I think there is a fairly good chance all of the officers will be acquitted.
I won’t detail all of the reasons why out of respect for those that have asked that I not present information that they interpet as making them feel like they are wrong to grieve and hope.
Serious training and negative consequences for anyone unable to grasp the important issues of racial inconsistency and mistreatment by any and all of law enforcement is spot on.
However if you or your family is touched by rape, murder, missing persons, armed robbery, child abuse, or assault just to name a few of the millions of cases that occur each year. Along with home invasion, drug dealing and human trafficking.
Defund the police ? Come on. The reason so many people come to America is to flee the lawless and unsafe environments in so many countries.
Come on people. Let’s use our collective educations to be smart about all of this together.
Police have a very difficult and dangerous job. They are humans not robots. It must be incredibly stressful every time you pull over a car on the highway or come to a brutal crime scene or have to knock on the door to deliver bad news.
Please let stop grouping everyone into large pools of behavior as though they are monoliths.
That’s a big reason we are here with these problems in the inverse.
Some police are bad and training needs to be adjusted and implemented broadly. Plus other reforms.
Defunding the police?
Well education is needed and tolerance. Basic respect and human decency is needed. There was a sesame street on the pandemic on CNN. They will be presenting one on racism soon. Think it might be as basic as that. Learning about each other will give us the understanding of each other. Having open and honest dialogue might actually lead to some change. No question departments need to be reevaluated. Individuals need to be reevaluated. Training on this subject needs to improve. Local police need to be part of their community. I know many do try.
@privatebanker It doesn’t sound as though you’re addressing my post #137 but I want to come back and make sure that what I’m advocating is to actually provide more resources rather than less.
I’m also trying to avoid the assumption that "all police are . . . " anything; my criticism is with the climate which we as a nation have created for the work of law enforcement.
I’ll try to write as precisely as possible and hope I haven’t posted anything misleading.
@HouseChatte No, I was not referencing your post at all.
I thought your post was quite thoughtful actually. I really appreciate everyone’s comments here, even those which I disagree with, in part.
Shutting down dialogue is the last thing anyone needs.
I was responding to the growing number of calls I am hearing across media and social sites. Many local governments including LA have already talking about massive cuts.
I think it’s the wrong messaging during an extremely emotional period of time and potentially extremely dangerous. Most people don’t even know what it means.
My interpretation of this statement is that we would take SOME of the budget from the police force and put the money into other uses like better education, programs, reform, affordable housing, and mental/physical health for certain communities which over time would lessen the need for so many police officers. This country spends 2x as much money on law enforcement than other comparable countries, maybe some of the money could/should be used for reform and rehabilitation and not expensive prisons and incarceration facilities.
Unlike what Tucker Carlson said last night, no reasonable person is advocating to completely eliminate law enforcement; this is just scare tactics and rhetoric which attempts to cloud the issue of much needed reform and societal change.
@socaldad2002 I understand that sentiment.
In Minneapolis, that’s not what is being suggested at all.
My daughter and her friends. Not what they think in theory.
In LA, as you referenced 250 mm from a department doesn’t sound like much but it’s not exactly a perfectly safe place as is.
Raise taxes. Issue social impact bonds (you would over subscribe 10x).
Cuts like that have real meaning. Usually in the areas and for the people that can least afford it. Beverly Hills. (I know it’s a separate city) Brentwood. Rancho Palos Verdes. They won’t have any problems imho.
But enough on that subject. I have a brother who is a state trooper major crimes detective . His story and commitment to helping others drives my thinking. Most people have no idea how difficult it is and the toll they pay on human level. and danger involved. Most guess. Few know.
I also want to get it back on track toward the discussion of healthy reforms and racial justice initiatives which are real.
I know.
My f-i-l is a retired police detective. Two of his brothers are State Patrol police. Another brother is a sheriff’s deputy. One of my mentors growing up was a police detective. I have several close friends who are defense attorneys, one who is an ADA, and one who has run two failed elections to be DA. I know probation officers and judges and magistrates. Not to mention the literally hundreds of people I know and have met who have suffered at the hands of an unjust justice system. I myself have been arrested by a racist white policeman who ended up getting fired after a judge was incredulous to find I had been arrested in the first place (because there was absolutely no cause, except for one policeman’s bruised ego and racist mindset) and tossed the case out of court – I won, but that policeman’s racism cost me hundreds of dollars in lawyer fees and almost cost me my corporate job at the time. But I’m thankful because it could have completely ruined me. My opinion on the subject does not originate from a place of ignorance.
I know very well how the American criminal justice system works. And I believe that in the area of systemic injustice, it needs a near complete overhaul.
That would be great!
@EconPop that’s great. You know the what it’s like. But it’s few really. And you have had some lousy experiences it sounds like as well.
Certainly can respect your take on things.
My life has been fantastic. A life well lived and worth living, and hopefully I have a few decades of it to live yet. But I wouldn’t wish my children or anyone’s children to have to endure some of the things that have come my way. I wouldn’t wish anyone’s child to have to be murdered walking home from the store like Trayvon Martin and have parents watch the murderer be found not guilty, or have the police torture and murder a man in broad daylight like George Floyd.
