US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4115

On December 22 2023 15:39 KwarK wrote:

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=oakland pd budget by year

The "Defund The Police" thing is a conservative myth, nobody ever actually defunded police anywhere and nobody was ever actually calling for what they imagine that it meant. It just doesn't happen. It's a bogeyman that people are dumb enough to fall for despite being perfectly capable of a simple google search. They'd rather believe the narrative that crime is some simple thing to solve which liberals have somehow failed on than make even a basic effort to inform themselves. "If only the liberals hadn't defunded the police, San Francisco would be fixed".

What they're trying to express is that giving the police ever increasing sums of money for overtime and excessive force settlements while refusing to fund any of the solutions to the structural problems is clearly not working. Your story is evidence of that. They not only funded the police, they increased the funding of the police to an all time high, and yet you're here complaining that they can't seem to do their jobs. And you’re passionately arguing for the policy that is currently failing you, funding the police, while getting angry at the only people saying that maybe we should try something other than the policy that we’re seeing didn’t work.

On December 23 2023 01:50 KwarK wrote:
You literally claimed Oakland defunded their police in a year in which they have record funding. Your personal anecdote of your recent person experience with Oakland PD was directly connected with your specific claim that the PD was defunded. No amount of changing the subject, switching to different cities, or bringing up council votes from years ago can make your claim true. You specified that X happened because of Y when Y doesn’t exist.

Take the L and move on.

On December 23 2023 02:06 BlackJack wrote:


Budgets always go up over time. Cost of living raises happen, salaries go up. Almost every year has "record funding." By your logic if the budget goes up by $1 for each of the next 20 years then we've had 20 consecutive years of record high budgets and thus no "defunding." It completely glosses over the fact that 2043 dollars would be worth less than 2023 dollars. You're applying this logic so poorly that even when presented with an article that clearly states Oakland stripped $17 million from its police budget you can dismiss it. You're literally the last person on the website I should have to explain this to.

On December 23 2023 02:12 JimmiC wrote:

Would you like to do some simple math to check if the salary rise makes the difference or just throw it out and assume youre correct? And then when someone else does the math shows your wrong what will be you next move to make you still right?

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf released a statement voicing her opposition to the revised budget and the police department cuts.

"Unfortunately, it [the budget] also cuts 50 police officers who respond to Oaklanders' 911 calls and enforce traffic safety. It also cuts much-needed future academies, which will significantly reduce police staffing and delay response to Oaklanders in their time of crisis," Schaaf's statement read in part. "It will force our officers to work even more overtime shifts, which are expensive and unsafe for officers and residents alike."

On December 23 2023 02:19 KwarK wrote:
They were already murdering people in the streets, that’s what was being protested. The idea that if we were nicer to them maybe they’d be nicer to us is pretty crazy. They’re public servants, not a dragon terrorizing our towns.

Also the idea that ACAB is not new, they’ve always been this way and a section of the population have always known. What has changed is recording equipment.

On December 23 2023 02:26 ChristianS wrote:

I agree! Did it sound like I don’t?

I thought I basically said “police were atrocious before, but probably got even worse when we acknowledged it,” and explicitly suggested that pretending they’re not awful in hopes they’d improve was a dumb idea. Or are you not replying to me?

On December 23 2023 02:32 KwarK wrote:

Not everything that I write is strictly adversarial. I also angrily agree sometimes. You were disagreeing with an idea and I also wanted to join in on disagreeing with that idea.

On December 23 2023 02:15 KwarK wrote:

And if the budget had only gone up by $1 and if your argument was “given inflation the budget, in inflation adjusted dollars, actually went down” then you’d have both evidence and a valid argument.

However the budget went up $23m from $330m in FY22 to $353m in FY23 and your argument was that it had been defunded and so maybe you should shut the fuck up and walk away.

On December 23 2023 02:41 BlackJack wrote:


Great job cherry picking years AFTER they had realized their own stupidity and reversed course on Defund.

Oakland PD budget went from $330m FY20-21 to $335 FY21-22.

Or put another way, The Police Budget went from being 20% of the overall city budget to being 16.5% of the overall city budget. This drop pretty easily explains how the budget has not kept pace with the increase in other city budgets. I don't think it can be put any more simply.

On December 23 2023 02:49 KwarK wrote:

You opened with an anecdote about how you had a recent experience with Oakland PD in which they failed to perform well. You attributed this poor performance to the fact that the department had been defunded. Cause, defunding. Effect, bad service. That was your claim.

I’m not cherry picking years, you picked the year of discussion. You said that your present experience was caused by present defunding because you erroneously believed that there had been defunding. Now that it has been explained to you that the funding has increased your standing by your anecdote because you’re ashamed of being wrong.

If you open with “this thing happened to me in 2023 because the department was defunded (in 2023)” then at some point you will have to address the record 2023 funding.

