I really hate that in typical US manner this issue gets pushed to the extreme so in the end a reasonable discussion can’t be had but it’s only a fight with everybody digging in and not listening to each other.
Abolishing the police was always nonsense but there are plenty of areas where police is overused and too aggressive. In my view there shouldn’t be police in schools or hospitals. The drug war causes a lot of unnecessary arrests and aggravation with a lot of neighborhoods. Bad cops often stay in the force without consequences for clearly bad behavior. Cops don’t have enough training so they aren’t prepared for difficult situation . The list goes on and on.
Addressing these issues would be good for cops, citizens and also public budgets. But instead the country chooses to have this stupid fight where the interested parties spend a lot of time distorting other views. Reminds me of the typical healthcare discussions. It’s very sad.
I think the thing you're missing here is that the distortion (see the use of the word abolish here, the proposal is defunding) is completely deliberate.
This divide didn't happen by accident, it's the product of decades of deliberate political choices.
It wasn't like this a few years ago. Outraged responses are a feature of outrage culture, which is pretty recent. Media have been pushing it to drive clicks, and sell ads on cable TV, for years. Grifters push their instagrams, their vlogs, their books.
I think the decline started when University produced generation after generation of supposedly educated people that had no skill other than fanning the flames.
And social media has been the A-bomb against rational, paused discourse.
You need police in hospitals to maintain security for the patients in there. It's not uncommon to have incidents with people from the outside trying to assault/murder someone they know in the hospital. Criminals shot on the street still have to go to the hospital and this leaves an opportunity for their would-be-murderer to come in and finish the job.
Schools, it's sad but I'm in favor of school resource officers. Those people were good to have around and can serve as a role model.
Issues have to get pushed to the extreme because politicians drag their heels otherwise.
Corruption is the best business to be in. Police departments have no interest in oversight, beyond the amount necessary for leadership to protect their positions of power. And Police Unions are generally very powerful and dominate local politics.
> I really hate that in typical US manner this issue gets pushed to the extreme so in the end a reasonable discussion can’t be had
That's kind of the intention. It's easy to argue against "Abolish the police! Anarchy for everyone!". Not so much against "maybe we shouldn't send people with guns drawn to respond to unarmed individuals going through a mental health crisis" [1].
None of the real proposals for policing reform that have come out the protests are calling to get rid of the police. Pretending that they want that is a political fearmongering tactic.
Abolishing the police combined with the protests (or riots) and the move against the NRA creates a very uncomfortable environment for probably half of the United States.
All in an election year no less.
Does no one remember 2000,2004 and 2016? Perhaps the DNC could write a book called “How to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”
That's the point... Nobody is seriously considering getting rid of the police. Calling it that is a fearmongering technique from the political right.
Biden doesn't even support the defund the police movement [1] which is the real goal of most of these protests. If you look beyond the media's reality distortion bubble, the defund the police movement is about diversifying how we respond to crises, not getting rid of the police as some claim.
You should be aware that I've talked to liberals in rural areas who feel physically threatened by far-right rhetoric. I.e. the "the only good democrat is a dead democrat" video, conservatives guarding voting locations with guns, the president encouraging both these examples, etc. A couple of them have taken up gun ownership specifically because of this fear. I absolutely sympathize with both sides, but being "very uncomfortable" is nowhere near one-sided.
But it's an uncomfortable environment happening on the incumbent's watch. That doesn't say much positive about the incumbent's ability to lead, and suggests new leadership is in order.
"Aren't so sure" from reading the article seems like an understatement. Many of the people featured in this article are suing the city for not doing it's responsibility.
I get that police treatment is often inequitable, but I think we've had some experiments this summer showing that some of the radical changes being proposed have their own problems.
> the radical changes being proposed have their own problems
I'd like to point out that none of said changes have been implemented anywhere in the US in any meaningful way. Save some minor defunding, I know of no locale who has transferred any responsibility away from the police, which is one of the main roads to abolition. As another poster said, this is a very clear straw man. CHAZ was a result of protesting and an incredibly aggressive Seattle PD, not an ideal people are looking to recreate everywhere.
