> I find it very easy to blame people who are not willing to spend 10 seconds researching what a movement stands for.
Then you suffer from a profound lack of empathy.
I invested your "10 seconds". Google took me to a site called Defund the Police[1].
Reading this site, it seems that they want to... defund the police. As in, take the majority of their funding away, and put it somewhere else (nominally into social programs).
Not making a value judgement here, but I'm pretty sure this thing does what it says on the tin.
>>I don't believe significantly more people would be receptive to "defund the police" if it has been phrased a little differently.
FWIW, anecdata, per my other comment [1]: I and large majority of my friends & family (Canadian lower-case-liberals by and large) all fall into that category. It took us a LOOOOONG time (I mean weeks and months) to give the platform and movement enough benefit of doubt to investigate underlying proposals (and then largely agree with them), after having immediate and strong negative reaction to "defund the police".
And most people will not give it benefit of doubt. I literally to this day have conversations with acquaintances of the sort: "No, they're not actually advocating anarchy and everybody fend for themselves! No, I'm serious! Yes, I know that's what the term implies. Hear me out, this is what I think they're saying..."
It's a horrible horrible term that does horrible horrible disservice to the intent.
> and called it "Defund the Police". When what they were actually calling for was more training, especially in regards to mental health situations and deescalation.
I think you are amalgamating the separate actions of several different groups and attempting to attach a single coherent narrative to their collective actions in an effort to excuse everyone involved.
> But slash the politicians did, because they could do the most literal interpretation of the protesters' demands and then blame them when they obviously don't work.
"Defund the police" has a single obvious interpretation, and there many individual groups that were calling for this precise interpretation.
> The reason why the current policing structure is so corrupt is that the police are expected to "pay their own way" in a sense.
Can you explain this more thoroughly?
> There's a whole phenomenon of known-bad cops jumping from department to department
And to what extent is this the source of the problems of modern policing?
> Perhaps they should have called it "Refund The Police". It even has a double meaning: we need more money for less harmful policing and we need to refund (i.e. send back) the idiots who were running the current corrupt system.
We used to just call this "Police Reform." So this all seems like a huge unforced error, then.
Multiple reasons, but the big one is money. There are a lot of places smaller than big cities who have massive revenue problems. Turning cops into revenue generators seems to be the preferred solution.
And then come second-order effects: private probation enforcement companies, private prisons, communications monopolies for private prisons... and they all lobby to keep and expand their pound of flesh. And you get this:
> anyone who even thinks of defunding the police should visit a country with no police (for example a favella in Rio at night)
Rio has police. The fact that they choose not to act against crime in certain cases in certain areas (and are extremely likely to act brutally against suspects from those areas in other cases) is, actually, quite parallel to the problems that underly the defund/abolish movements in the US.
But neither the defund nor even the abolish movements want there to be no law enforcement, they just want (in the defund cases) resources and peripheral responsibilities stripped from law enforcement agencies and given to more appropriate alternative agencies, or (in the abolish case) local community services, especially law enforcement, to be redesigned and radically restructured, with no 1:1 replacement for the existing main law enforcement agency (but, in virtually all cases, with the law enforcement function retained in new entities.)
> Defunding police because of police brutality is swallowing a spider to catch the fly. You do NOT want to live in a place without police.
False dichotomy.
You can defund the police, by not sending armed, militarized police to do the bullshit parts of their jobs, while still responding to violent incidents.
For 99% of police calls, you don't need an armed gunman to show up. Of the 1% that you currently do, more often than not, that armed officer won't even show up in time.
> The defunding the police stuff is impossible and stupid
> If you think that your life will be worse if the demands or whatever of BLM are met then you really need to be honest with yourself and others about who you are.
I mean, I'm anxious about all _impossible_ things making incursions on to this reality, but boy, you seem very favorable towards ideas you describe as stupid (I'm less convinced defunding is stupid, but abolishing police, that's not for me).
>When talking about policing, the only thing it provides victims is deterrence for criminals. Beyond that, there is nothing more the police can do for victims.
What about taking criminals out of the community and locking them away in prison? Would that not help? Because that's what this surveillance program would do. It allows the police to view footage after the crime occurred and track down the perp. It wouldn't help that victim, but it would prevent the next one.
>Lo and behold, police departments take a lot of tax money that could be used to help victims in ways beyond deterrence and so that is why we talk about defunding police.
False choice. You don't need to defund the police to fund whatever program you want. And you make it seem like there is some magic social program just waiting to be funded that would solve criminality but the evil police budget is what prevents it from being implemented. As if!
> Instead we ask too much, cut funding and criticize the outcomes.
The movement that was partially aimed to stop asking so much of police officers by distributing those responsibilities mentioned in your first sentence to others (Defund the Police) was almost entirely unsuccessful. As the peer poster mentioned, there are almost no instances of police budgets being cut. You are correct about us criticizing the outcomes, though.
