https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/outrageo...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/hsbc-s-1-9b-money-launderin...
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-18880269
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/hsbc-holdings-plc-and-hsbc-ba...
Edit: Rolling Stone did take a credibility hit after Sabrina Rubin Erdley came clean about manufacturing parts of her college campus rape story, but that’s the only thing that comes to mind when I think about RS and journalistic credibility.
Does anyone under 80 think that?
I was travelling a few years ago, and hanging out in the hotel bar in Portland, Maine, and I listened in on a heated conversation between some guy and a lady whose husband is a cop. They were discussing police brutality and the protests at the time (Baltimore maybe?), and the lady's point was basically "do whatever you want with regulating police behaviour, but I will take my husband coming home at the end of the night over anything else"
It's possible with the falling rates of crime, this may just solve itself (though increasing police training and standards is a good thing regardless).
I’m not one of those people either, that had to be embarrassing for them and I’m assuming they changed their editorial practices to avoid such things in the future.
- https://www.themarshallproject.org/2019/09/30/new-fbi-data-v... - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/17/facts-about...
The latter indicates that, depending on which data you use, the violent crime rate dropped 50–75% between 1993 and 2018 (the larger drop is from BJS, which has some methodology for estimating unreported crimes). The property crime rate dropped at 50–70% over the same time period.
Various actors in society—police gangs (sorry, “unions”), public prosecutors, for-profit prison operators, and straight up fascists—have been stoking fears of Americans for decades such that there are people who genuinely believe that America (as a whole) has more crime even when the numbers completely put a lie to that.
I’m certain that the leaks from this will reinforce what we should already know: America is increasingly a surveillance state of its police against its people, that the police rarely end up doing the jobs that they are nominally hired for (solving crimes), and that there has been an overall reduction in crime but an increase in policing outsized compared to the value police forces provide.
Don’t believe the bollocks.
But the state of the police and its militarization is due to policies of the last decade, meaning that deescalation wasn't tried at all. The former terrorism has become domestic terrorism, something early critics predicted (wasn't even hard). The loudest voices we hear from seem to not be able to hold a thought, because the other side needs to be silenced first.
Ultimately I believe many cops will quit due to lacking support of their governors or president. But I doubt we will see significant changes. Private security will become an even more booming market. Police departments will lack funding but will be sold expensive riot gear.
Neither do the protestors, which is why they aren't out chanting “increase police funding for additional deescalation training and increased standards”.
Dismantle/defund/abolish isn't about incremental training and increased standards, it's about radical reorganization of basic services and rethinking the role of armed law enforcement within that spectrum.
You observe an outlier but fail to put it into context. The police in the US aren't comparable to police in other western countries. As a result, comparing crime rates is disingenuous.
The lady in your anecdote is also painfully disingenuous. Being a police officer isn't really dangerous. The death rate is much higher for landscapers, bartenders, taxi drivers, etc.. Roofers have a mortality rate of 4x the police. Even then, most police officers die in traffic accidents, not homicide [0].
[0]: https://qz.com/410585/garbage-collectors-are-more-likely-to-...
Those Baltimore riots were sparked because a man who was in custody suffered injuries that could not have been caused any other way except by the police who held him, and all of them were acquitted. When people see that the system is intent on protecting the police, that means a lot of people aren't going to care whether that woman's husband makes it home or not.
Crime has been falling at the same time as police misconduct (not just the actual abuses, but the protection around them) has become more visible. Somebody needs to de-escalate it, and that would be a great place to start.
US Police is above the law.
They can and do break most any law at will, without consequence.
Any "Law & Order" fan will tell you crime needs to not pay for people to behave civilized. For US Police, crime does pay.
Step 1: deny jobs and education
Step 2: leverage racist biases among police
Step 3: criminalize drugs
“Look at all this crime! America is so unsafe. We need military equipment and chokeholds so we can go crush skulls.”
I don't think that's actually true. I'll have to find the stats, but IIRC the number of raw crimes is comparable between Western Europe and the US, but in the US the crime is WAY deadlier due to all of the guns. Canada is somewhere in the middle.
