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The Cities Taking Up Calls to Defund the Police

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Re: The Cities Taking Up Calls to Defund the Police

#131

Post by thu2111 »

seunosewa wrote: post #130
thu2111 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brilliant. And whilst you're building a new police force from scratch, who will be doing the policing in the meantime? Who will be appointed to create this new police force and how will they be chosen? What will they do the first time one of their new police officers gets shot? What will the city do if the brand new police force is incompetent because none of them have any experience? And then if they decide to union…

Actually, it has been done before and seems to have worked: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/08/872470135/new-police-force-fr...

Well, that's not really building a new police force. She says the new force was largely made up of the same people as the old one. That's re-interviewing/re-assessing everyone, calling it firing+hiring is perhaps meaningful from a legal or contractual perspective, but from an outcomes perspective they could have done a rolling perf review + firings with new management and a big focus on cultural change, whilst preserving continuity of service. There was no discussion that they actually stopped policing for a few months whilst they did this re-assessment, so I suspect they were "fired" in a sense but were being told they'd still have a big chance to get their old jobs back. Otherwise a rolling "fire" and "rehire" wouldn't have worked.

That said whatever they did and whatever it was called, it apparently worked. But I wonder if that was due to this re-culturing vs the more practical aspect of using body cameras.

Re: The Cities Taking Up Calls to Defund the Police

#132

Post by Fjolsvith »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #120
Fjolsvith wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe we could reorganize the police as a private enforcement group that wouldn't answer to the courts or constitution? Sort of like the brownshirts before WWII. [1] Edit: Youtube took down a video of them back in 2019. [2] 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturmabteilung 2. https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/youtube-bans-anti-nazi-docum...

That sounds like it goes in the opposite direction, we need police to have MORE not LESS oversight and be under more scrutiny and actually get punished (probably 2-3x the sentence of a non-officer).

And yet, the no-police zone in Seattle is just what I described.

Re: The Cities Taking Up Calls to Defund the Police

#133

Post by pwinnski »

root_axis wrote: post #76
pwinnski wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one recent article: https://reason.com/2020/06/03/its-time-to-bust-police-unions...

So the article seems to present the typical argument against unions, i.e. "they protect bad employees", but ultimately the story concludes with the creation of a new union that negotiated an improved and ostensibly successful deescalation policy as part of the labor agreement. I don't think article presents a convincing case that unions are the problem.

I gave you the link that was closest at hand. There are many. For text, try https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/melissasegura/police-un...

For video, and I highly recommend this, try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf4cea5oObY

But if you don't like BuzzFeed or John Oliver, it's trivial to find articles about the harms caused by police unions from sources across the political spectrum.

In the abstract, conceptually, unions aren't a problem. I love unions! But police unions have such a long and consistent pattern of making police worse that I'm not sure any police union can maintain good things for more than a year or two.

I would be pro-police-union if police unions worked like all other unions, fighting for better pay and conditions for their members. That's just not how police unions work in the USA.

P.S. As you say, the article mentions a new police union that so far seems to be okay. It should be noted that union was formed after completely dissolving the existing police force of Camden, NJ, and all of its contracts, including the contract with the existing police union. Time will tell whether the new union starts to be a problem or not, but certainly starting under the threat of "act up and we will dissolve the entire police force again" is a good start.

Re: The Cities Taking Up Calls to Defund the Police

#134

Post by danaris »

thu2111 wrote: post #131
seunosewa wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it has been done before and seems to have worked: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/08/872470135/new-police-force-fr...

Well, that's not really building a new police force. She says the new force was largely made up of the same people as the old one. That's re-interviewing/re-assessing everyone, calling it firing+hiring is perhaps meaningful from a legal or contractual perspective, but from an outcomes perspective they could have done a rolling perf review + firings with new management and a big focus on cultural change, whilst preser…

It doesn't appear to mention it in that article, but one aspect that gets brought up a lot with regard to remaking the police departments is replacing the union. In many cases, it's the local police union that's actively working to prevent investigation or prosecution of police misconduct and crimes.

Firing and re-hiring everyone, legally and contractually, lets you get rid of the existing union and work on building a new one that's actually focused on what a police officers' union should be focusing on: protecting good police officers from abuse and corruption from above, negotiating salaries and job conditions, etc., much like any other workers' union.

Re: The Cities Taking Up Calls to Defund the Police

#135

Post by trianglem »

seunosewa wrote: post #129
jeffbee wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Police toxicity is a path-dependent phenomenon. We got here by decades of incrementalism, where politicians, many of whom were, at the time, avowed racists, agreed to various aspects of civilian-police relations. Simply starting over today with current civilian leadership to draft a new doctrine guarantees a dramatically different outcome.

> Simply starting over today with current civilian leadership to draft a new doctrine guarantees a dramatically different outcome. The current leadership (Trump) is very racist and authoritarian, so I'm not sure that your confidence fits the current time;

Yes but the federal government has only so much influence in local level decisions so it will still pan out to be a massive net positive.

Re: The Cities Taking Up Calls to Defund the Police

#136

Post by trianglem »

root_axis wrote: post #25
trianglem wrote: post #12

I think the best thing for America would be to completely dissolve the police union. This single action should fix a lot of the issues.

Are unions really the problem? Why not raise the standards and the wages for police officers instead of dismantling labor power?

Not unions. Literally just the police union.

Re: The Cities Taking Up Calls to Defund the Police

#137

Post by adamsea »

adamsea wrote: post #70
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read another comment elsewhere with which I totally agree. I think we're at a tipping point in the US where if the slogan was "End the War on Drugs" you're likely to get majority support, and ending the war on drugs would do more than any single thing to bring about social justice in the US. Contrast that with "defund the police", the goals of which are amorphous even from its supporters , and if you don't think ca…

That’s actually not true about convincing the majority. A minority has had outsize political influence in the US for a decade or two now. Because of the electoral college and because of gerrymandering.

OK I admit pique and curiosity at the downvote. There are mathematical models which can be used to measure gerrymandering.

And the way in which the Electoral college disempowers lots of people (a vote in an 8 million person city counts less than one in Ohio, or a small town in Wisconsin) is easily verifiable.

One might disagree with ethical implications which can be drawn from these facts, but, these facts are facts, and there's even math to back it up.

http://math.cmu.edu/~wes/gerrymandering.html

https://math.duke.edu/news/electoral-plot-detecting-gerryman...

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