EPTUS Politics Mega-thread - Page 3655
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Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets. Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source. If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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plasmidghost
Belgium16168 Posts
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plasmidghost
Belgium16168 Posts
On May 30 2022 02:43 JimmiC wrote: Yes, defund the police made a bunch more sense, when you read the whole strategy. It is basically like police and social reform. Regulating guns and ending the war on drugs moving to harm reduction and thrn hopfully decriminalization and eventually regulation and regulation would hekp lots. Lengthy Guardian article outlining how Portugal's decriminalization of drugs in 2001 wildly succeeded. In 2001, nearly two decades into Pereira’s accidental specialisation in addiction, Portugal became the first country to decriminalise the possession and consumption of all illicit substances. Rather than being arrested, those caught with a personal supply might be given a warning, a small fine, or told to appear before a local commission – a doctor, a lawyer and a social worker – about treatment, harm reduction, and the support services that were available to them. The opioid crisis soon stabilised, and the ensuing years saw dramatic drops in problematic drug use, HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates. HIV infection plummeted from an all-time high in 2000 of 104.2 new cases per million to 4.2 cases per million in 2015. The data behind these changes has been studied and cited as evidence by harm-reduction movements around the globe. It’s misleading, however, to credit these positive results entirely to a change in law. Portugal’s remarkable recovery, and the fact that it has held steady through several changes in government – including conservative leaders who would have preferred to return to the US-style war on drugs – could not have happened without an enormous cultural shift, and a change in how the country viewed drugs, addiction – and itself. In many ways, the law was merely a reflection of transformations that were already happening in clinics, in pharmacies and around kitchen tables across the country. The official policy of decriminalisation made it far easier for a broad range of services (health, psychiatry, employment, housing etc) that had been struggling to pool their resources and expertise, to work together more effectively to serve their communities. | ||
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BlackJack
United States10387 Posts
More than half of the $120 million would be directed to mental health and programs to help Black homeless people. Another 35 percent would be used for education, youth services, and job programs. Five percent would be used toward redirecting police calls from non-criminal activity, such as having social workers engage with homeless people and those requiring mental health intervention. https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-mayor-breed-budget-redirects-120-million-from-law-enforcement-to-black-community/ They also have a very progressive District Attorney that is focused on decarceration and sends a lot of cases to diversion courts to keep people out of jail or just doesn't prosecute them at all. SF County compared to neighboring Alameda county: In 2020, SFPD presented 6,333 felonies to Boudin’s office. Contrast that with neighboring Alameda County, where 6,331 felony cases were presented, resulting in 1,413 convictions. Alameda dismissed only 11.4 percent of cases, while San Francisco’s dismissal rate was 40 percent. https://www.marinatimes.com/chesa-boudin-by-the-numbers So far things have been going spectacularly bad. The results speak for themselves. In 2019, Boudin reduced San Francisco’s jail population by 73%, to 766 from 2,850 in 2019, despite the fact that more than half of all offenders, and three-quarters of the most violent ones who are released from jail before trial, commit new crimes. The charging rate for theft by Boudin’s office declined from 62 percent in 2019 to 46 percent in 2021 and for petty theft declined from 58 percent to 35 percent. Car break-ins were 75 percent higher in May 2021 than in 2019, before the pandemic, and reached an astonishing 3,000 last month. Meanwhile, many business owners and residents tell me they long ago stopped bothering to report crime. Multiple Walgreen's/CVS have closed down because people can go in and fill up garbage bags worth of merchandize and then walk out the front door. Car break-ins have become so common that people leave notes on their cars that say "Nothing of value inside please don't smash windows." Or they just leave their doors unlocked or wide open. People smash and grab luggage out of tourists cars in broad daylight sometimes when the occupants are still in the vehicle and sitting in traffic. I've had my car door broken into twice since moving here. Unsurprisingly people have peaced out of the city at record numbers ![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/w8z33Rl.jpg) The district attorney is facing a recall election next week that is likely to succeed because people are fed up with the bullshit. Meanwhile the Mayor pulled a quick 180 on her defund the police stance and gave a press conference calling for the end of the reign of criminals are for law enforcement to get more aggressive As the top comment puts it, "She's basically arguing with herself from a year ago. Better late than never, I guess." Now she plans on boycotting the San Francisco pride parade next month because the organizers have decided to ban uniformed police officers from participating. I guess ACAB has really lost a lot of its trendiness. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Fleetfeet
Canada2528 Posts
I believe that it isn't working in the short term and might not work in the long term, but a lot of the US doesn't feel like it's working in the long term, so an experimental failure still feels like progress (That is, if you're willing to write this off as a failure. I feel like there's still room for debate there) | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands21587 Posts
You first make sure you can support former convicts and successfully guide them towards employment and a functional life before you release all your convicts from jail. You don't stop going after theft, but you help them when you catch them to get their life on track rather then just ruin their life further. If you try to speedrun it and just jump strait to 'defund' before setting up the alternative social programs obviously your criminals with no future do what all criminals with no future do when they get out of jail, go strait back to being criminals. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24853 Posts
