zlacker

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+(OP)
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+81
> 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+y8
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+81
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+O51
> 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+jP
> 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+4w3
"Defund" means removing funding, not reducing funding – though I know it's trendy these days to call a thing what it clearly is not.