US Politics Mega-thread - Page 4123

On January 01 2024 08:36 Gorsameth wrote:
I think indeed this is not a great place because crime statistics tends to be a local focus and unless you happen to have someone here from the same area no one is going to have actual knowledge of the situation to meaningfully discuss it, but I will just add this, aren't you kind of doing the same thing your talking about here by just saying "we need more police" as a response to increased crime rather then looking at the deeper causes of said increase beyond "the city may or may not have reduced the budget for a single year"?

maybe the increase in crime has more to do with social and economic factors then with police funding.

On January 01 2024 10:20 Sadist wrote:
I think theres way too much explosive language being used. Saying crime is spiraling out of control or using percentages can be really misleading. Saying crime is up 30% just seems like a way to push a narrative, is 30% alot? Whats the base number you are increasing from? How does it compare to cities if similar sizes or per 100k?


On the other hand, GH I am not sure what you are expecting BJ to do about his stolen car. It seems like the police are the correct person to call in this instance regardless how you feel about capitalism. What is he supposed to do? Go vigilante and kill these people or just let them go? How would this situation be handled in a communist society?

Local elected leaders need to declare a public safety emergency in Oakland because of rampant crime in the city impacting minority communities the hardest, the Oakland branch of the NAACP said in a lengthy statement last week.

"Everyone is in danger" in Oakland, the NAACP argued in its statement released Thursday. "Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney's unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals."

If criminals face no consequences for their actions, "crime will continue to soar," according to the NAACP.

On January 01 2024 10:07 BlackJack wrote:


Not exactly. I think I've said a couple times that my position is not "more police --> less crime." I think we need more police because we have more crime. If we didn't have more crime we wouldn't need more police. Why crime is spiraling out of control is something nobody is offering a theory for except myself and the counter seems to be "I don't know why crime is up but I know your theory on why it's up is wrong" without realizing the paradox of that sentence.

Even though you're not local to my area I'm quite certain that you are well aware that the US has high incarceration rates and high recidivism rates. I have no problem with the logic behind the left's desire for criminal justice reform --> If we can reduce recidivism we can also lower incarceration rates without crime going up. Fine. Except reducing recidivism is a hard task. It's not like turning on a light switch. Then when you elect progressive DAs that say they support non-carceral forms of justice or they just flat out aren't going to prosecute certain quality of life crimes you're putting the cart before the horse. They are unilaterally deciding to keep people out of jail without ensuring the proper mechanisms are in place to help them be productive. You're repeatedly releasing repeat offenders with high recidivism back on the street and refusing to acknowledge that it might increase crime. That's just a failure of basic math.

But even then, I could be satisfied if someone would just say something like "Yes there will be some growing pains with our reform, we want to keep people out of the prisons where they become career criminals and while having them on the street will increase crime in the short term, we will eventually be able to get recidivism rates down and achieve our vision." But instead the higher crime is either ignored or it's insisted that is has nothing to do with revolving doors on jails and eliminating consequences for committing crimes. So I'm left either having to assume these people have been driven insane by their ideology or they are just attempting to gaslight me.

On January 01 2024 10:32 BlackJack wrote:


Here's what the Oakland Chapter of the NAACP has to say about the conditions in Oakland



I think the fact that the NAACP will release such a damning statement on the first black district attorney of Alameda County speaks for itself. Or they've just been captured by MAGA. 50/50.

On January 01 2024 10:20 Sadist wrote:
I think theres way too much explosive language being used. Saying crime is spiraling out of control or using percentages can be really misleading. Saying crime is up 30% just seems like a way to push a narrative, is 30% alot? Whats the base number you are increasing from? How does it compare to cities if similar sizes or per 100k?


On the other hand, GH I am not sure what you are expecting BJ to do about his stolen car. It seems like the police are the correct person to call in this instance regardless how you feel about capitalism. What is he supposed to do? Go vigilante and kill these people or just let them go? How would this situation be handled in a communist society?

On January 01 2024 11:30 Blitzkrieg0 wrote:


GH wants him to recognize that police were useless and will always be useless in this situation.

