Law Enforcement Reform Thread (formerly Defund the Police) (1 Viewer)

[First Time Poster]

So I got busy the other day with the intention to revisit this topic and answer some of the responses put forward but I realized the thread was deleted. But, I felt we had good dialogue happening before I left so I wanted to restart the topic to get the conversation going again. We started some dialogue about it on the liberal board but I feel this topic transcends party lines so I'm making a MCB thread. Post #2, or my next post, is the post I made on the liberal board when asked to elaborate how I felt.

 

[Ayo]

Wouldn’t desegregation be part of the answer to this fear? I think the hold of this type of stuff is weakening, at least since I was a girl. My neighborhood was totally white growing up, but my parents, well, mom, did a good job of exposing us to other cultures and having a wide variety of reading material in the home. When I went to a desegregated middle school, it wasn’t such a shock.

My children have several mixed race couples in their group of friends, they are not afraid of black people, I don’t think. Their generation is friends with people from other races, so they know that people are just people.

That‘s my exceedingly simple minded take on this, anyway.

yes, desegregation is absolutely part of it

As Biden mentioned last night, the 'suburbs' are much less white than they used to be. Oakville - where I live - is pretty damn white historically. It's kind of what the city is known for.

But Olde Oakville is super white and super WASPy while the area we live in is much more diverse. I was out for a run this morning and saw whites but also blacks, Chinese, Korean, Muslim, Jamaican, Eastern European, Hispanic, etc. Just on our block, there are six interracial couples, with mixed ethnicity children. The park two blocks away has become a meeting place for a lot of the Muslim community here.

This part of Oakville doesn't at all reflect Ye Olde Oakville. It's still predominately white - it's a Toronto suburb after all. But there is a definite and obvious difference in the parts of the suburbs that are older and those which are newer.

It's one of the reasons why I advocate for re-modeling the zoning approach to public schools. White kids do better when in mixed ethnicity classrooms. It would lead to more equitability in schools.

Often, zoning decisions are made at board meetings. Board meetings are held on weeknights. Who can go to those meetings? It's mostly professionals or stay at home mothers. And they demand for their kids to go to a school with "fewer behavior problems" (code for poor, visible minorities)

So the kids go to a school that is much further away, and the zones look gerrymandered. Put those moms and professionals in schools with mixed ethnicity and class and what happens is improvement for everyone.

It would be one of the first things I would do were I in charge.

 

[UncleTrvlingJim]

So the historical (and current) effects of racism are not causal factors of violent crime?

That's not quite what I said. I said my understanding of the statistics is that a poor uneducated white person is as likely to be a violent criminal as a poor uneducated black person. However, minority populations are disproportionately represented in the poor and uneducated populace. And I think it's fair to say that the reason for that is due at least in part to historical and current racism.

Perhaps - but "higher yield" as you are using strikes me as possibly favoring the rich and powerful over the poor, given that financial crimes of the sort you seem to be talking about impact rich people more, at least directly, than poor people. It would be interesting to know if property crime comitted by poor people generally impacts more poor people - those least able to absorb it.

Possibly, I'm not sure it's that clear cut though. Part of the current debate about unequal policing is that it has left more black families without a father, it has normalized incarceration in those communities (ie, it's no longer shameful since so many people they know get arrested for so many random things), and so on. The net effect is that community as whole is not benefitting from the supposed reduction in crime.

It is a fair question. I can only go back to something in the above posts: I do think police presence has an effect on lowering crime. As you said before - we could create an [even more] authoritarian police state and reduce crime. There is a non-racist rationale for why the areas patrolled more heavily are patrolled more heavily.

I think the immediate rationale might be non-racist on the surface. Ie, cop arrests someone for marijuana possession is pretty straightforward. The person is clearly breaking the law. That is not in itself racist. But if the actual crime (marijuana possession) is as likely to be committed by white people as black people but they are not arrested as often, the net effect is racist - black Americans arrested at higher rates for the same behavior as white Americans.

I think a lot of arrests get made with the idea that it is somehow going to reduce the type of crime we actually care about. I don't think too many people care about marijuana possession, but they do care about assaults, rapes and theft. So, since we have either explicitly or implicitly laid the responsibility of keeping us "safe" from those things we care about at the feet of the police - they are using what tools we've given them to arrest people they think are going to commit those types of crimes. Which means arresting people for behavior that is committed in other populations just as frequently with the hope that it will reduce the crime we actually care about. So while the intention may or may not be racist, the effect is.

This isn't even getting into the unpacking historical police measures which 40-50 years ago were much more explicitly racist - such as the Nixon policy of trying to associate drug culture with black Americans, so that they could arrest black Americans (and white hippies) without appearing to be doing so for political motives (which is what @Ayo mentioned earlier). There is most definitely a historical pattern to this, where society intentionally tries to associate black Americans with crime, and that then justifies harassment and incarceration.