What experiments? None of the proposals for policing reform have been implemented. The only thing we've seen are the police refusing to respond to calls and do their job in a political move. Nobody asked for that and none of the serious reform proposals consider anything like that.
It's possible to have a world where the police do their job and are accountable when they commit horrible acts as we've seen over the past few months. Talking about the subject as if we can either have the police and look the other way at their abuse, or get rid of them completely is a terrible false dichotomy.
We can split hairs about 'defunding' vs 'abolishing', but I just get the distinct impression that many people have got no real idea about the threat that crime poses to the prosperity of a community (or city or state), and the effort that is required to keep it in check. The occasional misbehaviour of police officers is a small price to pay compared to the oppression and privation wrought by widespread crime.
Most of the examples that spurred this movement are killings that are disproportionately either negligent or depraved heart at the very least (let's pretend we can't form an argument that any of them were purposeful murders that were not necessary to save the officer). Even given this benefit of the doubt, it is still reasonable for independent citizens of a free nation to fight tooth and nail against such an assault on a tenant of civilization: That the state never kills you in the streets, if they can at all help it. Further, I can't see from any angle how allowing these instances to continue is a necessary price for preventing widespread crime.
>I just get the distinct impression that many people have got no real idea about the threat that crime poses to the prosperity of a community
I can't disagree more strongly.
>... and the effort that is required to keep it in check
This I agree with. But this is a weak argument against people who live with a constant background, and sometimes foreground, fear for their lives from their own government.
Funding a massive police force to curb what essential amounts to socioeconomic issues is highly inefficient. Putting that funding towards building better communities, alleviating the factors associated with crime directly, rather than just trying to patch it by putting public workers in danger.
Human ego seems to be the most powerful thing in the Universe.
Whole communities commit "suicide" just to fuel the delusions of a handful and the self-preservation of another handful. How many injustices have been perpetrated in the name of justice?
No one comes out of this looking good, certainly not the police too.
The reform movements of the last ~15 years have consistently failed to learn one lesson: pick a simple, easy to understand slogan that leads to simple, actionable goals. Occupy had the exact same problem and ultimately accomplished nothing.
Obama and Trump both understood this and both chose slogans that virtually no one can disagree with (“Change / Yes We Can” and “Make America Great Again.”) Pretty easy to understand.
“Abolish the police” seems almost designed to fail as a slogan right from the beginning.
People want security. That means different things to different people. Law enforcement is not necessarily the same thing as security. Law enforcement means just that, and the laws themselves may not be what many would consider just. The laws are likely to reflect the prejudices of those in power, which may lend itself to why we're seeing the clashes we're seeing in the US right now.
Those with the resources to do so have on-site security. This ranges from gated communities, to some condo/apartment buildings, and even shopping malls. Even this isn't necessarily free of problems, but it needs to be seen as something fundamentally different from law enforcement. So when we talk about "abolishing" the police, we have to ask what we really want in its stead.
> Law enforcement is not necessarily the same thing as security
I'm having difficulty finding my source right now, but it appears that in cases of homicide by someone unknown to the victim, a police officer is the perpetrator in between 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 incidents. These statistics don't consider whether the killing is justified; they just observe that if people know of someone who was killed by a stranger, there's a 1-in-3 or 1-in-4 chance that stranger has a uniform.
And as we know, people's perceptions of safety are more important than actual statistics. We rewrote the nature of air travel in response to 9/11.
Am I the only one under impression that the article is chaotic and it's hard to tell from it what is the extend of the damage done and who and to what degree contributed to it?
> “Seattle’s unprecedented decision to abandon and close off an entire city neighborhood, leaving it unchecked by the police, unserved by fire and emergency health services, and inaccessible to the public”
Is this what people advocating for abolish the police are advocating for? Removal of health services? Isn't it literally the opposite, to have more and more varied health (and social) services, that people are advocating for?
