"Defund the Police!" Start with Blue cities...

"America badly needs to rethink its priorities for the whole criminal-justice system, with Floyd’s death drawing urgent, national attention to the necessity for police reform. Activists, civil-rights organizations, academics, policy analysts, and politicians have drawn up a sprawling slate of policies that might help end police brutality, eliminate racist policing, improve trust between cops and the communities they work in, and lower crime levels.

A more radical option, one scrawled on cardboard signs and tagged on buildings and flooding social media, is to defund the cops. What might that mean in practice? Not just smaller budgets and fewer officers, though many activists advocate for that. It would mean ending mass incarceration, cash bail, fines-and-fees policing, the war on drugs, and police militarization, as well as getting cops out of schools. It would also mean funding housing-first programs, creating subsidized jobs for the formerly incarcerated, and expanding initiatives to have mental-health professionals and social workers respond to emergency calls.

Read: How to actually fix America’s police

More broadly, the demand to divest from policing doubles as a call to invest in safety, security, and racial justice. This week, cops in riot gear teargassed teenagers, Humvees patrolled near the White House, and military helicopters buzzed protesters. At the same time, health workers fought COVID-19 wearing reused masks. This is not serving. This is not protecting."  Anne Lowry at The Atlantic

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How did The Atlantic become so Left?  That happened while I was not paying attention.  Ms. Lowry seems a sincere soul.  I wonder which of the Seven Sisters or the Ivies she flowered at.  Ah! I see now that it was Harvard.  One of my ancestors was a Puritan minister who was among the founders of the place.  Would that have made me a "legacy?  She is married to Ezra Klein whom I have thought a sensible fellow.

"Man is born free and is everywhere in chains."  This quote from Jean Jacques Rousseau seem to lie at the heart of  Ms. Lowry's core beliefs as to the possible nature of human societies.  She believes people to be inherently good and capable of living together without rules or sheepdogs to keep them in line and on the job.

Floyd's death and the media induced hysteria that has followed provide a plausible excuse and platform for people like Lowry to push for a well established meme of the far left, i.e., "Defund the Police!"  

Well, pilgrims, I do not believe humans are innately good, quite the opposite.  But, the experiment in abolition of policemen and their replacement with social workers would be interesting.

If the Lowrys of the world want to try this, they should begin with cities controlled by Ms. Lowry's comrades.  Minneapolis would be the ideal place to begin, followed by Los Angeles, Oakland, California and the like.  Ah, I almost forgot Richmond, Virginia.  pl

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/defund-police/612682/

Comments

[Laura Wilson]

Average hours of training for police nation-wide:

60 hours fire arms
4 hours community relations

How about equal time!

[Alan Macdonald]

Read what Steven Pinker wrote about a police strike in Montreal, starting at 8:00 A.M: "By 11:20 A.M. the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting. Within a few more hours, taxi drivers burned down the garage of a limousine service that had competed with them for airport customers, a rooftop sniper killed a provincial police officer, rioters broke into several hotels and restaurants, and a doctor slew a burglar in his suburban home. By the end of the day, six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty carloads of storefront glass had been broken, and three million dollars in property damage had been inflicted, before city authorities had to call in the army and, of course, the Mounties to restore order."
https://fistfulofscience.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/why-steven-pinker-gave-up-on-anarchism/

I am of the rather far left. Please don't call everyone who is out of touch with reality "Left".

[walrus]

It indeed would get interesting when Ms.Lowry finds herself or her family to be subject to the tender ministrations of the less fortunate among her readers.

My son the Policeman occasionally reflects that the community get the police force they ask for. Unfortunately for the public, they don’t always make intelligent choices and they are fickle.

A case in point was the instruction to abandon high speed police car chases after a number of fatalities involving innocent bystanders. The criminals soon worked out that escape was just too easy. Then the public howled because crooks were getting away. Back to police chases. This happened over two years.

[jonst]

I got just the guy to head up the first 'reformed' 'action response teams' of social workers and excons. Mad Dog Mattis

[Eric Newhill]

It is going to be fun to watch these people get what they asked for. Real estate values in areas just beyond the suburbs are going to sky rocket as anyone who can flees the cities; especially in jurisdictions where gun ownership is not restricted (or where the cops look the other way if there are strict state level gun laws).