If you follow that up with how a proposed 2021 funding cut was a mistake and was followed with years of increases then I’m afraid to report to you that what you are arguing is that funding the police causes bad service. After all, you experienced bad service in 2023 after the radical policing of funding the police had been implemented for several years. You’ve kept the effect the same, bad service, but switched the preceding narrative from police budget cuts to police budget increases. Not a great argument.

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf released a statement voicing her opposition to the revised budget and the police department cuts.

"Unfortunately, it [the budget] also cuts 50 police officers who respond to Oaklanders' 911 calls and enforce traffic safety. It also cuts much-needed future academies, which will significantly reduce police staffing and delay response to Oaklanders in their time of crisis," Schaaf's statement read in part. "It will force our officers to work even more overtime shifts, which are expensive and unsafe for officers and residents alike."

On December 23 2023 03:05 BlackJack wrote:


Wow, you're making up a lot of words there, but okay.

Again, here is what the literal fucking mayor of Oakland, a Democrat, said about the city council voting to strip funding from the police



Mayor of Oakland: If we pass this funding cut we will have longer wait times for 911 calls

BlackJack *experiences long wait time for 911 call*

What a mystery

On December 23 2023 03:10 KwarK wrote:

In 2021.

They subsequently reversed course. You're using council minutes from years ago, I'm using actuals. The budget actually increased. In actual money. There's no reasonable definition of the word defunding that can be applied to a funding increase.

Imagine the year is 2021. There is a proposed funding cut. Someone flips a coin on whether to go ahead and cut the funding or reverse course and actually increase funding to record levels. The coinflip results in two parallel universes separated only by the outcome of the coinflip.

In universe A the funding is cut. The police is defunded. 2 years later BlackJack tells us a story about how he had a recent experience of bad service from Oakland PD due to the police being defunded.

In universe B the funding is increased to record levels. 2 years later BlackJack is also somehow telling us a story about how he had a recent experience of bad service from Oakland PD due to the police being defunded.

Do you see the problem here? Do you not see that you started with the conclusion and are subsequently making up nonsense to support it? You thought you were in universe A and that the outcome of the coinflip could be used as a cause to support your anecdote. I informed you of your mistake but somehow the opposite outcome is still somehow a cause to support your anecdote.

On December 22 2023 13:49 BlackJack wrote:


I'm not in San Francisco, but in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, yes. I'm also a little more fed up with all the bullshit that exists here because I had my car stolen in San Francisco last night. I was in Florida for the past week and flew in last night to discover my car was not where I left it. Side note, my friend that was watching my cats also had his window smashed and his ignition jacked up as someone tried to steal his car too. Anyway I had a sense that the bullshit that exists here would catch up to me so a few months ago I hid an AirTag under the floor mat of my car to track it in case it ever got stolen. I saw it pinging all over East Oakland, in the most crime-ridden areas until the wee hours of the morning. I drove around last night trying to find it but the pings were too sparse to track it down. This morning it stopped pinging and I found it in a crime-ridden area of East Oakland. I called 911 and the funny thing I learned about calling 911 in Oakland is sometimes you get to wait up to 10 minutes before anyone even answers. Good thing I wasn't having a heart attack and dying to the "no one is available to take your call, please remain on the line" messaging. I waited over 2 hours for the police to come to help me recover the vehicle. One time I called back and the guy said there were 86 other calls in the queue and my call was a low priority. I ended up 'stealing' the car back myself. I called the police dispatcher and told them I'm not waiting anymore and I'm taking my car. They got pissed and said "well it's still in the stolen vehicle system so if you get stopped for any reason they're going to initiate a felony stop and pull you over with their guns drawn." I said "I'm not too worried because they can't even recover a stolen vehicle that I'm telling them where it is" and hung up. It's now 11 hours later and Oakland police never got in contact with me. I ended up filing the vehicle recovery report with BART police which is the metro transit police whose garage the car was stolen from. They also scolded me for not waiting in the ghetto until I died of old age for Oakland police to show up. Apparently there is some special procedures they are supposed to follow with the DOJ to recover a vehicle and generate some SM#(?) or something. Like I give a fuck. 3 of my coworkers have had their cars stolen this year as well.

Oakland has a progressive DA, Pamela Price, that believes in "restorative justice" and an "equitable justice system" which as far as I can tell means doing anything she can to make sure people are not incarcerated, especially if they are of a certain color. It's so bad even the NAACP of Oakland had to come out and bluntly say 'Enforcing the law is not racist.'

OPD is at risk for losing state funding unless they improve their 911 wait times where callers wait on hold for sometimes 10-20 minutes. It's all about par for the course for a city that bought into Defund the police and All Cops Are Bastards. The sad thing is it's primarily the people of color that will suffer from this idiotic social experiment of letting crime run rampant. Polling shows that black people want MORE or equal police present in their community, not less.

And yes I think it's a pendulum swing as you describe and I expect the pendulum to swing back as people wake up to the bullshit. The SF DA got recalled. The recall for the Alameda DA is underway.