[fatcat500]

The people who support defunding the police have never felt genuine fear from being victimized by crime.

It's only after the crime, when you're thinking about how someone else had the hubris to threaten your life, thinking about how you could have died, or worse, if your loved ones had been with you, that they could have died, that you begin to wade yourself into a deep and abiding anger.

I used to feel sympathy for criminals. Especially seeing how many of them have led rough lives, having been raised by bad parents, in horrible environments, having been led by others to delinquency as youth, then into crime as adults.

However, once you have been victimized, this sympathy vanishes. It does not matter how bad you've had it -- violence is never justified. Any person who resorts to violence instantly loses all justification.

It is only the rich who can afford to stroke their moral ego in such an egregious manner. It is the poor and the middle class who pay with their lives for this sanctimony.

[reanimus]

I dunno man, both me and my mom have been mugged before and the police didn't help. Same with when my car was broken into and someone tried to break my front door lock.

People make this argument all the time but I fail to see how the police have helped any time I've experienced any actual crime, not to mention so many others. That's not even getting into the politics of who can call the police and how the police react differently to situations, either.

[livinginfear]

I don't see how defunding the police provides any kind of solution to the problems you mention. I know there's a strawman argument here, do you think that you'll get better treatment from local gangs/militias/warlords, in a society without police?

'Police Abolitionism' can't be taken seriously as an ideology. I'm not white, and I've been the victim of crime multiple times, unfortunately. I don't think the police are perfect, or a perfect institution. They did their job, and helped me in these cases. Whenever I hear people talk about being afraid to call the police I switch off immediately. Total bunk.

[alphabettsy]

You don’t believe there are people afraid to call the police? You’re not familiar of any stories of people who requested police assistance only to end up a victim?

[detaro]

If you know it is a strawman argument, why are you making it?

[throwawaygh]

It's not a solution, but I can buy a nice vacation with the reduction in my tax bill and functionally nothing else changes about my life.

[Corrado]

Yeah, I personally know people who were mugged at gunpoint and the police did nothing. The assailant is on social media and the victims provided the police with their account names. Nothing was done.

[throwawaygh]

I've been a victim of both violent crime and property theft. Police did nothing. It was pulling teeth just to get them to write up reports so that I could file insurance claims.

Police don't prevent crime. Hell, they barely even respond to crime.

And cops in our city have criminally generous pensions -- when you count the pension, lots of these high school grads making 100K+/yr. To say nothing of the absurd capital expenditures. So, I'm super okay with shifting resources from PDs to basically any other program. Value per dollar spent is just super low. Probably lower than literally every other item on the budget sheet.

Doesn't have to be a political thing. Hell, prior to 2019, right-leaning libertarians were the only ones who I could find who agreed with me on this. PDs are just a shit use of tax dollars until we figure out how to bust up the unions and reign in the excessive toy purchases.

[lamontcg]

With most crime you rarely need someone to show up who is trained to use guns and kill people because any violent threat is long gone.

If I find my truck has been broken into and stuff is stolen, all those abilities are deeply useless to me. I need someone who is good with taking down details and filling out forms and following up and ideally investigating. Up until that leads to the act of actually arresting someone there's very little need to have people who are trained in the violent use of force involved at all.

And that's before you start asking questions about how our current police force is trained to use violent force and if they could do all that differently or not.

[throwawaygh]

> If I find my truck has been broken into and stuff is stolen, all those abilities are deeply useless to me. I need someone who is good with taking down details and filling out forms and following up and ideally investigating.

Which is not at all what our hiring standards at police departments select for.

[atweiden]

> Police don't prevent crime. Hell, they barely even respond to crime.

Awarding a well-marked group with some measure of public accountability the right to use violent countermeasures for the protection of life and property in a geographic area facilitates commercial trade and societal advancement.

However, the “garbage-in, garbage-out” phenomenon applies to policing, which makes it less of a silver bullet. A certain amount of criticism lobbed at police forces in America can be reduced to hysteria over police being unable to turn lead into gold.

