zlacker

>>c420+(OP)
The NYPD and other big city police departments have been buying and using the same tools as the IC for years. When you hear about 'dual use' tech like Palantir, after DOD/IC these companies immediately target and sell to domestic law enforcement, from the FBI all the way down to the local PD.

I don't want to defund the police; I do want them to behave like they are part of the neighborhood and not its enforcers.

EDIT: Slashing funding ≠ defunding. It's a terrible, terrible argument that makes no sense, alienates people who'd otherwise support a more reasonable approach, and perfectly embodies the 'all or nothing' style of modern day performance politics.

>>23B1+un
> I don't want to defund the police; I do want them to behave like they are part of the neighborhood and not its enforcers.

The only way this can be achieved is through defunding the police. Take away all of their military arsenal budget, cyber spy budget, money for pensions...

The good that money could do the communities it's currently actively harming is almost unfathomable.

>>hypeit+uo
Absolute rubbish. Police are a necessary part of a peaceable society; 'Defund the police' is virtue signaling for wealthy people who live in safe neighborhoods and who've never experienced real violence.

>>23B1+Yr
That's absolutely not true. The impoverished communities are the ones most damaged by over policing. Common sense would tell you that if the massive police budgets were invested into bettering the health of those same communities, that crime would go down.

>>hypeit+Hs
No, that is not common sense at all, especially when you think about incentives.

Bureaucracies, if left unmanaged as they are today, will always find ways to increase their own budget or resource. It's as true with police departments as it is with... HR departments, or the Catholic Church, or the gun lobby, or unions, or congress, or Google.

The way to manage unchecked behavior is through structures and leadership that aligns incentives to policy. We do it all the time in plenty of other areas of society.

>>23B1+Pt
You're assuming that there is something wrong with policing in its current form that an alignment of incentives could fix. The problem though is that there isn't, because it isn't broken.

"The purpose of a system is what it does." The purpose of police is to maintain current structures of inequality, and to divert, undermine, and oppose mass movements that could lead to a radical upheaval of those structures.

It is effective at that! Its incentives are already aligned with the forces that have the most influence and mutual benefit with them. It is working as intended.

>>giraff+vy1
> The purpose of police is to maintain current structures of inequality, and to divert, undermine, and oppose mass movements that could lead to a radical upheaval of those structures.

This is one of my favorite modern conspiracy theories. Shea and Wilson did it better back in '75 if you ask me.