OT - Veto Proof Majority On Minneapolis' City Council Supports Disbanding Police Department
Personally, I hope they remove all first responders. 100% of them. I only need the Second Amendment and some fire extinguishers. /s/ urban-prepper since 2006
There's not going to be no police, they're going to rebuild the department. Don't just read the headlines.
Camden NJ did something similar in 2013, so it's not without precedent. It worked quite well for them, actually.
You are interpreting what you think Minneapolis might do, not what local BLM leaders have said. Minneapolis' Mayor was forced to leave a protest after saying "I don't support completely abolishing the police department."
Either way however, one thing has been validated in every survey of minority voters, including recent surveys: the black community wants more police presence, not less. They'd simply like racists not to choke or mistreat them. Chicago's African American Mayor said the same thing over the weekend.
Defunding or even reducing police is an absurd idea that hurts precisely the people we should be helping.
What BLM wants and what's going to happen aren't necessarily the same thing. The council has admittedly been very wishy washy thus far, but they have also said something will replace the PD, they're not just disbanding and calling it a day.
They've tried reforming the MPD, most recently after the Philando Castille shooting, but when abuses are so ingrained and when they're so resistant to change, blowing it up and building it over right isn't that absurd. Given Camden ended up with more police for less money, and fewer abuses to boot, it's not really absurd at all.
Minneapolis' City Council President on CNN today:
"It will take time, but I can envision a future in Minneapolis without any police"
(in response to a CNN question "what will happen if I call at 3 in the morning because my house is being broken into?"):
"I definitely hear that a lot, and I know that for myself too, that that comes from a place of privilege."
This is almost beyond parody in it's sheer academic stupidity.
" Defunding or even reducing police is an absurd idea that hurts precisely the people we should be helping. "
No - there is actually some pretty good evidence that reducing police budgets and shifting the money into things which reduce dangerous interactions (mental health professionals instead of police on mental health calls, etc.) actually work.
There is some definite evidence that the "law of the instrument" comes into play with police forces... and not everything is a nail.
Honest question. What happens to the good officers that were/are on the force?
I don't see why it could not be similar to any other type regime change (think elected officials, or a coaching change to keep it more Mgo relevant).
Disband the organization and "fire everyone" -- allow those fired to re-apply for their jobs. Just the raw math behind trying to staff a police force or community response force or whatever you want to call it would imply that a fair number of these "good officers" would be rehired and maybe even promoted or put in better positions to use their skill-sets.
I would say your comparison of a corporate regime change to what Minneapolis has decided to do is like comparing apples to oranges. Also, how many of those good officers will want to return to a city that just fired them because a POS murdered an innocent man? And for the good ones that don't want to return to a city that I would say unjustly fired them, now what? How many departments around the country will want to touch anyone coming from Minneapolis? Seems to me like they just threw the baby out with the bath water.
Good officers with no misconduct history and training that meets any upgraded standards would almost certainly be re-hired.
And you know this how? Any officer from that department now has a stigma attached to them no matter how good they are. You don't think when they are being considered for a position with a new department that the fact they worked for the MPD wont come into play? I think the city council of Minneapolis proved my point when the decided to defund and dismantle the entire PD because of a few scumbags.
I had no idea this was happening in Camden, so I spent some time reading the stuff that's out there on it. The best evidence that it is working is in the cops' claim that they are able to get help in the form of information that they would have never been able to obtain using their former kick ass model. This is a huge improvement in everything. One can only hope that it holds.
I also went to the Camden Police web site.
They have a picture of two of their officers wearing masks while holding adorable puppies.
I thought, "Well, cops have never been much good at subtle, at least they're being unsubtle here in the right direction."
camdencountypd.org
What happened in Camden could just as easily be seen as a racist usurpation of self-representation and power. The 6% white city of Camden had their police department shut down and the state stood up a new county force to police there based on the majority white county. For Michigan residents, it would be the same as the Governor stripping Benton Harbor of the right to police themselves and giving Berrien County policing authority. This is the new model of success? Yes, homicides are way down in all of New Jersey including Camden and I support their evidence-based policing approach in that state that goes after illegal gun owners and gangs. That said, we could just as easily write an editorial on the injustice of police reform there.
There's not going to be no police, they're going to rebuild the department. Don't just read the headlines.
Not necessarily in this article, but in some circles, that's exactly what some people are advocating. No police -- community enforcement.
listen to what the head of the city council said on cnn this morning...
What could possibly go wrong?
Possibly not a whole lot, depending upon what having a "community-based public safety department" means, as a replacement for the current police department.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/how-camden-new-jersey-reformed-its-police-department
Maybe something like this. Disbanded the police and made a new one essentially. Excessive force complaints down 95%!
I’m afraid the slogan of “defund the police” is going to give a lot of people the wrong impression.
