8 ms·

I hope this city learns its lesson after being sued. Separate but related, I'm actually sort of sad about the "defund the police" movement. While it's catchy,

I hope this city learns its lesson after being sued. Separate but related, I'm actually sort of sad about the "defund the police" movement. While it's catchy, it's pretty unhelpful. We don't need less funds, we need different use of funds. Deescalation training would be a massive one.

dr_petes 3y ago
Most catchy phrases can’t acutely articulate the meaning behind the message. People who argue to “defund the police” also mean use the funds meant to be distributed to the police force to other services that serve the same role, in a less harmful manner. But that messaging doesn’t stick as easily.
- DanHulton 3y ago
  I think you'll find a lot of people who say "defund the police" quite literally mean it. Why do you need armed individuals with qualified immunity out there performing wellness checks, guiding traffic, taking statements, and doing investigative work? Why should these roles continue to fall under "the police"? And especially why should they continue to be done by an organization that continues to show just how disastrously poor they are at such things, when at least any other organization would at least start at zero, not negative? The funds should quite literally be taken from the police and given to other organizations, even newly-created ones, that do not suffer from the baggage and the history of the police.
pstuart 3y ago
I'm "convinced" that the "defund the police" was planted to discredit the movement to reform the police. Ugh, what shitty messaging. My understanding is that police reform is impossible because the system is so corrupt there's no way to make it happen. I've seen many accounts of the good cops quitting because they got harassed out. Perhaps we should instead focus on messaging for "are the police above the law?" and if not what does that look like? And "why should taxpayers pay for police fuck ups?" I dunno, just tossing stuff out there. But it's clear that policing is broken and needs fixing, and that won't happen until there's enough unity in wanting to see it happen.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > police reform is impossible because the system is so corrupt there's no way to make it happen There are examples of successful police reforms [1]. In egregious cases, forces have been entirely disbanded and rebuilt [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/briefing/george-floyd-buffalo-coronavirus-your-friday-briefing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/briefing/george-floyd-buf... [2] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/how-defunding-the-police-department-worked-for-one-new-jersey-city/2452746/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/how-defunding-the-poli...
- renewiltord 3y ago
  Well, no one remembers the names of the other efforts. So they used resources and went nowhere.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  > I'm "convinced" that the "defund the police" was planted to discredit the movement to reform the police. "Reform"? You mean spend billions more on training so they can ignore all the criticisms levied at the institution? By any metric defund" is bad, reform is worse. Unless the goal is to change nothing of course, in which case "reform" is clearly preferable. God forbid we agree on any kind of concrete, measurable policy goal....
genocidicbunny 3y ago
At least in my experience, most of the 'defund the police' people I've talked to wanted the money to instead be given to social services that the police were ill-equipped and ill-trained to perform. If anything, they were the biggest proponents of letting police get back to policing, and wanting to move the 'softer' social services aspect to other organizations better trained to handle those kinds of situations without resorting to their service weapon. Alas, "Defund the Police" is a much catchier headline than "Redistribute funding to better provide for necessary social services"
- autoexec 3y ago
  > Alas, "Defund the Police" is a much catchier headline than "Redistribute funding to better provide for necessary social services" Catchier but also misleading. It's allowed certain media to push the narrative that everyone supporting "Defund the Police" wants to eliminate police entirely and that lie resonates very strongly with the fearful people being manipulated. As a slogan, it's probably done more harm than good to its cause.
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    > As a slogan, it's probably done more harm than good to its cause. It's a constant problem for libs. What's the last liberal slogan you can remember that was catchy and that didn't completely backfire or get twisted? That doesn't happen to conservative slogans. I don't have a dog in that fight. I'm just an observer. It's "funny" like a dad joke to me by now, though.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      > It's a constant problem for libs. No, its not. Its a problem for progressives. But mostly that's because, in the US, progressives are stuck (to have any meaningful impact at all) in a big-tent party with liberals, who actually oppose most progressive policy goals and methods, and align with conservatives in undermining them most of the time, except when they decide to tolerate them to get support for a liberal goal against conservative opposition. It's a fairly big practical difference between the right-to-further-right coalition in the GOP vs. the center-right-to-center-left coalition in the Democratic Party that the main factional differences in the former coalition are matters of degree and those in the latter are of opposing ideological principles.
keerthiko 3y ago
From my understanding that's a core goal of the "defund the police" movement. The police as it exists in this country right now is a state militia. We need more 911 respondents that are not armed to the teeth, to join the corpus of medics and firefighters, replacing the police in 80% of use cases. Noise complaint? Homeless person shooting up? Car accident? Cops are over-equipped and undertrained in most of these cases. They respectively need negotiation, compassion and first-aid, and a logistics/insurance official. Cops don't necessarily need to be trained in all these things, because cops suck up so much funding to deal with the few cases they might actually be necessary (gang shootout, protest security, armed robbery, etc), and one official can only be reliably trained in so many things. They just need to not be sent for these non-violent cases in favor of specialized unarmed social workers.
- Dalewyn 3y ago
  I want the police to be equipped for the situations they might or will encounter, and that includes surplus military gear sold down to them. What they need is better training, discipline, and accountability and for that we absolutely should not be "defunding" them.
  - chaps 3y ago
    You want rural towns to have APCs?
  - defrost 3y ago
    Most G20 countries have front line first responding police that can handle most calls without resorting to military gear, and call on specialised SWAT teams for ecounters that escalate. Having every officer primed to be a para military kill machine is exactly the wrong approach. You're in agreement with the original core "defund the police" groups when you want first responders to be trained to de-escalate mental health crisis situations, they want the same if not more money in public facing response, but a whole lot less going to the haress the public we view as bad divisions.
