I’m with you until the last sentence. I don’t know what defund the police means.

It means that police budgets are far too great a share of overall public spending, and their scope of responsibility has come to include tasks at which they are either ineffective or a detriment to public safety.

For one, police budgets include the funding to investigate members of their own departments. Many reformers want to remove funding from these duties and instead, spend it on independent commissions to ensure minimal conflicts of interest. Another would be the programs by which police departments use public money to buy military-grade weaponry to use against its citizens, whether through “riot policing” or no-knock warrants against non-violent offenders.

Defund the police does not mean “end all violent crime investigations.” It instead acknowledges that the current structure of policing in America actually means that homicide investigations are being hampered by the relationship between police and the citizens they are entrusted to protect, hence, “Stop snitching.”

There is no denying that the history of police forces in this country paints a picture of perverse incentives and diminishing returns on investment. For one: we could pay the police billions nationwide to enforce evictions, or we could instead invest in the federal housing voucher program to reduce housing instability, which is a major predictor, and cause, of criminal activity and poor life outcomes, especially in children.

The billionaires at the top — especially families like the Kochs, Mercers, DeVoses, Bradleys, Walton and Olins — want us to believe that spending on social infrastructure is inherently wasteful and corrupt — everything from the IRS to the Department of Education. Why do these same billionaires fund campaigns to preserve police budgets as they are?

And no, I’m not so busy today 😉

I get that you’re a doctor, and you’re probably extremely busy. But you have time to read a Knicks blog during a pandemic when the Knicks aren’t even invited to participate in the basketball season, so presumably you have the time to read other things from time to time too?

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/19/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-and-does-it-have-merit/

This is not the kind of thing that can happen if there are “good cops”’ around. Every cop that allowed that to happen— every one of this guy’s superiors, and every other officer they witnessed his brutal behavior— is a SHITTY COP.

Exactly. If you’ve got one bad cop and 999 good cops and those good cops don’t do anything about the one bad cop you’ve got 1000 bad cops none of whom deserve the power and privilege they wield.

It turns out he had something like 80 excessive force complaints against him in less than two years on the force. It also turns out the amount of discipline he faced for it was a big fat zero. No write ups, no suspension, no loss of wages, no re-training, just a big bunch of fucking NOTHING.

This is not the kind of thing that can happen if there are “good cops”’ around. Every cop that allowed that to happen— every one of this guy’s superiors, and every other officer they witnessed his brutal behavior— is a SHITTY COP. And as far as I’m concerned, that whole police force can kiss my ass. And I’m sure Fort Lauderdale is not some kind of outlier.

The whole system is corrupt and rotten. Cracking heads and facing no consequences for it is how they operate, unless somebody happens to catch them on camera. You want better policing, break up the corrupt unions that protect these thugs and start from scratch. If there’s no accountability they’re going to keep killing and maiming people.

Good cops are good at what they do. But if they were all good cops, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The cops involved in these killings are not good cops. Many have a host of prior complaints on their records. Blake was shot 7 times in the back while the cop was holding onto him. That’s not the work of someone ‘’extremely well-experienced in diffusing situations’’, and it undoes all the otherwise positive social work that the good police officers do.

Agreed 100%.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Knickerblogger over the years it’s that adding volume without increasing efficiency is a losing formula. That applies to police work too. Hence, “defund the police”.

I’m with you until the last sentence. I don’t know what defund the police means.

I do agree with Hubert here. I seem to remember that responding to social disturbance calls lead to the most injuries to police. Many of them can be defused, but a number involve drunk, drugged and impassioned violence, often with weapons of one sort or another. No idea what the solution is. A social worker AND a cop?

I feel like this ignores the kind of shit social workers deal with everyday anyway, which are basically exactly the kind of situations you’re describing and what they’re specifically trained to deal with. Eugene has been running a program like this since 1989. It works so well a bunch of other cities are in process of setting up their own. Here’s a link. Some places are sending a social worker AND a cop or EMT, some just two social workers, there’s a lot of variation. This kind of thing works. But these programs can be hard to get off the ground, even though they save money and lives relative to making the cops deal with it all. A lot of middle-class and wealthy voters think social workers are bullshit, think destitute people are inherently violent (thanks so much prosperity gospel!), pick your poison. It’d be a great thing the the players to get behind.

Obviously this is only one small part of the problem/solution.