept one of the reasons being a culture which is more tolerant of criminal behavior?
pixelgeek 5y ago
> Defund advocates dismiss these arguments—not because they can refute them with evidence, but because they’re blinded by ideology. I don't know how you are supposed to take a writer seriously when they write things like this. > Even in the absence of a viable alternative, they demand that existing law enforcement structures be torn down. And this actually just isn't true. The author has time to read academic papers on policing issues but he doesn't seem to have read any of the material that police abolitionists have written. He also references Michael Shellenberger frequently, a man who has also written "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All" and "Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalist". I think Shellenberger had to put aside his 'liberal' credentials a long time ago. > Today, with few exceptions, there is no more involuntary treatment for serious mental disease or drug addiction. But nor is there a humane alternative. There is only jail or the streets. Maybe this has something to do with public funding for mental health being slashed almost everywhere and also linked to drug laws. So people who are on the streets and self-medicating because they couldn't get treatment can't be placed in the few available options because of their drug intake. The entire article is a gloss over the issues without any real look at it. San Fran is indeed a messed up city. So is Oakland. But I really don't have time for white people complaining about a situation that never affects them. He is complaining about his nanny having to move. Not him. His nanny. How does that compare to the police killing your friends and relatives for no reason?
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AnthonyMouse 5y ago
The problem with "defund the police" is that we never really defined what it was. Are we talking about the libertarian thing were you literally don't have the police anymore, and then you have a posse of ordinary citizens come together to execute arrest warrants and a high rate of private firearms ownership to deter crime? That would have been a weird thing to hear from progressives, I would think. And did anybody actually do this anywhere? But if it's not that then the whole thing comes down to the details of what you're actually talking about. That's kind of the problem with the whole movement. You have some really quite serious problems with the criminal justice system. Police unaccountability, perjury, prosecutorial misconduct, overcharging, the plea bargaining system. Civil asset forfeiture. Traffic fines used for revenue generation, creating adversarial interactions between ordinary people and the police and needlessly increasing the opportunities for things to go very wrong. Over-criminalization of everything, causing the US to have the largest prison population in the world. The War on Drugs. Things that really need to get fixed. But then we have a video of a white cop killing a black man and a media narrative that says it's all about race, even though the statistics don't bear that out. If you misidentify the problem then you're going to come up with dumb solutions.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  The gist of the slogan, as originally intended, is to take some (not all) money and responsibilities away from the police and give them to unarmed or lesser-armed civil enforcement agencies when appropriate (for example: parking enforcement, mental health interventions with unarmed people), and to take away funding the exceeds that scope of reasonable armed police activity (e.g. no MRAPs, no elaborate SWAT teams in small towns). In other words, the intent is to fundamentally remove the institutional potential for cases like "I called in a noise complaint and then an officer showed up, shot my neighbor's dog, and kicked my child" by making it so that police are no longer the unfettered monolithic response for every possible civil disturbance.
  - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    I see what the problem is now. The thing you're asking for is too reasonable and the reason it hasn't happened is political corruption. Because the reason the police have military vehicles isn't because anybody thought it was a good idea. It's because companies that make military hardware lobby for funding for law enforcement to buy their products. So you say "police don't need MRAPs" and everybody says "no kidding" and there is no debate to be had because there is no one really defending it. There is no controversy to cover, no story, because what are you going to say? Everyone we interviewed thought this was stupid? Then you turn around and it's happened again because some Congressperson needed some campaign contributions they could only get by sticking that funding into the omnibus bill. And of course anything that would actually reduce the need for police, and therefore their number, would be fought hard by police unions. The best solution I can come up with to problems like this is the double ox goring. Police unions are Republican things, so if you want to get something that benefits the public at their expense, find some thing that benefits the public at the political expense of the Democrats (e.g school choice), and then do them both together so it cancels out. In other words, so you can pass it with 60% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans instead of 100% of either party.
Smoofer 5y ago
Similar propaganda being pushed by LAPD union leader: https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/12/07/we-cant-guarantee-your-safety-head-of-lapds-police-officers-union-warns-tourists-away/ https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/12/07/we-cant-guarantee...
rafale 5y ago
All of this debate is based on the bs idea that poverty breeds crime. When in fact it's a bad culture that does. I have seen places in 3rd world countries much poorer than most poor minorities in the US , and they just lived, helping each other out the best they can. But when the culture praises gangsters, being a "bad bitch" or whatever cancerous crap they brag about these days, then you get the issue of crime. Unpopular opinion, but culture is a bigger factor than most people recognize.
- tr_user 5y ago
  > I have seen places in 3rd world countries much poorer than most poor minorities Poor whites don't commit more crimes?
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  > But when the culture praises gangsters, being a "bad bitch" or whatever cancerous crap they brag about these days, then you get the issue of crime. Funny how upper-middle class kids listen to the same songs and end up working at FAANGs, banks, law firms, hospitals, etc.
  - keewee7 5y ago
    >Funny how upper-middle class kids listen to the same songs and end up working at FAANGs, banks, law firms, hospitals, etc. How many upper-middle class kids listen to Chicago SoundCloud rappers?
    - throwawaygh 5y ago
      I'd guess a fair number. Literally everyone in Gen X listened to NWA.
      - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
        Every white kid in America listened to Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine and had the Chronic LP in their CD players. 10 years later, kids the same age were listening to Eminem talk about putting 9 inch nails through his eyelids and killing his mom and somehow we ended up fine.
digitcatphd 5y ago
Why is this political shit on HN?
throwawayfear 5y ago
surprisedpikachu.jpg
modriano 5y ago
No police defunding has actually happened though, so I'm fairly confident that that doesn't explain the increase in violent crime, much less the DECREASE in property crime [0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/upshot/murder-crime-trends-chicago.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/upshot/murder-crime-trend...
coding123 5y ago
It's not the de-funding or firing of police causing this. It's the general announcement that everyone is on-board with de-funding the police that is causing it. You tell everyone that the police are not needed? What do you think the crime prone are going to react with? More crime.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
scottcodie 5y ago
Their cited research paper on police presence deterring crime does not fully support his claims. FTA: > Defund advocates often claim that police don’t actually prevent crimes, that they only bust the perpetrators after the fact. But that’s untrue. Police presence deters crime. Arresting career criminals takes them out of circulation. And, most important, effective policing bolsters a community’s faith in government-administered justice. From the cited paper: > Since larger police forces lead to reductions in index crimes, the decline in index crime arrests that we observe suggests that larger police forces reduce serious crime primarily through deterrence rather than by arresting and incapacitating additional offenders. More from the paper: > With respect to the prospect for police hiring to “widen the net" of the criminal justice system, we report mixed conclusions. ... we find evidence that larger police forces lead to large and meaningful increases in low-level “quality of life” arrests, in particular for Black civilians, where the per capita arrest increase for liquor violations and drug possession is 2.5-3 times higher for Black civilians.
Fervicus 5y ago
A good read with links to research on the subject: https://journalistsresource.org/criminal-justice/defund-the-police/ https://journalistsresource.org/criminal-justice/defund-the-...
focusgroup0 5y ago
Coming soon: Vigilante Justice
- alphabettsy 5y ago
  Some people believe that’s what we already have.
focusgroup0 5y ago
Are we allowed to discuss Human Biodiversity on Hacker News, or it also a verboten topic?
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Many cities in the formerly industrial parts of the US that have had these police long since defunded by economic circumstance. You don't have rampant crime in those places. The west coast's crime problem has nothing to do with money and everything to do with executive policy (to not do much prosecuting, to the point where crimes that were formerly opportunistic are now low risk enough to become reliable sources of income for those so inclined) that's slowly being copied in more and more cities hence the overall trend.
oaktrout 5y ago
I combined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_the_50_largest_cities_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_the_50_large... (proxy for political party), and found that the top 13 cities with the highest crime rate in that combined data set were democratic. 7 out of 9 republican cities were in the half with the lower crime rate. Interestingly, all 3 cities with independent party mayors were in the lower crime half. Of course this is totally unscientific, but I think it is interesting and at the very least there is some association. I also note that larger cities tend to be democratic.
- alphabettsy 5y ago
  If you ignore history this seems like it might be something to look into, that’s until you realize that crime has fallen greatly in the last two to three decades and quite a few of these cities, New York and Los Angeles included had Republican mayors at the start of that time period. NYC crime is way down since Guiliani was mayor. Los Angeles crime is down since Richard Riordan was mayor. So maybe the takeaway is that getting rid of Republican mayors reduces crime? It’s likely not, but that’s the problem with looking at things this way.
  - starik36 5y ago
