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How much do we need the police?

npr.org

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Re: How much do we need the police?

#281

Post by jimkleiber »

I love this interview. It seems to say that police are being too violent because their role is to be violent and that their role has been stretched to handle too many situations.

While saying we should shrink the police departments, the author seems to say we should do it to help the cops who are being overburdened with things they shouldn’t be asked to do.

I like the approach because it’s not saying cops are bad, but rather seems to say their behaviors are hurting people and they may be hurting as well and proposes solutions that may help everyone.

Really grateful I read this tonight.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#282

Post by mythrwy »

JPKab wrote: post #223
birdyrooster wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By civilizing the police we also mean affirmative action to bring the demographics of the officers in line with the people they serve. Removing guns wouldn’t have saved Eric Garner or George Floyd.

I'd hate to break it to you but if you look at the actual data collected on police shootings you will see that while black Americans are overrepresented (they are 13% of the population but represent 24% of people killed by police), there are many many cases where the person killed is the same race as the officer. The majority of people killed by police in the USA were white. https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/national…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...

I don't know if this includes deaths by things like choking or beating.

If this is correct, death by cop is actually pretty rare. Not bitten by shark rare, but maybe in the magnitude of fatally falling off a ladder rare.

Which of course isn't to say harassment or abuse by cop is also rare. Nor to say there isn't racial disparity because the chart clearly shows there is.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#283

Post by throwaway894345 »

chipperyman573 wrote: post #164
BurningFrog wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like are you suggesting the natural state of people is just to loot and behave completely selfishly? Don't know about that, but there is ABSOLUTELY enough selfish/predatory/angry people in any population that will commit violent acts for profit and pleasure if the risks of being brought to justice disappears. I would not have guessed it would erupt as fast as it did in Montreal, but empirically, it did. I expect da…

Day 2 may have been a lot better as store owners started to take matters into their own hands. We only saw the first day, which many people were unprepared for. A lot less people would be willing to loot if they had a friend who died after getting shot by a store owner with a shotgun. Not that this is really any better, I'm just trying to say that we can't really reach any conclusions from one day of this experiment

Vigilantism is better than a police apparatus? I don’t understand these takes.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#284

Post by throwaway894345 »

thephyber wrote: post #207
awb wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure gangs would take over. Power abhors a vacuum.

Yeah, but police units and private security firms are a form of "gang", just with different pay masters and accountability.

Notably accountability to the people (in principle if imperfect in practice), which is an important distinction indeed.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#285

Post by mythrwy »

missosoup wrote: post #102
djrobstep wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what part of Australia you're in, but literally every cop I've ever encountered here carries a firearm. They also have a pretty decent rep for brutality themselves, particularly if you're indigenous. So you are presenting a very misleading view.

Yes most police in AU carry a firearm. No they don't have a 'decent rep' for brutality, whatever that means. Comparing AU police to US police is insane. Every encounter with police like a traffic stop in the US is a nonzero chance of getting killed. That's not at all comparable to Australia where there are no tasers and the use of lethal force is in the single digits per year nationally. The view you're presenting is…

Cops fatally shoot about 1000 people in the US every year from what I read. The US has over 300 million people.

Not nonzero but... well, you can do the math.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#286

Post by theonemind »

jessaustin wrote: post #266
twyleo123 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not forget that the police themselves have their own share of fallen officers. For 2019, ~150 officers killed, out of ~700k total LEO. https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2019

It seems you're overstating the case. When I click through I see causes of death like "heart attack" and "automobile crash". Other people die of those causes as well. Policing isn't even in the top ten most dangerous jobs. Save the honors for fishermen and lumberjacks.

They shoot-to-kill anything that they feel like threatens them. I can see how that might keep them pretty safe.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#287

Post by ghthor »

wolf550e wrote: post #276
ncallaway wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demand in Seattle to defund the police isn't calling to totally remove funding. It's calling for a 50% reduction in the budget. Just a heads up that "defund the police" isn't actually that different from "we need to rethink the roles where we have police"

If their budget is reduced, the police will choose where to cut services in such a way as to inflict maximum fear in the population, to cause their budget to be restored. They will, for example, say they cannot investigate the rape of a white woman, supposedly because lack of funds. But they will have plenty of funds to harass poor and non-white people for maybe smoking pot, but mostly for being poor and/or non-white…

Using "completely peaceful" protestors is a disingenuous statement.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#288

Post by ncallaway »

wolf550e wrote: post #276
ncallaway wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The demand in Seattle to defund the police isn't calling to totally remove funding. It's calling for a 50% reduction in the budget. Just a heads up that "defund the police" isn't actually that different from "we need to rethink the roles where we have police"

If their budget is reduced, the police will choose where to cut services in such a way as to inflict maximum fear in the population, to cause their budget to be restored. They will, for example, say they cannot investigate the rape of a white woman, supposedly because lack of funds. But they will have plenty of funds to harass poor and non-white people for maybe smoking pot, but mostly for being poor and/or non-white…

Sure, "defund the police" isn't the only demand. I just wanted to clarify that particular demand.

For example, another demand was to keep SPD in the consent decree under DOJ supervision. The city council was planning on ending it.

They council announced just today that they are retaining to consent decree, so that's a policy win for the protestors.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#289

Post by andrewksl »

ragona wrote: post #248
BurningFrog wrote: post #38

Montreal once had a 16 hour police strike, creating a natural experiment in what happens without police. Steven Pinker describes how that went: > "As a young teenager in proudly peaceable Canada during the romantic 1960s, I was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parents' argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the…

Did you read the article? > “Well, I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them.” Vitale offers a nuanced perspective, and your response…

I thought it was an interesting anecdote. I didn't read it as a rebuttal but simply as extra data to consider. Both the article and this comment provide much food for thought.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#290

Post by automatoney »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #231
js2 wrote: post #3

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…

The use of the word 'violence' felt odd and inciting and disingenuous and very loaded in these contexts. I think the word the author is actually describing is 'force'. Police have the legal capacity to use force , not violence. That's why we have a legal concept of deadly force, but not one for deadly violence. Putting someone in handcuffs is not necessarily violent, but it involves using force to impose the will of…

Would you consider the threat of violence to be violent? I agree that you can handcuff someone without hurting them, but I would argue that 'force' is only possible due to the implication that non-compliance will lead to violence.
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