[tedrichard]

if we as a society really want to eliminate this sort of injustice committed against white people as much as against any other skin color do this one thing:

over turn the 1980's supreme court decision giving effective IMMUNITY to police officers and district attorney prosecutors. these individuals ought to be forced to eat their own cooking.

and VOILA the miscarriages of justice that michael flynn just experienced disappear along with a few bad apple police using the badge to commit murder and get away with it

[robt willmann]

Having been around the criminal justice system for many years, and having socialized with a few police detectives years ago, my opinion is that a change for the worse has occurred in law enforcement in the U.S. From what I can see, it started after 2001, when there were also changes in federal law after September of that year, such as what was called the USA Patriot Act. The public has become aware of some of the federal changes, especially on the issue of domestic surveillance. But the very important aspect of state and local law enforcement has gone largely unnoticed.

Some things in the state and local area are hidden from view, but others are visible. This has nothing to do with "racism".

Think back, starting from 2002 until now. What have you seen with your own eyes locally (and on television) that is different from what you saw before 2002?

[A. Pols]

I don't believe humans are innately good or bad, just innately all about number one.
"Here's to you and me and may we never disagree, but, if we do, to hell with you and here's to me"

It's mystified me how a person can go through to PHD level education and be so utterly clueless about about what poor miserable sinners we are...

[JMH]

And it will go a little sumpin’ like this: massive crime wave followed by white-flight followed by destitution followed by retrenchment of law-and-order followed by gentrification.

Suggested viewing: Death Wish (1974) & Fort Apache, The Bronx (1981)

The whole cycle takes about thirty years and the only point along the way where the black community benefits is the retrenchment of law and order.

[BillWade]

"Well, pilgrims, I do not believe humans are innately good, quite the opposite."

I believe the mayors of those cities mentioned know this fact as well, it's a feature for them.

I've seen it before in Tampa, I recommend highly you get a gun if your city/state goes down this path. They will steal your car and they will run you off the city streets and rob you/beat you with their guns. You ever been in one of those areas where you see bars on the windows, get'em while you can.

[akaPatience]

Yes, The Atlantic has really gone off the deep end since Trump's election. It's right up there with the Usual Suspects of predictable partisanship. Lowry's husband Ezra Klein was the instigator of "Journolist", the talking points memos begun and circulated during the Obama administration that facilitated lock-step blathering and reporting. When Journolist was uncovered, it simply went underground. This is a big reason why nearly all MSM reporters, talking heads, and guests say exactly the same thing, event after event, day after day.

As for the police, I have mixed feelings. Their unions seem to have a stranglehold on local politicians which is likely why worthwhile reforms are generally wishful thinking. For instance, I've never understood why it's acceptable for police union officers to perform full-time union work instead of actual policing while on a city's payroll. There also seem to be too many cops to begin with. Unlike Lowry though, I'd prefer any potential savings to be given back to taxpayers since there are already countless programs (in my city anyway) for the underclass.

Leftists rail against exurban sprawl but is it any wonder why people of means may want to escape cities? I've lived in an urban core for most of my adult life but my patience and purse have limits.

Without question, the Minneapolis cop shouldn't have knelt on the man's neck like he did, but I read yesterday that George Floyd had 4X the known lethal dose of fentanyl (plus other drugs!) in his system at the time of his death. If this is true it will likely be a mitigating factor in the prosecution of the police. All of the destruction, injury, death, financial loss, etc., that ensued on account of such self-destructive drug-addicted behavior is truly tragic.

[Lurker1]

The Gateway Pundit is reporting that the mayor of DC ordered national guard to leave DC.

If true, that would be an interesting experiment in lack of policing power right now.

Colonel, thanks for your blog.

[Fred]

I disagree, respectfully. To make the left live up to their own values we must start with defunding the police departments at every publicly funded university and college in the US.

[Paul E Merrell]

A couple of cities have announced that they're going to whack their police budgets. I don't recall which, but I think Seattle was one of them. State and local governments are going to be whacking much more than their police budgets; the virus has laid waste to their anticipated revenues. But announcing the police cuts now has the appearance of throwing a bone to the protestors. We'll be hearing about more such cuts.

[Peter VE]

Before defunding, we should crush the police unions.

But the PMC would never advocate that. Teacher's unions might be next.

[Jack]

The cognitive dissonance among the majority of the media and all the Democrat aligned agitprop groups is amazing.

Protesting police brutality when the majority of the big cities with endemic police violence have been run by Democrats for decades. How long have Democrats run Minneapolis?

Who suffers the most when the police get defunded? Obviously the poorer neighborhoods ostensibly where most police violence takes place.

Clearly this is all political. The enforced lockdown and then the sudden flip-flop that social justice implies no social distancing required. So they destroy the poor economically and then disregard the raison d'être for the economic destruction in the name of social justice. All the while using the same police that they want to disband to enforce the lockdown.

