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Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

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Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe the suggestion here is to disband the concept of having police entirely, just to disband the current police department.

Fair enough. The devil is in the details of course. But I am skeptical that the crime rates would drop if there is less policing since the crime rates are not caused by police.

is reducing crime rates the goal here?

reducing the abuses committed by police department is a benefit to society, even if the reported crime rate rises (up to a point, of course)

Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Camden disbanded their police department and has seen crime drop: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crim... Disbanding the police doesn't mean no public safety measures. It means disbanding the department and rebuilding a new approach to public safety.

Oh you mean replacing the police with... The police. Got it.

That's a trite dismissal.

Nobody actually thinks that we can have no law enforcement. That doesn't mean that disbanding systematically corrupt departments and rebuilding from scratch isn't a good idea.

Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

#103
The problem is American gun culture and the probability that any call might turn into a violent one. Other countries don't have that problem so they can send unarmed social workers with higher confidence, over a life time of calls, they're going to see retirement. In America that isn't the case and responders need a gun because everyone has guns and you need to have sustainable system for keeping order that ensures, over the long tail, peace keepers stay alive. This is probably an unpopular opinion in a time of police abuses but it's orthogonal, it just means our police need to be extremely well trained and disciplined because we built a society that is inherently more dangerous (and this costs a lot of money which we're now defunding).

Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

#104
"Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis retreated on Saturday through a sea of protesters yelling, “Go home, Jacob, go home!” and “Shame! Shame!” after he refused to commit to defunding the Police Department."

He says no to the abolition of the PD, not defunding.

Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

#105

"Dissolve the organization and start over from scratch" is an under-used solution in American life, even in the private sector. Apparently Camden, NJ did a version of this in 2013 with a fair amount of success: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/how-camde...

The Camden thing is going around a lot but to me it seems like they did a reorg and actually ended up hiring more police. https://www.tapinto.net/towns/camden/sections/law-and-justic...

I don't think anyone is against more police, but rather the tactics used and how that money is spent. Twenty years ago, police deploying tasers was an outlier. In 2020, it's become normalized and happens thousands of times a year. There's no reason we can't have better trained, restrained police at the same or greater budget. It's the tactics that are in question, and qualified immunity which allows bad actors to do as they please with little-to-no impact to themselves (thanks to local governments picking up the tab).

Let's not pretend we didn't just see 57 police officers resign from a volunteer position because two of their own were caught on camera pushing a 75-year old man to the ground and held accountable because "just following orders".

Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happens when the bodycams are off? Is the officer fired and jailed? If an officer's bodycam is turned off and there is a confrontation, the officer should be assumed guilty in any dispute. It should be the officer's responsibility to ensure their bodycam works, just as it is the officer's responsibility to ensure their gun works.

They aren't even assumed guilty when they're filmed killing someone.

Yes, that's why I said should.

I think bodycams themselves are fantastic tools—but like most technology, they cannot by themselves fix a human problem.

Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

#107
I highly recommend Jane Coaston of Vox for a follow. Her recommendations are:

1. End qualified immunity

2. Curtail the power of police unions

3. We need fewer laws

I don't think I could agree harder with this. It sounds like the "disband the police" movement is an elaborate implementation of #2. Now we just need #1 and #3.

https://twitter.com/cjane87/status/1267898762845880321

Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

#108

I don't think it will work. Minneapolis has one of the highest crime rates in the country, just as Baltimore did, and that city saw crime rates rise even higher after protests led to tighter regulations on the Police ... but I don't live in Minneapolis and so I'm curious to see how it will turn out. I support this as a great social experiment.

My sense is that most (but not all) of the people cheering this on are like you. They don't live there, they have no family there, and they have no ties to the city or the state. Spoke with a childhood friend last night, and he's leaving the city and moving to Minnetonka once his lease is up in August. Everyone else he knows is doing something similar. Obviously this is all anecdotal, and like you said we get to watc…

It’s interesting that we never consider the status quo to ever be an extreme. Perhaps part of why these root-to-branch efforts seem so extreme is because the Overton window has been shifted so far to the right wrt Criminal Justice we’ve lost perspective.

American policing is not exactly a shining beacon of civil achievement. It has a long history of being both problematic and largely ineffectual at establishing law & order within the confines of the US constitution.

When violent crime started dropping precipitously in the 90s researchers scrambled to figure out the recipe so it could be repeated and amplified. Ultimately they came up empty handed. Interestingly, the Environmental Lead Hypothesis emerged as a likely cause (especially because the pattern can be seen across different countries, cultures, and criminal justice systems) but does have its own share of detractors.

But regardless, we don’t actually have solid evidence our current approach to law & order is even effective. It’s largely a faith-based system. And it’s performance is abysmal... So we should be open to “radical” change as micro-optimizations aren’t going to help us here.

Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

#109
post #86

Is this equivalent to a software rewrite? Let's just throw the whole thing out and start over. Throwing out a system and starting afresh would likey introduce new bugs/systemic failures that aren't currently present. Is addressing and correcting each specific feature/SOP not an option?

So you keep decades old code in production, trying to fix bugs in obsolete languages and architectures? I would start a new project in a modern language or framework that's relevant for the environment and make my job a lot easier. Sure there's gonna be bugs, but its easier to fix when I actually built the system and documented it well.

Said someone who has clearly never been part of a big bang software rewrite before.

Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department

#110

I don't think it will work. Minneapolis has one of the highest crime rates in the country, just as Baltimore did, and that city saw crime rates rise even higher after protests led to tighter regulations on the Police ... but I don't live in Minneapolis and so I'm curious to see how it will turn out. I support this as a great social experiment.

My sense is that most (but not all) of the people cheering this on are like you. They don't live there, they have no family there, and they have no ties to the city or the state. Spoke with a childhood friend last night, and he's leaving the city and moving to Minnetonka once his lease is up in August. Everyone else he knows is doing something similar. Obviously this is all anecdotal, and like you said we get to watc…

I still live in Minneapolis and most people that I know want to stay.

Everyone who watched the video knows George Floyd was murdered, but the MPD and its union still want to fight their termination and all charges.

MPD response to protesters has been incompetent, callous, and malicious. The majority of MPD are suburban Trump supporters and like all Trump supporters they can't stand progressive places like Minneapolis. The last straw for me was when the MPD police arrested a reporter in broad daylight on live TV.

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