"Abolish the police" is a scale where there is an extreme end where they may call for completely removing police from across the USA. From what I've seen, that isn't what the majority who are calling for abolishment are aiming for. Maybe "abolish" was a poor choice of a word.
The more common level I've seen is advocating for replacing parts of policing for more appropriate systems and services.
I'd call this article a straw-man argument, but there are those on the extreme end of the scale, apparently.
Why should an ambulance driver have to respond to a call in a dangerous neighborhood without a police escort? I wouldn’t. Fuck that, you don’t want police, good luck.
Not sure if this could have been more perfectly executed to discredit the idea of abolishing/defunding the police, which in my understanding has always been proposed as a structured, intentional shift away from heavily militarized policing toward a system of robust social services. I've seen others use the language of divest/invest to make clear that it's a shift in resources. Reading a little bit of abolitionist literature (because this stems out of a much larger, ongoing conversation about the prison industrial complex), it seems even full abolitionists see it as a process that involves building new systems and drastically shifting the American mindset around punitive retribution.
Instead, you have a situation where the police to abandon a precinct all at once and not long after, far-right groups start showing up at night to stoke violence. Hard not to read that as intentional.
> "Abolish the police" is a scale where there is an extreme end where they may call for completely removing police from across the USA. From what I've seen, that isn't what the majority who are calling for abolishment are aiming for. Maybe "abolish" was a poor choice of a word.
It's not "Abolish the police" by itself. The same people also say "All Cops Are Bastards" and "Policing is a racist institution". It would be unreasonable to take these words as supporting anything other than doing away with police entirely.
> I'd call this article a straw-man argument, but there are those on the extreme end of the scale, apparently.
I too found it hard to believe that such people exist, but my own wife said she agrees with the statement "I believe police cause overall more harm than good in the USA, and it would be better to have no police at all than policing in its current form."
And yes, she believes that all police, except for investigating detectives, could be replaced by social workers and the like. Many of her friends believe similarly. So it isn't a straw man, these people really exist.
As you suggest, "defunding the police" is a motte and bailey argument, in that "defund" CAN equal abolish, if the defunding is 100%. On the other hand, a 5% shifting of funds would be a minor reform. So advocates, if they are unscrupulous -- and not all of them are -- can simultaneously advocate for a radical change in policing and assert it will have modest impact, by equivocating on the meaning of the word "defund".
For those of you who were not here when this happened: The police decided not to respond the actual 911 calls in or _near_ the CHOP (the auto shop was a block _away_, not within) was a retaliatory tactic they employed out of spite. Knowing full and well that it would look bad on the protesters and those who created the CHOP. Denying health services and aide is NOT what people who are advocating for defunding the police are advocating for.
>>From what I've seen, that isn't what the majority who are calling for abolishment are aiming for.
The problem is a large number of people calling for for abolishing the police do not have an actual plan on what to replace them with, saying things like "Something will rise up to replace it"
There is also a over riding belief that criminality is 100% related to systemic racism and poverty which is not really the case, Some of it is sure and we should address that with reform but a large part of criminality is not and abolishing the police is not a solution to that crime
We need massive reform and demilitarization of the police, and abolish police unions, but abolish police is crazy town
Remember back when people had such issue with the language and phrasing of "Black Lives Matter" until people (over 50%, according to recent polls) finally came around after George Floyd? "Abolish the police" is going to be the same scenario in time.
Please, do your research on what abolition actually looks like. This article does not describe abolition, it describes a PR tactic the Seattle PD decided to pull as punishment to protestors. Linked below is one with actual interest and nuance.
If you look around and see incredible injustice, great. Don't spend your time policing the language and methodology the oppressed use to argue for their rights, go do things and help them be more effective. This is a classic white liberal issue of "I support the ideas but not the way to them" that has been around for centuries.
Cutting the Seattle police departments budget by 50% would be the perfect way to provide an argument for Trump Republicans that the alt-left/Antifa are out to get you .
