Original/parent comment for this conversation said:
> There's a worrying trend in the conversation these days that has shifted from "there's a serious problem with racism in how police go about their job" to "we need less police". Folks in neighborhoods living with the constant threat of gang violence don't have the luxury to sit in their aeron chairs and argue about defunding the police. They face the very real threat of themselves or their loved ones being shot on the streets and statistically not by police.
The contrary part:
> The threat of gang violence is not mitigated by police response. The threat of gang violence is mitigated by providing much better options for people who would otherwise join gangs. Police presence is immaterial to the lack of gangs in affluent neighborhoods.
Original comment basically said "police are important to protect against violence in neighborhoods where there's a lot of it. W/the implication that said violence is gang violence.
The response argued that if we want to decrease or eliminate gang violence, we have to address the root issue, which is basically criminal neglect of neighborhoods (lack of schools, hospitals, entire communities systematically oppressed, disenfranchised, and neglected, etc) b/c of systemic racism.
'Conclusions. Relative “trauma deserts” with decreased access to immediate care were found in certain areas of Chicago and adversely affected mortality from GSWs. These results may inform decisions about trauma systems planning and funding.'
Where's the funding for hospitals where it's needed?
Or.
Let's look at the LA uprising (aka the LA riots). Let's look at Ferguson. Let's look at the riots in Baltimore. Those communities clearly had very strong feelings about the police.
>Just ask black people you know, observe what happens on the street in a black neighborhood
Have you asked any white people who live in deprived neighbourhoods, or latinos? I can tell from first-hand experience that a lot of white people hate the police. No racism was involved though. It has more to do with gangs not wanting the police to interrupt their crimes, high crime in general in those areas, real danger to the police putting them on edge, etc.
> I can tell you that policing an inner city neighborhood exposes you to the worst society has to offer on a daily basis, and it can lead to police forming some ugly opinions
I think this is the key problem. Not racism. Blaming it on racism just causes further problems. I'm sure there is some racism, but it doesn't appear to be the main problem.
>BTW, you linked to a Washington Times article. That's a very different newspaper from the Washington Post.
> You can go to a wealthy white neighborhood in a hard-right place like Texas and there will be plenty of guns. But the cops won’t feel the need to dress up like soldiers and kill people for minor offenses.
The video of the cop executing an innocent civillian[1] and getting away with it kind of disproves this statement.
I agree that inequality and poverty are the issues, and I agree that there is a correlation between certain races and poverty, but I don't believe that the issue is just racism.
> I also don’t know why people think it makes more sense to divert police resources away from where crimes are happening.
Because so many people who live in those communities consistently continue to say they both fear and distrust the police as the police exist today.
And because people in those communities continually say they need other forms of resources and support from our society - mainly a real path for economic opportunity, but also affordable healthy food (google food deserts), etc - and they understandably are pissed that as a society we’ll police the heck out of poor, mostly black neighborhoods, but not make sustained investments to help those communities the same way that our society does many (not all! mainly the wealthy ones) white neighborhoods.
I don’t think anyone actually wants lawlessness. People want the opposite. They want equality under the law, and for the police to be held legally responsible for when they break it, in one of worst ways possible - by killing.
> when black people call the police, there's the non-zero chance that they're the ones who end up getting shot.
As an absolute number, more white people are shot by police than black. [1]
As a percentage of population, the rate is higher in the black population, however that's a very complex analysis when you break it down by homicides by region and the populations (many urban areas are majority black, or Hispanic).
> You've got to try to make things right.
Discrimination based on race doesn't strike me as a very good strategy for making things right. It seems to me like it will just foster increased racial tensions, resentment and problems without solving anything.
> The discrepancy may be explainable simply by the police presence in the area.