It would help if you better understood why the outcomes are criticized, though.
US police killings are 7th most in the world, with peers like Syria and Afghanistan. If you look at it on a per capita basis, US police kill at a rate 3x higher than the next closest developed nation, 10x-20x more than most developed nations.
The NYPD—a police department—has a greater budget than the entire military of Ukraine—with 1/5th the population. Its budget would make it the 33rd largest military in the world.
If their role is supposed to be stopping crime, I know you’re aware that the US has among the highest crime rates of any developed nations. If their role is supposed to be investigating and solving crimes, our police officers are among the worst in the world at the clearance rate.
So. A single police department with more budget than most of the world’s militaries. The sum of our police spending dwarfs other nations. Our police kill more citizens, our crime rate is higher, and fewer of our crimes get solved. What’s not to criticize?
> It is an abolition movement, not because folks don't want consequences for their actions, but because the police state does not appear to have a stable, safe, and productive society as its core goal.
Have you spoken to any minorities? As an Asian immigrant, I feel much safer with more police and will support more funding for police.
As a democracy, we should listen to what people want (acting otherwise is fascist).
> The share of adults who say spending on policing in their area should be increased now stands at 47%, up from 31% in June 2020. That includes 21% who say funding for their local police should be increased a lot, up from 11% who said this last summer.
The police are not perfect but the hard data and critical thinking doesn't support the assertion that we have a police state.
As someone who emigrated from an actual police state to the US, please travel to a real police state and then compare it to the system we have here.
> I've been hard pressed to find anyone who honestly believes there should be zero consequences for violating laws or generally acting in an anti-social manner.
Really? There are huge swathes of population that thinks that way.
> Their description of the issue is not hyperbolic
Saying that police are never held accountable is, in fact, hyperbolic.
> Their description of the solution is well-reasoned
There's no reasoning beyond first order "this thing sucks, progress isn't fast enough, it has to go". No consideration is given to the second or third order effects of such a massive change. So no, it isn't "well-reasoned."
> I do think it's unreasonable to expect a detailed description of this solution off-the-cuff.
Hacker News is _supposed_ to be a place for curious and insightful discussion. Not just issuing complaints about the social issues of the day.
I made an attempt to engage in order to try and produce something substantive, but that fell flat pretty quickly because no effort was made to produce something well-reasoned.
A simple search yielding a page that ignorantly proclaims "But we have to remember that police do not prevent violence." Who responds to mass-shootings in progress? Did a cop not prevent someone from being stabbed in the Makhia Bryant case? Does solving cases and locking up the right people who are violet not prevent them from committing further crimes?
Your own link is agenda pushing, not a serious analysis of how & why policing has reached its current state, how this new system will avoid the same fate, and largely avoids talking about the potential problems of this new system.
> In many contexts, we accept that organizations have to end, and be replaced, to enact meaningful change. Companies go out business; political administrations lose elections.
There’s obviously a significant difference between the regular election cycle (which applies to police chiefs and mayors that run these departments) and abolition. I don’t think the people calling to defund or abolish to police just want to see the administration change, or the officers get fired and re-hired.
I think aside from the Marxists and Anarchists there are very few people who are supportive of abolishing or defunding police. Fomenting resentment and fear of policing, advocating violence against police, and diminishing police’s right to self defense seems to be a deliberate strategy to destabilize communities and increase crime while framing attempts to restore law and order as oppression and racism.
Police forces have gone through some major and rapid shifts due to technology, first in terms of statistical tracking of crime and enforcement and more recently with regard to widespread surveillance and body cams.
Police can ultimately expect to have every response recorded, maybe even automatically analyzed and flagged by AI. Perhaps surprisingly most police are supportive of body cams because more often than not they are used to support an officer’s actions.
> Some communities highly dissatisfied with their police attempted to defund and/or defunded their department. That's not a great example because self-service policing doesn't work very well, but it's kinda close.
This is a great example for what should happen - demands for systemic reform, not taking what you think is "your" money and going home.
It's one thing to opt out of a system, it's another to think you're justified to get money back for it. As someone without any children am I justified in getting 24k/year back because I'm not using the school system for my (average) 2 non-kids? Of course not, but I do pay taxes for that service.
> Defund the police. Not for any socialist reasons, or because they're racist or whatever people are angry about - but because they are so incompetent at their job
Who on Earth thinks the answer to attracting competent people to a middle-class job is lowering pay?
> 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.
Then you suffer from a profound lack of empathy.
I invested your "10 seconds". Google took me to a site called Defund the Police[1].
Reading this site, it seems that they want to... defund the police. As in, take the majority of their funding away, and put it somewhere else (nominally into social programs).
Not making a value judgement here, but I'm pretty sure this thing does what it says on the tin.
[1] https://defundthepolice.org
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