This combined with the portland protests will get Trump re-elected and keep the GOP majority in the senate.
This is what you call a diversion from the real issue which is COVID, that republicans have not managed well at all.
The CHOP was a nightmare that was not shut down soon enough. There were armed gangs patrolling the entire thing who would try and make you delete cellphone footage. There was also rape/Iv drug usage/trash all over. I was literally there back in June.
That is NOT what I want to deal with on a daily basis.
We need to hire more police and private security to stop the crazies, make cal Anderson a gun free Zone and stop the chaos.
The NYT is bootlicking with this article; they entirely left out that Seattle did defund their police, cutting their budget by about half. So did Portland. But NYT would rather focus on how scared business owners feel, because that's their target audience.
“Abolish the police” isn't “abolish law enforcement”. It's “abolish the centralized, generalist paramilitary model of local law enforcement.”
The ability of a blanket law enforcement withdrawal from selected neighborhoods, is largely a product of, and historically has been applied as a negotiating tactic by, exactly the model of law enforcement targeted for abolition by people who Say “Abolish the police”.
“Business owners describe a harrowing experience of calling for help and being left all alone.”
No one advocating defunding the police was saying it would be good for business owners. The point of the whole movement is that police protect the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.
I would argue that small business owners with few employees would hardly meet the generalized popular definition of "rich," and that their inability to operate would directly harm those employees who are also not "rich." This country runs on small business owners, and it's baffling that there are those who exclude that fact from their worldview.
If you're looking at what happened to the business owners in the article and thinking that that's a step in the right direction, I think there are a lot of criminal-justice/police reform folks who would prefer that you did not try to associate yourself with what they're fighting for.
Telling America that the coffee-shop guy deserved to get harassed by a violent mob because he's a wealthy fatcat is the surest way to discredit any cause you're advocating for. And I'm saying this as someone who thought the ideas underlying DTP made a fair amount of sense.
Then the businesses will leave and the local economy will suffer. Those with little will have less. Those with enough to start over elsewhere will leave. This phenomenon is called "blight".
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|5 years ago|reply
Abolishing the police was always nonsense but there are plenty of areas where police is overused and too aggressive. In my view there shouldn’t be police in schools or hospitals. The drug war causes a lot of unnecessary arrests and aggravation with a lot of neighborhoods. Bad cops often stay in the force without consequences for clearly bad behavior. Cops don’t have enough training so they aren’t prepared for difficult situation . The list goes on and on.
Addressing these issues would be good for cops, citizens and also public budgets. But instead the country chooses to have this stupid fight where the interested parties spend a lot of time distorting other views. Reminds me of the typical healthcare discussions. It’s very sad.
[+] [-] moomin|5 years ago|reply
This divide didn't happen by accident, it's the product of decades of deliberate political choices.
[+] [-] bassman9000|5 years ago|reply
I think the decline started when University produced generation after generation of supposedly educated people that had no skill other than fanning the flames.
And social media has been the A-bomb against rational, paused discourse.
[+] [-] low_common|5 years ago|reply
Schools, it's sad but I'm in favor of school resource officers. Those people were good to have around and can serve as a role model.
[+] [-] mywittyname|5 years ago|reply
Corruption is the best business to be in. Police departments have no interest in oversight, beyond the amount necessary for leadership to protect their positions of power. And Police Unions are generally very powerful and dominate local politics.
[+] [-] djaque|5 years ago|reply
That's kind of the intention. It's easy to argue against "Abolish the police! Anarchy for everyone!". Not so much against "maybe we shouldn't send people with guns drawn to respond to unarmed individuals going through a mental health crisis" [1].
None of the real proposals for policing reform that have come out the protests are calling to get rid of the police. Pretending that they want that is a political fearmongering tactic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey
[+] [-] Threeve303|5 years ago|reply
All in an election year no less.
Does no one remember 2000,2004 and 2016? Perhaps the DNC could write a book called “How to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”
[+] [-] djaque|5 years ago|reply
Biden doesn't even support the defund the police movement [1] which is the real goal of most of these protests. If you look beyond the media's reality distortion bubble, the defund the police movement is about diversifying how we respond to crises, not getting rid of the police as some claim.