I'd take it one step further:
I live in a medium to medium class neighborhood with a few lower priced apartments dotted throughout. One is actually next door to me. I had to call 911 last weekend when a bbq at the apt building next to me was close to violence. I listened through an open window as one calm male tried to disuade his friend from starting a fight as the latter ranted for 45 minutes in the street sometime after midnight. I heard male number one mention an open arrest warrant as an attempt to reason with male number two that violence was not going to end well. Male number two repeatedly dismissed this and periodically became hysterical with anger.
Between my initial call to 911 and the time when police arrived, I heard a new voice arrive, alerting the hostile guy that he (male number three) had called his cousin for backup and reminding everyone that his cousin is a Crip (a west coast gang, for those who are unfamiliar). I made a second 911 call to update the officers that the situation appeared to be escalating.
So, what I'm driving towards is the additional possibility that this type of behavior sticks out terribly in a quiet neighborhood where most residents have families and go to sleep by 10pm. The likelihood of someone notifying authorities is probably greater than in a high crime area because this is an extremely rare occurrence here.
Edit: yes, I live in a predominantly white neighborhood and the bbq attendees were all black, but that seemed less relevant until I remembered that someone is likely to ask.
> There are a lot of useless arrests for minor crimes like jaywalking which makes the residents of these neighborhoods hostile to the police. (These arrests are driven by the debunked theory of broken window policing.) Simultaneously, there's not enough effort put into solving serious crimes like murder.
Slightly off context but I think that the solution to this is some kind of quota and or tier system to laws and policing. Basically to restrict the amount of policing that may be done for things like jaywalking and traffic violations while the violent crime rate is above a certain threshold.
I have been held at gun point twice in my life as part of armed robbery and hijacking and neither time did I even consider for a moment that the police would find the people who did it. But if I do 60 km/h in a 40 km/h zone they will follow me to the end of the earth to get me to pay them.
> It would be better to stop public funding of police all together and replace it with either private security contractors hired on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, or citizen's patrols like the Guardian Angels, Black Panthers, or a version of Neighborhood Watch.
This is a bad take, in my opinion. For the most part, all types of crime have been steadily declining since the 1990's [0][1][2]. You can't say policing is ineffective as a whole. There are certainly things to be improved upon, though.
> I don’t disagree that we should try to gear our society towards producing less dangerous people. It sounds like we have very different ideas on how to achieve that, though. My personal opinion is that the threat of severe punishment is enough to scare most people into line.
See my point #5 in the parent comment:
> This one might be a bit philosophical but when you have a police force you aren't reducing violence, you're just shifting the violence that is done to the state.
When you give the police overwhelming power to punish dangerous people, you have created a new class of very dangerous people. In my theoretical universe where cops are infallible this is not a problem, in the real world if you give an institution that much power what do you think would happen when they "solve crime". Would they willingly relinquish that power? Or would they aim to extend their influence onto larger swaths of the population with more draconian laws?
> If there was a way to solve these issues while also being really nice and compassionate then I’d be all for it, but if you’re getting bullied sometimes the best thing to do is to just sock the bully in the mouth.
I think you're missing the point. I am not saying there should be zero accountability for criminals and zero police. I am saying we should also attack the root causes of criminality instead of just using punitive measures. Right now we are treating the symptom and not the cause.
> an even "smaller* chance of protecting you from murder
Considering how much murder is happening there already, I wouldn't guess that the amount there would be if the police stopped investigating them would be smaller than the existing rate of murders by police.
Also, as already mentioned, 0.0005% is the approximate rate at which the police kill black people, not the rate at which they murder them. What do you propose the cops do when someone draws a weapon on them?
> What's to be done with that gang?
You're talking about the local police, in black neighborhoods, in cities with Democrats already in elected office. They've been able to pass whatever changes they want this whole time, so what's stopping them?
>If you ask your coworker today, how many shootings were there in Chicago last weekend, unless you live in or near Chicago, they will be shocked that there were 17 shootings and 4 homicides just over the weekend.
Would they? Literally everyone who reads the news knows Chicago has a lot of shootings. This sounds like something you made up to drive a narrative rather than basing it in truth.
