In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Texas Congressman Will Hurd makes some suggestions about what Congress can do to reduce police abuse:
While marching in solidarity with George Floyd’s family and 60,000 others in Houston, I saw that you can be outraged by a black man getting murdered in police custody, thankful that law enforcement is enabling our First Amendment rights, and angry that criminals are treading on American values by looting, rioting and killing police.
His suggestions are:
- Ensure that federal law-enforcement grants go only to departments following best policing practices.
- Empower police chiefs to fire bad officers and keep them off the force permanently.
- Clarify federal law to ensure officers can be held accountable in court for violating civil rights.
While I agree that there is a problem I don’t think is a silver bullet for solving it. Certainly not the “defund the police” mantra being promulgated by BLM. It will need to be remedied jurisdiction by jurisdiction, police force by police force, maybe even police officer by police officer.
We had best hope that the issues about which people are protesting are not systemic. If they are I have no confidence that they are amenable to change.
Convenience store clerks can be fined $300. and even go to jail for selling cigarettes or alcohol to minors.
Maybe a model there?
I think defund means reduce funding and spend the money on alternative programs. You, and others, want it to mean do away with the police. No doubt you can find a few people who mean that, but most mean what I said.
I think it is systemic, as in culture. As long as police think they are justified in treating every interaction as a zero risk encounter, like with unarmed 75 y/o people, they can justify any response. On top of that as long as the instinct is to always protect each other, even when they clearly do wrong, I think outside efforts will have only partial effects. Lets face it, we have 800,000 LEOs, at least, in the US. What are the chances that out of that many some wont do something wrong?
Steve
You clearly have not been paying attention. A veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council is on record as favoring ABOLISHING the police department. Now prove that most think what you want it to mean.
Zero. Which means the problem is not systemic. It’s inherent. “Systemic” means relating to the system—the opposite of incidental. With a systemic problem changes to the system can mitigate the problem. With an inherent problem nothing short of abolition will effect the desired change.
Here’s another example, this one from Los Angeles:
They want to spend the money on other things but they’re okay with cutting 90% of the force.
In Illinois it means starting over de novo:
Rep. Ford is overestimating the savings. Under Illinois law the city would still be on the hook for the pensions of all of those former CPD officers.
From an op-ed in the Washington Post:
The point of the op-ed is that we are over-reliant on the police which I believe to be true. The solution to that is to only have the laws that are absolutely necessary. But notice the equivalencing of abolition with “defund”. And that’s by a supporter.
In Illinois I believe that if a municipality disbands its police department, law enforcement transfers to the county. I would kind of be surprised that this wouldn’t be true generally. What I’m less sure about is whether the county sheriff can then access at least some of the tax revenues that were going to the city for law enforcement. Some villages in this situation prefer to enter into some intergovernmental cooperative agreement because they think the county will do a dramatically poorer job. If they don’t create a new law enforcement district, it generally means that the larger city has a police department, politically accountable to city government who are accountable to the voters, while the smaller city essentially has contracted for services.
In any event, I assume that in most places getting rid of the municipal police means the municipality loses control of the police it will have.
Sigh. You are debating the absurd.
Now, I’ll grant you this, steve. IMO elected officials, realizing that abolishing police forces is a non-starter, are trying to negotiate with the radicals who are taking to their streets, offering a little tribute to see if that appeases them. In some places they may succeed. The mayor has pretty obviously lost in Minneapolis but I suspect that the City Council and their radical supporters will be gravely disappointed.
Should Minneapolis disband its police force, the adjacent suburbs and the county will beef up their police forces and not only will Minneapolis lose political control of the police they’ll lose the revenue paying for Hennepin County’s police protection. They will get neither reform nor the expanded services in other directions they want.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the city and state police chiefs are appointed by the mayors and governors, respectively. No elections. At the mercy of the politicians. The sheriffs, however, are elected, and can do what they want. Seems to me they will fill the gap. Heh. I suspect they will have grass roots support.
Oh, and contra steve, the people will do what they have to do; we are needlessly setting up confrontation. Steve made light of it, but here, and other southern states we won’t have it. We just won’t. Its a mentality. Guns exist. We are not subservient bitches. Steve may be. He’s clueless, truly clueless. Let the northern cities burn. You don’t see violent protests here. Repeat: you don’t have violent protests here. Ask yourself why? Why?