Don’t people get they’re being played?

[Cynthia]

Needless to say, the news media has wrongly turned this whole event into a black vs white thing. If anything, it is a cop vs people thing minus any mention of skin color. And in all honesty, though, it should be reported as nothing more than a single cop-gone-rogue kind of thing — a single bad apple among many good ones, if we will.

But by framing the whole event as though it were an all-cop thing against an all-black kind of thing, the news media is potentially putting more lives at risk on both sides of the fence, particularly on the white side of the fence. And because they invariably side with blacks over whites, we will start seeing more violent crimes and blatant acts of discrimination against not only white cops, but also white people as a whole as well. In fact, as a white in a predominantly black work environment, I’m being discriminated against on a daily basis. I can tolerate that, and I have for many years, but what I won’t be able to tolerate is becoming a victim of some sort of black-on-white crime.

Furthermore, as a frontline nurse who often has to deal with angry and violent behavior, I deeply empathize with any cop on the frontlines who too has to deal with such dangerous and scary behavior as well, which no doubt occurs much more often and at a greater level of intensity in their particular line of work. So if a cop is put in a position where he can’t do his job enforcing the law and protecting the public out of fear that if he does, he is likely to be reprimanded, fired or even put in jail, no cop, especially a white cop, will want to join the police force.

That’s largely how we got into a nursing shortage. Keep in mind, there is no shortage at all of nurses who do back office or armchair work, but there is a severe shortage of them who do frontline work, especially in acute care settings. That has a lot to do with the fact that nurses are put in a no-win situation when dealing with angry and violent behavior. Either they have the choice of getting reprimanded, if not fired, for defending themselves or getting injuries or even killed for not defending themselves. The same will become true for frontline cops in the post-“George Floyd “ era of law forcement, I’m afraid. But it’ll be much worse for them given that the anger and violence they’ll confront will also entail a weapon or two. At least patients and visitors are screened for weapons prior to entering a hospital. OTOH, there’s no way to screen criminals and other unsavory characters on the street for weapons prior to confronting them.

[turcopolier]

Cynthia

Are you the same person as Cynthia Ann?

[plantman]

Notice how the ideas emerging from the left usually focus on "identity", Me Too, heinous "white men", or Trump.

There's very little talk about inequality, falling living standards, nationalizing the crooked wall street banks, jobs, unions, college tuition or even universal health care.

It's like these self-appointed spokesmen for the left, like Lowery, only want to talk about the things that don't cost their deep-pocket constituents any money, like higher wages.

It's all very suspicious to me.

This latest idiot campaign, to defund the cops, during the worst outbreak of racial violence in the last 30 years, shows how completely disconnected from reality the Dems really are. The average Joe wants more security at the same time the Dems want to remove whatever bit of protection we have left.

God help us if they win in November.

[elaine]

I'd like to add Philadelphia, Portland, D.C & Atlanta to the list.
since many of the attacks aimed @ the police were also aimed @
fire fighters perhaps the "do gooders" could get along without
fire rescue departments as well.

Police brutality is unacceptable as is mob violence.

[Cynthia]

No, I’m not Cynthia Ann. I used to blog quite a bit at Moon of Alabama and Naked Capitalism, but not so much anymore. That’s how I found out about your site. Plus I have been following many of the writers on antiwar.com for many, many years, that’s where I also heard about you.

[BrotherJoe]

One of the legacies of the civil rights era were policy/community oversight committees to "police the police".
If officer Chauvin was such a bad egg (allegedly with 17 complaints) why was he allowed to remain on the force? Perhaps the administration of Minneapolis should start pointing the finger at itself.

[akaPatience]

Off topic: While watching CNBC (business news) this AM, I couldn't help but notice the long, sad faces of Jim Cramer, Carl Quintanilla and David Faber as the great news about the SPECTACULAR jobs numbers were reported. These f-ing jerks are evidently SO partisan that they'd prefer people and families to endure poverty and hardship in order to hope for Trump's defeat in November. I swear, they each looked like their puppies just died. Truly disgusting.

[Diana Croissant]

This entire discussion is interesting to me, as I simply can't relate to most of the points.

I lived on a farm while growing up. We went into "town" to purchase groceries, to attend church, to have a doctor's or dentist's appointment. We especially liked going to the local movie theater.

We traveled to different small towns to support our "home team."

