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On December 31 2023 04:27 King_Charles_III wrote:Show nested quote +On December 30 2023 09:44 Razyda wrote:On December 30 2023 09:33 BlackJack wrote:On December 30 2023 09:13 gobbledydook wrote:
In other news, Trump was disqualified from the ballot in Colorado and Maine and it looks like the Supreme Court is going to have to rule on it.
I personally think that Trump's guilt should be decided by criminal trial, not by election law. Irrespective if you think Trump should be taken off the ballot, in my mind the optics of this is not a winning play. SCOTUS is going to overturn it anyway and Trump gets more ammo to play the witch hunt card. Out of curiosity, as US legal system is somewhat of a maze for me, can SCOTUS, in a manner of speaking, abstain, by stating that elections are state matter and as such it is not a case for it? SCOTUS will allow trump to be on the ballot as is widely predicted. People like to say that section 3 of the 14th amendment doesn't require a conviction but that isn't taking account of the whole picture. Section 5 provides that congress has enforcement power over the 14th amendment. This makes it highly questionable that any other section of the amendment is "self-executing," because it would be pointless to specify that congress has enforcement power if others have enforcement power too. Thus if anyone wants to sue under section 1 of the amendment, they can only do so because congress has passed an enforcement law called "section 1983." As for section 3, Congress's only existing enforcement law is the law that makes insurrection a crime. That crime carries the amendment's penalty of disqualification. This is a very easy way for SCOTUS to reverse Colorado and Maine: congress has the enforcement power. Back during the Reconstruction era, congress had an additional enforcement law in place (federal prosecutors could petition to disqualify someone), and that's how a lot of the disqualifications from that era happened (though there were also some unilateral disqualifications by state officials I think). That law was then repealed by the Amnesty Act of 1872, so all that stands is the crime of insurrection. It makes all the sense in the world that section 5 is how the amendment is enforced. Trump has been charged with crimes over the relevant events but he has not been charged with insurrection. Over 1000 January 6 foot soldiers have been charged with crimes and none of them have been charged with insurrection. But now some dem partisans come in and assert insurrection by a makeshift process. Doesn't make any sense. There is an 1869 case called "Griffin's Case" where the court said section 3 is not self-executing because of section 5. Basically all of the above reasoning. I'd bet my bottom dollar that SCOTUS goes with that.
Colorado case was brought forth by Republicans.
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On December 30 2023 23:29 ChristianS wrote:Show nested quote +On December 30 2023 19:20 BlackJack wrote:On December 30 2023 09:45 ChristianS wrote:
Re: Trump Stuff
I wouldn’t be too up in arms if SCOTUS read a due process requirement into that provision (i.e. Trump has to actually be convicted of something to be disqualified from office). It’s not in the actual text, but it’s not an unreasonable requirement to add into a slightly-linguistically-ambiguous phrasing. It wouldn’t be especially “originalist” but w/e.
My suspicion/fear, though, is that they’ll say something more along the lines of “whether Trump should be on the ballot is a ‘political question’ so we’re gonna let the voters decide,” which would functionally delete that provision of the Constitution for no reason other than political allegiance. That would be, I think, absurd and indefensible, and is probably the most likely outcome, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
I think the chances they uphold CO’s decision is basically zero to the point of barely even being worth thinking about.
@BJ: I mean, not to rehash the 2020 criminal justice conversation, but prosecutors have enormous power in this “adversarial” system to, for example, threaten people into plea deals, or work directly with cops to slant the evidence (especially in cases of police brutality), and generally ensure that accused criminals’ lives are pretty dramatically disrupted even if they later turn out to be innocent. And generally speaking, they do, because their bosses, their police coworkers, and voters all love to see massive sentences as often as possible.
It’s not remotely clear those policies actually make anybody safer, and it’s extremely clear that the presence of a defense attorney is not sufficient to ensure the criminal justice system only imposes immense suffering on guilty criminals in a way that actually promotes public safety.
