US Politics Mega-thread - Page 2408

On June 10 2020 11:20 JimmiC wrote:
There is so much to unpack when it comes to the US and the issues around the police and crime. You have the rampant systemic racism. You have civic governments often looking for arrest "stats" to help in the next election instead of actual results. You have a massive amount of poor people considering the countries wealth. You have prohibition and a unwinnable "war on drugs" You have the mass, mostly unregulated gun ownership making being police a much more dangerous job than most countries. You have a for profit healthcare system which means prevention is not a priority since they want more customers and their customers to stay for longer, which is the opposite of what your society should want. You have a for profit prison system which means to succeed they need more customers who stay longer, which is exactly the opposite of what your society should want. You don't tackle the mental health issues of the poor or of the police. You have a police forces and unions who operate like gangs protecting their own regardless if they should and massive amounts of PSTD since there is so many shootings (both at them and others) where the police are first on the scene or involved.

Simply defunding the police is not going to accomplish anything without understanding that none of these issues work independently of each other.

The first and easiest step would be to tackle all the gun issues, by regulating it FAR FAR more and making them so much less accessible. Your police are armed to their teeth because so is the populous. Can you imagine the stress of every traffic stop even being a possible interaction with some one with a gun? You can make a great case for why police forces need to make a report for each time they uuholster their gun in other countries, not so much in the US. You could vastly disarm the police if you disarm the populous as well. It is very strange for me to that people on the left even are against this when it works EVERY where else. It is clear why it does not happen, gun and weapons companies are big business and make big donations to all politician's, and the more they can sell to people the more they can sell to the police. It is a vicious circle that everyone on the outside knows the solution for but some how the NRA's amazing marketing campaign has convinced people that guns some how equal freedom, hell they even took some of the wording out of the second amendment to the point where many Americans believe it says their slogan to help them sell more guns rather than what was actually written. (The actual "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/second_amendment


https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/12/16418524/nra-second-amendment-guns-violence

If American's do not end their gun issues, they will likely never fix their police. This has become so accepted that the satirical news site the Onion has been able to regularly repromote its article “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”



But if that is a unwinable battle the next best place to start is dealing with the nations mental health issues.


I really doubt that all the people who want to be police are psychopath's as has been suggested, heck I don't think there would even be enough psycopaths. But I don't doubt that given the massive stress, horrible events they both witness as first responders (not just murders, rapes, assaults and so on but also gruesome car accidents and so on), that they become very desensitized to violence and gain more and more prejudices both because of the culture they are surrounded with, but also because of the horrible things they see and experience. If you blame the people in the police for the problems instead of the system, you are no different than the people who blame the people committing the crimes instead of the system. On a case by case basis either can be true, but when it is this widespread it becomes clear that the conditions of the system are what is broken, and what breaks the people.

So this means making sure that everybody poor, rich, everyone in between has medical care, that includes mental health. It means moving the system from treating the symptoms (all stages criminally, policing and incarceration, and healthcare for that matter) to treating the causes. There is actually a huge savings in doing this for the overall system the problem is because of how everything is structured "for profit" the people who could are incentivized not too. The easiest way to do this is make it government funded. That way the government and the people are better off if the system works better and therefore costs less. Right now hospitals want you to be sick (it is not surprising that the US has some of the worst overall health) and the prisons want you to get jailed, stay jailed and come back to jail once you get out. (In fact judges have gotten in trouble for taking kick backs from prisons for sentencing people longer and to their facilities). So for socialist's the government oversight is likely a positive and for capitalists, all the money being wasted in that system can now be spent on various other goods. And all the criminals in jail can now because customers and positive members of the economy.

The people who are against the "defund the police" movement are right to be questing it, because no system in the world operates without some sort of policing. You can't stop paying the police, and make the job even more stressful and worse for mental health, while you are doing it and expect all the violence to magically go away.

What you need is a full system overhaul where all the various stages are pulling together for the same goal. No one has found the perfect system yet. But there are many that are functioning a lot better than the US.