[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/07/trumps-false-recurring-cla...
[+] [-] happytoexplain|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkingsbery|5 years ago|reply
I get that police treatment is often inequitable, but I think we've had some experiments this summer showing that some of the radical changes being proposed have their own problems.
[+] [-] adjkant|5 years ago|reply
I'd like to point out that none of said changes have been implemented anywhere in the US in any meaningful way. Save some minor defunding, I know of no locale who has transferred any responsibility away from the police, which is one of the main roads to abolition. As another poster said, this is a very clear straw man. CHAZ was a result of protesting and an incredibly aggressive Seattle PD, not an ideal people are looking to recreate everywhere.
[+] [-] djaque|5 years ago|reply
It's possible to have a world where the police do their job and are accountable when they commit horrible acts as we've seen over the past few months. Talking about the subject as if we can either have the police and look the other way at their abuse, or get rid of them completely is a terrible false dichotomy.
[+] [-] hevelvarik|5 years ago|reply
Truly bizarre
[+] [-] john-shaffer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leetcrew|5 years ago|reply
I'm not even sure you're wrong; I just think you can't conclusively say how black people feel about an issue.
[+] [-] Tycho|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] happytoexplain|5 years ago|reply
>I just get the distinct impression that many people have got no real idea about the threat that crime poses to the prosperity of a community
I can't disagree more strongly.
>... and the effort that is required to keep it in check
This I agree with. But this is a weak argument against people who live with a constant background, and sometimes foreground, fear for their lives from their own government.
[+] [-] djaque|5 years ago|reply
What's the going conversion rate on that? How many thefts should we expect the police to prevent for every person we allow them to rough up?
We can live in a society where police are held accountable for their actions and where they do their job. Pretending otherwise is a false dichotomy.
[+] [-] GaryNumanVevo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tolbish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miles7|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PedroBatista|5 years ago|reply
Whole communities commit "suicide" just to fuel the delusions of a handful and the self-preservation of another handful. How many injustices have been perpetrated in the name of justice?
No one comes out of this looking good, certainly not the police too.
[+] [-] keiferski|5 years ago|reply
Obama and Trump both understood this and both chose slogans that virtually no one can disagree with (“Change / Yes We Can” and “Make America Great Again.”) Pretty easy to understand.
“Abolish the police” seems almost designed to fail as a slogan right from the beginning.
[+] [-] azangru|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noarchy|5 years ago|reply
Those with the resources to do so have on-site security. This ranges from gated communities, to some condo/apartment buildings, and even shopping malls. Even this isn't necessarily free of problems, but it needs to be seen as something fundamentally different from law enforcement. So when we talk about "abolishing" the police, we have to ask what we really want in its stead.
[+] [-] shadowgovt|5 years ago|reply
I'm having difficulty finding my source right now, but it appears that in cases of homicide by someone unknown to the victim, a police officer is the perpetrator in between 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 incidents. These statistics don't consider whether the killing is justified; they just observe that if people know of someone who was killed by a stranger, there's a 1-in-3 or 1-in-4 chance that stranger has a uniform.
And as we know, people's perceptions of safety are more important than actual statistics. We rewrote the nature of air travel in response to 9/11.
[+] [-] cyberdrunk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1312|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_v._District_of_Columbia
[+] [-] dorian-graph|5 years ago|reply
Is this what people advocating for abolish the police are advocating for? Removal of health services? Isn't it literally the opposite, to have more and more varied health (and social) services, that people are advocating for?
"Abolish the police" is a scale where there is an extreme end where they may call for completely removing police from across the USA. From what I've seen, that isn't what the majority who are calling for abolishment are aiming for. Maybe "abolish" was a poor choice of a word.
The more common level I've seen is advocating for replacing parts of policing for more appropriate systems and services.
I'd call this article a straw-man argument, but there are those on the extreme end of the scale, apparently.