    I think some context is in order. Giuliani's heavy handedness in dealing with criminals forced the crime to come down in a way. Meaning, police were forced to deal even with the pettiest of crimes. Giuliani banned all sorts of "unsavory" businesses from Times Square. That reduced crime in the area and helped a ton because it showed that a horrible area can be rehabilitated. One year, the subways were gross, smelly, hot, dangerous and covered in graffiti. And the next, I was riding in clean subways at 2am without fearing for my life. In Los Angeles, with Richard Riordan, his years coincided with California's "3 strikes and you are out" law, which put away lots of habitual criminals. Crime went down everywhere in the state.
    - 5y ago
grouphugs 5y ago
people don't get how simple this is, this country chooses to not invest in people and more and more people are left with nothing but crime, violence against police will continue to increase following the trend of increasing funding for police. police don't make us safer. militarizing police more does not make us safer. having more cops does not make us safer. look at chicago ffs, the city loves boasting fake news about how hiring more cops and paying them more makes the city safer, but then 2-3 months down the line when statistics are realeased things look very different
keewee7 5y ago
In 2017 Copenhagen had a wave of gang shootings with 1-2 daily fatalities during the worst weeks. That is nothing compared to the most violent US cities but it was completely unprecedented for a Danish city. The gang warfare was stopped by massive police operations and surveillance. This included military surveillance and signal intelligence planes [1] and helicopters to aid the police. It worked. I know it goes against techno libertarian ideals on HN to suggest that police and surveillance can actually stop crime but it did in 2017 in Copenhagen. [1]: https://www.berlingske.dk/samfund/politiet-tager-nye-vaaben-i-brug-mod-banderne-vi-goer-fund-og-fangster-fordi-vi https://www.berlingske.dk/samfund/politiet-tager-nye-vaaben-...
g8oz 5y ago
I am convinced that many police units are an undeclared work to rule campaign. The resulting rise in crime is absolutely expected and will scare the country into backing off from efforts to enact serious reforms. "If we can't do our job like assholes than we are not going to try too hard." seems to be the message. And it absolutely will work.
- seg_lol 5y ago
  That has been exactly what I experienced.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwawaymanbot 5y ago
This is fake …afaik Zero budgets hav been defunded. So this is people paid to do work, not doing it. They should be fired.
kragen 5y ago
> The shooting didn’t even make the local news. Apparently, in the Bay Area right now, you can walk up a residential street firing your gun into houses, and you still won’t be able to compete for attention with all of the other sensational crimes. The Bay Area includes San Jose (25 murders a year), Oakland (normally 110 murders a year), San Francisco (50 murders a year), and dozens of other cities which are mostly more peaceful but contribute several dozen more murders a year to the total. So it has roughly one murder every day. There's a nice historical overview of the statistics at https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Homicides-increased-in-Bay-Area-major-cities-in-16494869.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Homicides-increase..., explaining that Oakland's murder rate has gone up 45% in 02021. The Merc has a great homicide map at https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/06/bay-area-homicides-2020-map-and-details/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/06/bay-area-homicides-20... A murder a day is plenty for the local news most of the time. So it's hardly surprising that a drive-by shooting that failed to actually shoot anybody wouldn't make the news, because things like that happen every day, and have been for thirty or forty years. This is not, in itself, a symptom of anything unusual in the SFBA this year. (Of course, there are many unusual things in the SFBA this year, since it's the second year of the pandemic, but a crime wave doesn't seem to be one of them, except in Oakland.) scrollbar points out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29503928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29503928 that in fact Oakland increased their police budget this year by US$39 million. So, if we're supposed to infer a causal relation from police defunding to homicide rates from these data, it would be the opposite of the one Weiss (or Leighton?) arrived at: increased police funding "caused" a huge jump in the homicide rate. This is not entirely implausible, but it seems unlikely to pan out on further investigation (for reasons Leighton mentions later in the story). You can see from the SF Chron story I linked above that Oakland's murder rate has mostly been between 20 and 40 per 100,000 residents per year for half a century, peaking above 40 from the leaded-gasoline crime wave just after 01990. This is very much in conflict with Leighton's portrayal of Oakland as being full of "areas where crime and violence are more of an abstraction than a daily reality", as is the Merc's map. The corresponding number for the US as a whole from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... is 5.0. Oakland is more like Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa than it is like the US; its spectacular murder rate puts it in the neighborhood of the top 50 cities in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate. On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b..., it was #23 by murder rate among US cities in 02019, before the current crime wave, with a historically very low rate of 16.24 (and #3 for robbery, and #2 for motor-vehicle theft.) I remember one afternoon, early in the current millennium, when I went to visit a friend in Oakland. I was having a hard time finding a place to park on her block. Her neighbor across the street was practicing martial arts with weapons in his yard, but he was kind enough to interrupt his practice long enough to push someone else's car along the curb a few meters, making space for mine. For me, that memory defines Oakland more than the memories of lovely afternoons on the grass at Lake Merritt.
uoaei 5y ago
A note on the comments, if meta-discussion is allowed: Seeing a lot of unchecked and unexamined confirmation bias despite the complete lack of evidence presented in the article or anywhere else that there is any kind of causal relationship here. Many commenters here on HN are self-aware but in the grass we can find hiding those who paradoxically fetishize rationality despite continually falling into fallacy traps.
olliej 5y ago
Except police budgets have been increasing for decades, and the amount of crime has as well. The biggest problem is every time there’s any suggestion that maybe the police aren’t actually doing a good job, police stop working and then blame any change in crime of lack of money. This is ignoring the non-theft crime caused by police (pedofile ring in Oakland PD, fraud, murders, etc). they also change their reporting of crimes to inflate or deflate the rate of crime as necessary. Hell they’ll even create their own crime wave if necessary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Boston_arson_spree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Boston_arson_spree Despite being the most significant cause of theft in the US.
myfavoritedog 5y ago
"Defund the Police" has been just one part of the problem. Combine it with catch-and-release no-bail, Soros prosecutors who refuse to prosecute, COVID policies that released criminals to avoid infections, immigration policies that allow the free flow of gangs and drugs across the border, and the hyper-sensationalist efforts of the media to cause a riot every time there's a killing of a black suspect by a white police officer... and disaster was inevitable. I'd really respect Progressives if they took a long hard look at all these factors, admitted their culpability in promoting them, and actually did something about them.
somenewaccount1 5y ago
The article the author cites as a source literally says "the majority of cities have not refunded the police". Mods, This should be removed from HN as a pure opinion piece with no factual info. Gross.
RickJWagner 5y ago
I just can't understand the defund movement. Seattle tried 'CHOP' or whatever it was, it seemed like it had murders in a week or two. San Fransisco is frequently in the news with smash-n-grabs. Chicago always has double-digit murder counts per weekend. Can we just agree that more policing would be better, if there was less violence against civilians? Maybe more liberal use of stun-guns or something. Less cops clearly seems to be a wrong path.
ogou 5y ago
The phrase "defund the police" appeared a month or so after the first protests. There was an existing niche movement to abolish police and prisons that was small but organized in Portland and Oakland and online. At first there was no message or cohesive platform, just anger. The abolition movement had plenty of slogans and content for young folks frantically searching "social justice" on their phones. Also, police departments were flush with military surplus from excess war supplies and Homeland Security grants. So they showed up to the protests with tanks, full body armor, and automatic weapons. There was shock at those images that fed an older liberal response to "demilitarize the police". That was used to soften "abolish" to "defund". Coupled with some civic movements to shift budgets to mental health response instead of armed force, "defund the police" became a thing. Very few cities ever actually defunded their police. Minneapolis itself voted it down.
tomas_nort 5y ago
Xaxaxa
sleepysysadmin 5y ago
There's an interesting book I read not long ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Policing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Policing For the most part I didn't learn anything new. Though didn't necessarily agree with everything. If you were to list out every task the police do and don't do. Eliminate any and all laws that the police never enforce. Fix any law which is disproportionately applied. For example, less than 1% of traffic accidents are because of speeding. Yet police enforce speeding laws extensively doing huge damage to society. On top of that, so many of the applications are intentionally meant to be antagonistic toward society. Speeding laws are meant to be set where 80% of society does not break the law. That's not at all how it is. It's set such that 100% of society is breaking the law. With intention of revenue generation. It's not just speeding. It's all the petty laws meant to generate revenue. Does your bike have a bell? These laws change police from law enforcement to antagonistic toward society. This is the fundamental problem. The police are no longer there to help you, they are there to be against you. Anything you say will be used AGAINST you in the court of law. Anything you say will NEVER BE USED FOR you in the court of law. The police are the enemy, this is intentional design and no politician ever will consider fixing this problem.
temp17364 5y ago
Read: priveleged person gets mad when the structure that provides that privelege gets dismantled. Like seriously. You're scared that there are gunshots and people dying in your neighborhood? Are you scared for the people in the projects who have been living like that for years? Where is this "effective police force" for those people?

