when people instinctively lie to you all the time…when you’re consistently charged with dealing with the worse of humanity…

I don’t have an answer…I would imagine policing attracts a certain personality type…different from our soldiers, teachers, firefighters, health care workers – others whom serve our society…

policing seems like a pretty shitty job to me…I’m thankful though there are folks whom do want that responsibility…

somehow though our society needs to control their actions…it just feels like they have a blank check to act in any manner…

The defunding question is pretty simple: why are police budgets historically high when crime rates are historically low? No one seems to have a good answer besides “cops have a lot of political power.”

You mean no one your age has a good answer. There are some of us who remember what the urban landscape was like when the criminals had higher budgets than the police. You can’t even imagine my first Knicks game as a 6 year old in 1984.

Para military is way too far (it’s not the political might of the police force that made it that way, it’s military weapons contractors), but you don’t want to be in a city where the police are not winning the arms race.

The defunding question is pretty simple: why are police budgets historically high when crime rates are historically low? No one seems to have a good answer besides “cops have a lot of political power.”

The answer would be something like “[hurr durr] Fox Butterfield effect”

Someone earlier up mentioned how they got treated when they were caught smoking a doob in Central Park. I had something very similar. Drinking a beer on the platform of the Marcy J (yeah, young and dumb). Anyway, two sips in, the backwards hats booted goons show up. The actually let us CONTINUE drinking and FINISH our beers as they wrote a summons for a $35 dollar mail in fine. I remember these black kids looking at us with their jaws open. It was embarrassing, but really drove home how there are two systems, things could of gone very differently.

Hopefully a real change comes from all this.

Oaktrees:
And until the day comes where I can say, ah thank goodness the police showed up, they made a bad situation better. I will be vehemently anti police. If and when that ever happens, I’ll gladly change my tune.

I think you put that really well.

It has come for a lot of people, which is why your stance will get some backlash. Granted, those people are going to be overwhelmingly white, like me. But I’m not gonna sit here and tell you that your stance on policing should be based on my experience with police.

I hope that day comes for you. That’s what we’re working for.

If we defund the police and a woman gets beaten by her husband or raped by a stranger, who is she going to call to have the beater or the rapist arrested? Is the idea that everyone just has their own private bodyguards, like a lot of celebrities do now? What if they can’t afford one?

Total non-sequitur. Even full-on police abolitionists acknowledge the need for some kind of service one can utilize when there is real danger. The fact of the matter is it would be both more cost-efficient and more ethical to deal with plenty of situations currently dealt with by police via some combination of social work and community involvement.

If you read his posts and thought “this is a person with some misguided ideas, but who is open to hearing other points of view,” god bless you.

A friend of mine who’s interested in this weird “Cock Jowles” alter-ego wrote this after reading the thread:

[6:09 PM, 6/2/2020] I try to only engage when the other person is acting in good faith
[6:09 PM, 6/2/2020] Otherwise it’s wasted energy

She may have been referring to my intermezzo railing against the phrase “true facts” (not for its redundancy, but for the quality of opinion that often accompanies it) but I think it’s relevant here.