    - sleepybrett 3y ago
anon84873628 3y ago
Most likely the police will continue to harass him. Probably in worse ways that will be harder to overcome.
realitysballs 3y ago
Well said
anon373839 3y ago
> I hope this city learns its lesson after being sued Government entities don’t generally learn a thing from being sued. The problem is that it’s not their money: it’s the taxpayers’ money, so no pain is felt. This is also the source of many other problems with government.
- chaps 3y ago
  This matches my experiences. On my ~10th FOIA lawsuit against gov agencies and I don't expect to stop anytime soon. They just keep going, seemingly under the reckless guise of "risk management".
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  You write as if there is no accountability in a democracy. The mayor can be voted out if he or she wants to use municipal funds to settle lawsuits due to poor judgement.
  - likeclockwork 3y ago
    There is no accountability in representative democracy. "Voted out?" You mean "not voted back in" again. During their term officials can do whatever they want and they know it. "We won't re-elect you" is a completely toothless threat.
    - Eisenstein 3y ago
      What do you propose we do instead?
  - anon373839 3y ago
    No, I write as if I have some experience in this area.
pazimzadeh 3y ago
Yeah, a better slogan is "cuff the police" imho
diogenes4 3y ago
> We don't need less funds We spend more on our police force than each country in the world spends on its military, except for ourselves and china. We need less funds.
- xw3098 3y ago
  Do you have a source for that? It seems like a problematic measure to use absolute dollars spent as it had to be normalized per capita and to cost of living. In just officers per capita the US more or less middle of the pack. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
  - diogenes4 3y ago
    This site claims $129 billion: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-police-corrections-courts-expenditures https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... Sure, you can adjust per capita. I still think it's a fairly shocking statistic—we certainly don't get that value back except as a jobs program.
    - otteromkram 3y ago
      I got ~$80 billion from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (page 14): https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/lpdp20.pdf https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/docu... One caveat: That spend metric has a standard error of ~$2.6 trillion. With a T. (See page 25 in same document for the error table.)
huytersd 3y ago
Dismantling the police union would do wonders for law enforcement in this country. It’s the only union that needs dismantling and the movement should have used that as their leading catchphrase.
- autoexec 3y ago
  Police need unions too, for the same reasons everyone else does. Police deserve pay increases that keep pace with the rising cost of living, limits on how many hours or days they can be forced to work without rest, time off for training, sick time, family leave, workplace safety etc. The problem isn't that police have unions, it's that police are allowed to police themselves. If we take that ability away, police unions won't have any say in how officers are investigated or disciplined. The other major problem are the district/state attorneys and judges who refuse (or are unable) to charge police with crimes and hold them accountable.
thephyber 3y ago
The “unhelpful” part is that people take the 3-word slogan and assume they know what it means. to pretend like “Defund the Police” ever meant “stop paying all police and don’t do anything different” is purposeful ignorance at this point (2.5 years after it was popularized). In practice, it is a call for lots of changes in the US legal/policing system and government responses to requests from residents. The best enumeration I have seen of these policies is CampaignZero[1]. You may not like their policies (they align with lefty prosecutors/DAs like Chesa Boudin), but they exist and there are specific policy proposals. And cities don’t learn from what police officers do. Most large cities have city attorneys who are required to clean up the lawsuit messes that the police department makes and larger cities have a city manager that insulates the police department from the political side of city government. Neither the city attorney nor the city manager are responsive to voter demands nor do they have the legal authority to tell the police to do anything differently (except during the labor negotiations phase, when they are almost always outmaneuvered by police union negotiators). [1] https://campaignzero.org/ https://campaignzero.org/
- freedomben 3y ago
  > to pretend like “Defund the Police” ever meant “stop paying all police and don’t do anything different” is purposeful ignorance at this point (2.5 years after it was popularized). You may not like it, but you don't control what "defund the police" means to everyone. There absolutely are people who mean it different ways, and it's not "willful ignorance", it's just the standard linguistic challenge of using an ambiguous pithy expression which then becomes overloaded as different people try to declare "what it really means."
  - bambataa 3y ago
    “Defund the police” is a terrible slogan. “Oh what we mean by that is actually the opposite where we want to redistribute funding in different ways blah blah blah”. And all a critic has to do is “left wing radicals say they want to defund the police”.
    - defrost 3y ago
balthigor 3y ago
Fewer cops, more detectives.
tetsuhamu 3y ago
Defund and Re-allocate. They really need to start saying the re-allocate part. No one can take them seriously without it.
iudqnolq 3y ago
Deescalation training is widespread, and doesn't work. It's the cop equivalent of phishing training: something everyone knows is silly you click through to get over with.
UncleMeat 3y ago
I don't think de-escalation training would actually achieve much. The folks saying that we should defund the police think that the system and its incentive structures are broken. Training cops to resist those incentives is a losing battle.
- smt88 3y ago
  There is evidence thay de-escalation training works: https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2022/01/police-training-reduces-certain-incidents-study-says.html https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2022/01/police-training-red...
plagiarist 3y ago
I agree that we need different use of funds, but it's worse than you're implying: we need to replace the "Killology" escalation training with something sane, like transition to the sorely needed explanations of the 1st Amendment.
dkran 3y ago
Camden NJ has a pretty successful story about removing their police department and replacing it with a new one: https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/08/872416644/former-chief-of-reformed-camden-n-j-force-police-need-consent-of-the-people https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...

