Great. This will be a very instructive experiment. I hope it would teach those people a good lesson, and not too many innocent people would die for it.
Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
331–340 of 398 posts
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
For every wrong shooting, there's what, maybe a hundred righteous ones? A thousand? Yes, I'll take it for now, and advocate for improvements.
How can you possibly think so when there are about 25 police killings in Germany in the last 30 years and about 25 police killings in the US in the last month?
Many people won't like this, but I cannot explain this phenomenon other than that it's the result of years of normalizing gun ownership.
Shootings are a very real and somewhat regular occurrence in the US. Here in Germany, it's literally not an issue people worry about. When was the last time you saw a gun anywhere in Germany? The majority of Germans would probably say in the holster of a policeman or possibly someone they know is a registered hunter.
Indubitably, the crazy amount of guns coupled with a tendency to romanticize them leads to policemen being more on edge and willing to pull the trigger -- because worst case, you have an armed loon in front of you that might just shoot first. The initially suggested idea of sending an unarmed civil service guy to de-escalate some situation sounds great in theory, but honestly I wouldn't want to be the guy trying to talk sense into an armed loon.
The fact that the above poster estimates there to be a thousand rightful shootings for every wrong one should really warrant the question of why there are a thousand shootings in the first place. That is not the norm.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#333"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...
Hiring more police is not a problem, as long as you fire all the old dysfunctional police, and get rid of all the mechanisms that kept dysfunctional police in place for all those years.
If you fire tons of bad cops and you want good cops, you're going to have to hire them.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am fine with more police if we entirely redefine police to mean social workers, counselors, community assistants, etc. And if they didn't carry guns nor drive unmarked cars. Police should be seen and they should be seen interacting positively with the community, not patrolling in a gradient of (un)identifiable vehicles.
Those aren’t police. They are part of the social safety net and community wellness. How would you ask a police officer to react to a criminal brandishing or firing a gun in public or at him? How would you ask detectives to work cases against gang leaders if they cannot conceal their identity?
@malnourish has a good point, though. Quite often police respond to calls that require a social worker or mental health professional. And in some of those cases, the police decides that a bullet is the best solution to the problem that they are equipped to provide. Many problems require very different solutions, and many police officers are not equipped to provide those solutions. That is a major problem.
Either police officers need to be trained as social workers and mental health professionals, or part of their work needs to be taken over by those that have that training.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or broken up and forced to sell to other orgs that can handle improving things from a security standpoint.
Decentralizing data rarely makes it more secure.
Not so much the data probably, but some of the services. I was thinking more business / consumer sides split. Of course given what sort of data shows up in my credit report (annoyingly outdated) I'd be okay with them being shut down too.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you ever really tried one for yourself? East Berlin used to be second World, but many of my American friends moved there because they were tired sick of being harassed by their own country brutality and would never go back. Even many African countries are safer than the US if you are black. On the other side, one of the most annoying kind of tourist you can find in my city, which is Rome in Italy, are Americans.…
I sure have, Venezuela. No water, constant power failures, gas at 8-12 USD per gallon (controlled by the military police$$$, though that is a recent development), minimum wage at 5USD per month. Food at international prices. Basically non-existent judicial system. Police brutality several notches above what you see in the US.
Obviously not every other country is the same. The situation is not that the US does everything one way, and the entire rest of the world does it another way; there are about 200 different countries, and they all do things differently in some ways. Some countries get most things right, some get most things wrong, but most countries get some things right and some things wrong.
There's a lot to learn and improve by looking at how other countries solve their problems.
This was also the topic of Michael Moore's Where To Invade Next. Instead of taking other countries' oil, the US should take other countries' ideas, and Moore had a couple of suggestions for interesting ideas from other countries, like school lunches from France, prison system from Norway, etc.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#337"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...
Milton Friedman said one of the most important aspect of capitalism, more than the profit motive, was that bad companies are allowed to fail & better company can fill the need.
But bad companies keep getting bailed out.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times." – G. Michael Hopf
What are you trying to imply by Hard times create strong men. Hard times also create broken men. Weak is not always bad. I don’t want “supposedly strong men” being so trigger happy , their happy dropping nukes on civilian because they couldn’t let go of their “strong” ego.
My comment was intended to be an agreement with GC’s second paragraph, which postulated that maybe these problems are partially caused by what is effectively complacency.
I did not come up with the phrasing of the quote. That being said, I'm fairly certain you are taking "weak" and "strong" more literally than the quotee intended.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can understand the sentiment of the people behind those writings, but it doesn't really answer my question. What will replace the Minneapolis police department if it's disbanded? Many (most?) of its current responsibilities and funding can be given to social workers, traffic wardens, and other people not armed with guns, but that doesn't obviate the need for officers of the government to enforce the law. Laws can c…
Abolishing the police means abolishing it. Nothing will replace it. Crime will be prevented by eliminating its causes and there will be some mechanisms to deal with last resort cases. The articles explain this.
I sure hope the mechanism for last resort cases isn't men and women in uniform with guns, because then social workers will be very unwilling to approach any potentially violent situation without the not-police-uniform-gun-men there.
Sorry to be cynical, just the experience of a police officer in a place where social services are funded far, far better than the US - police don't want to deal with mental health all the time, but being the agency of last resort makes it very easy to abdicate responsibility to.
Re: Minneapolis City Council members announce intent to disband police department
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that's not the goal of police abolitionists: [1] 1. https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/06/police-abo... Some more references: 1. https://www.8toabolition.com/ 2. https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1268547515038806018 3. https://twitter.com/TravelingNun/status/1268510966116954114
I can understand the sentiment of the people behind those writings, but it doesn't really answer my question. What will replace the Minneapolis police department if it's disbanded? Many (most?) of its current responsibilities and funding can be given to social workers, traffic wardens, and other people not armed with guns, but that doesn't obviate the need for officers of the government to enforce the law. Laws can c…
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