So no, I don’t think “prosecutors should just try to imprison dangerous people and let defense attorneys serve the role of keeping them honest” is a reasonable take. Nominally it’s the DA’s job to do what best protects the public, which is not necessarily maximizing sentences by any means necessary. Okay, maybe I'm wrong that removing the revolving doors from our jails would make the community safer, but one thing I always notice when I bring up my theories is that people only shoot them down without providing theories of their own. What's your theory for why police don't show up when you call 911 in Oakland? Something about housing being too expensive? Or is it some iteration of All Cops Are Bastards and it's worse in Oakland because those Cops are just more Bastardy? In what world is it even remotely acceptable to dial 911 and be on hold for 10 minutes before anyone even answers the phone. The problem with the SF Bay Area is that it's pretty one-sided politically so you can't really blame the conservatives for your troubles. So far the response has been either to stick their head in the sand and insist things are not going downhill or insist that things are going downhill in spite of their policies and not because of them. It's actually an impressive feat to mess things up this bad. San Francisco is a gorgeous city, the climate is lovely, it's a few hours drive from the most beautiful national parks in perhaps the whole world, and it's incredibly wealthy. Per capita the city has the most tax revenue of any other city and they still have managed to turn a massage budget deficit. If only they could raise taxes just a bit more. They were dealt a royal flush, folded face up, and insist they are playing their hand correctly. I don’t know why you were on hold for 10 minutes. Nothing about the budget stuff that’s been extremely over-discussed would have suggested that “we’re gonna have to slash our number of dispatchers by 90%” would have been reasonable or necessary at any point. Maybe they did it anyway just because they’re dumb? Or because fewer 911 calls helps their crime statistics somehow? As a rule I seem to recall average hold times tend to be related to call volume and duration and something about a Poisson distribution. So maybe they just get a lot of calls, or the calls run longer than most for some reason? That’s assuming, of course, that this wasn’t some weird fluke or the day you happened to be calling (maybe that ACAB-ey police department decided to just send a bunch of dispatchers on a training retreat without finding replacements because they don’t actually give a shit about protecting you?). But assuming this is, in fact, a consistent trend it would make sense that it’s a result of higher-than-average call volume, possibly adding in that the petty theft calls they’re getting tend to take longer than the average 911 call to resolve, and/or maybe they’re short on dispatchers for some reason. Presumably the obvious solution would be to hire more dispatchers. Is there some reason that’s not possible? IIRC our conclusion was that after not getting everything they asked for in 2021, they still got significant budget increases in 2022 and 2023, so I don’t buy that they don’t have the money. Is it just really hard to staff that position in SF right now?
Makes sense to me. When homicide is up 40%, vehicle theft up 100%, felonious assault up 140%, etc. it seems like you would have to hire more dispatchers to keep up with demand.
But that only solves the 1st problem of getting through to emergency services. It doesn't solve the 2nd problem that the police never showed up to help recover a stolen vehicle. If the 1st problem has an obvious solution of hiring more dispatchers then I submit that the 2nd problem has an equally obvious solution.
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On December 31 2023 07:39 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On December 30 2023 23:29 ChristianS wrote:On December 30 2023 19:20 BlackJack wrote:On December 30 2023 09:45 ChristianS wrote:
Re: Trump Stuff
I wouldn’t be too up in arms if SCOTUS read a due process requirement into that provision (i.e. Trump has to actually be convicted of something to be disqualified from office). It’s not in the actual text, but it’s not an unreasonable requirement to add into a slightly-linguistically-ambiguous phrasing. It wouldn’t be especially “originalist” but w/e.
My suspicion/fear, though, is that they’ll say something more along the lines of “whether Trump should be on the ballot is a ‘political question’ so we’re gonna let the voters decide,” which would functionally delete that provision of the Constitution for no reason other than political allegiance. That would be, I think, absurd and indefensible, and is probably the most likely outcome, but I’m happy to be proven wrong.
I think the chances they uphold CO’s decision is basically zero to the point of barely even being worth thinking about.
@BJ: I mean, not to rehash the 2020 criminal justice conversation, but prosecutors have enormous power in this “adversarial” system to, for example, threaten people into plea deals, or work directly with cops to slant the evidence (especially in cases of police brutality), and generally ensure that accused criminals’ lives are pretty dramatically disrupted even if they later turn out to be innocent. And generally speaking, they do, because their bosses, their police coworkers, and voters all love to see massive sentences as often as possible.
It’s not remotely clear those policies actually make anybody safer, and it’s extremely clear that the presence of a defense attorney is not sufficient to ensure the criminal justice system only imposes immense suffering on guilty criminals in a way that actually promotes public safety.