There is no justification for it. Absolutely none. Every defense of some of these absolutely horrid murders stuns me to some degree.
There are many books to read to see that America’s criminal justice system is not unjust by accident. It is systemically unjust by design. Check out the quote I posted from Ben & Jerry’s a few pages back – that’s a corporation that fully understands. Or read/skim some books to fully grasp the situation:
“Slavery By Another Name” by Douglas A Blackmon
“The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness” by Michelle Alexander
“The Warmth Of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson
There are tons of books about this. The system is not broken by accident. It is working exactly as planned. The American Criminal Justice System was created, maintained and updated again and again to dominate and imprison black men. The key is to rebuild significant parts of the whole. This cannot be fixed with a bandage. This requires open heart surgery.
As you said, many pontificate. Few actually know.
Then who will answer the calls for the police when they are needed if the police are seriously defunded? I think police training needs to be changed. According to a number of folks I know who live in NYC who do support having a large police force, there was much misdirection on how NYPD was used during the protests. Instead of protecting the protesters as part of their job, there was an attitude and mission from the get-go that they were the demonstrators were the problem, the enemy. I think much more attention could have been focused on the store fronts where it was predictable that looters were going to hit. Though There May have been demonstrators who went off route to take advantage of the goodies, sadly…many of the vandals and thieves were out there for that purpose.
No one is going to actually shut down all police departments across America. There is no reason to believe that would ever happen. That may be the rhetoric of a few very upset people who are desperate for any solution to stop the systemic unjustice, and that is being looped on some network news channels.
Can we all agree that is a false talking point?
Instead, can we discuss what, if anything, we think might be wrong with the current Criminal Justice System in America? How might we correct those problems? Will it require help from Congress or can most of the work be done on the local level, or the state level?
If we’ve learned anything from the riots, it’s the police are under-funded. They have insufficient resources and funding to maintain order.
How much defunding? That is the question. How should the police have handled the demonstrators with respect, support and protection is a huge question. How could the police, the leaders in the major cities that have been having the most destruction have done better to avoid those damages, rather than harassing demonstrators? How should the demonstrators interact with the police?
You asked about what next? Maybe we are seeing some changes.
Alexis Ohanian, who’s white and married to black tennis pro Serena Williams, will step down from Reddit the company he founded and is highly encouraging the remaining board members to hire a black executive to fill his vacant position.
He also is donating $1 million to black causes and all future earning from his Reddit gains will also be donated these charitable causes.
Any real change in America is going to be very uncomfortable to the majority and we should all expect much push back from various groups who have benefited from the status quo.
@Happytimes2001 and family have been discussing how they would have intervened unlike the witnesses who were actually there. But Minneapolis police have a terrible reputation with black residents. Police killings and other incidents of police brutality are not unheard of. Empathy is useful here and what a white middle-aged person would do isn’t very relevant.
Law enforcement is there to deal with day to day issues. If there were enough police to deal with civil unrest, that would mean that, on a day to day basis, there are more than three times as many police as are needed to protect the public. So are you saying that we should pay another 1,600,000 police officers to sit around all day for months at end?
As for the amount of money that we are already spending on law enforcement, and how it compares to the amount of money spent on issues with far larger impacts than theft and murder:
All retailers together lose $50 billion to theft, $6 billion a year are lost to auto theft, and property crime costs about $15 billion. A total of $71 Billion lost to property crimes.
About 15,000 or so die each year to homicide
On the other hand, The USA loses about $300 billion a year to mental health, and about 47,000 die every year due to suicide.
However, the USA spends $100 billion a year on law enforcement and $80 billion on incarceration. On the other hand, the total government (state + federal) expenditure on mental health is $44.53 billion.
So, if the government has only $43 billion to spend in order to deal with an issue which costs $300 billion and 47,000 lives a year, than it definitely shouldn’t be spending $180 billion to deal with an issue which only costs $71 billion and 15,000 lives.
A country which is spending so much to catch and punish people, but is not willing to spend more than a fraction of that amount to save people’s health and lives has its priorities truly messed up.
PS. In addition to the $100 billion, the police have been getting millions of dollars in military equipment through the 1033 program. In 2019, the military transferred 200 million in equipment to the police, and I’m not talking just Kevlar and guns, but armored Humvees, armored personnel carriers, etc.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/johntemplon/police-departments-military-gear-1033-program
As a side note, in most jurisdictions the city council has 100% control over the municipal police department. They control the policy and procedure manual, hiring practices, they select the chief of police, etc. If you aren’t getting the police you want, you need to fire your city councilman at the next election, because they are the ones with complete responsibility for the conduct of local police. Hold them accountable.
Almost any idea for change listed in this thread is a municipal, not federal, issue, and you need to participate in municipal elections if you want your voice to be heard.
Well with 12 straight days of protests around the U.S. and world, maybe this time will indeed be different?
Unfortunately, with people like Candace Owens’ rhetoric it just feeds the divisiveness and really does a disservice to the bigger issue. If you attack and marginalize the victim you don’t have to take a hard look at the root problems facing the AA community.
Come to Houston. Remarkably effective police department that the African American mayor wants to increase funding for. 60k participated in diverse and peaceful protest, and almost no looting occurred. Relational policing at its best.