So even though I don't think that's explicit policy anymore, the history is pretty fraught, and I'd say a lot of the results we have now (generational poverty and crime rates) were created by those policies and are not helped by current policing tactics and emphasis.

Thanks, I've been enjoying the discussion.

 

[JimEverett]

Thanks, I've been enjoying the discussion.

I have enjoyed it as well, and I have enjoyed this thread.

@Ayo I am not ignoring your thoughts. I just feel like our discussion might be getting muddled and I want to approach it more clearly instead of answering paragraph by paragraph or something that might get more muddled than where I think we are.

 

[insidejob]

The whole way warrants are served is problematic. On the one hand - so what if you scream "police" a half a second before you bust down a door? even ore so if the cops are in street clothes?
I understand that an element of surprise can help the safety of officers, and I do nto want to diminish that concern. But if you are going to serve a warrant like that I feel like there should be a much, much higher scrutiny of the warrant application.
The fact is, I think a main motivation is simply that we don't want to give people time to flush evidence down the toilet.
I am much more in favor of letting some criminals - including violent criminals - get away with crime than for similar events to Taylor's murder to continue happening - and Taylor is not an isolated incident. This stuff is rare, but it happens with some degree of regularity.

About 15 years ago I went through Jefferson Parish's drug court program. My girlfriend at the time got in a really bad car accident on the night of my birthday and was basically bedridden for the next nine months. I had to move in with her to take care of her. I notified my case worker of the situation and gave her the new address and she said she'd get it approved with no problem so I up and moved almost immediately. A month later, the compliance officer showed up at my old address at 11:30 pm and the new tenant wasn't home so they busted the door in. They called my cell phone and I told her I got approved to move to a new address, gave it to her and told her to come make the check. She wouldn't do it. Told me to report the next morning at 8 am at the drug court office. I showed up and was handcuffed and spent 60 days in jail for their fork up. Once you have any kind of record, you have no forking rights in this country. fork the police.

 

[DaveXA]

About 15 years ago I went through Jefferson Parish's drug court program. My girlfriend at the time got in a really bad car accident on the night of my birthday and was basically bedridden for the next nine months. I had to move in with her to take care of her. I notified my case worker of the situation and gave her the new address and she said she'd get it approved with no problem so I up and moved almost immediately. A month later, the compliance officer showed up at my old address at 11:30 pm and the new tenant wasn't home so they busted the door in. They called my cell phone and I told her I got approved to move to a new address, gave it to her and told her to come make the check. She wouldn't do it. Told me to report the next morning at 8 am at the drug court office. I showed up and was handcuffed and spent 60 days in jail for their fork up. Once you have any kind of record, you have no forking rights in this country. fork the police.

Yeah, I've heard stories like this before. My best advice is any request or change you make, be sure to have it documented and signed in writing. Don't ever assume they'll do what they say they will. Document it all.

That said, you didn't deserve to be treated like that. Your sentiments are justified, yeah.

 

[insidejob]

Yeah, I've heard stories like this before. My best advice is any request or change you make, be sure to have it documented and signed in writing. Don't ever assume they'll do what they say they will. Document it all.

That said, you didn't deserve to be treated like that. Your sentiments are justified, yeah.

Dude, I did that. We both signed the paperwork that day which was also the same day as staffing. No surprise that that case worker birch got fired a few months later because it turned out she was screwing clients - like literally.

 

[DaveXA]

Dude, I did that. We both signed the paperwork that day which was also the same day as staffing. No surprise that that case worker birch got fired a few months later because it turned out she was screwing clients - like literally.

If you did, you'd have a legitimate civil suit for what happened. Did you look for legal representation?

 

[GMRfellowtraveller]

very interesting podcast looking at whether or not police have an actual duty to protect citizen's safety (spoiler: they don't, really)

No Special Duty

A look at what happens when the police don’t do the one thing you expect them to.

www.wnycstudios.org

 

[insidejob]

If you did, you'd have a legitimate civil suit for what happened. Did you look for legal representation?

When you sign the paperwork to be admitted to drug court you literally sign away ALL of your civil rights as far as they're concerned. JP's drug court is the toughest in the state but also the most successful because of it. They forked me over many more times than that. The day I was supposed to graduate after 20 months in the program, they locked me up for what was a supposedly diluted drug screen. I spent 90 days in jail and they made me go to long term treatment when I never got loaded in the first place. It took me another 18 months at $200/week to finally graduate. At least since all of that shirt is so far in the rear view mirror it doesn't even come up on a background check anymore unless it's an FBI check because it's all over ten years ago.

ETA: I was lucky as hell to even get into their drug court because I had such good legal representation. They wrapped up charges in 4 parishes all into one drug court sentence which had never happened before and I don't think has happened since. You just can't fight them when you signed up for their program.