dr_petes 3y ago

Most catchy phrases can’t acutely articulate the meaning behind the message. People who argue to “defund the police” also mean use the funds meant to be distributed to the police force to other services that serve the same role, in a less harmful manner. But that messaging doesn’t stick as easily.

DanHulton 3y ago
I think you'll find a lot of people who say "defund the police" quite literally mean it. Why do you need armed individuals with qualified immunity out there performing wellness checks, guiding traffic, taking statements, and doing investigative work? Why should these roles continue to fall under "the police"? And especially why should they continue to be done by an organization that continues to show just how disastrously poor they are at such things, when at least any other organization would at least start at zero, not negative? The funds should quite literally be taken from the police and given to other organizations, even newly-created ones, that do not suffer from the baggage and the history of the police.

pstuart 3y ago

I'm "convinced" that the "defund the police" was planted to discredit the movement to reform the police. Ugh, what shitty messaging. My understanding is that police reform is impossible because the system is so corrupt there's no way to make it happen. I've seen many accounts of the good cops quitting because they got harassed out. Perhaps we should instead focus on messaging for "are the police above the law?" and if not what does that look like? And "why should taxpayers pay for police fuck ups?" I dunno, just tossing stuff out there. But it's clear that policing is broken and needs fixing, and that won't happen until there's enough unity in wanting to see it happen.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> police reform is impossible because the system is so corrupt there's no way to make it happen There are examples of successful police reforms [1]. In egregious cases, forces have been entirely disbanded and rebuilt [2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/briefing/george-floyd-buffalo-coronavirus-your-friday-briefing.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/briefing/george-floyd-buf... [2] https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/how-defunding-the-police-department-worked-for-one-new-jersey-city/2452746/ https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/how-defunding-the-poli...
renewiltord 3y ago
Well, no one remembers the names of the other efforts. So they used resources and went nowhere.
diogenes4 3y ago
> I'm "convinced" that the "defund the police" was planted to discredit the movement to reform the police. "Reform"? You mean spend billions more on training so they can ignore all the criticisms levied at the institution? By any metric defund" is bad, reform is worse. Unless the goal is to change nothing of course, in which case "reform" is clearly preferable. God forbid we agree on any kind of concrete, measurable policy goal....