[noahtallen]

I mean, accountability is severely lacking nearly across the board because the incentives are so messed up. (E.g. internal reviews are just the police governing themselves, and external reviews would be a prosecutor prosecuting the police, but that’s a professional relationship the prosecutor doesn’t want to mess up.)

But I think you’re also saying that police can’t change a local community, if it’s already filled with crime. If that’s the case and they don’t have a big impact… what’s the point?

I’d also say it works the other way around, where garbage input to the police force will result in garbage policing. And since education and training isn’t that rigorous, it’s hard to correct that.

Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily. Perhaps you could argue whether or not the “hysteria” is justified given the number of times it happens. But the biggest outcries are normally against things you see where police are pretty obviously in the wrong. (Or at the very least, where police were incredibly brutal. Which in my opinion is nearly always wrong.)

[atweiden]

> But I think you’re also saying that police can’t change a local community, if it’s already filled with crime. If that’s the case and they don’t have a big impact… what’s the point?

The point is to preempt a power vacuum threatening social order, e.g. imagine if Japan didn’t have a police force.

> Plus, I’d say the “hysteria” is more about police turning gold into lead, so to speak, harming or killing people unnecessarily.

I don’t disagree, nor did I claim to. However, I’d be curious to know whether you’d prefer all police be replaced by robots and drones which perfectly upheld the law. For many, that’s an even scarier thought than imperfect, human policing.

[noahtallen]

No, I wouldn’t want that :)

What I would want is:

- More intensive training and education with less focus on violence.

- Better laws to increase accountability and to reduce conflicts of interest.

- Police or social worker units which don’t need to carry guns. Basically separate dangerous crime from vice or disturbances in terms of enforcement. I fully agree the FBI should have resources to hunt down serial killers. I don’t think we need a similar level of force (guns) for dealing with a drug addict on the street, or a drunk driver.

And other things would be good or better I’m sure! My feeling now is that police are entrenched in their own system of power enough that many types of good changes are unlikely to happen. Why would police want to increase their risk by adding more oversight, for example?

[monodeldiablo]

Allow me to pile on here.

I used to believe as you do. Then I was a little down on my luck and found myself living in a poor, high-crime neighborhood. It was a shocking for me. There were cops everywhere, but they somehow never managed to help a situation.

I called the police multiple times because of violence in the area -- including for a discharged firearm in the apartment upstairs. Sometimes they showed up, sometimes they didn't. And when they did, they invariably contrived to make things worse.

I could have walked to the precinct station in less time than the police typically responded to calls. They were routinely aggressive and bullying to victims. They were dismissive of eye-witness testimony and anyone who volunteered assistance. They made open threats to anybody who questioned them or asserted their rights -- to record an interaction, retrieve their personal effects, or even help calm a neighbor in distress.

The police in that community drove around in custom cars and body armor, armed to the teeth. They hassled hard-working men, women, and even children as they went about their daily business, humiliating them in front of their neighbors for sport. They were -- almost to a man -- officious, patronizing cowards.

I moved to that neighborhood believing that police dedicated their lives to serve and protect their communities. I have several police officers in my family and, prior to my time south of the tracks, had always believed their side of the story. Criminals bad. Cops heroes.

But I left that neighborhood afraid of the cops. Far more afraid than of any of the many criminals in that community. I left with the understanding that most American police are little more than a terrifyingly well-armed gang. They have a fundamentally oppositional stance to the communities they are supposed to serve. And they are almost completely unaccountable for their actions and inaction.

So no, it's not the luxury of the rich to criticize the cops or call for a reallocation of police funds from guns to training and crime prevention. The poor have been doing it for ages. We were just ignoring them.

[rbanffy]

> The people who support defunding the police have never felt genuine fear from being victimized by crime.

A lot of them felt more than once genuine fear from being victimized by crime committed by the police. Which, of course, is almost never reported as a crime by whoever survives it.

[setpatchaddress]

> Any person who resorts to violence instantly loses all justification

This is an argument for defunding the police.

Police reform is sorely needed. "Defund the police" as a slogan was insane political malpractice.