The police did have to stop us now and again for driving a bit faster than the speed limit. And they often interrupted our "keggers" on Saturday nights to send us home before things got out of control. They knew most of our parents.

Now, in this same town where I returned to retire, I do see some disturbing trends. Two gangs from the state capital have found inroads. It happened once before decades ago and is happening again. We trust the police to keep it under control.

Our many churches work together for local causes: young unwed mothers, helping the "at risk" kids in schools, etc.

I am saddened by the problems in the cities. I often wonder why I have been blessed never to have lived in them.

I have one relative who worked for the state patrol as an officer. He retired recently after a career marked by some situations that might have been dangerous for him. But he never really felt nervous about going to work each day.

I always thank God for the life I have been blessed to live. It makes me very sad for those who aren't so blessed; and the question of why there is that difference is never really answered for me.

But I do pray for the police men and women who enter their profession with the intent to do good and make things better for the people they serve. I'm sure it takes very special people to do the jobs they do. The real goal is to weed out the ones who have gone astray in their attitudes and behaviors.

I've been following this situation since it began in Minneapolis and have been completely unable to understand it all. It seems surreal and frightening.

[longarch]

Sir,
I agree with you that humans are sinners, and simply removing the restraints of law does not make us into saints instantly and painlessly. God created natural rights as inherent to humans, and "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed" to protect those natural rights from sinful men. Police forces should protect the rights of the populace. But police forces in the USA have shown "a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably" the end of endlessly increasing government power. The criminal punishment system is no longer a criminal justice system, because of its "repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny." The government is supposed to be a small night watchman state, but it "has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance."

I do believe that police forces should be small and frugal. I believe that police officers should be humble, and if possible should not be allowed to moonlight in jobs that suggest conflicts of interest. I strongly believe that asset forfeiture serves mainly to bloat police forces with unhealthy excesses of confiscated money. If I were in charge of defunding the police, I would start by forbidding asset forfeiture. I believe that Sir Robert Peel had a better vision of policing than Bull Connor did.

I would like to point out that policing does not require professional police. A website showed a short film of law-abiding citizens who gathered on the streets to deter rioters:

https://breakthematrix.com/a-beautiful-american-militia-in-idaho-has-a-message-for-antifa-stay-the-fk-out/

The people in Idaho are not saints or angels. They are sinners like the rest of us. But they are not a corrupt professional police force. Professional police forces are subjected to terrible temptations and most of them succumb to some degree. In particular, people loyal to Israel are allowed to propagandize US police and even give them junkets to Israel. In this matter, Paul Craig Roberts has written many critiques.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/06/02/israelis-trained-the-minnesota-cop-how-to-kill/

Even if Israel exerted no corrupting influence on US policing, the Puritanical tendencies of American culture make the USA particularly vulnerable to overcriminalization and excessive policing. I presume that you have some regard for General Flynn, who was deprived of rights under the color of law. If the despots are willing to abuse the law to attack men with sterling reputations, then no one is safe.

Further, tedrichard wrote:
over turn the 1980's supreme court decision giving effective IMMUNITY to police officers and district attorney prosecutors. these individuals ought to be forced to eat their own cooking.

That sounds like it would help greatly. The abuses of the police connect to the abuses of the prosecutors. The entire legal system has grown out of control.

Robt Willmann wrote:
a change for the worse has occurred in law enforcement in the U.S. From what I can see, it started after 2001, when there were also changes in federal law after September of that year, such as what was called the USA Patriot Act.

I believe the pressing problems started long before that, but I agree that 2001 was a very dark year, in which the worst sort of law enforcers saw themselves as unaccountable.

Peter VE wrote that the people should crush the police unions and to me, that sounds like it is worthy of examination. The other side of the coin is that top-down management of police leads to abuses like policing by quota, asset forfeiture, and police who demand 'incentives' to continue the self-destructive War on Drugs.

Cynthia wrote: "if a cop is put in a position where he can’t do his job ... out of fear [of being] reprimanded, ... no cop... will want to join the police force. That’s largely how we got into a nursing shortage. Keep in mind, there is no shortage at all of nurses who do back office or armchair work, but there is a severe shortage of them who do frontline work"; this seems worthy of careful attention. We must have "internal affairs" to catch rogue cops, but we must not destroy the will of cops to do their job.

To point out one difficult example: Sheriff Joe Arpaio has often been accused of excessive zeal. However, his excesses may have protected innocent citizens from the far worse abuses of cultlike gangs such as MS-13. If "internal affairs" divisions had destroyed Arpaio's will before he struck his blows, the USA might be a much worse place now.