It’s hotspots. Take out Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC and maybe New Orleans then even gun crime in the US is no worse than Europe.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/coomer...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/nov/30/new-yo...
One issue is that there is no single entity pushing a single policy. You have a lot of people saying a lot of things.
>The argument is not that the police doesn't solve crime, it's that they cause it.
Yeah. That's insanity. Is that backed up by any study? What does that even mean? There is no country on earth without a police department.
>The police in the US aren't comparable to police in other western countries.
I agree with that, and one big reason is that the American crime-rate is an outlier compared to other western countries.
>he death rate is much higher for landscapers, bartenders, taxi drivers, etc.. Roofers have a mortality rate of 4x the police.
Sure - but there is a different level of stress that comes around when your death can be caused by another human versus accidents and negligence. The death-rate of soldiers in Iraq wasn't very high by percentage either and yet it resulted in a lot of PTSD in soldiers that weren't even casualties. The stresses that cops experience are closer to active military servicemen rather than landscapers - wouldn't you say?
I remember watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfi3Ndh3n-g which shows you how quickly things can escalate especially when you're dealing with tense situations. That's what cops have in the back of their mind, for good or bad. And if you're working in a high-crime area, it's going to affect you.
Unlike roofers and landscapers, the police are also dealing with the ugliest sides of humanity. They are called in to deal with murder and rape and abuse all the time.
Having said that, this is a good argument for INCREASED investment in police departments, namely the increasing and continual training for police officers in dealing with high-stress situations and de-escalation tactics. For example, each month, each police officer should take 2 or 3 days just for this kind of training. You can also raise standards for admissions. Those are all good policies, and though expensive still, cheaper than social strife.
You mean, humanity?
>Yes, we all want our loved ones coming home at the end of the day. But when you go out with the assumption that everybody is trying to kill you
Exactly true - but that's why the crime rate being so high rises the stress levels and enforces these views. Patrolling a Oslo, Norway, which has a murder rate of 0.5 per 100k, is different than patroling Atlanta, Georgia with a murder rate of 17 per 100k. Right?
>Crime has been falling at the same time as police misconduct (not just the actual abuses, but the protection around them) has become more visible.
I think I saw some stats that showed police misconduct has been falling as well - but as you said, visibility has been increased. Maybe this is all being solved, it just takes time.
Having said that, I do think police standards should be high, including admittance, and continual training on de-escalation drills and handling of high-stress situations. That should be simple to implement, and all it costs is taxes (and I think, given the current situation, that cost is worth it)
Come on. And those are aggregate numbers. There is variability between different states, and rural vs urban crime. For example, I just looked up the homicide rate in Atlanta Georgia (17 per 100k), vs Oslo, Norway (0.5 per 100k). That's crazy big.
>have been stoking fears of Americans for decades such that there are people who genuinely believe that America (as a whole) has more crime even when the numbers completely put a lie to that.
Things were really bad in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. The downtown cores of most major cities were dangerous. Don't pretend it was OK before. Things like the 90s 'crime bill' didn't just come out of nowhere. It was bad. Things only started changing the late 90s and early 2000s when cities went through resistance and yes, crime started falling.
First, you're only looking at cities. Lots of the US population does not live in cities.
Second, even just looking at cities, do you know how many cities there are in the US? (A lot more than 96.)
All this is telling you is that, as far as crime rates go, the US is basically two countries: certain large cities (high crime rate) and everywhere else (low crime rate).
>but in the US the crime is WAY deadlier due to all of the guns. Canada is somewhere in the middle.
That doesn't matter. Cops don't set gun policy. They have to deal with it. Just as cops don't cause vagrancy in cities like LA and San Fran (which usually results from mental illness and/or drug addiction), but they still have to deal with it (because those cities and states won't).
Where do you think these police abuses (and subsequent protests) are coming from? Pretty much exclusively from cities.