192 points by hncurious 5y ago

dang 5y ago

I took the less baity title from the author's site: https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/defund-the-police-meets-the-crime https://leightonwoodhouse.substack.com/p/defund-the-police-m.... I didn't change the URL because this appears to be a more recent article on the same topic.

nverno 5y ago

Defunding the police, along with every other policy, applies well in some areas and poorly in others. When I was a kid, our town decided to defund the police, cutting the force from 3 to 1 officers IIRC. It made sense because there was no crime, and the townspeople didn't want to waste the money on police. All useful politics are local.

mercy_dude 5y ago

Bari doesn’t sound to me a genuine person. I have seen her first podcast with Joe Rogan where she sounded like a layperson with typical 21yr old understanding of sociology-political affair. Then she suddenly became pro free speech and anti establishment media. This is a person who has worked for NYT for gods sake.

throwawaygh 5y ago
Just another entertainer grasping desperately for an audience large enough to justify an upper-middle class income's worth of ad revenue.
blast 5y ago
Leighton Woodhouse wrote the article.

ab_goat 5y ago

For anyone that likes podcasts, there's a good podcast (1h27m) on this topic: The Ezra Klein Show / Why Is Murder Spiking? And Can Cities Address It Without Police? / November 23, 2021 https://overcast.fm/+oiPWjrl3U https://overcast.fm/+oiPWjrl3U

keewee7 5y ago

Many comments here are pointing out that police haven't been defunded yet. But just threatening to defund a service will lower the quality of that service. The "Defund the police" movement has completely dominated the Internet and mainstream media so it wouldn't surprise me if many cops are moving to smaller towns or changing fields.

starik36 5y ago
Exactly right. If someone tells me that I'll be getting paid less next year (even if it's not going to happen), I will literally do the bare minimum not to get fired.
- sitkack 5y ago
  Which is technically, illegal.

Bostonian 5y ago

The Democrats run the cities where this is happening. What are they going to do about it? Quoting the article: 'I recently finished reading “San Fransicko,” by Michael Shellenberger. I recommend it. The subtitle is provocative: “Why Progressives Ruin Cities.” But, as Shellenberger explains, he does not mean to imply that progressives always ruin the cities they govern. He’s just interested in the specific phenomenon of when progressives do ruin cities, and explaining why that happens. And progressives—I count myself as one of them—do ruin cities. Or, at least, they put in place policies that cause profound harm to the people living in them.'

redis_mlc 5y ago
[flagged]
noduerme 5y ago
I think we should start differentiating between Democrats and progressives. At least here in Portland, the differentiation is already complete. Basically everyone is a Democrat and most residents would like to have our police force back and see people prosecuted for property crimes. The city leadership is beholden to a radical fringe who aren't really even liberals so much as anarcho-communists.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > differentiating between Democrats and progressives...a radical fringe Well, I don't see the moderate democrat leadership denouncing the radical fringe, either.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    This is roughly like saying that the Republicans in Congress aren't denouncing the Capitol rioters. My point about progressive cities is that a portion of the leadership is afraid of the extremists. Ted Wheeler, the Mayor of Portland, had to run his last election against an actual Stalinist who had very vocal supporters but ultimately not overwhelming numbers on her side. She catalyzed the average Dems to get out and vote for Wheeler, who no one really likes. So what I mean is there's a large silent majority of Dems, if not the leadership, who are rattled by the progressives' increasingly unhinged, illiberal program. Just as I think there's a bulk of Republicans who don't believe in attacking the Capitol.

r00fus 5y ago

Bari Weiss is hardly a neutral (or reasonable) voice. Flagged.

_dain_ 5y ago
this isn't wikipedia
MonadIsPronad 5y ago
In fairness, the article isn't written by Weiss.
- terminatornet 5y ago
  it's hosted on her substack, so I think we can assume it's probably an opinion endorsed by her
- pixelgeek 5y ago
  She thought it was good enough to host it.

mysecretaccount 5y ago

> Defund advocates often claim that police don’t actually prevent crimes, that they only bust the perpetrators after the fact. But that’s untrue. Police presence deters crime[citation provided]. Arresting career criminals takes them out of circulation. And, most important, effective policing bolsters a community’s faith in government-administered justice. Regardless of whether defunding is good/bad for crime, this is the core justification for existing funding in this article and it is quite thin. Edit: I am unclear on why this is getting downvoted. Almost nothing in that paragraph is adequately substantiated anywhere in the article. I am not married to any particular perspective on this topic, but remain unconvinced of the author's conclusion.

