zlacker

Their first demand is that the Seattle Police Department be abolished, as in 100% defunded, as in completely deleted. Coming out with a demand like that is just asking to lose right off the bat.

I wish they would delete it and stick with their second demand - take all weapons away from police. No guns, no batons, no tasers. It's also crazy, but at least it's crazy in a "this might just be crazy enough to work" kind of way.

>>dawg-+(OP)
A bunch of people are calling for defunding the police and not total abolition, although that is what this site says. Socialist City Council member Kshama Sawant has already pledged to bring legislation to cut the police department budget by 50%, and city officials are going over it in depth.

>>dawg-+(OP)
> Their first demand is that the Seattle Police Department be abolished, as in 100% defunded, as in completely deleted. Coming out with a demand like that is just asking to lose right off the bat.

Abolition of existing centralized paramilitary police departments in favor of rethinking public safety and social services and reconstituting and redistributing law enforcement within a new framework is an idea which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.

It may seem, by a pre-June-2020 perspective, to be an out-of-the-range-of-serious-debate demand, but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.

>>dragon+Uj1
Here's a recent summary: https://kottke.org/20/06/police-abolition-defund-the-police

>>dawg-+(OP)
Abolish police is a first step. The idea is to create an alternative way to keep public order, and not _start_ from the police as a concept.

>>dragon+Uj1
It's also extraordinarily unpopular, across the ideological spectrum[1].

>...which has fairly rapidly recently moved from the fringes to the mainstream of debate, and it is a policy openly and actively being discussed by many local governments, and already committed to by the Minneapolis City Council.

>but the Overton Window on that issue just underwent and sudden and massive shift.

Well you're right about that. Because it's insane, and generates clicks, likes, and retweets and so media keeps covering like it's actually popular despite the fact the inverse is true to keep generating their clicks, likes, and retweets. I've been waiting for the Star Tribune to actually run some local polling on this, because everyone I know still back there also thinks it's insane. My guess is they do run the polls, and don't publish the results for the same reason.

[1]https://twitter.com/databyler/status/1268555840098906115?ref...

>>remark+no1
“Cut funding for police departments”, that is shown in that poll isn't what the dismantle/abolish is about (it's not even a fair portrayal what “defund” is centrally about, which is shifting funding from PDs to alternative services.) And that poll is from near the beginning of the recent protests.

More recent polling shows much higher support for both “defund” and “dismantle” than what that poll found for it's lopsided framing of “defund”.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-poll-e...

>>dragon+mp1
Yes, there exists nuance to the "defund the police" stance (though a lot less on the whole "abolish" the police position). My point is that many people have essentially been gaslit into thinking this has widespread support. It does not, regardless of whatever nuance exists.

From your article:

>For example, 39% of respondents supported proposals “to completely dismantle police departments and give more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence.”

So, only 39% of respondents support "dismantling" (notice the specific word choice here) and essentially creating, out of thin air I guess, another organization that would obviously have a license to engage in violence if their charter includes dealing with domestic violence. This is an echo chamber proposal if there ever was one.

>>remark+1r1
If you told me this stat a month ago, I would never believe it. 39% is a shocking amount and I can only imagine it is going to increase.

You're right that we would still need to train a new organization to deal with violent events. But you're also ignoring the upside of not having a cop with a gun issuing speeding tickets, or dealing with someone experiencing mental health issues, or other things that could be better served by more specialized roles.

>>hellom+HD1
>give more financial support to address homelessness, mental health, and domestic violence.

is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this poll, which should be obvious. I'm not ignoring anything. Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems. The grand irony of all of this is that the defunding of the police departments in this country will make the kinds of reforms you are talking about impossible.

>>remark+1r1
> So, only 39% of respondents support "dismantling" (notice the specific word choice here) and essentially creating, out of thin air I guess, another organization that would obviously have a license to engage in violence if their charter includes dealing with domestic violence.

“Dismantle” and “abolish” are about equally popular in the movement for those that support the position that goes beyond “defund” in organizational change.

And 39% is widespread, though obviously not majority, support (and “defund” has 76%—a large majority—support in the pool, which I notice you ignore completely.) And nothing in the quote (or the movement) suggests that whatever armed law enforcement functions were retained would be concentrated in a single new organization created ex nihilo. While, again, advocates are mostly calling for a community process to rethink a design new service delivery and public safety systems rather than selling an already completed redesign that just needs legislative blessing, one framework concept I've seen mentioned more than once is redistributing domain-specific law-enforcement functions within service agencies consistent with the agencies’ domain, broadly the same much state and federal law enforcement functionality is rather than being concentrated in a single paramilitary force of general remit.

>>remark+9U1
>Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems.

This makes no sense.

>>remark+9U1
> Cops respond to a variety of calls, all the time ... because there simply are not enough of them to have this "specialized" force you think would solve all of these problems

Cops respond to a wide variety of calls all the time because over time (particularly between the 1960s to 1990s with concerns driven by crime statistics, though the trend has continued even as the original impetus reversed) resources were pumped into police departments, often diverted from other local services organizations.

When all you have is a paramilitary force trained for the application of force, every local problem looks like a target for the application of paramilitary violence.

>>hellom+pQ2
You ever put a duty roster together? Done a Troops to Task analysis? If you wanted to have separate divisions that all do only one thing you need more troops. If you spread the workload around you can get by with fewer but the service level probably suffers. It's that simple. So sometimes you do domestic calls, next rotation you're on traffic or patrol. If you want specialized units, which to me does sound smart and does sound like an idea worth exploring, you need more officers. Maybe it's possible to save some money here (I imagine there'd be some salary disparity depending on which specialization you choose). Ironically, again, this would make the police more like the military - not less. The military already has specialized branches that have categories of doctrinal tasks they are responsible for (artillery vs infantry, armor vs cavalry ... and in this example patrol vs traffic).

>>remark+wZ2
> If you wanted to have separate divisions that all do only one thing you need more troops.

This assumes that generalists are equally effective at all tasks as specialists. Well, as a generality; in the specific case of all-purpose use of police vs appropriate use of other community services, it actually involves the assumption that specialists in the application of violence to achieve compliance are as effective in specialists in tasks unrelated to application of violence in those non-violent tasks.

In technology, if senior IT management decided they could reduce staff by having network installation specialists, with little to no additional training, cover application development, QA, requirements analysis, SRE, DBA, desktop support, and project management tasks instead of having specialists in each of those domains, they'd rightly be viewed as insane. But that's, broadly, what local governments have done with city services, with cops in the role of the network installers.