> think if enough money is poured into it, with enough eyeballs on it, and a high level of training, it can be very effective.
There is no way it would be effective. Brutal? Yes. Inhumane? Sure. Suffering? Absolutely. The type of person who is attracted to being an authoritarian is not the type of person you want to have power. We already live in a quasi-police state, much more than other countries, and we still have a ton of crime and violence.
>You can't achieve economic security without safety.
You have that backwards. You can't achieve safety without economic security.
>. Can you name a single wealthy location with as high a crime rate as South side Chicago or Baltimore?
Nope, because wealthy places don't have a ton of crime. I'm not sure how that supports your argument, because it's literally what I'm saying.
Can you point to a very poor place that is safe due to the police?
>We have fucking ABANDONED Baltimore and it's disgusting.
Baltimore is literally the closest city we have to a police state, you apparently don't like the outcome.
Edit* @yucky - HN doesn't want me to post and I don't want to come back and remember to post in a hour or whenever I'm allowed to again so here ya are
Police are powerful in all communities in the US. Rural people generally have less interaction with the police than urban areas. If you want to kill someone or rob someone in a rural setting, police are almost a non-factor as they wont be nearby.
I guess we agree then: more police so we can stop targeting minorities in street-level busts and instead target the big offenders: white collar crime that destroys minority communities and keeps them in perpetual bondage. If you want to haul the rich and powerful out of their homes with tear gas and tanks, who am I to disagree?
> No, but that didn't cause gangs, and you know it.
Now we're getting somewhere. By itself, no, it didn't. Institutionalized racism in the forms of employment, education, and housing discrimination carried from the 1960s caused largely-minority communities to remain segregated and poor while at the same time, white flight took money from the inner cities and moved it to the suburbs, leaving behind an underfunded and broken education system [0]. The Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act are relatively recent developments: 1964 and 1968, respectively -- just a little over 10 years before your father got to LA. By the 80s, increased class stratification and tough-on-crime initiatives from the federal government meant minorities and the poor faced even more disproportionately aggressive policing and incarceration. With little hope of achieving the same success as their more affluent counterparts in the suburbs, many individuals turned to crime as a mode of survival. Then came Iran-Contra, crack cocaine, and gangs.
Of course, if you're talking about true gangs in the US during this time, we can also discuss the American mafia, white supremacists like the Aryan Brotherhood, the KKK, or even the gangs depicted in the film, "Gangs of New York" in the "Five Points" area of NY (but this is an example of some of the first gangs in the US, around the late 1700s -- thought some historical context would be interesting). These gangs, however, have faced less scrutiny because of their close connections with law enforcement and government.
[0] For a heartbreaking account of the devastating long term effects of this, I highly recommend Jonathan Kozol's 1991 book, "Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools"
> If members of my community are being killed with abandon across the country by the police
Frankly, I don't even think that this is true. I think the US police is just hyper-violent, mostly for cultural reasons (both on the side of the police and on the side of the criminals). The 2.3 million inmates in US prisons are the demonstration of a deeply flawed culture in that respect. And the fact that blacks are disproportionately engaging in criminal behaviour (for whatever reason) makes them more vulnerable to police violence. But just framing this as a racism issue is misguided. There, I said it.
>"I don't think police are the right agents to enforce societal change though."
Of course, agreed. However, they're most certainly there to prevent crime and stop/catch criminals. There is a whole lot of overlap between those two goals.
>"I found it rather surprising that such kinds of conditions exist in a developed country like the US; its usually something you find in less developed countries."
People aren't allowed to talk about it, frankly. Sweeping generalizations and policies that affect and stop these kinds of conditions from existing are not politically correct, and completely politically unpalatable.
