zlacker

The NYPD and other big city police departments have been buying and using the same tools as the IC for years. When you hear about 'dual use' tech like Palantir, after DOD/IC these companies immediately target and sell to domestic law enforcement, from the FBI all the way down to the local PD.

I don't want to defund the police; I do want them to behave like they are part of the neighborhood and not its enforcers.

EDIT: Slashing funding ≠ defunding. It's a terrible, terrible argument that makes no sense, alienates people who'd otherwise support a more reasonable approach, and perfectly embodies the 'all or nothing' style of modern day performance politics.

>>23B1+(OP)
> I don't want to defund the police; I do want them to behave like they are part of the neighborhood and not its enforcers.

The only way this can be achieved is through defunding the police. Take away all of their military arsenal budget, cyber spy budget, money for pensions...

The good that money could do the communities it's currently actively harming is almost unfathomable.

>>23B1+(OP)
> I do want them to behave like they are part of the neighborhood and not its enforcers.

People have been saying this for decades and decades. It doesn't work. How long does it have to not work before you accept that we need another strategy?

>>hypeit+01
Absolute rubbish. Police are a necessary part of a peaceable society; 'Defund the police' is virtue signaling for wealthy people who live in safe neighborhoods and who've never experienced real violence.

>>coldpi+21
I'm interested any realistic solution to a social problem. Eliminating police departments isn't one of them; it's fantasy virtue-signaling by people who are lucky enough to have never experienced first-hand what happens in societies without law enforcement.

>>23B1+u4
That's absolutely not true. The impoverished communities are the ones most damaged by over policing. Common sense would tell you that if the massive police budgets were invested into bettering the health of those same communities, that crime would go down.

>>hypeit+d5
No, that is not common sense at all, especially when you think about incentives.

Bureaucracies, if left unmanaged as they are today, will always find ways to increase their own budget or resource. It's as true with police departments as it is with... HR departments, or the Catholic Church, or the gun lobby, or unions, or congress, or Google.

The way to manage unchecked behavior is through structures and leadership that aligns incentives to policy. We do it all the time in plenty of other areas of society.

>>23B1+l6
> Bureaucracies, if left unmanaged as they are today, will always find ways to increase their own budget or resource.

This is why you put pressure in the opposite direction by taking away funding from these bloated and toxic organizations. In a functioning democracy the size of the budget shouldn't be dictated by the organizations themselves, but by the voters.

I think "defund the police" is the perfect message as it cuts straight to the heart of the matter and gives people something they can support that will directly make a difference and be difficult to work around via corruption. Police budgets are massively bloated, we should start slashing and reinvesting into social programs and public infrastructure.

>>hypeit+Ld
Slashing funding ≠ defunding.

It's a terrible, nonsensical 'branded comment' that makes no sense, alienates people who'd otherwise support a more reasonable approach, and perfectly embodies the 'all or nothing' style of modern day performance politics.

>>23B1+l6
You're assuming that there is something wrong with policing in its current form that an alignment of incentives could fix. The problem though is that there isn't, because it isn't broken.

"The purpose of a system is what it does." The purpose of police is to maintain current structures of inequality, and to divert, undermine, and oppose mass movements that could lead to a radical upheaval of those structures.

It is effective at that! Its incentives are already aligned with the forces that have the most influence and mutual benefit with them. It is working as intended.

>>giraff+1b1
> The purpose of police is to maintain current structures of inequality, and to divert, undermine, and oppose mass movements that could lead to a radical upheaval of those structures.

This is one of my favorite modern conspiracy theories. Shea and Wilson did it better back in '75 if you ask me.

>>23B1+W4
I don't think there are very many people out there proposing eliminating police departments. Most calls are for reducing funding from the police to reduce their ability to cause harm, and spending more on other activities that are better at reducing crime. Broadly this is called "defunding the police," though I do understand why you dislike that label.

"Abolish the police" is a different, and I suspect much smaller, movement.

>>23B1+wU
> Slashing funding ≠ defunding.

I actually think "defunding" is the perfect way to describe slashing funding. We should start defunding/slashing now because the budgets are huge. It may asymptotically approach zero, but we need to reverse the trend.

"Defund the police" correctly highlights the actual issue, which is why people get so upset about it. The "people who'd otherwise support a more reasonable approach" do not and have never supported a more reasonable approach. They like the police, but can't come out and say it directly so instead they deflect to "hey! I can't support defunding the police because I don't like the slogan".

>>hypeit+hB3
"Defund" means removing funding, not reducing funding – though I know it's trendy these days to call a thing what it clearly is not.

>>coldpi+xp3
Sorry, I'm not trying to be pedantic but the literal definition of "defund" is as follows:

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng... - " to stop providing money for something, especially something official"

which is the same as:

https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/ame... - "to officially end a law, a system, or an institution"

You can see where if you and I are having this conversation, probably there's a lot of other people like you and I who are talking past each other because the word is being either incorrectly deployed by proponents – or the proponents genuinely want to eliminate police departments.