41–50 of 505 posts
However, the reason this interview is topical has to do with someone paying for cigarettes with a possibly counterfeit bill and refusing to give them back. That seems to me to be an entirely reasonable reason to call the police.
> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much. A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put…
Or you lost a sports game, let's not pretend the bar for rioting is very high...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_rio...
EDIT: Sorry, I missed "you just won a sports game" as a reason for rioting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_riot
> After the Canadiens defeated the Boston Bruins in the first round of the 2008 Stanley Cup playoffs, fans began rioting in celebration.
I prefer the idea of peace officers. The more peace oriented the position, the less toxic people will be attracted to it. At the same time, there should also be health/toughness standards lest we want to go full Demolition man.
1) Replace 90% of police with community officers (unarmed) and social workers. Have them working their 'beats' regularly, pro-actively monitoring their areas and checking in with their charges. Again, unarmed.
2) Keep 10% for old style police work, that are only escalated to when specific conditions are met: approved by a municipal authority, wear bodycams, and have the permission of the caller to appear (within reason). Make it a real pain in the neck to bring them out, so they only show up for truly dangerous situations, not like some guy reselling cigarettes that ends in death.
A lawyer recently made an observation that really stuck with me: Only call the police when you're okay with the person you're calling about possibly dying. Sounds pretty strong when you put it that way - but it's just making explicit the implicit idea that the police will show up, the police are authorized (expected, even) to use force, and if there's disobedience or even just misunderstanding, the person could end up dead. See for example this story.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Justine_Damond
If peace officers did most of the work, that could be a game-changing improvement.
> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much. A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put…
Riots on the other hand should be met with police action. However, if you have a riot then that means you didn't hear the demands of the people to begin with. If you make it to a full blown riot you have MESSED UP. Not necessarily. Riots can begin when bad actors take advantage of the cover of numbers provided by a peaceful protest. If there are enough bad actors, usually masquerading as peaceful protesters, to reach…
> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much. A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put…
Getting large groups of people together to chant in common cause can easily be just about showing solidarity around a common cause. People out in the streets today aren't trying to get police to abuse them. They're trying to show the world this is something they care about.
If you defund the police but keep them around (after all, they are necessary), won't that just force them to self-fund by seeking funding from corrupt sources such as civil asset forfeiture and drug busts? Isn't this already a solved problem in other parts of the world, such as Britain, Ireland, Norway, Iceland and New Zealand, where most officers are unarmed when they are on patrol? Why can't we learn from other cou…
You’re reversing the sequence Mr. Vitale seems to be suggesting. He’s saying let’s analyze the work they do, find alternatives for those roles, and _then_ reduce the scope of the police force. Defunding seems much less important and farther down the road than making their jobs achievable, and the rest of us safer.
There are secondary effects too, though. The police force competes for funds with other public infrastructure like schools. Defunding the police means we can allocate that money to more productive and less violent causes.
I know folks don't always click through, so I'll highlight what I found most insightful: > Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use…
This framing of the police seems very strange to my Canadian sensibilities. I'm curious about whether Americans largely agree with this description.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
we should convert 80% of cops with guns to investigators, and civics officers who teach civics and encourage civility in the communities in which they live. we don’t need that many cops with guns on the street, as there’s very little violent crime relatively speaking.
If you believed such a role was appropriate to establish in society, why on earth would you want the police doing it?
> Political protests are a threat to the order of this system The quality of journalism for NPR has gone downhill so much. A real "protest" is inherently violent. Your are encouraging the state to use it's monopoly of force against you. Your goal is to ensure that others see the state using force needlessly against you. When others see others using violence against you they begin to reconsider the conditions that put…
This is going to sound a bit conspiratorial, but I've long suspected that there is a bit of astroturfing happening on Hacker News and this doesn't alleviate my suspicions.