You can’t give military style tools to poorly disciplined police forces without consequences. With the NSA or the Army, the problems are policy. With an org like NYPD, they don’t really have control of “the troops”, so who knows what’s happening.
I’m not saying drones are the answer, but it is not by any means a totally harmless event.
For those downvoting who don’t want to accept reality, below is an article from just a few days ago. It happens every year.
https://www.amny.com/new-york/brooklyn/spate-of-violence-sul...
This is correct. It's also the argument for ending qualified immunity and defunding the police.
I don't think anyone denies that there is often crime and violence in Flatbush, Brownsville, Crown Heights, and other neighborhoods around the parade route. In particular, it's a stretch to assume that everyone giving you downvotes "doesn't want to accept reality".
For my part, I wonder about the most effective way to reduce incidences of violence in our community. I know that these are some of the neighborhoods that have systematically been denied investment, perhaps that has a part to play? Also, these neighborhoods have experienced the brunt of overpolicing in our community for quite a long time. Somehow I don't think that the answer is more police. I don't think the answer is normalizing this appalling and illegal move.
My city, which is not exemplary by any means, after a fuckton of political backlash about the "policing" that happens at protests and parades switched to having a small group of unarmed cops specially trained in deescalation (which is mostly marketing but eh, sure) and comprised of almost entirely minorities, women, and older folks. They're not at all shy about this unit being visibly nonthreatening and they just walk with the people, sometimes joining them. We haven't had any "riots" ever since. It's allllllmost like the police had been instigating them, funny that.
What sorts of investments do you believe will directly and effectively curb violence and crime?
What does underinvestment have to do with J’Ouvert crime specifically?
That's their job. "Preventing harm" is acting _before_ crime happens. It's politicians and citizens job to prevent harm.
For this to work we have to start by taking a sober look at the history of the concentration of power under capitalism, and how the use of force by the police has repeatedly and systematically kept the masses under control.
We have to analyze the true root causes of crime, and work to eliminate those forces. It is not only immorral, but simply impractical, to make any attempt to address broad social unrest solely at the point where symptoms arise.
The one thing that police consistently and effectively do is themselves act as a criminal organization outside the law. They cause destruction and mayhem regularly on very flimsy premises and see little to no oversight for it.
People like you, the political climate you create, and the policies you vote for, are largely why our cities are devolving.
And to add: shooting a guy in an abuse of force during a traffic stop on an empty highway leaves no witnesses. A crowd will have a hundred eyewitnesses and dozens of phones recording.
" Values
In partnership with the community, we pledge to:
Protect the lives and property of our fellow citizens and impartially enforce the law.
Fight crime, both by preventing it and aggressively pursuing violators of the law.
Maintain a higher standard of integrity than is generally expected of others because so much is expected of us.
Value human life, respect the dignity of each individual and render our services with courtesy and civility."
It occurs to me that the concept of fighting crime is as much of a misnomer as the war on drugs, providing the wrong primer for the mind. One cannot fight a concept or object. I think it's important to retire the phrase. They see everything they do as fighting, they're trained to see threats, and so threats they will see regardless. (Just the wrong ones)
At least ideally. It doesn't always work that way but it's a misnomer to blame the police for a neighborhood being unsafe and you're going to be disappointed if you expect them to.
> our cities are devolving.
Turn off fox news and visit any of them and you'll see that American cities today are experiencing a rennaissance.
I think it would be great to set up competition to Police forces: Cities should create and staff an unarmed "Helper Force" who gets deployed to non-emergencies, to help people in distress, investigate "Karen's" complaints of this and that, to defuse mental health episodes (maybe bring a social worker), incidents involving children, rescuing cats out of trees, and so on. Carry on for a year, and then have both the Helper force and the Police force summarize in writing how they benefitted the community over then last 12 months, and have them fight for funding on the basis of that report.
I think taxpayers would decide that they'd rather have the helpers.
These people may even benefit from over policing wrt kickbacks from private prisons. For example, Marco Rubio [0] is a top recipient of money from the private prison lobby, and he's run attack ads wrongfully saying that his political opponents want to abolish police, and he himself ran on a platform pushing for larger police budgets.
0 - https://www.opensecrets.org/industries./indus.php?ind=G7000
Perhaps defunding eventually reveals that we should abolish the police. Perhaps not.
If you're actually interested and not just asking someone to elaborate on a complex problem over a HackerNews comment. An equally uncharitable opponent could ask you to prove that heavy policing (or at least the NYPD) has played a significant role in reducing crime.
In practice most of the common explanations I've seen mean "take a lot of the money from the police and give it to people more qualified to do things that police are filling in for" — so things like social work, for example.
This would also benefit the police, because they could focus on stopping and investigating actual crime.
A common example... if there's a homeless, mentally ill, or otherwise distressed person rambling on the sidewalk in front of your house for an hour... in the US many people would call the police. This is a terrible application of force and innocent people have been shot this way.
With properly staffed and funded social workers, someone could theoretically call them first, and then that person if needed could decide to escalate.
So really "defund the police" in a pithy slogan — "reduce funding to the police so it can be directed to more purpose-fit response teams" doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way.
This same criticism is levied towards "black lives matter" — some take it as "only black lives matter" (often intentionally despite having it explained to them). So the response is "all lives matter" but the general intent is actually "black lives matter as well." Earlier "vote or die" was sometimes criticized in a warped way of "vote or we'll kill you"
There's this strange insistence that political slogans be perfect or all-encompassing, which seems rather disingenuous.
The last line for direct assistance is at the county social services level. Those organizations don’t have the capability to scale. You’ll also be challenged as each county and state doesn’t necessarily want improve outcomes.