US Politics Mega-thread - Page 1499

GH, some of the things on that chart don’t make sense. You can’t take pensions because it’s not your money to take, the money is part of their earned compensation for work already performed. You’d have as much luck going after police home equity.

Paid administrative leave during investigations is also required for any job where there is suspension before evidence of wrongdoing. It could be used less if the unions were made less powerful so that officers could be immediately fired without investigation where an investigation is clearly unnecessary. But the practice needs to exist because the public trust requires that an officer under investigation be stripped of the power active service gives them.If a cop insurance system were put in place it would immediately be pooled, and probably be paid for by the precinct anyway, so no savings would manifest from introducing a third party profit seeking entity. The insurer would have an incentive to suppress and minimize public claims which very easily create a private pseudo legal system.
How credible would a court find a claim of police brutality after the investigation by the insurers already dismissed it? It would also make it economically irrational for cops to cooperate with investigations or to report on each other. My premiums go up if you get caught etc.

On May 29 2019 03:30 GreenHorizons wrote:


When you don't actually cite/quote/directly reference the "vague statement" and what's vague about it or what you need clarified beyond accusations about what you've interpreted those vague statements to mean it makes it practically impossible to clarify afaik.

I'm honestly caring less and less (though theory reminds me I should care) how people conclude the solutions the two parties and reformism offers are insufficient from a scientific, moral, ethical, practical, selfish, or any other grounding and will lead to catastrophe.

This seems like a basic scientific and political reality only a handful of participants have come to any sort of demonstrated recognition of. Kwark's being the most straightforward and "realistic" imo.

EDIT: people will probably miss this but one reason it's so important to recognize this now and to plan for socialist revolution is because otherwise fascists will blame "others" and make everything worse.

On May 29 2019 00:49 Sermokala wrote:
The caping overtime accrual just seems anti-labor. I get cutting spending for "military exercises" but a lot of overtime for police departments (at least outside of major cities) is actually mandatory for the department to fill. I remember my dad having to get an apartment near the airport after 9/11 and the mandatory shifts for fighting drunk driving have only gone up in the decade's sense MADD came around.

I think that the "abolish the police" campaign reforms mostly the reality of what police do in exchange for the image of what they want to get rid of. I really don't get the desire to change one police department for a dozen specialized departments doing the same thing but with less resources for the problems. Most of the problems it attempts to solve would be with just more funding and instead of asking for that they want to go the long way around and make a new order that is less efficient causes more problems and costs more.

The way that police departments work at least outside of the major cities is that the city contracts with the union in order for a set amount of shifts that the union needs to fill. Making overtime mandatory for the union is a way for these cities to save money. When the city needs security or parking assistance for events like a county fair they add that into the contract. The overtime shifts are first offered to the people on top of seniority and are forced to be filled by the lowest of seniority if it doesn't get filled by the people above them.

On May 29 2019 03:47 Sermokala wrote:

Every statement you make is vague. If you really don't care about the reality of your ideals you shouldn't be taking your ideas into reality.

If the only way your can present a positive message of your opinion is by saying "its better then the nazies" then you really need to go back to you message.

On May 29 2019 03:51 Trainrunnef wrote:



I would hazard a guess that the increased overtime was because a bean counter determined that at some point it was cheaper to pay overtime than full time wages and salaries for more officers, but I don't have any real evidence to back that statement up. Just seems like the logical conclusion.

I also think that some places need counter terrorism and other style training and excercises more than others. cities like NYC/paris that have been hit more than once likely benefit from the increased training and excercises in terms of response speeds and containment, but again its not like theres a wealth of research on the topic, though there is alot of theory crafting.

On May 29 2019 03:29 JimmiC wrote:


Have your read the Reply's? I found them very interesting, many start with "as a republican" or "as a conservative" and much with Country over Party themes.

This is going to upset some people so sorry in advance, but I think it is important to not villianize all republican's based on the actions of some or even many of them. I think that just leads to more tribalism and less understanding. I think there are lots of Republicans who think that what has been done is wrong, the question is do they think it wrong enough to state it at the ballot box. If not, how do you bring them down that path.

On May 29 2019 04:19 Sermokala wrote:
Ah so you're going with the "until you agree with me that I'm right I refuse to explain what I want to do" line of argument.

You want specialized teams that have rapid response times throughout the city for the majority for their shift do nothing but must be there regardless because something might happen that only they can do.

When guards were armed during a bank crime, injury rates soared for everyone in the bank. Civilian security guards have borne the worst of it: Sixty-four guards were hurt for every 1,000 incidents when armed, compared with less than 1 injury per 1,000 incidents when they were unarmed.