JamesBarney 5y ago
Why is it thin? There are several studies showing how policing reduces crime through a couple of measures. Intuitively it would make sense that locking up criminals would reduce crime (making them unable to commit more crime), that increasing the chance of a criminal getting locked up would reduce crime (via incentives), and just seeing more police officers around would reduce crime. I would be really surprised if for the past 1000 years, civilization was tricked into believing in a criminal justice system was necessary when in reality it wasn't. Are there any studies where they dramatically reduced police presence and crime wasn't affected?
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  People have been religious for thousands of years, it's easy for humans to believe things without evidence when it makes them feel better
  - JamesBarney 5y ago
    And you think we need a criminal justice system is one of those things?
    - netizen-936824 5y ago

giantg2 5y ago

Walking and spraying multiple houses... I was surprise there was no return fire, then I saw it was CA.

pengaru 5y ago
> I was surprise there was no return fire, then I saw it was CA. I'm in CA and am surrounded by neighbors with guns, for better or worse. If you think CA is devoid of gun owners you're sorely mistaken.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Not devoid, but lower prevalence with tighter restrictions. Quite a few have moved out over the years, or chosen not to move there in the first place. For example, approximately 1 in 10 adults in PA have a license to carry a firearm. Compared to about 70k CA CCW in a population of about 39M people (didn't find adults only). CA also mandates that guns be stored locked up and unloaded when not on their person. This can prevent some of the safes or lock boxes designed for rapid deployment.
- baby 5y ago
  It depends where you are in CA, I specifically moved to a place where I would know people around me don't own guns (SF). I have a hard time seeing myself live anywhere where people are allowed to carry or buy guns liberally.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    > I have a hard time seeing myself live anywhere where people are allowed to carry or buy guns liberally. you're not safe from these people in SF unfortunately due to new jurisprudence around 2A post-heller.
    - gcheong 5y ago
      I’ve lived here (SF)for almost 20yrs and I have yet to see anyone open carry here unless they’re trying to make some political statement. Sure it could be that I just don’t see all the people that are carrying concealed but I do think there is much less of a gun carry culture here. As for ownership I know of one neighbor that has guns. I’m sure there are probably more but I imagine they’re kept mainly for recreational not defensive purposes much like how people kept guns in the small town I grew up in in Oregon before the whole “patriotic” gun toter culture became a thing.

MonadIsPronad 5y ago

Good article. Nice calm tone, interesting points. Seems like a good addition to the conversation.

aejnsn 5y ago

You get what you pay for.

mejari 5y ago
Except they're still paying for it and the police weren't defunded https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-the-police-budget-at-all https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t...
- nerdponx 5y ago
  I can't speak for Oakland specifically. But when I see police departments with lots of fancy combat gear, but with minimal fitness standards and minimal training in things like unarmed combat, I can't help but feel like the people are not getting their tax money's worth.
- literallyaduck 5y ago
  Threatening to defund the police generally lowers the quality of your existing police. Pretend you run a business and say you are cutting salaries. Employees will look for other jobs or just be demotivated in general. Couple that with an increasing hostile work environment, you have the situation at hand. Do you work as hard when you know management is gunning for your job?
  - alphabettsy 5y ago
    Who created the hostile work environment?
  - mejari 5y ago
    So the excuse is that the police are allowing shootings and other crimes because they aren't motivated enough? Because they might be held to a higher standard? Because they might not get their awesome new toys? Stop treating them like children. I'm amazed when people will go to any lengths to excuse the police.
- aejnsn 5y ago

the_cat_kittles 5y ago

this article has no content. just show some contextualized statistics of how police funding correlates with crime. in seattle, it really hasnt from what ive seen. but if you have compelling numbers, go ahead

WalterBright 5y ago
Seattle crime statistics are misleading. It's been reported many times that since the police no longer even show up for shoplifting crimes, business owners no longer bother to report it. Nobody knows what the crime rate actually is as a result. But the accountants at the retail stores know, and they're raising prices, installing armored doors, or simply leaving the city. The local bank branch I patronize now sports an armed guard wearing body armor standing outside the door. It's only a block from the police station. Pretty sad.
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  > The local bank branch I patronize now sports an armed guard wearing body armor standing outside the door. It's only a block from the police station. Pretty sad. Well that's certainly a vote of confidence for the professionalism and effectiveness for the police.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    If you want more indications, on the Seattle side the bank branches have heavy armored glass completely separating them from customers. On the eastside, no such glass. These are branches of the same bank.
- the_cat_kittles 5y ago
  spd total spending went up every year 2016 to 2020 i believe. doesnt that suggest the money isnt doing much?
  - sitkack 5y ago
    From my discussions with current SPD personnel, the SPD itself is doing a stop work protest. Money In doesn't mean Services Out (MISO), it only reaffirms the thuglike nature of our relationship with the police.

scrollbar 5y ago

I read most of the article, in which the author implies that defunding the police increases crime, and blames the people in charge of Oakland with this crime. Yet I recalled hearing that police budgets in Oakland were steady to up this year, despite the protests. A quick search seems to confirm this: https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-the-police-budget-at-all https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t... >Despite claims to the contrary, the Oakland City Council did not make any cuts to the police budget at all this year. In fact, Oakland police were allotted about $39 million more than in the previous two years, according to a KTVU analysis of city records. What did I miss?

Invictus0 5y ago
It's more than an implication, it's a direct statement: > As the surge in violence has become less theoretical to white, middle class residents, Oakland’s mayor has been afforded the political space to push to restore the funds that were cut from the police budget.
reanimus 5y ago
You're right on the mark. A lot of articles scare-mongering about defunding the police point to numbers in places that haven't seen any defunding (quite the contrary, many of them have had boosts to their budgets, as usual).
wobblyasp 5y ago
You missed the opportunity to push your narrative
x1ph0z 5y ago
> What did I miss Someone pushing their propaganda
nerdponx 5y ago
> What did I miss? Nothing. There is a narrative being pushed that tries to correlate Black Lives Matter, Defund The Police, etc. activity with increasing crime. That narrative might have some validity in some localized cases, but is clearly not universally causal.

adt2bt 5y ago

> They claim that, by taking money from police and putting it toward social programs, they can eliminate the need for heavy-handed policing in the first place. But the social programs are an afterthought. This feels like a strawman. I don't think it's surprising that there's a rise in crime when police are defunded, especially when those social programs aren't enacted. I think most reasonable progressives who support defunding the police also recognize the whole point is to shift investment away from punishment (police) into aid (social programs) to deter crime. It takes years for that to happen, and really needs to happen on a societal level to provide opportunities that otherwise 'career criminals' do not have which leads them down that path.

JamesBarney 5y ago
Are there any good comparisons on how much a dollar of policing vs a dollar of social programs deter crime?
- schwartzworld 5y ago
  Is there any evidence that current police funding levels help to deter crime in any significant way whatsoever?
  - settrans 5y ago
    Is there any evidence that, on net, state welfare programs deter crime in any significant way?
    - Nostromos 5y ago
      It's been studied extensively and the research overwhelmingly shows that more generous welfare policies are associated with lower levels of crime. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0047235220300623 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-13463-002 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1999-13463-002 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3509381 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3509381 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655778 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655778

drewwwwww 5y ago

i think it's worth pointing out giving the still semi-inflammatory nature of the headline, no serious advocate of defunding the police has ever suggested that simply doing that is the goal. the idea is to shift funding from cops walking around with guns killing people to things that actually prevent crime from happening, and as the piece points out, even in the few places that have actually reduced funding to police, that has not occurred in any significant way. it's a resource allocation argument, not an 'everything would be better if police instantly winked out of existence' argument.