So no, I don’t think “prosecutors should just try to imprison dangerous people and let defense attorneys serve the role of keeping them honest” is a reasonable take. Nominally it’s the DA’s job to do what best protects the public, which is not necessarily maximizing sentences by any means necessary. Okay, maybe I'm wrong that removing the revolving doors from our jails would make the community safer, but one thing I always notice when I bring up my theories is that people only shoot them down without providing theories of their own. What's your theory for why police don't show up when you call 911 in Oakland? Something about housing being too expensive? Or is it some iteration of All Cops Are Bastards and it's worse in Oakland because those Cops are just more Bastardy? In what world is it even remotely acceptable to dial 911 and be on hold for 10 minutes before anyone even answers the phone. The problem with the SF Bay Area is that it's pretty one-sided politically so you can't really blame the conservatives for your troubles. So far the response has been either to stick their head in the sand and insist things are not going downhill or insist that things are going downhill in spite of their policies and not because of them. It's actually an impressive feat to mess things up this bad. San Francisco is a gorgeous city, the climate is lovely, it's a few hours drive from the most beautiful national parks in perhaps the whole world, and it's incredibly wealthy. Per capita the city has the most tax revenue of any other city and they still have managed to turn a massage budget deficit. If only they could raise taxes just a bit more. They were dealt a royal flush, folded face up, and insist they are playing their hand correctly. I don’t know why you were on hold for 10 minutes. Nothing about the budget stuff that’s been extremely over-discussed would have suggested that “we’re gonna have to slash our number of dispatchers by 90%” would have been reasonable or necessary at any point. Maybe they did it anyway just because they’re dumb? Or because fewer 911 calls helps their crime statistics somehow? As a rule I seem to recall average hold times tend to be related to call volume and duration and something about a Poisson distribution. So maybe they just get a lot of calls, or the calls run longer than most for some reason? That’s assuming, of course, that this wasn’t some weird fluke or the day you happened to be calling (maybe that ACAB-ey police department decided to just send a bunch of dispatchers on a training retreat without finding replacements because they don’t actually give a shit about protecting you?). But assuming this is, in fact, a consistent trend it would make sense that it’s a result of higher-than-average call volume, possibly adding in that the petty theft calls they’re getting tend to take longer than the average 911 call to resolve, and/or maybe they’re short on dispatchers for some reason. Presumably the obvious solution would be to hire more dispatchers. Is there some reason that’s not possible? IIRC our conclusion was that after not getting everything they asked for in 2021, they still got significant budget increases in 2022 and 2023, so I don’t buy that they don’t have the money. Is it just really hard to staff that position in SF right now? Makes sense to me. When homicide is up 40%, vehicle theft up 100%, felonious assault up 140%, etc. it seems like you would have to hire more dispatchers to keep up with demand. But that only solves the 1st problem of getting through to emergency services. It doesn't solve the 2nd problem that the police never showed up to help recover a stolen vehicle. If the 1st problem has an obvious solution of hiring more dispatchers then I submit that the 2nd problem has an equally obvious solution.
Police should apparently use their budget increase to educate the public on how they handle this stuff.
The standard procedure for recovering a stolen vehicle is for police to basically forget that it happened. Then someone calls about an abandoned car that's bothering them and they show up at their leisure if at all. The next part can all happen without the police ever seeing the car themselves. The plates get run, pop up as a stolen vehicle, then they call a tow-truck, and whatever phone number is associated with the report (if they remembered to get it). If you don't beat the tow-truck to your car (typically about 10-45 minutes depending on where it is and if they need a specialty vehicle) it gets towed and you can't have it back unless you pay for it being towed and stored with an additional fee because the police called it in.
The other way is just them stumbling on it for something unrelated while it's being driven and discovering it's a stolen car, with the same ensuing steps as before. That's if you're lucky and they didn't find a bunch of stolen stuff or whatever in it, because then it's evidence and you both wont get it back or be able to claim it as totalled on your insurance indefinitely. Oh and you still have to pay for it being towed and stored if/when you do get it back.
Police showing up to help you recover your stolen vehicle is not something they really even do, regardless of funding, and most definitely not something that would get an emergency response lol.
TLDR: Your problem is with the police and how they run themselves, you just don't understand how the police work in the US well enough to recognize it (assuming you're arguing in some semblance of good-faith).
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BART police (metro) responded immediately and even sent officers to the location I was telling them it was pinging at but the vehicle was gone by the time they arrived moments later. They also asked me repeatedly if I received any new GPS pings so they could go to those locations. So no, this is not par for the course everywhere.