You’re right that the 90s `crime bills` didn’t come out of nowhere. But they didn’t come out of a “we need to make our communities safer” perspective (that was merely the sales pitch)—because they increased criminal penalties on acts that generally affect low-income and minority “criminals”. They _built_ the problems we have today. The whole idea of a “super predator” was as much a racist invention as Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens in Cadillacs”.
Civil Forfeiture and RICO sounded like a great idea when it was to be used against white-collar beneficiaries of criminal enterprises. Except that’s not how it got used, and so cops in all jurisdictions started rolling up money from regular citizens just like a regular protection racket, except without the protection. It was _meant_ to be used against the cartels, but instead it got used as an income booster.
What made communities safer? It _wasn’t_ giving cops and prosecutors more powers. Reinvestment in those communities. Education. Treatment for trauma. Those things _all_ made far more difference in making communities safer than any single power given to cops since the 90s. Those things just destroyed some of the communities even more. Cities are _safer_ when you have people spending money in them and living there. Suburbs and exurbs and white flight made downtowns more dangerous by taking all of the money out of the cities and leaving people in desperate straits. Reurbanization and gentrification reversed the trends (although gentrification has its own problems).
Related to the use of aggregate numbers, read the Pew link. It talks about the rural/urban variability and about local perception of crime (people believe that there’s more crime across America, but most do not believe that there’s more crime in _their_ area).
If you compare a rich suburb to Europe's average then yeah, it's probably comparable. But any sort of apples to apples comparison will show that the U.S. has a much higher violent crime rate.
Color me skeptical. Does banning certain drugs prevent drug-related crime? These kinds of indirect proposals (e.g. ban guns), that purport to solve complicated social problems (e.g. crime-rate) never pan out, but they are attractive because it FEELS like they are the answer - especially if you already have an ideology that underpins that belief.
> But they didn’t come out of a “we need to make our communities safer” perspective (that was merely the sales pitch)
Of course it did. That's exactly why that bill was passed.
>because they increased criminal penalties on acts that generally affect low-income and minority “criminals”.
Because those companies are the most impacted by crime, petty or otherwise. Gated rich communities were perfectly fine.
>Reinvestment in those communities. Education. Treatment for trauma. Those things _all_ made far more difference in making communities safer than any single power given to cops since the 90s. Those things just destroyed some of the communities even more.
None of the things you present as explanations are actually supported by anything. You're putting out explanations that you FEEL are correct based on your own ideology and biases. City, State and Federal governments spend an inordinate amount of money already. Maybe they should spend more, but I don't see evidence that that will lead to outcomes you think it will.
>It talks about the rural/urban variability and about local perception of crime (people believe that there’s more crime across America, but most do not believe that there’s more crime in _their_ area).
Don't gas-light. Pull up the crime and homicide rates of a few American cities and compare to Europe. Clearly, America is an outlier.
1. There wasn't an 8:46 video showing Noor murder her (no video publicly released until trial?).
2. The PM of Australia immediately denounced it and called for action.
3. BLM protested the shooting and failure to immediately charge Noor in the streets of Minneapolis.
4. The police chief resigned almost immediately.
Nope. As a poster elsewhere in this thread noted, it's less than the top 100 cities in the US. There are a lot more than 100 "decent sized" cities in the US.
Sure it is. In general this kind of data is hard to acquire because the police rarely stop working. When they do though, the results are fairly clear [0]. This study was made after a "strike" by the police. The study attempts to account for under-reporting due to this fact.
Please note that just because _some_ crime is caused by police doesn't mean _all_ is.
> There is no country on earth without a police department.
Something about appeal to tradition. Anyway, as you might know police departments are a very new thing. Policing, in its current form, has existed for <200 years, founded under what is known as the Peelian principles [1]. Principles my previous paragraph demonstrates to have been violated by the police departments.
> PTSD in soldiers that weren't even casualties
The two of us are obviously coming from two very different perspectives. I have a hard time having sympathy for the soldiers who fought in Iraq and I think I'll have a hard time convincing you to feel otherwise.
[0]: Sullivan, C.M., O’Keeffe, Z.P. _Evidence that curtailing proactive policing can reduce major crime_. Nat Hum Behav 1, 730–737 (2017).