 

[DaveXA]

When you sign the paperwork to be admitted to drug court you literally sign away ALL of your civil rights as far as they're concerned. JP's drug court is the toughest in the state but also the most successful because of it. They forked me over many more times than that. The day I was supposed to graduate after 20 months in the program, they locked me up for what was a supposedly diluted drug screen. I spent 90 days in jail and they made me go to long term treatment when I never got loaded in the first place. It took me another 18 months at $200/week to finally graduate. At least since all of that shirt is so far in the rear view mirror it doesn't even come up on a background check anymore unless it's an FBI check because it's all over ten years ago.

ETA: I was lucky as hell to even get into their drug court because I had such good legal representation. They wrapped up charges in 4 parishes all into one drug court sentence which had never happened before and I don't think has happened since. You just can't fight them when you signed up for their program.

Yeah, that sucks. I've never been a fan of the criminal justice system. Stuff like that happens all too often. At least it's all in the distant past now. But I wouldn't just forget something like that either.

 

[insidejob]

Yeah, that sucks. I've never been a fan of the criminal justice system. Stuff like that happens all too often. At least it's all in the distant past now. But I wouldn't just forget something like that either.

Trust me, I'll never forget it. It's why I haven't been arrested since. But as forked up as they treated me and screwed with my life, they also saved it. I was going so bad so fast that there was no reaching me. I'd be dead now if I didn't have to suffer through drug court.

 

[MT15]

So this doesn’t directly fit here, but it does in a tangential way. I just found it very interesting, but probably doesn’t need its own thread. A lot of police encounters involve homeless people, and it’s an issue we need to work on. It’s from Canada. Maybe Ayo is familiar.

 

[GMRfellowtraveller]

So this doesn’t directly fit here, but it does in a tangential way. I just found it very interesting, but probably doesn’t need its own thread. A lot of police encounters involve homeless people, and it’s an issue we need to work on. It’s from Canada. Maybe Ayo is familiar.

what did you say?
you want another podcast about the subject at hand
why i'd be happy to oblige

Homelessness is #Solvable

Malcolm Gladwell talks to Rosanne Haggerty about ending homelessness for everyone. Forever. Rosanne Haggerty is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Community Solutions, which assists communities throughout the US and internationally in solving the complex housing problems facing their...

www.rockefellerfoundation.org

 

[superchuck500]

So this story is noteworthy. Apparently a high school journalism club got their hands on a Kentucky police training PowerPoint that had encouraged brutality and referenced Hitler. They ran the story in their paper and it has become a big deal in KY.

 

[CoolBrees]

How forking pathetic is it that the last bastion of investigative reporting is a bunch of high school kids

Only thing more pathetic is the piece of garbage that made that PowerPoint.

 

[DJ1BigTymer]

Who are the Kentucky State Police at war with??? I thought their mission was to prevent/reduce/deter crime and the fear of crime; enhance highway safety through education and enforcement; and to safeguard property and protect individual rights.

Their Core Values/Oath of Office

Kentucky State Police sworn officers shall adhere to and abide by the following: “As a law enforcement officer, my fundamental duty is to serve mankind; to safeguard lives and property; to protect the innocent against deception, the weak against oppression or intimidation, and the peaceful against violence or disorder; and to respect the constitutional rights of all persons to liberty, equality and justice.”

“I will keep my private life unsullied as an example to all; maintain courageous calm in the face of danger, scorn or ridicule; develop self-restraint; and be constantly mindful of the welfare of others. Honest in thought and deed in both my personal and official life, I will be exemplary in obeying the laws of the land and the regulations of the agency. Whatever I see or hear of a confidential nature, or is confided to me in my official capacity, shall be kept secret unless revelation is necessary in the performance of duty.”

“I will never act officiously or permit personal feelings, prejudices, animosities or friendships to influence my decisions. With no compromise for crime and with relentless prosecution of criminals, I will enforce the law courteously and appropriately without fear or favor, malice or ill will, never employing unnecessary force or violence and never accepting gratuities.”

“I recognize the badge of my office as a symbol of public faith and I accept it as a public trust to be held as long as I am true to the ethics of police service. I will constantly strive to achieve these objectives and ideals, dedicating myself before God to my chosen profession: law enforcement.”

How is that Power Point compatible with their mission statement and core values?

 

[GMRfellowtraveller]

Who are the Kentucky State Police at war with??? I thought their mission was to prevent/reduce/deter crime and the fear of crime; enhance highway safety through education and enforcement; and to safeguard property and protect individual rights.

Their Core Values/Oath of Office


How is that Power Point compatible with their mission statement and core values?

They have always been at war with Eastasia - or whatever the equivalent would be

 

[zztop]

bumping this because.. this must be the (R) version of defunding the police

Trump, newly charged, urges defunding Justice Department and FBI

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday called on his fellow Republicans in Congress to slash funding for the U.S. Justice Department and the FBI, one day after pleading not guilty in New York to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

www.reuters.com