The Netherlands would be a great place to start since they are actually closing prisons because they don't have enough "customers" instead of bursting at the seems.

https://johnhoward.ca/blog/dutch-closing-prisons/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/12/why-are-there-so-few-prisoners-in-the-netherlands

And there are a bunch of other countries that you could also look at that have actual well (MUCH MUCH better than the US) functioning systems and take the best aspects from all of them.

It is actually more drastic societal changes that are needed to improve the situation than defunding the police. And it means spending a lot more money up front to end up saving even a bunch more at the end.

It does not take much analysis to see that taking the police completely out of the picture when you see how well armed the Boogaloo boys, Proud boys (strange how they all call themselves boys, I guess they also know they are not mature enough to be men, but I digress), gangs and various other well armed and bad intentioned groups that left to their own idea of justice will not end as a benefit to society. You don't even have to get into the criminal gangs in the US and beyond, because you have so many "legal" or legal adjacent gun owners who are not the people you want in control of justice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boogaloo_movement#:~:text=The boogaloo movement, members of,they call the "boogaloo".

This seems like another case of American exceptionalism where you can easily look at other countries and see what they are doing and copy them, hell talk to them and see how you can do what they do and do it better. Otherwise if the answer is more of the same you are going to keep getting the same results. Defunding the police is just going to make people buy more guns, I bet it already has. Sure "guns don't kill people, people kill people" but you are not putting any effort or money into fixing the people, you are just creating more messed up people who kill people with more guns. You need to attack the root issues which is way to many mental health issues and culture that creates more. Then you mix in a fetishist attitude about guns and gun violence and you get what you have now.

The answer is not some confusing message and something that has never worked anywhere. The answer is in finding out what has worked in other places the best and customize it to work for your unique setting.

On June 10 2020 22:42 GreenHorizons wrote:


It's important to note that "defund the police" comes specifically out of the abolitionist movement. Work that goes back decades. Work that included dialectically moving past reformist strategies like you see there. The stuff you're seeing there DPB is the centrist reactionary cooption of that phrase and is at the core of the discordance between the tepid reforms listed and the phrase "defund the police".

Now reformists are free to do what they wish, but it's important to know this distinction and not try to tell people that do want to abolish the police (because reformism has categorically failed them) that they actually want to go back to fruitless reformist strategies.

On June 10 2020 23:03 PhoenixVoid wrote:
Hashtag slogan-making is a tricky thing. Defund The Police is an excellent bundle of firewood to throw on the flames and are not the words worth dying on. You can play semantics all you want over, "Well, we don't literally mean defund or abolish the police and instead here's a 10-point proposal list of reforms you aren't looking at", but the public has a tendency to latch on simple phrasing that skirts around nuance. I'd think "Rebuild the Police", "Rethink Policing" or "Rebuild Justice" strikes me as the tone that would satisfy most. We're talking an enormously complicated problem spanning policing, criminal justice, the legal system, the medical industry, prisons, institutional racism, hospitals, education and economic fairness that cannot be captured by three words that imply on face value that slashing police budgets will correct the problem that the Floyd protests exposed.

On June 10 2020 23:19 GreenHorizons wrote:


Appreciated. Also important to note that what you're talking about is a counterrevolutionary movement and stands in opposition of defunding and abolishing the police, despite the superficially overlapping goals.

On June 10 2020 23:33 NewSunshine wrote:

If you shoot for the stars and miss, you at least hit the moon or something.

I tend to agree. If the messaging is on the far end, the compromise just comes when it's time for implementation. If you start compromising before that point, then the compromise goes too far and you don't end up getting almost anything you needed. If messaging about defunding and abolition results in a more level approach involving rebuilding what exists in a more accountable way by the time it comes to action, that's still valuable progress. If you start your message with the compromise built-in, you end up selling the cause short.

It's easy to forget that there is a constant disconnect that exists between an ideology and the messaging it uses. Trumpers were and probably still are happy with their "Build the Wall" messaging even though it never resulted in a wall. It's just how it works.