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How much do we need the police?

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Re: How much do we need the police?

#111

Post by twyleo123 »

nmca wrote: post #77
jorblumesea wrote: post #29

One of my current frustrations with American politics is how radical everything has become. The debate is now, either we don't have any police and defund them, or, we allow them to continue being completely unaccountable. Neither of those situations sound ideal. It feels like Europe and other places have a much more reasonable and nuanced view. Police get funded, and well funded, but the job requirements are strict,…

It's a guns issue, surely? Not got the exact stats but for 2019 I think police killings in the UK ~3 and US ~1000, with only a 5x difference in population. I'm a well spoken law abiding white guy and American cops frighten me. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enfo... https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police...

Let's not forget that the police themselves have their own share of fallen officers. For 2019, ~150 officers killed, out of ~700k total LEO.

https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2019

Re: How much do we need the police?

#112

Post by socialdemocrat »

tathougies wrote: post #81
jbay808 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This framing of the police seems very strange to my Canadian sensibilities. I'm curious about whether Americans largely agree with this description.

Canadians do not have violent warlords on their streets. You don't understand what it's like to live in our (mainly South Western) cities, and live with threats of drive-by shootings, vandalism, and getting caught in gunfire. My dad worked driving around downtown LA and surrounds for 20 some odd years and there was more than a few times he was caught in gang-based gunfire. This was in the 80s and 90s mostly, and thin…

But here is this complete disconnect in how Americans think about this. As a European you point out that cops are trigger happy and shoot people 100x more frequently than say in London. Then Americans respond "well we have way more guns so cops are on the edge and shoot more easily."

Well how about introducing some gun control then and reduce the number of guns in society?

But no, Americans don't want that. So many American problems are self inflicted wounds due to a dogmatic adherence to particular principles and ideas which simply are unworkable.

No society has managed to maintain the kind of inequality and high gun ownership that the US has without leading to violence. Inequality combined with high gun ownership and lax regulation, just doesn't work. There is no way to make it work.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#113

Post by zarkov99 »

josephg wrote: post #32
js2 wrote: post #3

I know folks don't always click through, so I'll highlight what I found most insightful: > Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use…

I think that’s made much more true because that’s the image police forces in America have of themselves. “We’re here to beat up the bad guys”. Police here in Australia are far from perfect, but they are much more seen as part of the community. They don’t even carry firearms any more. In Australia I wouldn’t hesitate to contact the police or talk to them on the street if something happened. (Just like I wouldn’t hesit…

Police in the small US college town I live in is pretty much part of the community. I personally know many of the officers - and they are fine people. Even so, they are still a target for antifa agit-prop tactics. The playbook is always the same, catch the one cop that said or did, or appeared to say or do, the wrong thing, once, and you can tarnish the entire department, the entire profession, forever. And it works. Somehow we lost all perspective and have come to expect that our officers, whose jobs regularly confront them with mortal danger and the darkest parts of human nature, will always display the same perfect virtues we carefully signal everyday on Facebook.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#114

Post by seibelj »

missosoup wrote: post #102
djrobstep wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what part of Australia you're in, but literally every cop I've ever encountered here carries a firearm. They also have a pretty decent rep for brutality themselves, particularly if you're indigenous. So you are presenting a very misleading view.

Yes most police in AU carry a firearm. No they don't have a 'decent rep' for brutality, whatever that means. Comparing AU police to US police is insane. Every encounter with police like a traffic stop in the US is a nonzero chance of getting killed. That's not at all comparable to Australia where there are no tasers and the use of lethal force is in the single digits per year nationally. The view you're presenting is…

You are also greatly exaggerating the risk to citizens in the USA when calling the police. The risk is not to the caller, the risk is to the alleged criminal that may get manhandled (or shot) way out of proportion to the offense. But you don’t make a mental “death chance calculation” when you call the cops.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#115

Post by alexashka »

js2 wrote: post #3

I know folks don't always click through, so I'll highlight what I found most insightful: > Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use…

Just because someone has the ability to escalate to use force, does not reduce them to being a 'violence worker'. A parent has the ability to punish a child, is the parent a 'child punisher'?