genocidicbunny 3y ago

At least in my experience, most of the 'defund the police' people I've talked to wanted the money to instead be given to social services that the police were ill-equipped and ill-trained to perform. If anything, they were the biggest proponents of letting police get back to policing, and wanting to move the 'softer' social services aspect to other organizations better trained to handle those kinds of situations without resorting to their service weapon. Alas, "Defund the Police" is a much catchier headline than "Redistribute funding to better provide for necessary social services"

autoexec 3y ago
> Alas, "Defund the Police" is a much catchier headline than "Redistribute funding to better provide for necessary social services" Catchier but also misleading. It's allowed certain media to push the narrative that everyone supporting "Defund the Police" wants to eliminate police entirely and that lie resonates very strongly with the fearful people being manipulated. As a slogan, it's probably done more harm than good to its cause.
- drewcoo 3y ago
  > As a slogan, it's probably done more harm than good to its cause. It's a constant problem for libs. What's the last liberal slogan you can remember that was catchy and that didn't completely backfire or get twisted? That doesn't happen to conservative slogans. I don't have a dog in that fight. I'm just an observer. It's "funny" like a dad joke to me by now, though.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    > It's a constant problem for libs. No, its not. Its a problem for progressives. But mostly that's because, in the US, progressives are stuck (to have any meaningful impact at all) in a big-tent party with liberals, who actually oppose most progressive policy goals and methods, and align with conservatives in undermining them most of the time, except when they decide to tolerate them to get support for a liberal goal against conservative opposition. It's a fairly big practical difference between the right-to-further-right coalition in the GOP vs. the center-right-to-center-left coalition in the Democratic Party that the main factional differences in the former coalition are matters of degree and those in the latter are of opposing ideological principles.

keerthiko 3y ago

From my understanding that's a core goal of the "defund the police" movement. The police as it exists in this country right now is a state militia. We need more 911 respondents that are not armed to the teeth, to join the corpus of medics and firefighters, replacing the police in 80% of use cases. Noise complaint? Homeless person shooting up? Car accident? Cops are over-equipped and undertrained in most of these cases. They respectively need negotiation, compassion and first-aid, and a logistics/insurance official. Cops don't necessarily need to be trained in all these things, because cops suck up so much funding to deal with the few cases they might actually be necessary (gang shootout, protest security, armed robbery, etc), and one official can only be reliably trained in so many things. They just need to not be sent for these non-violent cases in favor of specialized unarmed social workers.

Dalewyn 3y ago
I want the police to be equipped for the situations they might or will encounter, and that includes surplus military gear sold down to them. What they need is better training, discipline, and accountability and for that we absolutely should not be "defunding" them.
- chaps 3y ago
  You want rural towns to have APCs?
- defrost 3y ago
  Most G20 countries have front line first responding police that can handle most calls without resorting to military gear, and call on specialised SWAT teams for ecounters that escalate. Having every officer primed to be a para military kill machine is exactly the wrong approach. You're in agreement with the original core "defund the police" groups when you want first responders to be trained to de-escalate mental health crisis situations, they want the same if not more money in public facing response, but a whole lot less going to the haress the public we view as bad divisions.
  - sleepybrett 3y ago

anon84873628 3y ago

Most likely the police will continue to harass him. Probably in worse ways that will be harder to overcome.

realitysballs 3y ago

Well said

anon373839 3y ago

> I hope this city learns its lesson after being sued Government entities don’t generally learn a thing from being sued. The problem is that it’s not their money: it’s the taxpayers’ money, so no pain is felt. This is also the source of many other problems with government.

chaps 3y ago
This matches my experiences. On my ~10th FOIA lawsuit against gov agencies and I don't expect to stop anytime soon. They just keep going, seemingly under the reckless guise of "risk management".
Eisenstein 3y ago
You write as if there is no accountability in a democracy. The mayor can be voted out if he or she wants to use municipal funds to settle lawsuits due to poor judgement.
- likeclockwork 3y ago
  There is no accountability in representative democracy. "Voted out?" You mean "not voted back in" again. During their term officials can do whatever they want and they know it. "We won't re-elect you" is a completely toothless threat.
  - Eisenstein 3y ago
    What do you propose we do instead?
- anon373839 3y ago
  No, I write as if I have some experience in this area.