mjevans 5y ago
'Defund' is far more inflammatory than alternative phrasing. RE-form the Police -- this is a movement I can more readily support and I hope is self descriptive and accurate. Police departments have become alienated from communities because they are no longer about the mission to protect and serve the common people and the commons; they have instead become yet another type of organization using violence for control. The videogame Crackdown got that right many years ago. As horrid as the Japanese justice system is about the presumption of guilt; their practice of neighborhood officers and community involvement seem like positive traits that should be copied in the USA and elsewhere as one facet of improving the positive interaction of peace officers and the community.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  > RE-form the Police -- this is a movement I can more readily support and I hope is self descriptive and accurate. What this is missing here from "defund the police" is that part of the point of that slogan is to take responsibility (and, yes, funding) for some duties away from police entirely and give them to new organizations that have more limited scope and much more limited use of force. A prime example here is parking enforcement, which is often performed by the police despite having no particular need for the legal monopoly on violence that comes with police officers.
bellyfullofbac 5y ago
... with a sadly very stupid title. One that gets an instant angry reaction from "the other side" instead of a discussion. Even Obama says that much: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-defund-the-police-slogan/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-defund-the-police-slogan/ . You even have to write this comment to explain "Actually, the idea behind those 3 words are..." If I were in charge of naming the idea, I'd suggest something like "Get Rid of Thug Cops!". Focus on how cops are supposed to be part of society instead of prison guards. Focus on the fact that e.g. Western European police get multiple years of education. Even the UK has a problem, since the lying thieving government has been squeezing budgets for the last decade, the police have been underfunded there and it's harder to do the "be a part of society" part of policing. But it's incredible how a protest slogan has been morphed by "the other side" into "this is actually happening, and look at all the results", when, as many have said, no actual defunding is happening.

fatcat500 5y ago

The people who support defunding the police have never felt genuine fear from being victimized by crime. It's only after the crime, when you're thinking about how someone else had the hubris to threaten your life, thinking about how you could have died, or worse, if your loved ones had been with you, that they could have died, that you begin to wade yourself into a deep and abiding anger. I used to feel sympathy for criminals. Especially seeing how many of them have led rough lives, having been raised by bad parents, in horrible environments, having been led by others to delinquency as youth, then into crime as adults. However, once you have been victimized, this sympathy vanishes. It does not matter how bad you've had it -- violence is never justified. Any person who resorts to violence instantly loses all justification. It is only the rich who can afford to stroke their moral ego in such an egregious manner. It is the poor and the middle class who pay with their lives for this sanctimony.

rbanffy 5y ago
> The people who support defunding the police have never felt genuine fear from being victimized by crime. A lot of them felt more than once genuine fear from being victimized by crime committed by the police. Which, of course, is almost never reported as a crime by whoever survives it.
reanimus 5y ago
I dunno man, both me and my mom have been mugged before and the police didn't help. Same with when my car was broken into and someone tried to break my front door lock. People make this argument all the time but I fail to see how the police have helped any time I've experienced any actual crime, not to mention so many others. That's not even getting into the politics of who can call the police and how the police react differently to situations, either.
- Corrado 5y ago
  Yeah, I personally know people who were mugged at gunpoint and the police did nothing. The assailant is on social media and the victims provided the police with their account names. Nothing was done.
- 5y ago

endymi0n 5y ago

The knee-jerk reaction of "defund the police" to the power abuses of police officers struck me as deeply weird from the beginning. It made me wonder whether the right NOR the left had any clue left as what the role of a police force in a democracy was actually supposed to be — or whether that battle cry _really_ originated from the same forces trying to split the US society: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/14/russia-us-politics-social-media-facebook https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/14/russia-us-po... Like, there would have been lots of great claims: "Train police", "Restructure Police", "Rebuild Police"... but what's a single good argument to "Defund Police" other than wanting to go back to anarchy?

Zigurd 5y ago
"Train police", "Restructure Police", have been tried, and that has just inflated police budgets. That last one "Rebuild police" has not been tried. Many PDs need that. From the ground up. One applicant at a time. Carefully screened and lavishly trained.
rbanffy 5y ago
> there would have been lots of great claims: "Train police", "Restructure Police", "Rebuild Police"... but what's a single good argument do Defund Police other than going back to anarchy? I believe it's a reaction to police forces now having military gear when it should be totally unnecessary. In many places police officers don't even need guns. Maybe spending less money in militaria and more in training would be a consequence of not having to fund military equipment, supplies, and maintenance. It'd, at least, limit the violent options police has when they are going to engage a suspect.
- asdff 5y ago
  Oftentimes they are given this military gear for pretty much free. When is the last time you've even seen SWAT deployed that made you think "I wish they didn't deploy SWAT?"
  - r00fus 5y ago

Abroszka 5y ago

I thought violence is up almost everywhere in the US compared to previous years. It would be interesting to see whether this increase correlates with police funding or not. My bet would be no.

mattnewton 5y ago
Police funding is also not significantly reduced basically anywhere in the US afaict - in fact, it increased in Oakland, though not by as much as police chiefs had hoped and as a slightly smaller percentage of the overall city budget due to increases elsewhere. https://oaklandside.org/2021/06/25/oakland-2021-2023-budget-defund-police-alternatives-violence-prevention/ https://oaklandside.org/2021/06/25/oakland-2021-2023-budget-... Separately, the article links to this source[0] when talking about how progressives are "ruining cities", arguing that progressives have successfully pushed for decreases police budgets despite violent crime increases. But the article linked shows increases in police budgets by percentage of the overall budget. There are real instances of yoy "cuts" but they seem to occur with disproportionately larger cuts elsewhere across the budget, which does not support the hypothesis that progressives are defending the police; it shows that when cutting budgets we still prioritize policing. [0] https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-the-crime-wave-hits-your-family https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/when-the-crime-wave-hits-yo... Obviously crime is Oakland is too high, what happened to the author shouldn't happen anywhere. These experienced incidents are an important barometer on whether or not what we measure statistically is working to describe reality. We need good metrics prescribe the cure. However, it doesn't follow to me that the issue was caused by lower police budgets looking at how police budgets changed, and I am not convinced that there a progressive voting block to blame yet.. Maybe the morale issue is related, but the budget seems like a red herring.
- nsriv 5y ago
  Exactly this, I've seen so much made of local budgets giving less to PD's in percentage terms, which is disingenuous in the era of increased municipal spending during COVID.

Trias11 5y ago

To solve violent crime we just need to give citizens ability to protect themselves. Try to rob me or hurt my family - be carried away in a body bag. Yet that goes against some politicians narrative.

rbanffy 5y ago
> Try to rob me or hurt my family - be carried away in a body bag. If the criminal expects you to be armed, they'll just shoot first, before you even have the chance to reach your weapons. Remember they have the surprise on their side. This expectation should by itself increase violent crime and turn violent crimes that wouldn't be.
- Trias11 5y ago
  That's what conceal weapons permits are for. Criminals won't know and every attempt to do stupid thing might mean the end of them. If wanabe robbers expect citizens to be armed and legally able to protect themselves and their loved ones - they will think twice if it worth dying for $100.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    They don't have to know. They just assume and kill everyone before they have a chance to defend themselves. From their point of view, it's simple and neat. Remember it's always them surprising their victims, not the other way around.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Dunno, when I was growing up, around 01990, there was a bank robbery in my town where one of the bank customers shot the robbers dead. Bank robbery is already a pretty bad career choice but it gets worse in a hurry when mass-murdering the customers is a prerequisite.
      - rbanffy 5y ago

plorkyeran 5y ago

This is one of many articles which are trying to suggest that we cut police budgets and then crime went up, but the first half of that never actually happened. Oakland's police budget is the highest it's ever been and was not cut in 2020. The article it links to as a source for police budgets being cut has the headline "Cities Say They Want to Defund the Police. Their Budgets Say Otherwise.", and shows that police budgets as a percentage of major city budgets slightly _increased_.