The firefighters that specialize in getting cats out of trees can only get cats out of trees, the firefighters that specialize in traffic accidents that can only get people out wrecked cars. The firefighters that spray water on burning buildings are separate from the firefighters that go into burning buildings to save people. And we need enough of all these people to cover the same footprint that we used to cover with just firefighters.

On May 27 2019 16:12 IgnE wrote:


Why are you asking?



No I am talking about Black Skin White Masks and Wretched of the Earth. I haven't read Memmi, but I have read Fanon and several contemporary scholars. It's mostly pretty good stuff. But I would stress that a lot of it is based on situations that are a half century old or more. I am becoming very wary of "twitter-theory" uses of terms like "colonizer." People toss it around to mean just about anything — people who are into astrology and witchcraft and Marvel movies.

It's one thing to diagnose and critique a situation where colonized populations are second class citizens by law, by institution, by religion, by pseudoscientific concepts of race. It's another thing to talk about global capital and nation-state politicking in 2019 as broadly "colonizing" without going into the weeds about the structure of global finance, international law, natural resources, nation's own governmental apparatuses, and other systemic factors by which capital reproduces itself. And it's another thing yet to talk about middle class brown people in the United States with graduate degrees being "colonized" by cis white heterosexual ableist neurotypical patriarchal culture. The term and its cognates have become synonymous with something like "being a subject." Certain, unpopular things get scrutinized and condemned for being part of a colonizing hegemony that is oppressive. A wide variety of other desires and attachments are uncritically seen as acts of "resistance."

My frustration with most of the current discourse is that it's not obvious to me why a subjectivity centered around astrology, skincare products, fashion, and self-care is any less "colonized" — that is, subjectivated, formed as a subject — than the ostensibly unfashionable, bourgeois, colonizing/er subject. It does not seem clearly more free, "desirable", sustainable, ethical, etc. In fact, it seems to me that nearly everyone gets "colonized" in this sense by external forces which increasingly, and paradoxically, simply do not care about the particular intersections of your identity except insofar as your identification with certain affiliations and your attachments to certain identity-based desires can be used to capture your attention and/or sell you something. Everyone, brown or pink, binary or non-binary, is both more and less "colonized" than ever. Consumers are consumers are consumers. It also seems to me that "resistance", such as it is, is only possible through strenuous self-subjectivation, or discipline.

There's certainly room for people to make themselves in a way that incorporates whatever they like, be it astrology or whatever. But I wonder why it is that I so often see critical terms like "coloniz-" associated with thoughts like "I'm tired! [let me just put on a face mask and watch Netflix while sipping wine]" or "I'm not here for your white feminism." It's almost like it's become an epithet used in the performance of a slow death: colonization is killing me. There is certainly a sense in which that is true, it just doesn't seem to be a meaningful or useful one. And the imagined "decolonization" (decolonize your mind bro) that accompanies such thoughts often looks like an escapist fantasy or a nostalgic return to lost origins.

An investigation by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found one in three communities in Alaska has no local law enforcement. No state troopers to stop an active shooter, no village police officers to break up family fights, not even untrained city or tribal cops to patrol the streets. Almost all of the communities are primarily Alaska Native.

Seventy of these unprotected villages are large enough to have both a school and a post office. Many are in regions with some of the highest rates of poverty, sexual assault and suicide in the United States. Most can be reached only by plane, boat, all-terrain vehicle or snowmobile. That means, unlike most anywhere else in the United States, emergency help is hours or even days away.

When a village police officer helps in a sex crime investigation by documenting evidence, securing the crime scene and conducting interviews, the case is more likely to be prosecuted, the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center concluded in 2018. Yet communities with no first responders of any kind can be found along the salmon-filled rivers of Western Alaska, the pancake tundra of the northwest Arctic and the icy rainforests in the southeast panhandle.

The state recognizes that most villages can’t afford their own police force and has a special class of law enforcement, called village public safety officers, to help. But it’s not working. In the 60 years since Alaska became a state, some Alaska Native leaders say, a string of governors and Legislatures have failed to protect indigenous communities by creating an unconstitutional, two-tiered criminal justice system that leaves villagers unprotected compared with their mostly white counterparts in the cities and suburbs.

ProPublica and the Daily News asked more than 560 traditional councils, tribal corporations and city governments representing 233 communities if they employ peace officers of any sort. It is the most comprehensive investigation of its kind in Alaska.

Here is what we learned:

Tribal and city leaders in several villages said they lack jail space and police stations. At least five villages reported housing shortages that prevent them from providing potential police hires with a place to live, a practical necessity in some regions for obtaining state-funded VPSOs. In other villages, burnout and low pay, with some village police earning as little as $10 an hour, lead to constant turnover among law enforcement.