pazimzadeh 3y ago

Yeah, a better slogan is "cuff the police" imho

diogenes4 3y ago

> We don't need less funds We spend more on our police force than each country in the world spends on its military, except for ourselves and china. We need less funds.

xw3098 3y ago
Do you have a source for that? It seems like a problematic measure to use absolute dollars spent as it had to be normalized per capita and to cost of living. In just officers per capita the US more or less middle of the pack. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_number_of_police_officers https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_depend...
- diogenes4 3y ago
  This site claims $129 billion: https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-police-corrections-courts-expenditures https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative... Sure, you can adjust per capita. I still think it's a fairly shocking statistic—we certainly don't get that value back except as a jobs program.
  - otteromkram 3y ago
    I got ~$80 billion from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (page 14): https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/lpdp20.pdf https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/docu... One caveat: That spend metric has a standard error of ~$2.6 trillion. With a T. (See page 25 in same document for the error table.)

huytersd 3y ago

Dismantling the police union would do wonders for law enforcement in this country. It’s the only union that needs dismantling and the movement should have used that as their leading catchphrase.

autoexec 3y ago
Police need unions too, for the same reasons everyone else does. Police deserve pay increases that keep pace with the rising cost of living, limits on how many hours or days they can be forced to work without rest, time off for training, sick time, family leave, workplace safety etc. The problem isn't that police have unions, it's that police are allowed to police themselves. If we take that ability away, police unions won't have any say in how officers are investigated or disciplined. The other major problem are the district/state attorneys and judges who refuse (or are unable) to charge police with crimes and hold them accountable.

thephyber 3y ago

The “unhelpful” part is that people take the 3-word slogan and assume they know what it means. to pretend like “Defund the Police” ever meant “stop paying all police and don’t do anything different” is purposeful ignorance at this point (2.5 years after it was popularized). In practice, it is a call for lots of changes in the US legal/policing system and government responses to requests from residents. The best enumeration I have seen of these policies is CampaignZero[1]. You may not like their policies (they align with lefty prosecutors/DAs like Chesa Boudin), but they exist and there are specific policy proposals. And cities don’t learn from what police officers do. Most large cities have city attorneys who are required to clean up the lawsuit messes that the police department makes and larger cities have a city manager that insulates the police department from the political side of city government. Neither the city attorney nor the city manager are responsive to voter demands nor do they have the legal authority to tell the police to do anything differently (except during the labor negotiations phase, when they are almost always outmaneuvered by police union negotiators). [1] https://campaignzero.org/ https://campaignzero.org/

freedomben 3y ago
> to pretend like “Defund the Police” ever meant “stop paying all police and don’t do anything different” is purposeful ignorance at this point (2.5 years after it was popularized). You may not like it, but you don't control what "defund the police" means to everyone. There absolutely are people who mean it different ways, and it's not "willful ignorance", it's just the standard linguistic challenge of using an ambiguous pithy expression which then becomes overloaded as different people try to declare "what it really means."
- bambataa 3y ago
  “Defund the police” is a terrible slogan. “Oh what we mean by that is actually the opposite where we want to redistribute funding in different ways blah blah blah”. And all a critic has to do is “left wing radicals say they want to defund the police”.
  - defrost 3y ago

balthigor 3y ago

Fewer cops, more detectives.

tetsuhamu 3y ago

Defund and Re-allocate. They really need to start saying the re-allocate part. No one can take them seriously without it.

iudqnolq 3y ago

Deescalation training is widespread, and doesn't work. It's the cop equivalent of phishing training: something everyone knows is silly you click through to get over with.

UncleMeat 3y ago

I don't think de-escalation training would actually achieve much. The folks saying that we should defund the police think that the system and its incentive structures are broken. Training cops to resist those incentives is a losing battle.

smt88 3y ago
There is evidence thay de-escalation training works: https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2022/01/police-training-reduces-certain-incidents-study-says.html https://www.uc.edu/news/articles/2022/01/police-training-red...

plagiarist 3y ago

I agree that we need different use of funds, but it's worse than you're implying: we need to replace the "Killology" escalation training with something sane, like transition to the sorely needed explanations of the 1st Amendment.

dkran 3y ago

Camden NJ has a pretty successful story about removing their police department and replacing it with a new one: https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/08/872416644/former-chief-of-reformed-camden-n-j-force-police-need-consent-of-the-people https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racia...