San Jose has issue with single family units over dominating the area; the need for denser housing options hasn't abated, nor for the surrounding county and the greater bay area. That has to be planned with local Transpo options, and now you enter the quagmire of 4 transportation agencies systems in the South Bay at least across several modes.
Hence the brilliant onion headline, "‘So, It Means Making The Police Lose Their Homes And Forcing Them To Get A Divorce?’ Says Nation Still Struggling To Understand How Defunding The Police Works"
https://www.theonion.com/so-it-means-making-the-police-lose-...
https://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2019/01/09/charts-poli...?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
The defund the police narrative isn’t based on any actual examination of US police spending, or general public spending. The key issues are instead police unions, lack of police training in the US, impunity for police abuses, etc
Cambridge NJ is often cited as a model of reform. But I am not sure they reduced spending. Instead they disbanded and reformed their police.
Do you have a source for this claim? I mean we can all claim it is intuitive but just how many police, how "well funded", what equipment, and what jurisdiction?
Police unions, poor training and qualified immunity are really serious issues - but ones that are intractable to fight for on the national stage due to political gridlock. Just breaking up the unions as they stand right now and enforcing transparent employment history for law enforcement would make worlds of difference, but the action can't be taken unilaterally by a particular district - that district can ensure that incident reports are preserved but officers moving into the district may have had their employment history purged.
Defunding the police is an actual policy decision that can be made on a local scale to address issues of over policing and start reinvesting in crime prevention rather than punishment.
Can you give an example of a country that does what you recommend? If you can’t, what evidence do you have that it is the solution?
I’m not American. My criticism above is that the movement appears to have developed a policy idea that is not used in any country with a successful policing track record.
As for your claim that individual districts can’t take action....why? Cambden did. They’re hardly perfect, but it’s an improvement. They’re a local area.
And this story shows that when they did try cutting funding, before the reforms and it didn’t solve the problem. Only a concerted reform effort did.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...
Comment above was heavily downvoted, but no one has provided a meaningful reply to the stats. The numbers are clear. Compared to places with better policing, the US has a smaller number of officers per capita, and spends less.
The US does spend much more on prisons however, which is surely a mistake. To your point on shifting focus away from punishment this is one of the first places I would look to cut money: prisons.
In the UK, police killed only 3 people in 2019. There has been surprisingly little inquiry as to how they do it. I get that US police are bad, and so spending less money to get less of them might be an improvement. But to actually solve the problem it seems that changing the police is the better answer. And this will necessarily be local because most of the important stuff in the US is local.
Well then.
- US police are above the law, and have free union-provided legal counsel.
If a city prosecutes an officer, he will sue them right back, and the union will threaten the careers of city councilpersons, DAs and judges at the next election. A perfect circle of corruption.
- DA's and judges are elected, so political from Day One of their careers. Public unions hold 20% or more of the votes and vote in a bloc. Either play with the unions, or finish second.
- the US is the most successful multicultural large country in history, but that makes things more complicated.
- everybody who wants a handgun has one, or two. A lot of people driving around illegally have a loaded gun under their seat.
No, they don't. Public employees don’t, outside of a few localities with extremely high concentrations (which are usually military, which isn't unionized) make up 20% of the electorate, much less public sector unions holding 20% of votes.
> and vote in a bloc
No, they don't. Law enforcement and corrections unions often don't even lean toward the same major party as most other public sector unions.
So get your facts straight.
If you want to see DA politics in action, watch just about any Law & Order episode when they discuss optics. Those "stories" are based on current affairs.
How does that relate to my argument? My point was that attempting to tackle those factors is the actual solution.
(Would need a source on your 20% claim though. Endorsed by the police union is an appeal to voters outside the union, not an appeal to union share of electorate)
a city prosecutes an officer, he will sue them right back
That doesn't contradict anything I said. There are signs saying that not because public sector unions as a whole either make up the 20% of the electorate you've claimed or vote in a unified block across different public sector unions as you've claimed, but because the general public, and especially voters that consider “law and order” an important concern, are particularly likely to be swayed by law enforcement union endorsements.
> If you want to see DA politics in action, watch just about any Law & Order episode when they discuss optics. Those "stories" are based on current affairs.
...often, quite badly. I've got a Political Science degrees from a subprogram specialized in the pragmatics of US electoral politics at all levels; “Law & Order” is, I know, entertaining to a lot of people, but it's not really a guide to reality on, well, anything.
Governments employ 20 percent or more of workers in nine states
https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/on-numbers/scott-tho...
The claim was public sector unions, not government employees. And the claim was 20% of votes, not 20% of workers. A substantial share of government employees are not unionized; this is particularly true of federal government employees; and a substantial share of voters are not employed (some unemployed, but more out of the workforce, looked students, homemakers, and retirees.)
And nine states leave 41, or 82% of the total, where even that far-from-what-you-originally-claimed situation still doesn't apply.