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Defund the Police meets the crime wave

bariweiss.substack.com

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Re: Defund the Police meets the crime wave

#31

Post by JamesBarney »

adt2bt wrote: post #23

> They claim that, by taking money from police and putting it toward social programs, they can eliminate the need for heavy-handed policing in the first place. But the social programs are an afterthought. This feels like a strawman. I don't think it's surprising that there's a rise in crime when police are defunded, especially when those social programs aren't enacted. I think most reasonable progressives who support…

Are there any good comparisons on how much a dollar of policing vs a dollar of social programs deter crime?

Re: Defund the Police meets the crime wave

#32

Post by nverno »

Defunding the police, along with every other policy, applies well in some areas and poorly in others. When I was a kid, our town decided to defund the police, cutting the force from 3 to 1 officers IIRC. It made sense because there was no crime, and the townspeople didn't want to waste the money on police. All useful politics are local.

Re: Defund the Police meets the crime wave

#33

Post by fatcat500 »

The people who support defunding the police have never felt genuine fear from being victimized by crime.

It's only after the crime, when you're thinking about how someone else had the hubris to threaten your life, thinking about how you could have died, or worse, if your loved ones had been with you, that they could have died, that you begin to wade yourself into a deep and abiding anger.

I used to feel sympathy for criminals. Especially seeing how many of them have led rough lives, having been raised by bad parents, in horrible environments, having been led by others to delinquency as youth, then into crime as adults.

However, once you have been victimized, this sympathy vanishes. It does not matter how bad you've had it -- violence is never justified. Any person who resorts to violence instantly loses all justification.

It is only the rich who can afford to stroke their moral ego in such an egregious manner. It is the poor and the middle class who pay with their lives for this sanctimony.

Re: Defund the Police meets the crime wave

#34

Post by endymi0n »

The knee-jerk reaction of "defund the police" to the power abuses of police officers struck me as deeply weird from the beginning.

It made me wonder whether the right NOR the left had any clue left as what the role of a police force in a democracy was actually supposed to be — or whether that battle cry _really_ originated from the same forces trying to split the US society: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/oct/14/russia-us-po...

Like, there would have been lots of great claims: "Train police", "Restructure Police", "Rebuild Police"... but what's a single good argument to "Defund Police" other than wanting to go back to anarchy?

Re: Defund the Police meets the crime wave

#35

Post by nerdponx »

mejari wrote: post #24
aejnsn wrote: post #14

You get what you pay for.

Except they're still paying for it and the police weren't defunded https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t...

I can't speak for Oakland specifically. But when I see police departments with lots of fancy combat gear, but with minimal fitness standards and minimal training in things like unarmed combat, I can't help but feel like the people are not getting their tax money's worth.

Re: Defund the Police meets the crime wave

#37

Post by mitigating »

eckmLJE wrote: post #27
scrollbar wrote: post #18

I read most of the article, in which the author implies that defunding the police increases crime, and blames the people in charge of Oakland with this crime. Yet I recalled hearing that police budgets in Oakland were steady to up this year, despite the protests. A quick search seems to confirm this: https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t... >Despite claims to the contrary, the Oakland City Coun…

Actual instances of police funding being reduced are so rare that the author reaches for incidents of low police-citizen interaction following controversial police-on-citizen violence as evidence of what a straw-man version of "defund the police" advocates for. "Defund the police" has to be the most poorly conceived political slogan of all time. It sounds more like a pejorative its opponents came up with.

wouldn't that mean the cause of the increased crime is either criminals who are angry at the police so they commit more crimes or the police not working as hard (or a combination)

Re: Defund the Police meets the crime wave

#38

Post by codenesium »

scrollbar wrote: post #18

I read most of the article, in which the author implies that defunding the police increases crime, and blames the people in charge of Oakland with this crime. Yet I recalled hearing that police budgets in Oakland were steady to up this year, despite the protests. A quick search seems to confirm this: https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t... >Despite claims to the contrary, the Oakland City Coun…

Not much. It's an opinion piece. Probably doesn't belong on HN.

Re: Defund the Police meets the crime wave

#40

Post by Invictus0 »

scrollbar wrote: post #18

I read most of the article, in which the author implies that defunding the police increases crime, and blames the people in charge of Oakland with this crime. Yet I recalled hearing that police budgets in Oakland were steady to up this year, despite the protests. A quick search seems to confirm this: https://www.ktvu.com/news/oakland-didnt-cut-any-money-from-t... >Despite claims to the contrary, the Oakland City Coun…

It's more than an implication, it's a direct statement:

> As the surge in violence has become less theoretical to white, middle class residents, Oakland’s mayor has been afforded the political space to push to restore the funds that were cut from the police budget.

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