Rebuilding the police depts in a lot of major cities might be the right move tho. Gets rid of the cronies in the unions that purposefully shield crooked cops.
Camden’s reform could be a great roadmap for others to follow. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crime-in-camden/549542/
i have the same concern. 'defund the police' is a really unfortunate choice of phrase for something that, if you describe it to most people, makes sense...but "don't pay the police to do things that other entities can do way better because they're trained for it" isn't very catchy.
Yeah it doesn’t mean just stop funding police. It’s also meaning that we have to allocate the funding to upgrade the societal issues which facilitate the crime we supposedly need police protection from.
For a minor example, instead of treating drug addition as a criminal offense, treat it as a health issue. Rehabilitate criminals while incarcerated instead of punishing them and sending them back to society.
Crime will never 100% disappear. But we can’t ignore the socio-economic conditions which facilitate the vacuum in which crimes occur. Over-policing of minor offenses created bigger issues down the road.
Edit: How exactly does this get negged exactly? Are we denying that the vast majority of crime occurs because of various social and economic issues? Are we denying the impact of going to jail for a minor offense and that implicating your employment status and the ability for you to get a job once you return, and that the ensuing economic struggle leads that person to return to crime?
It’s easy to sit here and say “crime bad.” But if we, as a society, don’t address the issues that facilitate crime in the first place, crime isn’t going anywhere. No matter what the police do. The US has less than 5% of the world population, yet almost 25% of the global prison population. In the “Land of the Free” no less. That’s a simple sign that our laws don’t work and we’re going about addressing those issues entirely wrong.
yes, along the lines of drug court; or if probation, in addition to punitive measures for violations, was also built to help people socioeconomically, to the point that some motivated people on probation can look back and say that probation helped them.
Minneapolis' Mayor was forced to leave a protest because he said "I'm not in favor of completely abolishing the police department."
Reform is a pretty difficult word- I can see how it often gets confused with defund.
The goal here is defund, as well as reallocate. Take money away from the police and give it to mental health professionals. Half of all police killings involve people with mental illnesses. Police should not be interacting with the vast majority of people going through mental crises. Reallocate the funds to create better-suited professionals.
There are many who believe police and corrections officers need to have a background or a degree in psychology and social work. People trained to deal with different human behaviors instead of short-tempered guys with guns.
'reform the police' is a phrase that's been used many times; on the rare occasions that reforms have actually occured, the reforms have had nowhere near the desired effects.
it's not surprising that police reformers have given up on the word.
I mean, I've seen quotes from some of these activists and protesters calling for a "police-free future." I don't think it's possible to get the wrong impression from that; it's very straightforward. I've seen a lot of apologetic articles pop up in places like Rolling Stone and Vox and the Atlantic, hustling to try and explain that "defund the police" does not actually mean defunding the police. "Here's what it actually means." I say that it's on the activists to use words that mean what they want to mean, not ones that just rile everyone up.
i mostly agree; a "police-free future," is not likely, attainable, or honestly something that we should even try to accomplish. on some level, an activist saying that phrase is doing their cause a disservice by making meaningful discussion less likely. words mean things.
that said - in my opinion, protest is meaningless unless it forces power into an uncomfortable position. using the phrase "defund the police" forces us to ask ourselves what, exactly, we want the police to do in this society. do we want such a large police force that its funding forces budget cuts to departments that could provide services far, far more effectively than the police? one example - do we need police officers doing sweeps of homeless people, when an effective community housing policy could reduce homelessness without a police presence?
So we don't like unions any more?
(And, before you answer "well we don't like bad police unions", that's not the question...unions exist to protect their members so it's not a question of good or bad, it's a question of what unions are and do)
How is this hard to understand?
Unions helping negotiate a fair wage and protect job security: good.
Unions helping protect dirty cops from consequences of criminal behavior: bad.
Can we have one without the other? So far, it hasn't seemed like it.
How hard is that for you to understand?
Camden (<80K) is a much smaller city than Minneapolis (425K) and didn't have the woke activist Antifa loving City Council that Minnapolis has when it reinvented its police force. It is a different dynamic where Camden didn't go into this with the "f@ck the Police" attitude that we are seeing right now in the Twin City.
Just listen to what one Council Member said on CNN. These are not rational adults running that city.
https://twitter.com/EddieZipperer/status/1269951088964370432
So do cops do too much or not enough? I don’t understand her logic.
If I understand her correctly, I think she's saying that whites get proper police attention because of their white privilege but not blacks and therefore the current police department is racist and should be dismantled to build a new one that serves everyone.
This is what makes America great. Let the cities and states handle their issues their way. It'll be interesting to see what happens in Minneapolis.