You may find this commentary incendiary, but in my opinion its simply real world, which so many just can’t come to grips with because its icky. Its reality. But people don’t like icky. They don’t have the balls to argue icky. But if you can’t come to grips with real life issues, how are you going to come to grips with the reality of the injustice of looting, and setting, mostly minority small businesses, on fire. You can’t. You set it aside. You are, emotionally, a child, or just an amoral thug.
Did you see the tape of the Minneapolis mayor slinking away like the little impotent bitch he is? A liberal on full display.
Los Angeles, much larger than MPLS, has shown what defunding will be by actually acting. MPLS is only talking.
“Defunding is simpler than disbanding, though, and at least one mayor’s already taken that step. After Californians decried a proposal to increase the Los Angeles Police Department budget to $1.86 billion, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti agreed to slash between $100 million to $150 million from the proposed funding.”
So you have one example of maybe. I have a much larger example, already done. Do we see one or two departments actually disbanded? Maybe. I am betting that is all we see at most. You think otherwise so lets see where we end up.
“Zero. Which means the problem is not systemic. It’s inherent. ”
Human nature is inherent. Being on the protestant side I think sin is inherent in people. There will always be people, including police that do bad things. It is the response to that bad behavior, not only in terms of punishment but also in trying to minimize it which is systemic, cultural or whatever you want to call it. The system or culture in some cities is clearly not nearly as toxic, and in some places, Chicago seems like a good example, it is pretty awful. Unless you change that system/culture I dont think you get more than partial reform anywhere.
Steve
“Now, I’ll grant you this, steve. IMO elected officials, realizing that abolishing police forces is a non-starter, are trying to negotiate with the radicals who are taking to their streets, offering a little tribute to see if that appeases them.”
Exactly. For some reason you seemed to be able to realize that when Trump promised a 30 foot wall across the entire souther border and Mexico would pay for it, that had no chance of happening. Someone on the left makes a radical and essentially impossible promise and it must be true. Appeasing the radicals in both parties is pretty important so impossible plans get generated.
What is possible is what LA did, and other variants. As noted elsewhere about 30%-50% of 911 calls are for mental health issues. Are we better off hiring police to handle these calls, or have trained team of mental health workers? Reduce police spending by 10%-20% and use that to expand the mental health team. One of the things we are learning in health care is how to effectively allocate resources and sometimes you dont spend it on obvious personnel. If a hospital is short on internists, maybe rather than hire 4 more internists they might be better off hiring 5 more visiting nurses and 4 more social workers. Might reduce the number of Docs needed and pts have better outcomes. Might actually save money.
Steve
So we are in 2020 having a debate about whether to take Democrats seriously or literally, like we did with Trump in 2016?
At this point — I think it is better to let mayors and city councils define what they mean by defunding the police; lets judge the phrase by its results.
All I insist is it does not become a Federal government mandate or as a way for mayors / city councils to socialize their mismanagement. I absolutely oppose if Minneapolis shifts 1 billion from police to some activist slush fund, then asks the State to put its police forces to maintain order, and the Federal Government 1 billion dollars to pay for the “reform”.
“You don’t see violent protests here. ”
Missouri was a slave state, so part of your tribe. No lack of violence and riots there. Charlottesville ring a bell? Oops, sorry I forgot. Killings by people on the right dont count. No lack of looting and riot events in Miami and New Orleans for that matter. I am sure they dont count for some reason. Maybe they just remember the Greensboro massacre and know that the police will work with counter protestors to help kill protestors. No lack of riots in the 60s and 70s, of course no one in the South had guns then.
No riots in our area. Maybe because we have guns too. Even people on the left hunt here.
Steve
Mayor Garcetti is a joke in LA! He talks about defunding the police dept. to appease the people who have been harassing him at his own home, while he demands 24/7 police protection himself! Hypocrite doesn’t describe half of mayor garcetti’s traits.
“sin is inherent in people. There will always be people, including police that do bad things.”
That’s a Strawman.
Sin is not what’s on trial here. What’s on trial is anti-Black Racism. Endemic, inoperable, untreatable Racism. Systemic, ingrained, inherited, even legislated hatred and bias that knowingly allows Black people to be killed by Police at will with full support of the dominant white population.
If you don’t understand that YOU are the problem, YOU are the Racist, and YOU cannot be cured, only eliminated, you are not worthy of going to your knee in submission. Not to repent and ask forgiveness of the oppressed Black population, but to submit to them.
Leave their city in shame. They don’t want you, slaver. They’ll do fine without you, murderer.
YOU are the problem. YOU need to go.
How this American of African descent feels about white contrition.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/frederick-joseph-warren-surrogate-dems-african-cloth