In MN the Minneapolis city council wants to disband the police department entirely. This may be all talk, and I'm not sure if it's technically possible, but what happens if there is no police department? What are the second and third order effects of that? Is having no law enforcement a better outcome for the residents? My initial reaction is "no".
When confronted with videos of people rioting, looting and vandalising most respond that "it's only a few bad apples, the vast majority are peaceful". Is it not true that most cops are OK too? I'm honestly asking. Yes there are some problem cops - Chauvin obviously having a long history of issues. But are we really saying that the majority of cops are bad actors? It feels like with emotions so hot right now, people are willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I am skeptical that is the right course of action.
The goal is to wipe the slate clean and rebuild from the foundation.
It seems that the Minneapolis police department has had excessive force issues for years. That feels like a leadership failure to me. In that case you'd look at the Chief, the union rep, the Mayor and any other folks who can change the culture but don't.
"The Camden County Police Department rehired most of the laid-off cops, along with nearly 100 other officers, but at much lower salaries and with fewer benefits than they had received from the city."
So the solution was to keep most of the cops (which I agree with) and then pay them less (which I, umm... I mean... that doesn't seem like a recipe for success but eh).
From that article it sounds like it's too early to tell if it worked. Is the new police force doing better than the old one?
And there's effects on the wider system - courts will believe a police officer's account of what happened pretty much no matter the opposing evidence. There's no accountability when a police officer goes against the reasons they were hired, and destroys people's lives.
There's the possibility of alternative systems of protection and justice, which don't create organisations which are incentivised to protect murderers, abusers, and rapists.
You know the protests are in all 50 states. Some of the flare-ups are due to responses to pent-up frustration from covid, but a lot are due to police riots/escalation. The rest of the protests are peaceful.
> But what are the second and third order effects of underfunded police departments?
Police departments, for many reasons, are the most over-funded [1]. NYPD went on strike and crime actually went down [2] for the month they didn't police.
The goal is not to "disband" but essentially rewrite the entire purpose of the department. Essentially put the policing function in receivership to be revived with new leadership.
[1] https://theappeal.org/spending-billions-on-policing-then-mil...
[2] https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
And simply meeting people's needs deters a lot of crime - nobody's going to wind up in a position where they're robbing a gas station if they know, from an early age, that they're going to be sheltered, well fed, and have a good life, and this isn't dependent on massive amounts of luck, and if they fuck up there's another chance.
The problem is that they are dramatically limited in the types of charges they can press against officers of the law (charges that carry big penalties, and have a very high burden of proof). This is anachronistically because we as a society have decided that officers deserve benefit of the doubt in the lack of compelling evidence. These days, many instances of misconduct are recorded, and the rules should change.
In Eric Garner's case, for example, the govt attorneys declined to press charges, because they lacked sufficient evidence that the officer was knowingly violating the rights of Eric Garner. The burden of proof for any kind of misconduct charge is currently so high, that even an egregious misconduct case like this passes by untouched.
If the attorneys general had a wider range of misconduct charges in their arsenal, they could raise the average cost of police misconduct, and it might improve the situation.
[1] recently informed by https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/pushkin-industries/deep-bac...
judge for yourself - the 3 randomly selected cops from Minneapolis PD were clearly aware of what was happening and were just watching as business as usual when a sadistic psychopath (just watch the video and listen to the Chauvin's tone of voice for example) was slowly and torturously executing a human being. What those 3 tell you about the cops en masse?
>a long history of issues
It is pretty typical - while many cops would usually not commit severe abuse/crimes/etc. at their own will, they would do nothing to stop, prevent, help to prosecute the "bad apples" cops. Basically it is a police union's, the Fraternal Order of Police's, version of omerta. And that makes them at least accessories to all those crimes.
As with the Floyd case, for every murder by police there are three officers standing by watching and doing nothing, at best.
The examples to watch are Camden NJ and the RUC -> PSNI transition.
Yeah, I agree 100%, and this is why the "few bad apples" angle falls apart. This is a widespread problem with the culture of many police departments. It's not enough to fire the murderers themselves, we also need to ask:
- Who hired them?
- Who trained them?
- Who supervised them?
- Who looked into the previous excessive force complaints and decided they weren't a problem?
The Norther Ireland article specifically covers a few of the reasons why this works.
Edit: I realized that I didn't respond to your question of whether this demonstrates an improvement in Camden. Citylab seems to think so, but offers a nuanced explanation of why this may not be the case and what other factors are at play [3]
[1] https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2019/p... [2]https://www.centreforpublicimpact.org/case-study/siezing-mom... [3] https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crim...
> I don’t know yet, though several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.
It takes a lot of investment in the community, but it works: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crim...
This is where the department of justice, and state-level attorneys general should be able to check and balance the system, but current laws render them unable to do so effectively.
Even during the Obama years (Eric Garner happened while Obama was POTUS), when a DoJ that wanted to do the right the thing was empowered to, these laws were a huge impediment to progress.
You mean marching down neighborhood streets and firing unprovoked at people on their own porches while yelling, "Light 'em up."