E.g. If you asked me for my politically incorrect answer: It would be to increase policing ten-fold in those areas, maybe even impose martial law and curfews until the criminals have to pretty-much stop their business because it's not viable anymore. High-definition cameras on all street-corners, license-plate scanners to keep decent track of ALL vehicles going through the city and crime hot-spots. Additionally, you have to stop gang-culture from propagating through those neighborhoods. Not just that, but keep it from spreading through the whole society in general via media, especially music that glorifies it.
The unfortunate thing is that it'll probably work, we can probably pay/implement it right now, and we would very quickly start saving lives and helping people out of a crime/poverty cycle. Yet we aren't.
> I think the problem is that when white people leave a neighborhood, they bring with them their political influence to allocate city funds to that neighborhood. Funds for things like... adequate policing. Huh.
I don't think that makes sense in context of GPs argument, as GP also argues that "more policing" did not help alleviate the violence problem.
The assertions "police were defunded, therefor the area got more violent" and "policing was escalated, and still the area got more violent" cannot both be true at the same time.
> So, if it is the fault of each black individual, as you claim is the underpinning of society, why are black communities being more policed?
Because effective policing means distributing police resources according to demand?
> police institution that trains its members to be more aggressive and fearful of black communities?
It seems perfectly reasonable to be more fearful when going into a more dangerous area. I don't see any evidence that police are somehow less aggressive or fearful when going into areas dominated by violent gangs with other skin colours. Can you point to some official training doctrine that tells police to be fearful of black people? I'm quite sure that has been illegal for a long time.
> Don't fight with a cop, don't resist arrest, you don't get shot. . Pretty simple solution.
Well, except for all those people who neither fought with cops nor resisted arrest and still got shot.
> I know far more victims of crime than I do victims of police brutality.
Since police brutality is crime, its impossible for the reverse to be true. But really, all that tells us (even assuming the characterization is accurate) is something about who you know, not what the relevant incidence of those things is in society.
> You're more likely to be shot by a gangbanger than a cop, thus shouldn't we be complaining about that?
I'm not sure law enforcement failing to do their job and thereby endangering innocents is a different problem than law enforcement failing to do their job and thereby endangering innocents.
> Arguably, part of the reason the police is so aggressive and distrustful when interacting with regular people is the higher gun density in the country.
The vast majority of police violence we witness in the US is against totally unarmed people. I think this gives the police far too much credit. Being a police officer is actually a very safe job to begin with, and violent crime in the US has been decreasing steadily for decades.
In fact, most of the worst offending police departments are the places in the US where the incidence of civilian gun ownership, legal or otherwise, is lowest: New York, Boston, Chicago, LA.
The cops simply don't need an excuse for violence, they're violent even, or perhaps because, the public they attack are unarmed.
> There's a worrying trend in the conversation these days that has shifted from "there's a serious problem with racism in how police go about their job" to "we need less police". Folks in neighborhoods living with the constant threat of gang violence don't have the luxury to sit in their aeron chairs and argue about defunding the police. They face the very real threat of themselves or their loved ones being shot on the streets and statistically not by police.
The contrary part:
> The threat of gang violence is not mitigated by police response. The threat of gang violence is mitigated by providing much better options for people who would otherwise join gangs. Police presence is immaterial to the lack of gangs in affluent neighborhoods.
Original comment basically said "police are important to protect against violence in neighborhoods where there's a lot of it. W/the implication that said violence is gang violence.
The response argued that if we want to decrease or eliminate gang violence, we have to address the root issue, which is basically criminal neglect of neighborhoods (lack of schools, hospitals, entire communities systematically oppressed, disenfranchised, and neglected, etc) b/c of systemic racism.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3698742/
'Conclusions. Relative “trauma deserts” with decreased access to immediate care were found in certain areas of Chicago and adversely affected mortality from GSWs. These results may inform decisions about trauma systems planning and funding.'
Where's the funding for hospitals where it's needed?
Or.
Let's look at the LA uprising (aka the LA riots). Let's look at Ferguson. Let's look at the riots in Baltimore. Those communities clearly had very strong feelings about the police.
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