If you can’t trust your police with it, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your society.
At least if it's in the hands of corporations there's still a chance that the only entity more powerful (the government) will do something about it (through regulation).
There is something fundamentally wrong with American society, though. No arguments there.
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.
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".
you can google for more details.
I disagree. Why should anyone at all be trusted with facial recognition technology? What if facial recognition technology is a fundamental enabler of dictatorship?
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.
I dont agree. Racism is a problem but I think corruption is the core. The police are often taught that they are above the law, starting with quotas - which encourage ticketing people for minor, subjective, or fictitious infractions. Moving up to things like parallel construction (lying in court), civil forfeiture (stealing from people), coercing confessions, and more. Then sprinkle in speeding when on duty when there is no reason, or illegally parking at McDonalds to run in for a burger. From small to significant infractions they give themselves and each other a pass, or are taught or encouraged to do wrong. In an environment like that you drop in a couple racists and well...
There are studies on workplace safety. If you want to prevent fatal accidents you start by creating a culture of safety from the bottom. You clean up work spaces. You take care of trip hazards. You measure the number of bandages used each month and take measures to prevent those accidents. Over time this results in fewer fatalities even on large construction projects.
I think the same applies to corruption.
To most people “abolish” means “it shall exist no longer” rather than “we’ll replace current police departments with reformed police departments along with possibly some budgetary changes”
It’s a bit of sloganeering as currently constructed, though admittedly the police need reforming and retraining especially deescallation with regard to mentally imbalanced, people as well as people who’re high and such.
I want to see suggestions, for any major city, how much of their budget we should cut (as percentage and gross) as well as where this funding should go as a percentage of how much funding already goes to that place.
Apologies if this is readily available, I haven’t seen it yet.
If a corporation uses facial recognition to count how many times I walked into a 7-11, I care much less about that than I do about the authorities building a database and watching every step people take in public. Yes maybe it's a little tinfoil hat to say, but the police/district attorneys are people and some of them are good, some bad. Why give them a tool that can be abused and misused against you?
There's a gif that humorously demonstrates this mentality [1] and shows a police officer instinctively pepper spraying the air around him in response to falling down, even though there's no one around him.
Personally, I blame the laws & culture that encourage excessive civilian gun ownership. The common excuse for preemptive police brutality is the fear that a civilian could be reaching for a gun which puts the officer's life in danger. Without guns, police have no excuse to strike preemptively and it'd be much easier to gain political support for de-arming the police.
"Defund" is a good example of a term which has a precise, nuanced, technical definition to its main users but which shouldn't be used in common speech because it is so easily and terribly misunderstood. For another example, think about the word "intercourse". It can just mean "communication"... but what is the first idea that comes to most people's mind when people come across that word?
This is a legislative and judicial issue as well. Politicians, a fair number of whom are former judges, pass terrible legislation that is then prosecuted by DA's with little to no regard for justice (only conviction rates matter, right?), while cases are judged by former DA's who've managed to move up the chain a little. The management layer is a circle of incestuous self aggrandizing bullshit, and while cops are the boots stepping on the people, someone else to managing where, and how most of that stepping happens.
Within the movement, there are different groups with different policy proposals (which, even in the “defund” camp, are not limited to just moving money around), which inherently must vary in detail for specific police departments.
But mostly the point right now is to get the people who legislate at the local level to agree that the broad principal is worthy of detailed discussion. And most advocates anywhere on the defund/dismantle spectrum will tell you that they are calling for a broad rethinking around a particular outline involving a variety of community and government groups, not selling a detailed package of ready-to-implement policies.
The Democratic Party sponsored and suggested legislation throws even more money to police forces and does nothing to suggest curtailing the undue influence public employee unions have with the cities and localities they are supposed to serve. If anything the large unions have already walked back any talk that collective bargaining agreements are shielding the police and they have exerted their pressure on politicians at all levels. The reason being is because these public employee unions know if police unions fall then teachers will be next and the party cannot allow that.
