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What a 'defund the police' plan in Seattle might look like

Brainster said:
CAHOOTS has been around for 31 years, and they were able to handle 20% of the 911 calls? When you go around proposing "abolition" of the police, that hardly sounds like a dramatic success story.
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It's a very dramatic success story if 20% of 911 calls involve mental crisis. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be able to help much at fires or car accidents.
 
deadrose said:
It's a very dramatic success story if 20% of 911 calls involve mental crisis. I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be able to help much at fires or car accidents.
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That actually seems like a very good plan to implement honestly. If 20% of calls involve mental crisis, there should be a dedicated response with people correctly trained for the situation. I imagine a large problem will be the recurring nature of this, but the more familiar those arriving to help in these calls are with the person, the less likely it will devolve. Everyone will have to accept that there will be a certain percent of events that will turn south though, and not deter the attempt because of it.
 
rdwight said:
That actually seems like a very good plan to implement honestly. If 20% of calls involve mental crisis, there should be a dedicated response with people correctly trained for the situation. I imagine a large problem will be the recurring nature of this, but the more familiar those arriving to help in these calls are with the person, the less likely it will devolve. Everyone will have to accept that there will be a certain percent of events that will turn south though, and not deter the attempt because of it.
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Putting on my technocrat hat:

Is it cheaper to provide mental health care to people in crisis than it is to pay out settlements after the cops show up and just shoot them?
 
lomiller said:
Why do you think opposing fascism is bad?
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It's possible to oppose "fascism" without being a violent far-left extremists with no respect for even basic personal freedoms and rights. The enemy of my enemy is not nessecerily my friend.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Putting on my technocrat hat:

Is it cheaper to provide mental health care to people in crisis than it is to pay out settlements after the cops show up and just shoot them?
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Seems like a thread topic in itself, along with homelessness and mental health etc. Far too many moving parts to attempt root cause solutions before targeted emergency management ones.
 
Here's a terrific article about an armchair detective who has compiled the largest database on unsolved murders in the US. These two points might prove salient:

MAP tracks staffing trends on its website, too. Hargrove notes that Flint, Mich., and Dayton, Ohio, have seen their clearance rates fall more than 30 percentage points since the 1990s, coinciding with huge reductions in police manpower (330 to 185 officers in Flint; 500 to 394 in Dayton).
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And:

Pulling up information from 218 metropolitan jurisdictions in the 2014 Uniform Crime Report, he found that in the places with poor clearance rates, the homicide rate was almost double that of places where the clearance rate was better—from 9.6 homicides to 17.9 per 100,000 people.

“It makes perfect sense,” Hargrove says. “If you leave the killers to walk the street, why wouldn’t that cause more killings? The answer is, it does."
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“It makes perfect sense,” Hargrove says. “If you leave the killers to walk the street, why wouldn’t that cause more killings? The answer is, it does."
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Good to know that all those murdering cops would be behind bars if only there were more cops to arrest them.

Wait...
 
Leftus said:
Why should you renounce something you aren't, and repair damage that doesn't exist until Antifa shows up and burns you out? The target isn't fascist until it's designated as the target and then there is no escape.
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As far as I can see, actual misapplication of the label is...rather rare. When, for example, black people rally in a public park to protest police brutality, and police respond by beating random people with batons, flooding the entire neighborhoos with tear gas, and so on...well, the police are pretty much acting fascistically. Same thing for the guy in public (either in the open, on Youtube, whatever) waving guns and screeching about how "George Soros" and "the Globalists" are trying to replace white people with black and brown people as part of their evil plan to...do...something.

Antifa doesn't define what a fascist is, until they show up ready to torch your place to the ground. Target didn't seem to be to be a bastion of Fascism, but those with ill intent showed up. It's a Willie Sutton justification. Why is Target fascist? They have goods we want. If only Willie had called himself an Anti-Fascist. Getting to believe banks were fascist would not be a hard sell, but the logic is backwards.
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Odd, I don't recall Antifa burning any Target - although random angry people, and white nationalists (ie. fascists) have. Nor do I recall them attacking any banks - although they've likely exposed particular people that work at various banks - although fake anarchists that really just want to vandalize businesses certainly have.

And actually, they have a pretty clear view of what makes a fascist movement - although like everything in politics, nothing is absolutely black-and-white. Indicators include things like demanding a return to a distant, fictional idealized past, the targeting of a subgroup that is somehow both extremely weak, and at the same time secretly in control of everything and thus incredibly powerful, and an obnoxious, unhealthy view of the roles of men and women in society.

...huh. Sounds familiar to me here in America...
 
One thing you can expect: City council members asking, "Where are the police?"

Just months after leading an effort that would have defunded the police department, City Council members at Tuesday’s work session pushed chief Medaria Arradondo to tell them how the department is responding to the violence.

The number of reported violent crimes, like assaults, robberies and homicides are up compared to 2019, according to MPD crime data. More people have been killed in the city in the first nine months of 2020 than were slain in all of last year. Property crimes, like burglaries and auto thefts, are also up. Incidents of arson have increased 55 percent over the total at this point in 2019.
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Petulance and irresponsibility aren’t exactly desirable qualities in people to whom we grant the power of authority by use of deadly force.
 
Brainster said:
Yep, bring on those flying squads of mental health professionals. That will surely do the trick!
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Good point. We should probably just stick with the militarized fascists who violate civil rights, commit murder, and conspire to cover it up because there are obviously no other options.
 
johnny karate said:
Petulance and irresponsibility aren’t exactly desirable qualities in people to whom we grant the power of authority by use of deadly force.
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The cops are never around when you need them, but always seem to find time to harrass and beat random poor and/or darker-skinned people.

Imagine that, it's as though that thing black people have been saying collectively for well over a century is correct. :eek:
 
Anecdotal evidence, the two times I tried to make a criminal complaint to the cops, both around being chased during road rage encounters captured on helmet cam footage with clear license plates, the cops did nothing. Nowadays I wouldn't even bother, but I was younger and more naive then.

Sure, they'll hassle people in the streets, because that's easy, but they suck at real police work. Complaints about cops not showing up in a timely matter, not following up on cases despite clear paths forward, and not solving seemingly simple cases are extremely common.

Clearance rates for serious crimes is pitifully low despite the bloated police budgets. The cops suck at their job and are a parasite on the communities they serve.
 
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SuburbanTurkey said:
Anecdotal evidence, the two times I tried to make a criminal complaint to the cops, both around being chased during road rage encounters captured on helmet cam footage with clear license plates, the cops did nothing. Nowadays I wouldn't even bother, but I was younger and more naive then.

Sure, they'll hassle people in the streets, because that's easy, but they suck at real police work. Complaints about cops not showing up in a timely matter, not following up on cases despite clear paths forward, and not solving seemingly simple cases are extremely common.

Clearance rates for serious crimes is pitifully low despite the bloated police budgets. The cops suck at their job and are a parasite on the communities they serve.
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There's an aphorism among second-amendment nerds that the cops will show up in ten minutes, and you have ten seconds.

One of the most interesting developments of the civil rights era was the Black Panthers promoting the exercise of second amendment rights for black Americans - especially open carry.

Anyway, my prediction is that communities that successfully abolish the police will immediately re-invent police. And, because they are explicitly rejecting hundreds of years of conventional wisdom and baked-in tradition, their version of policing will be very ugly for some time, until they figure out all the pitfalls for themselves from first principles.
 
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