felistoria 5y ago

The police departments can get 100 billion a year and it won't matter when the DA just lets criminals walk after they are arrested. I think that is one of the main factors in the rise of crime and violence. The Waukesha tragedy is a good example of this.

rboes 5y ago
That's the problem here in the Seattle area. First the DA won't charge for many crimes and if they do the judges often don't sentence appropriately
- felistoria 5y ago
  Yeah I'm in the Portland area. It is not going well...
Fervicus 5y ago
Things like Proposition 47 doesn't help either. [1] [2] [1] 2014 California Proposition 47: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_California_Proposition_47 [2] It’s Time for Californians to Recognize that Prop. 47 Criminal Justice Reform Failed: https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2021/06/16/its-time-for-californians-to-recognize-that-prop-47-criminal-justice-reform-failed/ https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2021/06/16/its-time-for-...

le_epic_throw 5y ago

Sorry, but I haven't seen any evidence for a "crime wave" in 2020-2021. FBI stats show a slight uptick in violent crimes. These rates haven't been seen since... gasp ... 2017. If police-civilian interactions really decreased 80% (as quoted in the article), and in exchange violent crime only raised 5.6% [0], personally that shows even dramatic reductions in police presence don't lead to complete "anarchy". I fear, given the increasing discussion around this crime """wave""", that some disastrous "tough on crime" policies are going to be (re)introduced in the coming years. [0]https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...

eigenrick 5y ago
That data doesn't show 2021. It only goes up to 2020. You don't have to try very hard to find data that supports a massive uptick in violent crime in 2021. Dozens of cities have reported all-time-high murder rates. Even cities like Philedelphia, which was already pretty high to begin with. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/27/us-murder-rate-increase-2020 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/27/us-murder-ra... I don't think it is due to defunding the police, however. As has been pointed out, murder rates are up in large cities, and small towns, both Red and Blue. There is a simple explanation: Nobody is getting incarcerated, because of COVID requirements in jails. In my hometown, which is not a major metro area, a friend of mine (who lives inside city limits) even had a cow stolen. When discussing this with the police officer, the officer's remark was "crime is up over a thousand percent" because "they can't incarcerate anyone" because of covid. They would book people, but the jails are at max capacity, so they don't even do time. They get "booked and released". https://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-the-covid-19-crisis-struck-and-washington-jails-emptied-out/ https://www.opb.org/news/article/npr-the-covid-19-crisis-str...
- deleted 5y ago
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- crooked-v 5y ago
  Also, COVID as an ongoing thing isn't great for anybody's mental health in general. I suspect there's some similarity to how crime rates go up during heat waves.

unethical_ban 5y ago

This should probably be flagged, but I've thought about creating an HN clone where people could put some kind of code in their profile to validate their identity, to have these kinds of conversations with the same handle they use here, while keeping HN clean and tech friendly.

deleted 5y ago

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terminatornet 5y ago

> I have seen the unraveling over the past year in my own neighborhood. In October, about three blocks from my house, a neighbor was shot and killed in a home invasion. About a mile south in the same month, a 15-year-old girl was shot to death in an act of road rage. And just a few weeks ago, a little more than a half-mile west of me, another teenager was fatally shot. What exactly would police have done in any of these situations to prevent them from happening? > They claim that, by taking money from police and putting it toward social programs, they can eliminate the need for heavy-handed policing in the first place. But the social programs are an afterthought. What matters most to these activists is tearing down the cops, not building up the tattered neighborhoods those cops are charged with protecting. Progressives in the US want an increased federal minimum wage and guaranteed healthcare for everyone. Studies seemed to show mixed results on whether or not this will result in a decrease in overall crime, but now seems like the time to try.

thegrimmest 5y ago
> What exactly would police have done in any of these situations to prevent them from happening? They would have arrested and imprisoned the perpetrators, who are more than likely to have long criminal histories, after their first offence. People don't often go from zero to armed home invasion. > Progressives in the US want... I'm not sure any of this will work if there's insufficient order as to prevent smash-and-grab robberies and shootings from being a daily occurence. I don't suppose these people are stealing to eat or pay for healthcare. Dollars are best spent incarcerating violent people a la Japan, rather than paying them and hoping they behave themselves. Living in a peaceful society is a right afforded only to those who remain nonviolent.
- confidantlake 5y ago
  The US has an incarceration rate nearly 20 times that of Japan.
  - thegrimmest 5y ago
    Why do you think that is? Would you be willing to accept one of the reasons being a culture which is more tolerant of criminal behavior?

pixelgeek 5y ago

> Defund advocates dismiss these arguments—not because they can refute them with evidence, but because they’re blinded by ideology. I don't know how you are supposed to take a writer seriously when they write things like this. > Even in the absence of a viable alternative, they demand that existing law enforcement structures be torn down. And this actually just isn't true. The author has time to read academic papers on policing issues but he doesn't seem to have read any of the material that police abolitionists have written. He also references Michael Shellenberger frequently, a man who has also written "Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All" and "Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalist". I think Shellenberger had to put aside his 'liberal' credentials a long time ago. > Today, with few exceptions, there is no more involuntary treatment for serious mental disease or drug addiction. But nor is there a humane alternative. There is only jail or the streets. Maybe this has something to do with public funding for mental health being slashed almost everywhere and also linked to drug laws. So people who are on the streets and self-medicating because they couldn't get treatment can't be placed in the few available options because of their drug intake. The entire article is a gloss over the issues without any real look at it. San Fran is indeed a messed up city. So is Oakland. But I really don't have time for white people complaining about a situation that never affects them. He is complaining about his nanny having to move. Not him. His nanny. How does that compare to the police killing your friends and relatives for no reason?

deleted 5y ago

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AnthonyMouse 5y ago

The problem with "defund the police" is that we never really defined what it was. Are we talking about the libertarian thing were you literally don't have the police anymore, and then you have a posse of ordinary citizens come together to execute arrest warrants and a high rate of private firearms ownership to deter crime? That would have been a weird thing to hear from progressives, I would think. And did anybody actually do this anywhere? But if it's not that then the whole thing comes down to the details of what you're actually talking about. That's kind of the problem with the whole movement. You have some really quite serious problems with the criminal justice system. Police unaccountability, perjury, prosecutorial misconduct, overcharging, the plea bargaining system. Civil asset forfeiture. Traffic fines used for revenue generation, creating adversarial interactions between ordinary people and the police and needlessly increasing the opportunities for things to go very wrong. Over-criminalization of everything, causing the US to have the largest prison population in the world. The War on Drugs. Things that really need to get fixed. But then we have a video of a white cop killing a black man and a media narrative that says it's all about race, even though the statistics don't bear that out. If you misidentify the problem then you're going to come up with dumb solutions.