So expect nothing more than a few hundred million dollars splashed around and virtue signaling bills offered up, this is a bill which is not expected to pass but if it does in the end does nothing to actually fix the problem.
To fix the police requires locking up their guns to where gaining access to them is under very set rules that cannot be watered down with exceptions. It requires requiring at all times, subject to termination, the full use of cameras any time they work either as police or contracted work in uniform; like directing traffic or protection for private individuals. It requires an outside board govern disciplinary proceedings and not leaving it up to the police force to prosecute their own when they do wrong. It requires keeping records for the lifetime of every officer that follows them where they go.
There is a lot that can be done but just watching the news shows how much is being done to insure not much actually changes but that politicians get their face time needs satisfied.
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...
It is sort of a bleach and ammonia thing. One or the other is more or less fine with some potential for both legitimate use and abuse but together are a horribly toxic combination which is guaranteed to hurt and kill innocent people.
If it only means that other politically connected groups that are territorial about funding get it instead of police departments, then...good? I mean, part of the accountability problem with law enforcement is the institutional power that comes from the amount that is centralized in the monolithic local law enforcement agencies.
(And “hundreds of millions” is probably right or in some cases low for a single large local department; e.g., LA's mayor who opposes the “defund” movement has backed a $150 million shift along the same lines for the LAPD, a large number of NY City Council members and candidates are calling for $1 billion to be redistributed from NYPDs annual budget.)
> The Democratic Party sponsored and suggested legislation throws even more money to police forces
If the defund (and even more clearly the dismantle/abolish) movement is successful, the local agencies with law enforcement functions applying for and receiving that federal funding may not (in the latter case will not) be the centralized paramilitary police forces that are targeted by defund/dismantle/abolish.
None of these movements are opposed to law enforcement functions, or to funding them.
It's actually kind of terrible at that, because it's not perfectly accurate. Even if they could make it 99% accurate, the country has 300+ million people in it and for every person you told it to match, it'd give you three million false positives.
What it's used for is mass surveillance. You capture a face and there are millions of possible matches, but hey, one of the matches just bought something with a credit card 50 meters from there. Or they're carrying a cell phone billed to a person whose DMV photo matches that face. Then they put the cell phone down and travel on a vector from there past twelve more cameras.
You get everyone's location history and meatspace social graph in a database. That's way more useful to an oppressive regime than any kind of legitimate use, because you can get the same information from a suspect under investigation by conducting surveillance of only them, e.g. put a GPS on their car.
Retroactive surveillance can be used by future regimes to observe past behavior. Even if your existing government is trustworthy, there is an election every four years and turnkey fascism is inherently dangerous.
Meanwhile retroactivity not all that useful for legitimate purposes because criminals who are actively committing new crimes can be caught by non-retroactive surveillance specifically of them, whereas there is a much weaker state interest in interest in catching criminals who have already reformed and stopped committing new crimes.
> The end goal of these reforms is not to create better, friendlier, or more community-oriented police or prisons. Instead, we hope to build toward a society without police or prisons, where communities are equipped to provide for their safety and wellbeing.
When somebody breaks into my home, I don't need a counselor; I need some sort of investigator or detective who can track that man down and make sure he doesn't do it again. Maybe that guy needs a counselor instead of a prison sentence, I'm [skeptical of but] amenable to that idea, but who does the grunt work of figuring how who did it and where he's at? Who brings him to trial, where his guilt or innocence can be assessed? I can't find any answers for this on that site, so it's hard for me to take seriously.
This document also mentions permanently closing all jails and freeing everybody from involuntary detention, etc. When a man refuses to stop beating his wife, where should he be put? I don't see any answers for this. Is the idea really to create a utopia where people no longer do shitty things to other people? Because if so, that's a pipe dream, not a serious proposal.
Yeah under those assumptions it would be true that sun rises in the west.