Re: How much do we need the police?

#116

Post by sys_64738 »

In some states there are many police force (state, university, city, county, town). Every one is armed to the teeth. Mental and physical standards for police are abysmal in the USA. Don't ever try to make a complaint against the police in your local town or they'll start to intimidate you. Police don't have an external and independent investigative procedure. It's all rigged.

Police are often the revenue generators for individual towns. That's inherently wrong.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#117

Post by throwaway0a5e »

Animats wrote: post #100

Police in the US do now have jobs others used to do. Big cities used to have more social workers to deal with street people and such. There were "the men in the white coats" who hauled crazies off to mental institutions. Political parties had more boots on the ground - in the days of machine politics, you could talk to the block captain about getting a job. All those jobs were dumped on cops, who aren't that good at…

>Bad cops are a minority

And over represented on street duty because the specialty task force jobs, management and investigator roles are where the high achievers work their way to.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#118

Post by tathougies »

socialdemocrat wrote: post #112
tathougies wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canadians do not have violent warlords on their streets. You don't understand what it's like to live in our (mainly South Western) cities, and live with threats of drive-by shootings, vandalism, and getting caught in gunfire. My dad worked driving around downtown LA and surrounds for 20 some odd years and there was more than a few times he was caught in gang-based gunfire. This was in the 80s and 90s mostly, and thin…

But here is this complete disconnect in how Americans think about this. As a European you point out that cops are trigger happy and shoot people 100x more frequently than say in London. Then Americans respond "well we have way more guns so cops are on the edge and shoot more easily." Well how about introducing some gun control then and reduce the number of guns in society? But no, Americans don't want that. So many A…

Gangs aren't affected by gun control though -- most gang guns are gotten illegally (when they're not being supplied by the government of course). Moreover, states with strict gun control, like California, have more gangs than others. Chicago used to ban guns entirely but its murder rate was higher than today, when guns are allowed (by the Supreme Court). And inequality is not what leads to gang violence. We have less gang violence now than in the 90s, despite more wealth inequality. These are all distractions.

So no.... there's no disconnect, Americans just realize what's going on.

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-la-gangsters-homem...

http://www.ecineq.org/ecineq_paris19/papers_EcineqPSE/paper_...

Re: How much do we need the police?

#119

Post by barry-cotter »

creaghpatr wrote: post #67
chrisco255 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed drug war is a total failure, policy-wise. Where is the middle ground between criminalizing everything and legalizing everything? Real lives are destroyed by drug abuse and particularly with regards to meth, fentanyl, etc it kills people. I can't imagine a world where we sell these things over the counter. Would that help or hurt communities?

Maybe there’s a legal path to meth but you can literally die from touching a small dose of fentanyl if you haven’t built a tolerance. Very dangerous for that to exist in a legal setting.

Making things illegal leads inexorably to more of the hard stuff. If you can buy it at the corner store you’ll go for weak, comparatively safe substances, opium/morphine or beer. If you’ve got to smuggle it because it’s illegal you go for harder stuff with a greater intoxication for weight ratio like fentanyl or before heroin or hard spirits. Most people don’t drink spirits straight, they drink beer or wine or mixed drinks.

Re: How much do we need the police?

#120

Post by RhysU »

downerending wrote: post #99
js2 wrote: post #3

I know folks don't always click through, so I'll highlight what I found most insightful: > Part of our misunderstanding about the nature of policing is we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers. That's what distinguishes them from all other government functions. ... They have the legal capacity to use…

> police are violence workers That's a rather pejorative way of expressing the point. (Thanks NPR.) It would be better to say that policing is about protecting law-abiding citizens from people who are acting antisocially and often violently. Many of those people are simply criminals. They belong in prison, and often force is required to get them there. Others are experiencing mental-health problems to varying degrees…

Agreed. Police are, within our borders, uniquely permitted to be "violence workers". That is their core competency. Everything else that can be accomplished by others should be.
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