6 ms·

In the town I live in, the police has decided to not to respond to nonemergency calls. They put the blame on their budget being cut and #defundthepolice movemen

• tehwebguy 5y ago
  > reporters looked up numbers and the budget was reduced in 2020 but it was increased back significantly in 2021 Exactly, with negligible exceptions every police force in the country has always had their budget increase.
• nostromo 5y ago
  It’s interesting that the cities who wanted to fire all cops and then ran them out of town with pitchforks are suddenly upset cops aren’t policing as much as they used to. De-policing was the goal and that goal has been partly achieved. Now we all get to live with it until trust is restored.
  • monocasa 5y ago
    Their budgets are still bigger than ever. De-policing hasn't been achieved because most of the goal was to better utilize those resources. Police refusing to do the basics of their job and increasing their budget isn't a point in favor of their positions.
  • altacc 5y ago
    I'd be interested if can you supply a good body of evidence to support the claim that significant, widespread de-policing has occurred in the US and it's effects. Mostly I've just seen opinion pieces that cherry pick numbers.
    • nostromo 5y ago
      Seattle, as an example, lost 1 out of 5 cops between 2020 and 2021. Crime, including violent crimes like murder, are all up. Closed cases are down. There are new lists of crimes that are “deprioritized” every few months. This last month it was a laundry list of crimes related to traffic safety, like expired tabs or missing license plates. A local businessperson that posted memes in 2020 about defunding the police just had his business ransacked again a few weeks ago. He then took to social media to complain about how Seattle is no longer safe and he may leave the city. It’s like people have completely lost grip with reality.
      • kelnos 5y ago
        An anecdote about Seattle is not evidence of significant, widespread de-policing across the US. At any rate, de-prioritizing expired tabs and missing plates seems like a nothingburger.
        • nostromo 5y ago
          > The U.S. murder rate rose 30% between 2019 and 2020 – the largest single-year increase in more than a century, according to data published this month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/06/health/us-homicide-rate-increase-nchs-study/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/06/health/us-homicide-rate-incre...
          • altacc 5y ago
            Where’s the link to reduced policing? Crime rates are most definitely not as simple an equation as more police = less crime. There’s a myriad of factors at work and taking any simple assumption of a single cause and effect is bound to be wrong.
          • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
            I really hate news articles that talk about an increase in rate yet only show a graph of absolute numbers to reason about it.
  • OnlineGladiator 5y ago
    > De-policing was the goal and that goal has been partly achieved. Now we all get to live with it until trust is restored. I call this progress. There are many people who do not think the police are effective at their jobs, or even a net good to society. I say this as a white male who has never had a positive interaction with the police in his life. I hear about the "good" cops but I never meet them, and I've met a lot of terrible cops. What I want is for the police to be held accountable to the public they are supposedly serving. Until we have that I am happy to see fewer of them because I do not believe they are serving the public, but are instead serving themselves (on the taxpayer's dime, no less).
    • nostromo 5y ago
      This is a pretty typical opinion for progressive white men, who don't fear sexual violence the same way women often do, and often don't live in high-crime neighborhoods. When the violence reaches your front door, it'll be harder to be so privileged to think the answer is to get rid of all policing.
      • OnlineGladiator 5y ago
        I once lived in one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, where murder was pretty common (there were at least 3 murders within 5 blocks of where I lived, and probably more I didn't know about). And my girlfriends have all been pretty terrified of the police, often moreso than of other people. I'm not sure whether or not it matters, but they've all been raped, and they feel the police do not help at all. So I've seen the violence up close and I've listened to the vulnerable women, and I think the police are still part of the problem. One of my exes basically described them as legal thugs, and was terrified the police would rape her as well. You should look up statistics for police beating their wives, they're not exactly known for defending women against violence.
        • OnlineGladiator 5y ago
          I don't think I actually made my stance clear before - the police are the people I'm scared of. They are the criminals I fear. And they regularly get away with murder, and essentially all of them help cover up crimes. I have no idea how you can defend them unless you are willfully ignorant.