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On December 31 2023 09:36 BlackJack wrote:
BART police (metro) responded immediately and even sent officers to the location I was telling them it was pinging at but the vehicle was gone by the time they arrived moments later. They also asked me repeatedly if I received any new GPS pings so they could go to those locations. So no, this is not par for the course everywhere. So when you had coordinates and visually located the car, the first thing you did was update BART police with this information since they were repeatedly asking you for it?
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On December 31 2023 09:50 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2023 09:36 BlackJack wrote:
BART police (metro) responded immediately and even sent officers to the location I was telling them it was pinging at but the vehicle was gone by the time they arrived moments later. They also asked me repeatedly if I received any new GPS pings so they could go to those locations. So no, this is not par for the course everywhere. So when you had coordinates and visually located the car, the first thing you did was update BART police with this information since they were repeatedly asking you for it?
BART sent an officer immediately to take my stolen vehicle report and it was as he was taking the report that night that they went to the location I was telling them it pinged at and that was when he was asking me if I received any new pings. It was the next morning I located the vehicle and it was in Oakland 2 kilometers from the nearest BART station and I called OPD because that's their jurisdiction. BART PD's purview generally involves the metro stations and trains, not to fill in the holes when other PDs are unable to respond.
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On December 31 2023 10:37 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2023 09:50 GreenHorizons wrote:On December 31 2023 09:36 BlackJack wrote:
BART police (metro) responded immediately and even sent officers to the location I was telling them it was pinging at but the vehicle was gone by the time they arrived moments later. They also asked me repeatedly if I received any new GPS pings so they could go to those locations. So no, this is not par for the course everywhere. So when you had coordinates and visually located the car, the first thing you did was update BART police with this information since they were repeatedly asking you for it? BART sent an officer immediately to take my stolen vehicle report and it was as he was taking the report that night that they went to the location I was telling them it pinged at and that was when he was asking me if I received any new pings. It was the next morning I located the vehicle and it was in Oakland 2 kilometers from the nearest BART station and I called OPD because that's their jurisdiction. BART PD's purview generally involves the metro stations and trains, not to fill in the holes when other PDs are unable to respond.
So no, you didn't update the BART police. The same police you say were studiously investigating your case. Instead, you ignorantly called 911/OPD. Where apparently someone did you the favor of letting you know that you were going to be waiting a while. They even spelled it out pretty plainly that 911/OPD has different priorities (and just a lot more things to deal with generally) than BART, which you should have realized on your own at this point.
There's a lot going on in all that, but one important part is that this was quite literally their purview. They specifically investigate "all reported crimes that occur on BART property. These crimes include transit-related crimes and auto burglaries, auto thefts, robberies, purse snatches, assaults, homicides, and any other felonies, misdemeanors or infractions that occur within the BART District."
I'm not going to go through everything, but it was literally a BART police case to investigate/close. You ignorantly (somewhat understandably so) and errantly thought you were acting reasonably and auspiciously by effectively unilaterally trying to transfer the case from BART police to OPD via 911. You were doing the opposite. It's an understandable mistake given the perpetually petulant jurisdictional pissing contests PD's and the thousands of other policing agencies in the US are always in.
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Lol I called both, mate. BART PD punted it back to OPD. A lot of assumptions you are making.
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Not really an assumption if he asked explicitly “did you call BART back?” and you replied not “yes and they said to call OPD” but
It was the next morning I located the vehicle and it was in Oakland 2 kilometers from the nearest BART station and I called OPD because that's their jurisdiction. BART PD's purview generally involves the metro stations and trains, not to fill in the holes when other PDs are unable to respond.
I also read that post and thought it meant you had not called BART again the next morning.
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On December 31 2023 09:36 BlackJack wrote:
BART police (metro) responded immediately and even sent officers to the location I was telling them it was pinging at but the vehicle was gone by the time they arrived moments later. They also asked me repeatedly if I received any new GPS pings so they could go to those locations. So no, this is not par for the course everywhere.
it must be nice to live in a city where one or both police departments in your area are so well-funded they can afford to send people chasing stolen vehicles.
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On December 31 2023 22:26 ChristianS wrote:Not really an assumption if he asked explicitly “did you call BART back?” and you replied not “yes and they said to call OPD” but Show nested quote +It was the next morning I located the vehicle and it was in Oakland 2 kilometers from the nearest BART station and I called OPD because that's their jurisdiction. BART PD's purview generally involves the metro stations and trains, not to fill in the holes when other PDs are unable to respond. I also read that post and thought it meant you had not called BART again the next morning.