BJ reported his car stolen to some authority. Did they find his car? No. Did they even attempt to search for his car? No. Do police often recover stolen goods? Not really. BJ found his own car and then reclaimed it. He didn't need to go vigilante and even if the police showed up they wouldn't have done anything except make a note in some file. Considering he drove away with it himself it must have been parked on a street somewhere accessible.

If we doubled the police force do you think his car would have been stolen still? Probably as police officers don't watch BJ's car as personal security. They're a reactionary force to crime not a preventative force. Best case scenario is that a police officer would have escorted him to maintain the peace while he recovered it. He still would have found it himself and it is basically impossible to prove who stole it and press charges in this case.

On January 01 2024 11:52 BlackJack wrote:


Yes I recognize that police won't be able to un-steal my car. A police escort to safely recover my car is of course what I was looking for.

+ Show Spoiler +.

On January 04 2024 00:28 Velr wrote:
I would expect them to bring it to me.

WTF is your police actually doing?

On January 04 2024 00:28 Velr wrote:
I would expect them to bring it to me.

WTF is your police actually doing?

In 2019, 88% of the time L.A. County sheriff’s officers spent on stops was for officer-initiated stops rather than in response to calls. The overwhelming majority of that time – 79% – was spent on traffic violations. By contrast, just 11% of those hours was spent on stops based on reasonable suspicion of a crime.

In Riverside, about 83% of deputies’ time spent on officer-initiated stops went toward traffic violations, and just 7% on stops based on reasonable suspicion.

Moreover, most of the stops are pointless, other than inconveniencing citizens, or worse – “a routine practice of pretextual stops,” researchers wrote. Roughly three out of every four hours that Sacramento sheriff’s officers spent investigating traffic violations were for stops that ended in warnings, or no action, for example.

Researchers calculated that more of the departments’ budgets go toward fruitless traffic stops than responses to service calls -- essentially wasting millions of public dollars

The prevailing political myth about police work was echoed again in August, when President Joe Biden announced his administration’s “fund the police” measure to support hiring more cops around the country over the next five years.

“When it comes to fighting crime, we know what works: officers on the street who know the neighborhood,” Biden said.

Most of the existing research flatly contradicts that account.

In 2016, a group of criminologists conducted a systematic review of 62 earlier studies of police force size and crime between 1971 and 2013. They concluded that 40 years of studies consistently show that “the overall effect size for police force size on crime is negative, small, and not statistically significant.”

“This line of research has exhausted its utility,” the authors wrote. “Changing policing strategy is likely to have a greater impact on crime than adding more police.”

Decades of data similarly shows that police don’t solve much serious and violent crime – the safety issues that most concern everyday people.

Over the past decade, “consistently less than half of all violent crime and less than twenty-five percent of all property crime were cleared,” William Laufer and Robert Hughes wrote in a 2021 law review article. Laufer and Hughes are professors in the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania’s Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department.

Police “have never successfully solved crimes with any regularity, as arrest and clearance rates are consistently low throughout history,” and police have never solved even a bare majority of serious crimes, University of Utah college of law professor Shima Baradaran Baughman wrote in another 2021 law review article, including murder, rape, burglary and robbery.

Existing research also affirms the findings in the recent report on police work in California.

Law “enforcement is a relatively small part of what police do every day,” Barry Friedman, a law professor at the New York University School of Law wrote in a 2021 law review article.

Records provided by the sheriff’s departments in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and Riverside showed the same longstanding pattern of racial disparities in police stops throughout the country for decades. Black people in San Diego were more than twice as likely than white residents to be stopped by sheriff’s deputies, for example.

More notably, researchers analyzed the data to show how officers spend their time, and the patterns that emerge tell a striking story about how policing actually works. Those results, too, comport with existing research showing that U.S. police spend much of their time conducting racially biased stops and searches of minority drivers, often without reasonable suspicion, rather than “fighting crime.”

On January 04 2024 06:59 Mohdoo wrote:
Even if we think she is targeted for bad reasons and even if we hate the people going after her, she is so clearly a totally buffoon and behaving unethically that it feels insane for her to be defended in any way. Even if we assume other people have done the same or whatever, it is important for us to always be rigidly strict and cut-throat when it comes to putting "our own" down. I would say I am extra enthusiastic and extra aggressive when it comes to punishing folks "on my side". I am insanely intolerant of even the slightest bit of defense of clearly shitty people "on my side".