zlacker

>>danso+(OP)
> “I blame myself,” she kept saying. “I never let him out on Halloween. A bunch of Black boys together. I shouldn’t have let him out. But he begged me.”

Notice that while average white parents might worry about criminals before letting their kids out on the street, the black parents worry (with good reason) about the police.

(Just to spell it out: this is why so many BLM activists feel comfortable saying "abolish the police" or "defund the police", because from their point of view the police are the people most likely to assault or kill them or their children on the street, more so than random criminals)

> “Young teens or pre-teens of color were handcuffed, arrested, or held at gunpoint while participating in age-appropriate activities such as running, playing with friends, high-fiving, sitting on a stoop, or carrying a backpack.”

This is child abuse.

>>pjc50+Ck
Coming from a poor (and incidentally very white) area myself, I understand the sentiment behind 'defund the police', but being comfortably middle class now, I also recognize it's something of a nonstarter with people who don't have that experience.

I prefer 'Police Out Of Poor Neighborhoods'. Police actually add value in rich neighborhoods (maybe by definition), and it's got a humorous acronym.

Edit: And police are much less likely to be shot at in rich neighborhoods. It's really win-win-win.

>>SuoDua+y21
Yes, lets further exacerbate class disparities by now only providing safety and security for the rich. At least this way we can stop pretending that we even care about the poor.

>>woeiru+131
I can't second the GPs post hard enough. Police tend to abuse the poor much more often than they help. When they are there to help it's usually a zero-sum proposition: one poor person, usually a non-white, is gonna get a beat down at the hands of "justice" far out of proportion to whatever transgression against another poor person they may be guilty of.

I grew up poor, white, in a neighborhood with non-whites (black, asian, and hispanic). None of us was safe from the police, though whites were in marginally less danger generally.

>>sidlls+Li1
I understand that the police need to be reformed, and that they disproportionately police the poor. There are much better options than withdrawing them from all poor neighborhoods though. As we have seen time and time again, when the police are impotent, someone else will step up into the void to provide security. Typically, that's either organized crime, or (worse) vigilante justice. The net result is always the same though: the people living in those communities are always worse off.

Edit: I guess I should propose a solution instead of just railing against this idea. How about we: 1 - end the war on drugs, and 2 - fundamentally address poverty for once in this country.