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Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

nytimes.com

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Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#131

Post by kortex »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #20
_fat_santa wrote: post #3

Policing has to be one of the hardest jobs in our modern society, I honestly couldn't event imagine the stress. Imagine picking up a JIRA ticket at work and not knowing if that ticket is going to a run of the mill bug fix or something that can kill you. That's just out of the realm of possibility for an SWE but for a cop it can be any one of the calls they take on a daily basis. I've always had respect for cops becau…

Imagine just doing your best to help your local community by building some online community notice board, only for a rabid horde to start picketing your house, shouting ALL PROGRAMMERS ARE BASTARDS!!!

If people were picketing me that intensely, I'd do some serious soul-searching of myself, my coworkers and my reporting structure.

If programmers were resulting in deaths in my community, I'd be picketting right with them with "I'm a programmer. Please hold me accountable. End qualified immunity for programmers."

assert great_power == great_resposibility

Etc

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#132

Post by delecti »

blacktriangle wrote: post #74
plank_time wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paranoid mentality that any call could kill you is the exact reason why so many unarmed black people are shot. If you can’t carry out a day’s work without the unreasonable fear that you will be shot, and any action makes you “fear for your life” so that why you emptied your clip into a car, then you shouldn’t be a cop. Cops needs to have cooler heads and this should be measured and verified before allowing them t…

Except "so many unarmed black people are shot" is a lie. A larger per-capita percentages of unarmed whites are shot than blacks.

Even if it's true that more unarmed whites per-capita are shot, there's still an unacceptable amount of unarmed blacks that are shot (a threshold I would argue is crossed roughly at "any of them", but certainly before where it stands now). That data point should be used in the context of "it's even worse than you think", not the opposite.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#133

Post by [deleted] »

_fat_santa wrote: post #3

Policing has to be one of the hardest jobs in our modern society, I honestly couldn't event imagine the stress. Imagine picking up a JIRA ticket at work and not knowing if that ticket is going to a run of the mill bug fix or something that can kill you. That's just out of the realm of possibility for an SWE but for a cop it can be any one of the calls they take on a daily basis. I've always had respect for cops becau…

[deleted]

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#134

Post by CapitalistCartr »

_fat_santa wrote: post #3

Policing has to be one of the hardest jobs in our modern society, I honestly couldn't event imagine the stress. Imagine picking up a JIRA ticket at work and not knowing if that ticket is going to a run of the mill bug fix or something that can kill you. That's just out of the realm of possibility for an SWE but for a cop it can be any one of the calls they take on a daily basis. I've always had respect for cops becau…

A couple weeks ago, I needed to shut a business down to add capacity to their electrical service. I arranged it to be late in the day, but once I got involved, I discovered it was an unexpected type of meter can and I can't turn off the power. So I have all the breakers off, no load, undo the load-side wires to the meter, live, and make it all up, also live, the last half hour by flashlight. There's enough power to incinerate me, but I know how to do my job well. I'm probably at greater risk from physical abuse of my body over decades, back and knees. Most jobs are less safe than programming.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#135

Post by bradklein »

pininja wrote: post #109
bradklein wrote: post #27

Here are some facts from the City of Vallejo, a city of 120,000 people located 30 miles north-east of San Francisco: - Recently featured in ABC's 20/20 show for a "Gone Girl" case were the Vallejo Police Department accused a couple of faking a kidnapping. The woman was sexually assaulted during her kidnapping, and the VPD staged a news conference claiming the whole thing was made up. The city paid the couple millions…

The two ABC news links are broken. Are they still online?

https://openvallejo.org/2020/07/28/vallejo-police-bend-badge...

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/5-7-million-settlement-r...

https://abc7news.com/vallejo-police-association-union-presid...

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/search/?a=vallejo...

https://abc7news.com/vallejo-police-association-union-presid...

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#136

Post by ceejayoz »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #110
RankingMember wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is accountability. Police unions are much too strong, so the bad cops are reinstated even when they're on camera doing something heinous. How is the public supposed to feel about that?

The issue should be accountability. Police unions are a root cause of the problem. Instead, ordinary officers are being treated like the first five paragraphs of this story. The most popular slogan is "defund the police". There's people non-ironically advocating for 'abolishing prisons'. This is why they're quitting, and this is why the drive to meaningfully reform police will be wasted this time around, too. It will…

> Instead, ordinary officers are being treated like the first five paragraphs of this story.

This should be an unsurprising reaction to there generally being minimal consequences for individual bad cops, though.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#137

Post by ssully »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #10

Sounds like 'defund the police' is stupid, self-defeating sloganeering that makes no sense given what its apparent settled-upon meaning (only settled upon many months after becoming popular).

The comment you are referring is quoting from the article where officers mention being thrown into situations they aren't trained for (mental health episodes, etc). Defunding the police literally calls for taking from the enormous budget police have, and using it to fund personnel, like say EMS, to be trained to handle these scenario's. That sounds like a win for everyone.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#138

Post by throwkeep »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #29
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #10

Sounds like 'defund the police' is stupid, self-defeating sloganeering that makes no sense given what its apparent settled-upon meaning (only settled upon many months after becoming popular).

The meaning of "diverting funding to other resources" has been a consensus in the community for a very long time. It's only recently that "defund" has been conflated with "abolish," which has always been a very very small niche of the police reform community.

Sitting member of Congress: "No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can't be reformed."

https://mobile.twitter.com/RashidaTlaib/status/1381745303997...

Sitting member of Congress: "We can’t reform this."

https://mobile.twitter.com/AyannaPressley/status/13817027443...

Activist with 475k followers whose name is currently: "DEFUND & ABOLISH POLICE"

https://mobile.twitter.com/BreeNewsome

Ben & Jerrys: "This system can’t be reformed."

https://twitter.com/benandjerrys/status/1381743962558504969

When activists say they want to abolish the police, they “100%” mean they want no more police, Noor says.

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/07/17/black-lives-matte...

NYT op ed: "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abol...

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#139

Post by themolecularman »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #24
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #7

Guys, police are self-abolishing. Victory is within grasp. But seriously. Why is this surprising? This is a completely rational reaction of people who feel they're being unfairly demonized as a group despite most of them being professional and doing their jobs the best they can with the training and incentives they're given. Enjoy the crime wave.

> despite most of them being professional and doing their jobs the best they can If you stand in solidarity with those who flagrantly abuse their power, you're not doing your best.

> If you stand in solidarity with those who flagrantly abuse their power, you're not doing your best.

I've been thinking of this. And everyone on HN is not doing their best then.

Every tech employer that we all work for qualifies.

Re: Police have been quitting in droves in the last year

#140

Post by zepto »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #29
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #10

Sounds like 'defund the police' is stupid, self-defeating sloganeering that makes no sense given what its apparent settled-upon meaning (only settled upon many months after becoming popular).

The meaning of "diverting funding to other resources" has been a consensus in the community for a very long time. It's only recently that "defund" has been conflated with "abolish," which has always been a very very small niche of the police reform community.

Firstly, I’ve heard plenty of people say they mean abolish.

Second, it still makes no sense. I am a very strong supporter of violence intervention, mental health services, restorative justice, etc.

But police are and poorly trained. Defunding them will lead to more problems.

We need to fund police training, and create alternative services.

The ‘defund the police’ mantra is clearly just a polite version of FTP.

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