[+] [-] hartator|5 years ago|reply
Words have meaning though. No one on the political board is against reforms but “abolish”, “defund”, or “shut down” mean what it means.
[+] [-] laichzeit0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway924385|5 years ago|reply
Instead, you have a situation where the police to abandon a precinct all at once and not long after, far-right groups start showing up at night to stoke violence. Hard not to read that as intentional.
[+] [-] john-shaffer|5 years ago|reply
It's not "Abolish the police" by itself. The same people also say "All Cops Are Bastards" and "Policing is a racist institution". It would be unreasonable to take these words as supporting anything other than doing away with police entirely.
[+] [-] xab31|5 years ago|reply
I too found it hard to believe that such people exist, but my own wife said she agrees with the statement "I believe police cause overall more harm than good in the USA, and it would be better to have no police at all than policing in its current form."
And yes, she believes that all police, except for investigating detectives, could be replaced by social workers and the like. Many of her friends believe similarly. So it isn't a straw man, these people really exist.
As you suggest, "defunding the police" is a motte and bailey argument, in that "defund" CAN equal abolish, if the defunding is 100%. On the other hand, a 5% shifting of funds would be a minor reform. So advocates, if they are unscrupulous -- and not all of them are -- can simultaneously advocate for a radical change in policing and assert it will have modest impact, by equivocating on the meaning of the word "defund".
[+] [-] donkey-hotei|5 years ago|reply
I agree, this is absolutely a straw-man argument.
[+] [-] syshum|5 years ago|reply
The problem is a large number of people calling for for abolishing the police do not have an actual plan on what to replace them with, saying things like "Something will rise up to replace it"
There is also a over riding belief that criminality is 100% related to systemic racism and poverty which is not really the case, Some of it is sure and we should address that with reform but a large part of criminality is not and abolishing the police is not a solution to that crime
We need massive reform and demilitarization of the police, and abolish police unions, but abolish police is crazy town
[+] [-] adjkant|5 years ago|reply
Please, do your research on what abolition actually looks like. This article does not describe abolition, it describes a PR tactic the Seattle PD decided to pull as punishment to protestors. Linked below is one with actual interest and nuance.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/6/12/21283813/g...
If you look around and see incredible injustice, great. Don't spend your time policing the language and methodology the oppressed use to argue for their rights, go do things and help them be more effective. This is a classic white liberal issue of "I support the ideas but not the way to them" that has been around for centuries.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/01/17/martin-luth...
"We do not need allies who are more devoted to order than to justice" - MLK
[+] [-] rayhendricks|5 years ago|reply
This combined with the portland protests will get Trump re-elected and keep the GOP majority in the senate.
This is what you call a diversion from the real issue which is COVID, that republicans have not managed well at all.
The CHOP was a nightmare that was not shut down soon enough. There were armed gangs patrolling the entire thing who would try and make you delete cellphone footage. There was also rape/Iv drug usage/trash all over. I was literally there back in June.
That is NOT what I want to deal with on a daily basis.
We need to hire more police and private security to stop the crazies, make cal Anderson a gun free Zone and stop the chaos.
[+] [-] AngrySeattleite|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Kednicma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
The ability of a blanket law enforcement withdrawal from selected neighborhoods, is largely a product of, and historically has been applied as a negotiating tactic by, exactly the model of law enforcement targeted for abolition by people who Say “Abolish the police”.
[+] [-] elil17|5 years ago|reply
No one advocating defunding the police was saying it would be good for business owners. The point of the whole movement is that police protect the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else.
[+] [-] andrew_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _zzaw|5 years ago|reply
Telling America that the coffee-shop guy deserved to get harassed by a violent mob because he's a wealthy fatcat is the surest way to discredit any cause you're advocating for. And I'm saying this as someone who thought the ideas underlying DTP made a fair amount of sense.
[+] [-] thatsfine|5 years ago|reply
Good luck Seattle.
[+] [-] leetcrew|5 years ago|reply