On May 30 2022 07:39 Fleetfeet wrote: I'm with Jimmi on this one, the idea behind the change feels correct to me and I honestly don't see many paths for reform in the US that aren't super ugly. I believe that it isn't working in the short term and might not work in the long term, but a lot of the US doesn't feel like it's working in the long term, so an experimental failure still feels like progress (That is, if you're willing to write this off as a failure. I feel like there's still room for debate there) The problem is that many are wedded to proven failures, for whatever reason and tend to judge the teething problems/failures of anything new much more harshly. This is especially true with crime. It’ll take a Herculean effort to get any kind of requisite holistic reform into place, especially with the overall culture of the US. | ||
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williamserna
Philippines2 Posts
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Djabanete
United States2786 Posts
https://www.vox.com/22580710/defund-the-police-reform-murder-spike-research-evidence My takeaway is that having a lot of police officers just walking around and being on duty deters crime, but that it's important for them to avoid behaviors that are harmful to the fabric of the community, such as racial profiling, stop and frisk, excessive traffic stops, and escalation of bad situations. You also don't want nonsense like for-profit policing and city policies where the effect of policing is to make poor people pay lots of fines. Basically cops need to recognize that they're putting a damper on crime just by moving around in public and not mess with regular people too much. The article also cites a study that finds that police solve more lethal shootings than nonlethal shootings. This is paradoxical because nonlethal shootings intrinsically leave more evidence (a surviving victim). This suggests that it's a matter of prioritization --- more manpower means more cases solved. Thus, more added manpower could solve more nonlethal shootings. (Obviously by "more" I mean %.) I have personal experience with the SFPD. My car was broken into, and a backpack containing my laptop and other stuff was stolen. (Yes, I was an idiot.) I talked to the police, since their station was down the street. They told me they had caught the perpetrator. They showed me a bunch of shit that had been found on the suspect. None of the stuff was mine. I asked where my stuff was. They said he must have given it to an accomplice or stashed it somewhere. They obviously had zero evidence linking the suspect to the theft of my stuff, but they assured me the suspect was going to go to jail "for a long time" and that he was the one who'd taken my stuff. In retrospect I should have have pushed back on the officer's narrative, but I was younger then and distressed by the loss of my stuff, which of course they never found. Overall the police were useless, for which I don't blame them in this case (that kind of case basically can't be solved after the fact), but also deceptive to me and eager to pin a crime on someone with no evidence, which is awful. 0/5 stars. TL;DR: We need more police patrolling crime-heavy areas, and more manpower solving crimes, but crucially the police need to not suck. Realistically, achieving the last part seems like it will require a lot of effort. | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15513 Posts
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Zambrah
United States7242 Posts
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Vivax
21959 Posts
On May 30 2022 13:38 Mohdoo wrote: Police requiring law degrees and being paid a salary comparable to most lawyer jobs would solve 99% of all issues with police That would be one way to abolish them lol. But maybe that's your point on how to solve the issue. Without sugarcoating it, police are first and foremost people ready to commit violence within the required scope. So you already have an attractive job for sometimes unattractive or even deleterious personalities, so the screening needs to work. On the other hand if you get overly cautious and empathetic people filling the role then you get outcomes like these (not saying this was an empathetic approach in any way but restraining and punishing people isn't exactly the job for a sensitive pacifist). | ||
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Sermokala
United States13844 Posts
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Gahlo
United States35128 Posts
On May 30 2022 19:04 Sermokala wrote: Just curious have you seen the news about the recent school shooting? Please tell me there isn't a new waking nightmare I'm not aware of yet. | ||
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gobbledydook
Australia2602 Posts
On May 30 2022 02:43 JimmiC wrote: Yes, defund the police made a bunch more sense, when you read the whole strategy. It is basically like police and social reform. Regulating guns and ending the war on drugs moving to harm reduction and thrn hopfully decriminalization and eventually regulation and regulation would hekp lots. The idea is sound. The marketing was godawful. To ordinary people who are not constantly being oppressed by the police, the police perform an important purpose of maintaining law and order. The word 'defund' might have been the worst own goal in political history - it suggests that the police serve no purpose and should be removed, which is so far from the perception of ordinary people that predictably it became a very useful point of attack for Republicans. | ||
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland24853 Posts
On May 30 2022 21:37 gobbledydook wrote: The idea is sound. The marketing was godawful. To ordinary people who are not constantly being oppressed by the police, the police perform an important purpose of maintaining law and order. The word 'defund' might have been the worst own goal in political history - it suggests that the police serve no purpose and should be removed, which is so far from the perception of ordinary people that predictably it became a very useful point of attack for Republicans. It was bad marketing, I think that’s a bit overstated. Even presented in the most palatable framing I don’t think it’s popular. Plenty of people want police to stop the bad guys, and for the bad guys to go to jail, it’s really as simple as that. They don’t particularly care about the wider societal factors that pertain to crime. Criminals are bad people, they should either be stopped before offending, or go to jail if they offend and that’s how the criminal justice system should work. We’ve got a lot of people like that over here, and I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s more pronounced again in the States The States having a more punitive, militaristic approach to criminal justice isn’t coincidence, nor down to the proclivities of some shadowy elite, they’re pretty reflective of the culture they exist in too in a wider sense. | ||
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