Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did a more than just a reorg. Disbanding and replacing a PD eliminates the old police union contracts. Those lopsided contracts are at the root of the impunity and violence we've seen over the past week. Many cities have made extraordinary contractual concessions, including: - Secrecy clauses. Officer Bob might have 31 excessive force complaints against him, but the city is contractually forbidden from making th…
I don't understand why there isn't a professional license required for LEOs. I'm a paramedic. If I harmed a patient once (let along 31 times), my card would get revoked and that would be that. A cop, meanwhile, is likely to face no consequences at all, and in the absolute "worst" case scenario, they would just get a job in the next town over.
Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
251–260 of 398 posts
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws. While I vehemently disagree with these camps, there's no reason to assume a re-born America's laws would apply to people who are not citizens/legally accepted into its borders. A fix for these camps would be to guarantee the same protections we Americans enjoy to people who come her…
> Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws. What's the point in calling them 'human rights' if they only apply to Americans. The US Bill of Rights does not make any reference to citizenship or legal immigration status in the 6th or 8th amendments (which seem particularly relevant). Not to mention you still need due process…
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
> county police This is very, very rare. More frequently, we have county Sheriffs, not police. And their duties are quite distinct; only recently have they come to resemble police. Shrievalty is more concerned with the functioning of the courts: sometimes holding suspects before trial (and maintaining jail facilites), ensuring the security and order of the court, protecting jury members from violent coercion, capturi…
Country Sheriffs in the US appear to me to do a lot of policing work. For example, Polk County Sheriff (Florida) seems to be busy arresting people for DUI – https://tampa.cbslocal.com/2020/06/06/sheriff-grady-judd-54-... Sacramento County Sheriff's (Calfornia) has a homicide bureau – https://www.sacsheriff.com/Pages/Organization/CID/Homicide.a... Erie County Sheriff (New York) has a drug squad which regularly carries…
But I think that the distinction is still important as we talk about abolishing police.
Police, as an institution, are very new. Much newer than Sheriffs.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those are for people who are specifically not here legally and therefore don't recieve the full protection of our constitution and laws. What's the point in calling them 'human rights' if they only apply to Americans. The US Bill of Rights does not make any reference to citizenship or legal immigration status in the 6th or 8th amendments (which seem particularly relevant). Not to mention you still need due process…
The term "human rights" do not appear anywhere in the constitution.
The word 'comment' doesn't appear in your comment, but that's still what it is.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Patrolmen shouldn’t carry guns. I know that wouldn’t have helped George Floyd, but we need to ratchet down societal acceptance of violence. If a situation warrants firearms, it should at least warrant a radio call to the station for armed backup.
I don't think taking weapons away is enough. Police aren't trained to provide long-term solutions to domestic violence, homelessness, mental illness, or drug addiction, which are often tasked with solving. The typical solution law enforcement offers to these situations is to jail someone. Rightly, people don't want to go to jail and the situation escalates. And as we're witnessing all over the US, the police are ofte…
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#256I mentioned this solution in a comment the other day. The NCAA gives sports programs the 'death penalty' when the 'loss of institutional control' [0] is so great the only fix is to disband and start over. Having it as an option is a good thing. The people in charge can't use an 'I didn't know' defense, because that itself is evidence of loss of institutional control. [0] https://www.ncaa.org/governance/institutional-…
You'll see that sometimes too with Greek organizations at colleges. I argued at the time the the "corporate death penalty" was the only appropriate remedy for the Equifax breach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judicial_dissolution
Over free pitchers of beer the undergrads are regaled with tales of hazing and wild parties...giving them the template to start shit all over again.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#257"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...
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Camden is in the top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate, according to the googling I just did. Not a great recommendation there.
But this was true of Camden before its police reform as well. From the linked article: > He led the city’s high-profile pivot to community policing from 2013 until last year and oversaw what turned out to be a steep decline in crime. Homicides in Camden reached 67 in 2012; the figure for 2019 was 25.
I'm not familiar with Camden or the reforms, so maybe there are other metrics by which things have improved. However, "top 0.2% of American cities in terms of per capita crime rate" is an awfully condemning statistic.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#259I don't live in Minneapolis, and I don't know if this is the right solution or not. But what bothers me about what I've read so far, is they seem to have remarkably little details about exactly what they want to replace the department with. Exactly what does "community-led public safety" mean?
My understanding, based mostly on what I’ve seen on Twitter: 911 call -> Dispatch unarmed City employee, typically a social worker, who specializes in the relevant situation, population or neighborhood. Goal is to assist the individuals involved, to be compassionate instead of punitive, to get to the root cause of the issue. There is still some kind of armed security backup for the social worker’s protection in situa…
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that there is no organization that is incentivized to uncover or investigate police crimes. All other portions of government have cross-checks to stop people breaking the law. The police don't, and cover for one another. There needs to be an organization that has clear and direct incentive to prosecute abuses by the police, that doesn't have a century+ long tradition of violence, selective enforcement,…
The state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia has a Law Enforcement Conduct Commission (LECC) [1], which is a body legally separate from NSW's law enforcement agencies–NSW Police Force, which is the main state police force; NSW Crime Commission, which specialises in organised crime and other serious crime–and which is tasked with investigating law enforcement misconduct. (In Australia, there is no local law enforceme…