  • joshuamorton 5y ago
    No, the goal was funding alternate approaches to reduce the need for policing. If police are getting paid more to do less, everyone loses.
• manuelabeledo 5y ago
  Sounds like Austin. City council approved an increase in taxes, and used part of it to raise the APD budget [1]. This didn't translate into a more effective force, and the perception among citizens is that police has given up on misdemeanors or infractions. Incidentally, one of my neighbours is an officer, and his major complaints are the lack of new recruits, which is odd since that is ultimately the department responsibility, and the inability to charge people with possession of weed, since the city has effectively decriminalise it. [1] https://www.kut.org/austin/2021-08-12/austin-passes-4-5-billion-budget-increases-police-budget-per-state-law https://www.kut.org/austin/2021-08-12/austin-passes-4-5-bill...
  • dont__panic 5y ago
    Denver, too. DPD budget is higher than ever before, and they can't be bothered to respond to calls like: - non-lethal car accidents - disturbances of the peace - illegal drug selling/use in public spaces - car thefts - break-ins Let alone deal with predatory towing, which has really taken off in town, too. With crime skyrocketing and housing costs higher than they've ever been, I really don't understand why anyone would want to live here any more.
    • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      I posit that many people are not bothered by what you described because it "feels like home" to them.
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Why is your neighbor complaining about not being able to charge people with possession of weed? If anything, you'd think that would make their job easier. I don't know about you, but I certainly appreciate anything that makes my job easier, all else remaining equal.
    • manuelabeledo 5y ago
      He seems to think that his inability to charge people with misdemeanors may lead to other crimes, quite a leap if you ask me. I think it may just be a talking point in the police force.
• ASalazarMX 5y ago
  > How they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me. To be honest, we all know it's because traffic fines are risk-free income, while chasing actual criminals is an expense. The invisible hand of the Free Market(tm) optimizes for income instead of effectiveness, because police departments don't have competition.
  • bak3y 5y ago
    Technically if the police department doesn't have competition isn't that the opposite of Free Market?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • jandrese 5y ago
      The competition turns inward when you have a monopoly. Instead of different companies vying for market dominance you have middle managers trying to post the biggest numbers to get that coveted promotion. Actually, that happens in a Free Market too, but companies have more incentive to tamp down on inefficient behavior if it makes them less competitive. In a monopoly the inefficiency is much harder to prevent.
    • actually_a_dog 5y ago
      The word "free" just implies a minimal amount of regulation. Monopolies can and do form in free markets. There's even such a term as "natural monopolies," which are things like utility providers, where it would make little sense to have multiple companies servicing the same market. For example, it would not make a lot of sense municipal water systems servicing the same area, due to infrastructure difficulties. The term you're looking for is "competitive market." In a perfectly competitive market, monopolies don't form, but, there is also no long term economic profit to be had. That is, the sum of "accounting profit" (what you'd typically think of as the "bottom line" of a company's P&L statement) minus opportunity costs tends to 0 in the long term. Perfect competition is a highly idealized model that can't happen in practice, but is instructive to analyze in theory. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
• jandrese 5y ago
  Of course this also misses the entire point of #defundthepolice. Back in the 80s social services were heavily cut under the Reagan administration, on the assumption that the police could serve that purpose instead. But the police are trained to deal with potentially violent criminals and applying those techniques to the homeless or mentally ill only makes the problem worse and leads to tragedy. So the idea is you claw back the extra money the police departments need to handle cases like that (poorly) and greatly increase the funding for social workers and state mental health institutions. In reality the second part is a huge amount of work to set up and few if any governments have really tried to take it seriously. Most have not even freed up the money from police departments, and a few that have ended up giving it right back when they realized how much extra work it was going to make for them. The underlying theory is that if you fix the social safety nets then you won't need much of a police force, and in fact the social support programs are much cheaper than police and jails in the long run. But they are also "socialism" so we can't have that in this country.
• raydev 5y ago
  > how they prioritize pulling people over actually responding to incidents is beyond me Revenue.