As Minnesotan I can affirm that Defund the police is stupid

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ironpony
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29 Apr 2021, 10:11 pm

Oh okay, I guess it's just what I think would happen, but I guess sometimes we can only make judgements on an issue based on what we think.

But I feel that defunding the police may be an overreaction perhaps. Yes there are bad cops out there, but I didn't think that defunding the police nationwide was the answer.

People do not call for this in other professions. There have been doctors that have gotten people killed because of malpractice yet people do not want to defund the medical industry nationwide. That's just one example, but it just seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.



funeralxempire
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29 Apr 2021, 10:12 pm

ironpony wrote:
Oh okay, I guess it's just what I think would happen, but I guess sometimes we can only make judgements on an issue based on what we think.

But I feel that defunding the police may be an overreaction perhaps. Yes there are bad cops out there, but I didn't think that defunding the police nationwide was the answer.

People do not call for this in other professions. There have been doctors that have gotten people killed because of malpractice yet people do not want to defund the medical industry nationwide. That's just one example, but it just seems like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so to speak.


You've heard where I stand, I don't support abolishing police forces. I just want them reformed significantly with a means of holding bad cops accountable and holding cops all to the same standard no matter where they're working.


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ironpony
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29 Apr 2021, 10:20 pm

I am for that as well. But I thought that the US wasn't too bad at holding cops accountable, as with the George Floyd case, all involved were held accountable, but I guess that is a rare example?



funeralxempire
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29 Apr 2021, 10:44 pm

ironpony wrote:
I am for that as well. But I thought that the US wasn't too bad at holding cops accountable, as with the George Floyd case, all involved were held accountable, but I guess that is a rare example?


Only one of them has been held accountable, the others still have trials pending.

That's a rare example where the video evidence was overwhelmingly compelling.

Lots of cases with substantial evidence end up without a conviction.

Prior to video recordings being widespread convictions were rare, pretty much unheard of.

There's generations upon generations where zero accountability existed and demands for overwhelming proof were made, once overwhelming proof started to be provided there was still a tendency to not find guilt and finally what's the standard of evidence needed to convict a black defendant of anything (especially historically)? Why's it so much lower than to convict a cop of a clearly criminal act that kills a black person?

Historically they were used for intimidation and oppression of these groups, so serving the interests of those communities was never part of the culture and neither was being served by them. Even after that era mutual mistrust exists; there's two or three major problems in the relationship between law enforcement and black and indigenous communities in a lot of areas: when police offend against those communities they rarely face justice, when members of those communities report being victims of crimes their concerns often fail to receive significant attention or effort and when reports of crimes being committed by members of those communities are made often less effort is put into ensuring the person held accountable is actually the one who committed them. Convicting someone who's close enough is often good enough.

Obviously this issue isn't relevant on reservations with their own policing, but that's why they demanded the establishment of their own policing in the first place.


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ironpony
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30 Apr 2021, 9:01 am

But I think that if those other cases are not prosecuted, defunding the police is not the answer that some people have, and I think it's the prosecutors fault, and therefore the prosecutor should be the one who needs delt with more than a whole police force. Blame the prosecutor, and not the job occupation of the murderer.



funeralxempire
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30 Apr 2021, 9:15 am

ironpony wrote:
But I think that if those other cases are not prosecuted, defunding the police is not the answer that some people have, and I think it's the prosecutors fault, and therefore the prosecutor should be the one who needs delt with more than a whole police force. Blame the prosecutor, and not the job occupation of the murderer.


The job isn't being blamed, but they're social servants and if there's deep-seated issues that prevent them from actually serving and protecting everyone those issues need resolved, and right now there's undeniably deep-seated issues that currently prevent them from accomplishing that goal.


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ironpony
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01 May 2021, 8:43 pm

Oh okay, but what deep seated issues would those be exactly?

Another thing I don't understand about the defund the police movement is that the government, the media, and Hollywood celebrities are really pushing hard for it seems, but why? What's their stake in it, since the government, the media, and Hollywood are probably not people who have been harrassed or assaulted by the police so what is their stake in it therefore?



funeralxempire
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01 May 2021, 8:47 pm

ironpony wrote:
Oh okay, but what deep seated issues would those be exactly?

Another thing I don't understand about the defund the police movement is that the government, the media, and Hollywood celebrities are really pushing hard for it seems, but why? What's their stake in it, since the government, the media, and Hollywood are probably not people who have been harrassed or assaulted by the police so what is their stake in it therefore?


Which deep-seated issues? I just described them:

Quote:
There's generations upon generations where zero accountability existed and demands for overwhelming proof were made, once overwhelming proof started to be provided there was still a tendency to not find guilt and finally what's the standard of evidence needed to convict a black defendant of anything (especially historically)? Why's it so much lower than to convict a cop of a clearly criminal act that kills a black person?

Historically they were used for intimidation and oppression of these groups, so serving the interests of those communities was never part of the culture and neither was being served by them. Even after that era mutual mistrust exists; there's two or three major problems in the relationship between law enforcement and black and indigenous communities in a lot of areas: when police offend against those communities they rarely face justice, when members of those communities report being victims of crimes their concerns often fail to receive significant attention or effort and when reports of crimes being committed by members of those communities are made often less effort is put into ensuring the person held accountable is actually the one who committed them. Convicting someone who's close enough is often good enough.