I can think of one reason ... high incarceration rates lead to lower crime.
I'm being facetious, but I suspect that has something to do with it. There are other factors no doubt. Freakonomics claims abortion was partially responsible, I read somewhere video games are partially responsible (i.e. incentive to stay home instead of going out). I've also read that higher lead levels in air and water in the past may be responsible for higher crime rates, etc.
I'm sure there are a lot of factors that explain the lower crime-rate.
The problem for you is that cops aren't responsible for the crime rate. They are called to deal with it.
>Plus with how fucked up the prison system is in the US.
You don't actually think the vast majority of people in State or Federal prisons are actually innocent do you? (Because they aren't). Another myth is that there is some huge proportion of inmates serving time for non-violent drug offences and drug possession - that's not true either. Almost nobody goes to prison for simple drug possession or low-level drug offences (prisons are too full for that). Those chargers are usually pleaded down from more serious violent charges.
Having said that, US prison sentences are also an outlier, but that's a double-edged sword too. Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison for sexual assault and rape (third degree). Having spent time abroad and having family all over the place, in most jurisdictions, he would not get any prison term or would be paroled within a short amount of time.
I see this dichotomy in American thinking all the time. There are calls to lower prison sentences, while at the same time accused individuals (who are usually unlikable - like Weinstein) have the same people calling for maximum sentences so those individuals spend years behind bars. Reducing prison sentences does necessarily imply murderers, rapists, child molesters, would be out in relatively short amount of time (10-15 years typically, if you compare to prison terms in countries like Canada for comparable offenses) - are you OK with that?
>certain areas of the US (parts of certain large cities)
So unless we're counting Boise at 220k and ~100 others like it as "parts of certain large cities" then your statement isn't accurate.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/weekly-nyc-shootings-s...
Yes, that's what we're doing. There are a lot more than 80 cities in the US, and a lot of places where people are that aren't cities.
Yes. There are a lot more than 100 cities in the US, and a lot of places where people are that aren't cities. My point is that citing one single "crime rate" for the US misrepresents what's actually going on; there are basically two crime rates, the "cities" one (or however you want to label it) and the "everywhere else" one, and only the former is significantly larger than other developed countries.
Gun controls are not incompatible with the second amendment—at least they weren’t until conservative judicial activists bought long-discredited and ahistorical views of gun ownership in the ~40s and ~50s with the foot on the gas pedal ever since (except, of course, for the utter silence of the NRA on the banning of “assault weapons” when the Black Panthers carried them…).
Guns were rare, expensive, and often owned by the _militia_ to which the citizen belonged until about 1865. They were then more readily available, but cities and towns (especially the so-called “Wild West”) had fairly strict rules on how/when/who could carry (for reasons both good and bad, especially in the Reconstruction South).
Everyone wants to forget the first clause of the Second Amendment: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”. It’s not clear what it means, and I happen to think that Scalia was wrong, but I’ll admit that Stevens may have been wrong, too.
In modern terms, I would argue that the amendment absolutely permits strict licensure of gun owners as a precondition of gun ownership.
Your assertion that the reason crime bills were passed is “we need to make our communities safer” is nonsense. It’s the reason that was sold to terrified Americans—and most of the terror was provided by the news, not the reality. (IIRC, the crime rates were _already dropping_.) The reasons that they were passed is a) racism, b) profit, c) power, and d) racism.
And yes, America’s an outlier. But mostly because it also has the widest wealth gap in the developed world (_mostly_ predicated on race, but not exclusively).
I’m not gaslighting anyone—I’m telling you straight up that America’s crime problems—such as they exist are:
1. Incorrect, usually radicalized, reporting in a way that supports the _fear_ that there is more crime than there is; 2. Overpolicing and overprosecution, especially of minority persons; 3. the effects of extended systemic racism and the casual acceptance of white supremacy in policing; and 4. poverty and the criminalization of being poor or otherwise disadvantaged.
If people have no hope, what do you expect?
You have no basis for anything of those things.