crooked-v 5y ago
The gist of the slogan, as originally intended, is to take some (not all) money and responsibilities away from the police and give them to unarmed or lesser-armed civil enforcement agencies when appropriate (for example: parking enforcement, mental health interventions with unarmed people), and to take away funding the exceeds that scope of reasonable armed police activity (e.g. no MRAPs, no elaborate SWAT teams in small towns). In other words, the intent is to fundamentally remove the institutional potential for cases like "I called in a noise complaint and then an officer showed up, shot my neighbor's dog, and kicked my child" by making it so that police are no longer the unfettered monolithic response for every possible civil disturbance.
- AnthonyMouse 5y ago
  I see what the problem is now. The thing you're asking for is too reasonable and the reason it hasn't happened is political corruption. Because the reason the police have military vehicles isn't because anybody thought it was a good idea. It's because companies that make military hardware lobby for funding for law enforcement to buy their products. So you say "police don't need MRAPs" and everybody says "no kidding" and there is no debate to be had because there is no one really defending it. There is no controversy to cover, no story, because what are you going to say? Everyone we interviewed thought this was stupid? Then you turn around and it's happened again because some Congressperson needed some campaign contributions they could only get by sticking that funding into the omnibus bill. And of course anything that would actually reduce the need for police, and therefore their number, would be fought hard by police unions. The best solution I can come up with to problems like this is the double ox goring. Police unions are Republican things, so if you want to get something that benefits the public at their expense, find some thing that benefits the public at the political expense of the Democrats (e.g school choice), and then do them both together so it cancels out. In other words, so you can pass it with 60% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans instead of 100% of either party.

Smoofer 5y ago

Similar propaganda being pushed by LAPD union leader: https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/12/07/we-cant-guarantee-your-safety-head-of-lapds-police-officers-union-warns-tourists-away/ https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2021/12/07/we-cant-guarantee...

rafale 5y ago

All of this debate is based on the bs idea that poverty breeds crime. When in fact it's a bad culture that does. I have seen places in 3rd world countries much poorer than most poor minorities in the US , and they just lived, helping each other out the best they can. But when the culture praises gangsters, being a "bad bitch" or whatever cancerous crap they brag about these days, then you get the issue of crime. Unpopular opinion, but culture is a bigger factor than most people recognize.

tr_user 5y ago
> I have seen places in 3rd world countries much poorer than most poor minorities Poor whites don't commit more crimes?
throwawaygh 5y ago
> But when the culture praises gangsters, being a "bad bitch" or whatever cancerous crap they brag about these days, then you get the issue of crime. Funny how upper-middle class kids listen to the same songs and end up working at FAANGs, banks, law firms, hospitals, etc.
- keewee7 5y ago
  >Funny how upper-middle class kids listen to the same songs and end up working at FAANGs, banks, law firms, hospitals, etc. How many upper-middle class kids listen to Chicago SoundCloud rappers?
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    I'd guess a fair number. Literally everyone in Gen X listened to NWA.
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      Every white kid in America listened to Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine and had the Chronic LP in their CD players. 10 years later, kids the same age were listening to Eminem talk about putting 9 inch nails through his eyelids and killing his mom and somehow we ended up fine.

digitcatphd 5y ago

Why is this political shit on HN?

throwawayfear 5y ago

surprisedpikachu.jpg

modriano 5y ago

No police defunding has actually happened though, so I'm fairly confident that that doesn't explain the increase in violent crime, much less the DECREASE in property crime [0]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/upshot/murder-crime-trends-chicago.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/16/upshot/murder-crime-trend...

coding123 5y ago

It's not the de-funding or firing of police causing this. It's the general announcement that everyone is on-board with de-funding the police that is causing it. You tell everyone that the police are not needed? What do you think the crime prone are going to react with? More crime.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

scottcodie 5y ago

Their cited research paper on police presence deterring crime does not fully support his claims. FTA: > Defund advocates often claim that police don’t actually prevent crimes, that they only bust the perpetrators after the fact. But that’s untrue. Police presence deters crime. Arresting career criminals takes them out of circulation. And, most important, effective policing bolsters a community’s faith in government-administered justice. From the cited paper: > Since larger police forces lead to reductions in index crimes, the decline in index crime arrests that we observe suggests that larger police forces reduce serious crime primarily through deterrence rather than by arresting and incapacitating additional offenders. More from the paper: > With respect to the prospect for police hiring to “widen the net" of the criminal justice system, we report mixed conclusions. ... we find evidence that larger police forces lead to large and meaningful increases in low-level “quality of life” arrests, in particular for Black civilians, where the per capita arrest increase for liquor violations and drug possession is 2.5-3 times higher for Black civilians.

Fervicus 5y ago

A good read with links to research on the subject: https://journalistsresource.org/criminal-justice/defund-the-police/ https://journalistsresource.org/criminal-justice/defund-the-...

focusgroup0 5y ago

Coming soon: Vigilante Justice

alphabettsy 5y ago
Some people believe that’s what we already have.

focusgroup0 5y ago

Are we allowed to discuss Human Biodiversity on Hacker News, or it also a verboten topic?

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

Many cities in the formerly industrial parts of the US that have had these police long since defunded by economic circumstance. You don't have rampant crime in those places. The west coast's crime problem has nothing to do with money and everything to do with executive policy (to not do much prosecuting, to the point where crimes that were formerly opportunistic are now low risk enough to become reliable sources of income for those so inclined) that's slowly being copied in more and more cities hence the overall trend.

oaktrout 5y ago

I combined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_the_50_largest_cities_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mayors_of_the_50_large... (proxy for political party), and found that the top 13 cities with the highest crime rate in that combined data set were democratic. 7 out of 9 republican cities were in the half with the lower crime rate. Interestingly, all 3 cities with independent party mayors were in the lower crime half. Of course this is totally unscientific, but I think it is interesting and at the very least there is some association. I also note that larger cities tend to be democratic.

alphabettsy 5y ago
If you ignore history this seems like it might be something to look into, that’s until you realize that crime has fallen greatly in the last two to three decades and quite a few of these cities, New York and Los Angeles included had Republican mayors at the start of that time period. NYC crime is way down since Guiliani was mayor. Los Angeles crime is down since Richard Riordan was mayor. So maybe the takeaway is that getting rid of Republican mayors reduces crime? It’s likely not, but that’s the problem with looking at things this way.
- starik36 5y ago
  I think some context is in order. Giuliani's heavy handedness in dealing with criminals forced the crime to come down in a way. Meaning, police were forced to deal even with the pettiest of crimes. Giuliani banned all sorts of "unsavory" businesses from Times Square. That reduced crime in the area and helped a ton because it showed that a horrible area can be rehabilitated. One year, the subways were gross, smelly, hot, dangerous and covered in graffiti. And the next, I was riding in clean subways at 2am without fearing for my life. In Los Angeles, with Richard Riordan, his years coincided with California's "3 strikes and you are out" law, which put away lots of habitual criminals. Crime went down everywhere in the state.
  - 5y ago

grouphugs 5y ago

people don't get how simple this is, this country chooses to not invest in people and more and more people are left with nothing but crime, violence against police will continue to increase following the trend of increasing funding for police. police don't make us safer. militarizing police more does not make us safer. having more cops does not make us safer. look at chicago ffs, the city loves boasting fake news about how hiring more cops and paying them more makes the city safer, but then 2-3 months down the line when statistics are realeased things look very different

keewee7 5y ago

In 2017 Copenhagen had a wave of gang shootings with 1-2 daily fatalities during the worst weeks. That is nothing compared to the most violent US cities but it was completely unprecedented for a Danish city. The gang warfare was stopped by massive police operations and surveillance. This included military surveillance and signal intelligence planes [1] and helicopters to aid the police. It worked. I know it goes against techno libertarian ideals on HN to suggest that police and surveillance can actually stop crime but it did in 2017 in Copenhagen. [1]: https://www.berlingske.dk/samfund/politiet-tager-nye-vaaben-i-brug-mod-banderne-vi-goer-fund-og-fangster-fordi-vi https://www.berlingske.dk/samfund/politiet-tager-nye-vaaben-...