He also originally said:
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.
Which reads like he only called BART back to file the vehicle recovery report. The first call to 911 was obviously a mistake since it wasn't an emergency (a frequent contributor to increased 911 wait times).
Otherwise, he's whining about getting a better police response than you could expect in most cities in the US because he thinks it helps his argument about defunding the police being bad policy (it doesn't).
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On December 31 2023 23:23 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2023 22:26 ChristianS wrote:Not really an assumption if he asked explicitly “did you call BART back?” and you replied not “yes and they said to call OPD” but It was the next morning I located the vehicle and it was in Oakland 2 kilometers from the nearest BART station and I called OPD because that's their jurisdiction. BART PD's purview generally involves the metro stations and trains, not to fill in the holes when other PDs are unable to respond. I also read that post and thought it meant you had not called BART again the next morning. He also originally said: Show nested quote +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. Which reads like he only called BART back to file the vehicle recovery report. The first call to 911 was obviously a mistake since it wasn't an emergency (a frequent contributor to increased 911 wait times). Otherwise, he's whining about getting a better police response than you could expect in most cities in the US because he thinks it helps his argument about defunding the police being bad policy (it doesn't).
Yeah, I think BJ is getting a little defensive about the details here but it’s kinda beside the point anyway. This is getting lost in this niche question about calling BART or OPD, much like the argument with Kwark got lost in what does or does not constitute a budget cut, when I’m only interested in the discussion if it actually relates to generalizable conclusions about police in America.
In hopes of getting back to that, perhaps it would be helpful to imagine a comparable interaction with a private company’s customer service. You might call about a product defect covered by warranty, get ahold of one department, maybe they were pretty helpful but then they say this is really some other department’s purview. You call the other department, wait on hold for hours, find out there was a different number for that department you were supposed to call, get some hostile interrogation implying you broke it on purpose, get disconnected, until eventually you were bored enough while listening to hold music to Google how to fix it yourself and just do it. Then they eventually pick up, scold you for fixing it yourself under warranty, and threaten to void your warranty unless you file the right feedback form explaining exactly what broke and how you fixed it.
What might we conclude from that interaction? Certainly that company has terrible customer service. Is their customer service department underfunded? Maybe, maybe not. It *might* improve your experience if they doubled their service agents’ salaries, or hired twice as many agents, but it’s not obvious that’s the issue here. It’s certainly not obvious it would be accurate to attribute it to “because of woke,” even if we suppose there had been a popular Twitter trend of leftists saying all customer service agents are bastards. There’s a lot of systemic changes we can imagine recommending to that company based on this story, but I don’t think many of them would be generalizable to national culture war issues. Some of the specific systemic changes might be generalizable to other corporations’ customer service policies, though.
So dispensing with blaming the problem on “defund the police” or wokeness generally, what can we conclude from BJ’s poor experience with the police? I think one problem this situation hints at about modern PD’s is that the system is overly abstracted from the public. Whose jurisdiction something is, whether something is an emergency, or even which emergency service should be showing up are all considered too difficult for the average person to understand, so we’ve settled on a system where basically everything is funneled through calling 911 and then they’re supposed to deal with whatever the problem could be.
That has a number of obvious consequences. One is that regular people have no idea how these services actually work; you’ve already decided they’re too dumb to get it so you created a mega-simplified interface to connect them to professionals who handle everything from there. But that’s an extremely wide funnel, including everything from “I’m having a heart attack” to “my house is on fire” to “I saw a guy robbing a liquor store at gun point” to “there’s some kids smoking weed behind the CVS” to “I found a homeless guy vaguely menacing and I’d like to report it.”
Triage is necessary, of course, but you can’t triage the initial incoming call; you have to find out what kind of call it is first. That means the heart attack folks might get stuck in line behind the “I saw kids smoking weed” calls. And once you start triaging, you still have to figure out what to do with an infinity of different types of calls. If there’s not an obvious box to put it in (e.g. medical, fire, animal control, poison control, etc.) they’re probably just going to put it in the “Misc.” box, which generally means the cops.
So, TL;DR obvious recommendations:
The general public should learn more about what situations actually merit a 911 call. Just like the medical system improving if you go to an urgent care instead of the ER for non-emergency medical issues, the whole emergency services system will work better if people reserve 911 for actual emergencies.