>2. Overpolicing and overprosecution
America has an over-sentencing problem. American prison sentences are higher than anywhere in the world. The people who are actually in prison, are guilty of the crimes they are accused of being guilty, the difference is that in Europe a rapist may get probation, while here (e.g. Weinstein) gets 23 years.
It's not clear at all. This was a singular event and it wasn't even a police 'strike'. It was a work-to-rule action. Police were still there. To counter your conclusions, we've seen evidence of crime spikes in Baltimore, and even Chicago in areas that are ostensibly police free. Hell, we've seen two shooting and three casualties (and one death) in the Marxist utopia of CHOP, just in the last 48 hours without police presence - so much so that the idiot mayor of Seattle is now having the police coming back to restore order. So no, a single study isn't indicative of anything, and certainly not of what society looks like without a police department. It certainly isn't indicative that destroying a system that works well in every free nation in the world, and replacing it with something else, will lead to better outcomes.
Urgh, the entire thing is so juvenile and idiotic that is boggles the mind. Are you just a disaffected teenager or early-20 something that has you literally believing that dismantling police is the right way to go.
>Something about appeal to tradition
Similarity you don't get a free pass in just claiming that after you destroy the current system, which statistically works very well (the number of people killed by cops is minuscule at the population level), you'll be able to rebuild in an improved way - without even citing one example of where your methodology actually worked.
>Please note that just because _some_ crime is caused by police doesn't mean _all_ is.
Noted.
>Policing, in its current form, has existed for <200 years,
Just around the time Democracy was becoming a thing. Maybe we should give up on this Democratic thing too. Just because policing is new is not an argument for whatever it is you're proposing. It's just a statement of fact not supporting evidence for whatever it is you're proposing. But even with that, policing has, in fact, changed. Let's take your 200 years at face value, that means we have 200 years of incremental improvements based on societal needs that you would be throwing those away.
>I have a hard time having sympathy for the soldiers who fought in Iraq
I never asked for you to show sympathy towards another human being. Thank you for sharing you have none to give.
The point wasn't sympathy, it was that these military servicemen came back with PTSD even though statistically, the death rate was low (and probably similar to working on an oil rig). So the overall death rate is not necessarily correlated with the stresses of the job. But let me try again because you clearly cannot show empathize with a entire group of people you hate ... suicide was (is) prevalent among Japanese office workers. I'm going to go on a limb and assume that working at an office in Japan doesn't run you a high risk of death, but the stress incurred by those workers manifests in depression and suicide.
Do you understand now? And look, you didn't even have to show empathy towards an entire group of young people (and military service is, by and large, a young person's profession).
>You don't actually think the vast majority of people in State or Federal prisons are actually innocent do you?
No, I don't. But the system is still horrible and brutal. I think think prison in the US should focus much more rehabilitation over punishment. In Germany and Scandinavia being removed from society is the punishment. Norway has a recidivism rate of only 20%. I don't know the other countries, it's higher in Germany at 35% but still less than half of the US which is a total failure. You treat people prisoners like animals and you are surprised when they act like animals.
>I see this dichotomy in American thinking all the time. There are calls to lower prison sentences, while at the same time accused individuals (who are usually unlikable - like Weinstein) have the same people calling for maximum sentences so those individuals spend years behind bars.
So I think prison sentences should be reduced generally in the US. I'd get rid of mandatory minimums. But I'm not sure how I would fix it, but I would have charged the bankers, and people involved wit that in jail. I would change background checks too. Norway, and as far as I know, Denmark does this too, but if you're applying for a job, nobody will find out about your crime, just if you're available to work somewhere. For example, if you apply at a bank but you were guilty of financial crimes, they would tell the bank you cannot work there.
My reasons in this case are your 1) purposeful misinterpretations, 2) unequal demands in needed evidence for claims, 3) insults about my person and 4) misunderstanding of the topic at hand.
Don't expect me to reply further.
Two examples of many:
Evidence suggests that teachers are less likely to identify bright minority students for placement in accelerated programs. Evidence suggests that teachers are more likely to treat minority students who "act out" as problem students and place them in remedial programs rather than finding solutions.