g8oz 5y ago

I am convinced that many police units are an undeclared work to rule campaign. The resulting rise in crime is absolutely expected and will scare the country into backing off from efforts to enact serious reforms. "If we can't do our job like assholes than we are not going to try too hard." seems to be the message. And it absolutely will work.

seg_lol 5y ago
That has been exactly what I experienced.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

throwawaymanbot 5y ago

This is fake …afaik Zero budgets hav been defunded. So this is people paid to do work, not doing it. They should be fired.

kragen 5y ago

> The shooting didn’t even make the local news. Apparently, in the Bay Area right now, you can walk up a residential street firing your gun into houses, and you still won’t be able to compete for attention with all of the other sensational crimes. The Bay Area includes San Jose (25 murders a year), Oakland (normally 110 murders a year), San Francisco (50 murders a year), and dozens of other cities which are mostly more peaceful but contribute several dozen more murders a year to the total. So it has roughly one murder every day. There's a nice historical overview of the statistics at https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Homicides-increased-in-Bay-Area-major-cities-in-16494869.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Homicides-increase..., explaining that Oakland's murder rate has gone up 45% in 02021. The Merc has a great homicide map at https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/06/bay-area-homicides-2020-map-and-details/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/01/06/bay-area-homicides-20... A murder a day is plenty for the local news most of the time. So it's hardly surprising that a drive-by shooting that failed to actually shoot anybody wouldn't make the news, because things like that happen every day, and have been for thirty or forty years. This is not, in itself, a symptom of anything unusual in the SFBA this year. (Of course, there are many unusual things in the SFBA this year, since it's the second year of the pandemic, but a crime wave doesn't seem to be one of them, except in Oakland.) scrollbar points out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29503928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29503928 that in fact Oakland increased their police budget this year by US$39 million. So, if we're supposed to infer a causal relation from police defunding to homicide rates from these data, it would be the opposite of the one Weiss (or Leighton?) arrived at: increased police funding "caused" a huge jump in the homicide rate. This is not entirely implausible, but it seems unlikely to pan out on further investigation (for reasons Leighton mentions later in the story). You can see from the SF Chron story I linked above that Oakland's murder rate has mostly been between 20 and 40 per 100,000 residents per year for half a century, peaking above 40 from the leaded-gasoline crime wave just after 01990. This is very much in conflict with Leighton's portrayal of Oakland as being full of "areas where crime and violence are more of an abstraction than a daily reality", as is the Merc's map. The corresponding number for the US as a whole from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... is 5.0. Oakland is more like Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, and South Africa than it is like the US; its spectacular murder rate puts it in the neighborhood of the top 50 cities in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate. On https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b..., it was #23 by murder rate among US cities in 02019, before the current crime wave, with a historically very low rate of 16.24 (and #3 for robbery, and #2 for motor-vehicle theft.) I remember one afternoon, early in the current millennium, when I went to visit a friend in Oakland. I was having a hard time finding a place to park on her block. Her neighbor across the street was practicing martial arts with weapons in his yard, but he was kind enough to interrupt his practice long enough to push someone else's car along the curb a few meters, making space for mine. For me, that memory defines Oakland more than the memories of lovely afternoons on the grass at Lake Merritt.

uoaei 5y ago

A note on the comments, if meta-discussion is allowed: Seeing a lot of unchecked and unexamined confirmation bias despite the complete lack of evidence presented in the article or anywhere else that there is any kind of causal relationship here. Many commenters here on HN are self-aware but in the grass we can find hiding those who paradoxically fetishize rationality despite continually falling into fallacy traps.

olliej 5y ago

Except police budgets have been increasing for decades, and the amount of crime has as well. The biggest problem is every time there’s any suggestion that maybe the police aren’t actually doing a good job, police stop working and then blame any change in crime of lack of money. This is ignoring the non-theft crime caused by police (pedofile ring in Oakland PD, fraud, murders, etc). they also change their reporting of crimes to inflate or deflate the rate of crime as necessary. Hell they’ll even create their own crime wave if necessary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Boston_arson_spree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Boston_arson_spree Despite being the most significant cause of theft in the US.

myfavoritedog 5y ago

"Defund the Police" has been just one part of the problem. Combine it with catch-and-release no-bail, Soros prosecutors who refuse to prosecute, COVID policies that released criminals to avoid infections, immigration policies that allow the free flow of gangs and drugs across the border, and the hyper-sensationalist efforts of the media to cause a riot every time there's a killing of a black suspect by a white police officer... and disaster was inevitable. I'd really respect Progressives if they took a long hard look at all these factors, admitted their culpability in promoting them, and actually did something about them.

somenewaccount1 5y ago

The article the author cites as a source literally says "the majority of cities have not refunded the police". Mods, This should be removed from HN as a pure opinion piece with no factual info. Gross.

RickJWagner 5y ago

I just can't understand the defund movement. Seattle tried 'CHOP' or whatever it was, it seemed like it had murders in a week or two. San Fransisco is frequently in the news with smash-n-grabs. Chicago always has double-digit murder counts per weekend. Can we just agree that more policing would be better, if there was less violence against civilians? Maybe more liberal use of stun-guns or something. Less cops clearly seems to be a wrong path.

ogou 5y ago

The phrase "defund the police" appeared a month or so after the first protests. There was an existing niche movement to abolish police and prisons that was small but organized in Portland and Oakland and online. At first there was no message or cohesive platform, just anger. The abolition movement had plenty of slogans and content for young folks frantically searching "social justice" on their phones. Also, police departments were flush with military surplus from excess war supplies and Homeland Security grants. So they showed up to the protests with tanks, full body armor, and automatic weapons. There was shock at those images that fed an older liberal response to "demilitarize the police". That was used to soften "abolish" to "defund". Coupled with some civic movements to shift budgets to mental health response instead of armed force, "defund the police" became a thing. Very few cities ever actually defunded their police. Minneapolis itself voted it down.

tomas_nort 5y ago

Xaxaxa

sleepysysadmin 5y ago

There's an interesting book I read not long ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Policing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Policing For the most part I didn't learn anything new. Though didn't necessarily agree with everything. If you were to list out every task the police do and don't do. Eliminate any and all laws that the police never enforce. Fix any law which is disproportionately applied. For example, less than 1% of traffic accidents are because of speeding. Yet police enforce speeding laws extensively doing huge damage to society. On top of that, so many of the applications are intentionally meant to be antagonistic toward society. Speeding laws are meant to be set where 80% of society does not break the law. That's not at all how it is. It's set such that 100% of society is breaking the law. With intention of revenue generation. It's not just speeding. It's all the petty laws meant to generate revenue. Does your bike have a bell? These laws change police from law enforcement to antagonistic toward society. This is the fundamental problem. The police are no longer there to help you, they are there to be against you. Anything you say will be used AGAINST you in the court of law. Anything you say will NEVER BE USED FOR you in the court of law. The police are the enemy, this is intentional design and no politician ever will consider fixing this problem.

temp17364 5y ago

Read: priveleged person gets mad when the structure that provides that privelege gets dismantled. Like seriously. You're scared that there are gunshots and people dying in your neighborhood? Are you scared for the people in the projects who have been living like that for years? Where is this "effective police force" for those people?