In villages that do have police, more than 20 have hired officers with criminal records that violate state standards for village police officers over the past two years. They say that’s better than no police at all. Our review identified at least two registered sex offenders working this year as Alaska policemen.

Alaska communities that have no cops and cannot be reached by road have nearly four times as many sex offenders, per capita, than the national average.

The lack of local police and public safety infrastructure routinely leaves residents to fend for themselves. The mayor of the Yukon River village of Russian Mission said that within the past couple years, residents duct-taped a man who had been firing a gun within the village and waited for troopers to arrive. In nearby Marshall, villagers locked their doors last year until a man who was threatening to shoot people had fallen asleep, then grabbed him and tied him up. In Kivalina, a February burglary closed the post office for a week because the village had no police officer to investigate. Elsewhere, tribes mete out banishment for serious crimes from meth dealing to arson.

On May 29 2019 05:09 Ryzel wrote:
You don't need to use hypotheticals to talk about what it would be like with no police officers.



Pretty long but interesting article about the state of law enforcement in Native American Alaska. It doesn't offer info on whether policemen are necessary over trained crisis mediators, but it does paint an interesting picture. I liked how the one VPSO took the lady into her own home to care and protect her though.

Alaska Native leaders say, a string of governors and Legislatures have failed to protect indigenous communities by creating an unconstitutional, two-tiered criminal justice system that leaves villagers unprotected compared with their mostly white counterparts in the cities and suburbs.

On May 29 2019 05:09 Ryzel wrote:
You don't need to use hypotheticals to talk about what it would be like with no police officers.



Pretty long but interesting article about the state of law enforcement in Native American Alaska. It doesn't offer info on whether policemen are necessary over trained crisis mediators, but it does paint an interesting picture. I liked how the one VPSO took the lady into her own home to care and protect her though.

Seventy of these unprotected villages are large enough to have both a school and a post office

Most can be reached only by plane, boat, all-terrain vehicle or snowmobile.

Many are in regions with some of the highest rates of poverty, sexual assault and suicide in the United States.

Alaska communities that have no cops and cannot be reached by road have nearly four times as many sex offenders, per capita, than the national average.

On May 29 2019 06:47 Stratos_speAr wrote:


"It's sorta implicit" = "Let me put words in your mouth."

This is precisely what you're doing and yet you try to criticize others for doing that very thing, even defending Danglars when others supposedly do it to him.

I never said they weren't corrupt. In fact, I said that they were most likely quite corrupt (most likely because I haven't done an incredible amount of research into specific, current corruption in the institution).

Also, you're advocating for tearing down a major institution that prima facie has a significant and vital function in our society. The onus is on you to tell us why they aren't actually that necessary.

Finally, if your answer is going to be "read these many, many authors/watch these exhaustive videos", that isn't arguing in good faith. You're on a discussion forum. Requiring your interlocutor to do extensive homework is bad-faith discussion. You should be able to at least succinctly summarize the prevailing argument against "they serve a vital function" that comes from your school of thought.

These are general points in the discussion since you've been pretty hesitant to plainly state your views as of late; you may have detailed your argument in the last couple pages (I'm still reading).

On May 29 2019 06:47 hunts wrote:
Am I horribly misunderstanding something here or is GH saying that we need to abolish the police because of climate change?

On May 29 2019 06:59 Stratos_speAr wrote:


No, I think he's just lumping together the various societal problems we are facing and just referring to it all as one massive impending disaster.

GH, your argument is still boiling down to "abolish the police, and then form many separate entities that do basically the same thing they do."

First off, just "abolishing the police" is ridiculous because police aren't a monolithic entity in this country. That line sounds more reasonable when talking about the FBI or ICE.

Second, even if we do lump all three of those together, why is it functionally necessary to completely abolish these institutions? As I mentioned before, what vague ideas you do put forth sound incredibly inefficient. The various response teams you referenced recently are all done by the police because, well, people can do more than one thing at a time. You can make significant change to an institution (e.g. the FBI) by removing most of its leadership, drastically reforming its training, and holding people to a significantly higher standard. There simply isn't a real need to abolish these institutions and doing so is an idea that is, quite frankly, largely useless because it's never going to get off the ground due to being an overly-emotional appeal that no one but the hard, hard left wants to take on.

Also, this idea of separate, hyper-specialized response teams does nothing but feed the unsustainable inefficiencies of the capitalist system (i.e. it makes more bullshit jobs for no other reason that to have separate jobs).

On May 29 2019 07:00 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Japan has a sizeable police force. They are also mostly unarmed. Crime there is so small to be nonexistent.