As for celebrities and their involvement; I'd imagine it's a combination of virtue signalling and genuine agreement. While most of them don't face harassment by police now that doesn't mean they didn't before people recognized them. Since they have a platform that others lack they might feel a sense of obligation to comment and weigh in.


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ironpony
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01 May 2021, 8:55 pm

Oh okay, but it's just that Hollywood seems to have been losing business lately, and I keep hearing it's because of their heavy virtue signaling, if that's true?

Also, sorry for not understanding but were you saying that the deep seated issues were prosecutors being reluctant to prosecute then at it's core?



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01 May 2021, 9:03 pm

ironpony wrote:
Oh okay, but it's just that Hollywood seems to have been losing business lately, and I keep hearing it's because of their heavy virtue signaling, if that's true?

Also, sorry for not understanding but were you saying that the deep seated issues were prosecutors being reluctant to prosecute then at it's core?


I know that's what people who complain about Hollywood say, but I'm not sure it's true since usually the people making that complaint tend to be somewhat out of touch with contemporary values. They might be speaking for why like-minded people are less likely to appreciate what Hollywood puts out, but they still spend plenty of money on things they later complain about, right?

I'd say prosecutors failing to prosecute, or failing to appear to prosecute effectively is a part of the problem, for sure. That's not all there is to it because more broadly the issue is distrust. Improving the specific issue of prosecutors seeming to not prosecute cops who break the law would go a ways towards restoring trust, but that's only one of the categories where trust doesn't exist so fixing that issue without improving others wouldn't be a silver bullet.


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ironpony
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02 May 2021, 1:53 am

Oh okay. Thanks, that helps explain it. Another thing is, in the news a lot of police departments are being defunded rather than being reformed though. That is, large chunks of money are taken out of the budget, rather than any actual reform happening so far.

Why are police officers standing for this. Why don't police departments just go on strike, and they refuse to come back to work, until they get their money and budgets back?



weirdperson75000
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02 May 2021, 12:42 pm

Interesting !

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they currently do in their area, most Black Americans -- 61% -- want the police presence to remain the same. This is similar to the 67% of all U.S. adults preferring the status quo, including 71% of White Americans.

Meanwhile, nearly equal proportions of Black Americans say they would like the police to spend more time in their area (20%) as say they'd like them to spend less time there (19%).


Although Black Americans seem about as comfortable as Americans overall with the amount of police presence where they live, they differ markedly in their perceptions of how their local police might treat them if they were to interact.

Fewer than one in five Black Americans feel very confident that the police in their area would treat them with courtesy and respect. While similar to the 24% of Asian Americans saying the same, it is markedly lower than the 40% of Hispanic Americans and the 56% of White Americans who feel this way. This could either stem from Black Americans' own negative experiences with the police or from their familiarity with people who have had negative encounters with law enforcement.


https://news.gallup.com/poll/316571/bla ... yndication



funeralxempire
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02 May 2021, 12:57 pm

ironpony wrote:
Oh okay. Thanks, that helps explain it. Another thing is, in the news a lot of police departments are being defunded rather than being reformed though. That is, large chunks of money are taken out of the budget, rather than any actual reform happening so far.

Why are police officers standing for this. Why don't police departments just go on strike, and they refuse to come back to work, until they get their money and budgets back?


Why should police be able to hold a community hostage by going on strike just because that community has changed their understanding of how much policing they need?

Can you give an example of one of these cases you allude to so we can look at the specifics? Sometimes police departments have wasteful spending that can be trimmed. Sometimes (in the US) they have armoured vehicles that they don't need. Sometimes they employ more officers than they require.

Cutting their budget forces them to look for ways to become more efficient. They're not entitled to however much money they want so they shouldn't try to punish the people they work for if less money is allocated for them next year.


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ironpony
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02 May 2021, 1:44 pm

Oh okay, well I don't know how much money the police have and wasn't sure if they had an excess amount or not. I was working at a place once, where so much money was cut from the place, that the working conditions became terrible, and a hazardous, so we had to go on strike, in order to have better conditions met.

So I am looking at it from that point of view of my own experience, and think well if the police's budget is stripped to the point where their jobs become hazardous, would they do the same thing, in order to get their better conditions back.

Also, if the police departments across the US have too much money, I don't think that has anything to do with George Floyd's death which started all of this. He wasn't murdered because the police have too much money in their budget, so I don't think budget should not be looked at so heavily, when the crime was not a result of that, I don't think.



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02 May 2021, 2:01 pm

If the goal is to establish or better fund an alternative social service to deal with non-policing issues that police sometimes end up handling they need to free up funds for that goal, right?

We've talked about alternatives to policing before, they can't entirely replace police but there's plenty of cases where they're probably better suited to be the first response.


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ironpony
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02 May 2021, 2:25 pm

Oh okay, that makes sense. But since this issue was born out of the George Floyd issue was sending the police to arrest him for counterfeit money, not the proper people to call though? Even though the police grossly mishandled it, should they have sent a different organization in the first place?