Go listen to councilman Lisa bender. She is saying abolish/destroy/dismantle. Detroit is about to look like utopia compared to Minneapolis. Says having someone to call in the middle of the night if someone is breaking into your home is “privileged”. What a loon. Instead of defunding police we need to defund universities. By the way these same people don’t want you to have guns either. Gooood luck with that
Yep, "defund the police" is such a bad phrase because it's not really what most people want
That's not disbanding the police. It's just changing the police in some non-specific way.
The lady on the podium who confronted the Minneapolis mayor, in front of the 1000s of protesters, said VERBATIM, "Jacob Frye, we have a yes or no question for you. YES or NO. Will you commit to defunding the Minneapolis Police Department? WE DON'T WANT NO MORE POLICE. That clear. We don't want people with guns toting around in our community, shooting us down. Is that clear? It is a yes or no question."
We don't want people with guns toting around in our community, shooting us down.
Sounds to me like this is exactly what they want.
so i suppose no politics is dead
Only shit posting and lefty politics allowed.
Anything else will be considered part of the problem
It's not about left or right buddy. There's nothing more conservative than upholding the rights given to Americans by the constitution - unfortunately a brainwashed segment of our population sold their souls for an electoral win and continue to defend a sociopathic narcissistic aspiring autocrat, and call it the "conservative movement." If only these Neo-fascists realized that they are the antithesis of "conservative", and start to care about every amendment such as freedom of the press, and freedom of speech as much as they do about the right to bear arms.
You've been an outspoken Trump apologist on here for months, and now you spew that it's about right and left, when it never was. Sorry, not going to let you distort and rewrite your past comments.
This is about our system and institutions holding up against the weight of everything that is un-American about the attacks this administration makes against the foundations of this country, not a left vs. right debate.
You're on the wrong side of history bud, and every day the tides of the righteous continue to erode at your island. General after general, past president after past president, and eventually the very politicians that sold their party to a sociopath out of desperation for victory will no longer be able to support or rationalize this atrocity.
Well done
Thank you for this.
"You're on the wrong side of history bud". Don't use this phrase, it's really stupid. A lot of leftist policy would look really at home in say Louis XIV France, and bears more resemblance to Imperial Rome than it does to anything an unbiased person would call "progressive". (Please note, I'm not defending conservative policy, but conservatives don't use this moronic phrase - and yeah, I'm fully aware Pres. Obama used it, and it was just as whole-cloth brainless in that case too). Go look up the 'governmental' policy of the early Plymouth colony c. 1620 - it's scary how much it resembles modern leftist ideal. Wrong side of history? I'd like a government that's learned something in the last 400 years, please.
"tides of the righteous"?!? Do you understand that this phrase is disturbing? The only way our country stays on course is finding balance between the two sides. I absolutely guarantee that there is no monopoly of virtue on either side of the political aisle. I get that disagreeing with you here is what ends up with people like me in the gulag when you have power - but it requires people who say things like that to build gulags in the first place - and there's no argument ever made that can put righteousness and gulag on the same side. Or at least not without a great deal of self-delusion anyway.
"past president after past president" Only an idiot would argue that 1 president has made this whole crummy mess. It takes years of effort, and yeah, that means the ones significantly responsible for making this bed are the past presidents whose policies were just to kick inconvenient problems down the road. I really wouldn't be using their lack of support as an argument against this president, just sayin'.
I'm not asking you to be a supporter of the current president. Everyone has to make their own decisions about that based on their own lives. One of the biggest mistakes we make as people is assuming everyone could or should see the world from our perspectives. Take a step back, don't look at the president, but maybe a congressperson from the other side. Learn about their district, try to figure out why those people voted that way. Try your best to be unbiased. If at any point your answer includes any version of "they're bigoted" (i.e. they're racist) - you're the problem. Fix the problem. If you can decide that (even if you disagree) that they have an honest, rational argument for voting that person in - congratulations, you've taken a big step towards being the open-minded grown-up towards which we should all strive.
President Trump is no paragon of goodness. He's not been perfect. He's a guy doing a job. You do not owe him a whiff of support (aside from not breaking the law). If you really believe Sen. Biden's going to do it better, well by all means pull that lever. Don't lie to yourself that he'll do everything right. He won't. He'll just be a guy doing a job. We'll all hope he does well, and some folks will disagree with his decisions, that's part of how this goes. Disagreement spurns ideas, ideas are where great things happen. Neither side gets it all right or all wrong. There's a lot of good in finding disagreements and talking. Talking requires respect. Good ideas are only spawned in good spaces. You don't have to agree, you just have to respect, and be willing to listen.
Good luck Bo, I wish you well.
I hope you don't expect a response because you're attacking the phrasing of an argument instead of its substance. And relying on straw man arguments is essentially conceding a debate.
"You're on the wrong side of history" is the very core of that argument, not just a pithy phrase. And there have been many, many people - prohibitionists to give just one example - who were absolutely convinced they were on the right side of history, only to be proven wrong.