We should have more specialized public services for situations currently handled by cops. If all the weird difficult calls go to the cops, even if they don’t involve any actual criminal investigation, it’ll prevent the cops from focusing on their nominal job. Meanwhile the guy showing up will have no relevant training to actually deal with the issue.
Some changes *might* require additional funding but without an actual plan for what will change, budget increases are just throwing money at the issue and hoping it will go away.
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Well I'm glad we got to the bottom of this. The problem isn't that crime has dramatically increased at the same time that the number of police officers has decreased. No... the real problem is that people are calling the police when they need them.
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You wanted me to offer solutions, I took my best shot. If you wanna snipe instead of actually talking about it go ahead, don’t let me stop you!
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The problem is obvious - crime is dramatically up and police manpower is down. Educating the public on which phone # to call when they are the victim of a crime is not a serious solution if you don't talk about why crime is way up in the first place. It's akin to telling starving people how to ration their grain better while ignoring the reasons for the famine. It's analogous to the Republican solution of "lets give every teacher a firearm" while ignoring why we have so many school shootings in the first place. It's a band-aid proposal while ignoring the actual problem. Forgive me if I perceive the discussions on the minutiae of which police department to call or which telephone # to use as deflection from the actual issues, whether conscious or unconscious. Admittedly, an international gaming site is probably not the best forum for a discussion on local crime and politics in the first place so perhaps it's time to move on.
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On January 01 2024 07:58 BlackJack wrote:
The problem is obvious - crime is dramatically up and police manpower is down. Educating the public on which phone # to call when they are the victim of a crime is not a serious solution if you don't talk about why crime is way up in the first place. It's akin to telling starving people how to ration their grain better while ignoring the reasons for the famine. It's analogous to the Republican solution of "lets give every teacher a firearm" while ignoring why we have so many school shootings in the first place. It's a band-aid proposal while ignoring the actual problem. Forgive me if I perceive the discussions on the minutiae of which police department to call or which telephone # to use as deflection from the actual issues, whether conscious or unconscious. Admittedly, an international gaming site is probably not the best forum for a discussion on local crime and politics in the first place so perhaps it's time to move on.
Yeah, might be that time. If you want to just chant slogans and take cheap shots Kwark might be a better conversation partner for you.
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On January 01 2024 07:58 BlackJack wrote:
The problem is obvious - crime is dramatically up and police manpower is down. Educating the public on which phone # to call when they are the victim of a crime is not a serious solution if you don't talk about why crime is way up in the first place. It's akin to telling starving people how to ration their grain better while ignoring the reasons for the famine. It's analogous to the Republican solution of "lets give every teacher a firearm" while ignoring why we have so many school shootings in the first place. It's a band-aid proposal while ignoring the actual problem. Forgive me if I perceive the discussions on the minutiae of which police department to call or which telephone # to use as deflection from the actual issues, whether conscious or unconscious. Admittedly, an international gaming site is probably not the best forum for a discussion on local crime and politics in the first place so perhaps it's time to move on. 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.
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On January 01 2024 06:11 BlackJack wrote:
Well I'm glad we got to the bottom of this. The problem isn't that crime has dramatically increased at the same time that the number of police officers has decreased. No... the real problem is that people are calling the police when they need them.
The real problem is that police are a protection/enforcement gang for capitalists, but capitalists have convinced people they are something else. This has left you (among many ) feeling confused and upset. In response you're lashing out at the targets that make sense to you, which in this case is vaguely "the left" and more specifically "defund the police" efforts and legislators you perceived to have supported/enacted it. Ultimately advocating for even more spending (from where I wonder?) on police and imprisonment out of a short-sighted self-interest.
I don't know exactly what you thought you needed 911 for (? evidently nothing), but your experience isn't a problem caused by defund slogans, or some police staffing and budget reductions. It's firstly a better experience than most, based on BART police specifically being unusually responsive. Secondly, the more typical response you got from 911/OPD is reflective of issues that go way deeper than any particular department or legislation written in the 21st century.
Those issues can be complex but at the core are some pretty simple facts. Probably one of the most relevant to your specific experience/objections being: The police have no obligation to protect you.
If you reconcile that, it's not hard to figure out why you felt left in the lurch and that it isn't because of any slogans or reductions in the growth of police budgets.
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EPT
