zlacker

>>longde+(OP)
I’m not American, but isn’t the police about the only people you should ever trust (if any) with facial-recognition technology?

If you can’t trust your police with it, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your society.

>>moksly+P8
You got it in one: we don't trust our police with it, and there is something fundamentally wrong with society. That is why there have been calls to radically re-think, or even eliminate, policing in the US.

This announcement coincides with protests against police brutality, at which many police have behaved brutally. That was sparked by an outright homicide by a police officer, captured on video, of a man who was subdued and presented no threat -- while other police officers watched, and many others have subsequently attempted to justify.

The "something fundamentally wrong" is very complex and subject to genuine debate, but it's not subject to debate that whatever it is, people don't trust the police.

>>jfenge+ha
> That is why there have been calls to radically re-think, or even eliminate, policing in the US.

Isn't "defund the police" 99% "that's a nice slogan", not actually "we'll be good without any form of law enforcement"? From what I understand it's a play to break unions: you defund and dismantle the police department and then you can create a new department, can start fresh with new people, new tactics etc pp. Might work, might not, but it's certainly not "eliminate policing".

>>luckyl+Ne
> Isn't "defund the police" 99% "that's a nice slogan

No.

> not actually "we'll be good without any form of law enforcement"?

Not that, either.

“Defund the police” is about shifting substantial amounts of funding from police to supportive/responsive social service instead of law enforcement.

> From what I understand it's a play to break unions:

That's probably true of some supporters of the related-but-distinct abolish/dismantle effort, but even there it's not the main focus.

> you defund and dismantle the police department and then you can create a new department, can start fresh with new people, new tactics etc pp.

Dismantle/abolish does allow that, but most of the push for it is not for abolish-and-directly-replace, but for rethinking public safety and community services more generally and redesigning how law enforcement fits into it. While any replacement includes law enforcement personnel employed somewhere, they may not include a single large centralized paramilitary organization like the dominant model for city police / county sheriffs offices, and might (for instance) involve domain-specific law enforcement officers embedded in a variety of different public agencies.

It can, and for many people does, mean abolishing (not merely replacing) police departments as institutions, but, yes, it does not mean abolishing the law enforcement function of government.

>>dragon+Ng
No, "defund the police" is a slogan proposed by woke, white upper middle class intelligentsia who live in low-crime neighborhoods, and are under a false impression that crime is low everywhere and police is "not needed". They do still expect that when they call 911, someone will show up in a few minutes. You can see it play out comically on the street too: anti-defunders attack the defunders and defunders say "call the police", which just seconds ago they wanted to "defund".

The moment Seattle organizes an "autonomous zone", they appoint a violent warlord with a Kalashnikov and proceed to shake down local businesses for funding. If you don't need the police, why the warlord? If you don't need capitalism, why the shakedowns and requests for, I quote, "soy products"?

https://www.reddit.com/r/CapHillAutonomousZone/comments/h0lo...