Another day, another police beating in America

[LittleRaven]

Hi LittleRaven long time.

Hey man! Always nice to see you.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

I've never heard anyone make these so called "excuses" for police brutality or that the victims of it somehow deserved it, where do these ideas come from?

[Darth Wedgius]

Some of Minneapolis's city council members are getting private security, at taxpayers' expense.

I'm sure that will in no way continue after the police have been disbanded, and they city council members will either pay for their own security or will forego it.

And global warming will be solved because, any day now, cows are going to start farting Teslas.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Reminder of how low the bar is set:


Dragon, I have heard people make excuses for it all the time. "He shouldn't have resisted", "she shouldn't have run", "just don't commit crimes and you'll be okay". You can find them just by turning on Fox News.

[GreyICE]

The concept of representative democracy is that we elect people who represent us, and those representatives represent our interest to the government.

Except....the Mayor is elected, right? So...he acts a representative of the people? So as long as the Police Chief answers to HIM (as is normal in most American cities) the concept of representative democracy is upheld. Right?

It's not like I have some deep ideological objection to the idea of the Police Chief answering to the council, but I think it's going to make for very inefficient government, which comes with a whole new set of problems. There's a reason most cities put the Mayor in that slot. It means you have a single point of decision making, but one that still has to run for re-election, so you can kick them out if they screw up too much.

But again, we see this model isn't working. Many districts are getting neglected. Each individual district has a right to have their voice heard. Later on you refer to "mob rule" - aka tyranny of the majority. To explain the difference: the idea that individual districts have to shut up and not get any representation if they can't make up a majority is exactly the difference between Democracy and mob rule. Mob rule is when 51% tells 49% what to do. Democracy is when everyone gets a voice.

Having a government that answers to the people isn't "mob rule". That's Democracy. Having a government that only serves the majority is mob rule. Right now, our government definitely has issues with only serving the majority - or in the case of cops, only serving the rich.

Every single individual district needs to be heard, because each one of them is going to have specific concerns. Minneapolis' population is 425,000. A mayor can't possibly listen to every neighborhood for 425,000 people. Can a council member listen to 30-40k people? Yes, that's more reasonable. Still difficult, but more reasonable.

Of course, in practice, the boss (regardless of who they are) often has a very difficult time controlling the police, because the police almost always wield tremendous political power of their own. After all, the police almost always serve to protect the interests of the powerful, which gives them power in turn. I suspect Minneapolis is no exception to that rule. But the police do occasionally overstep their bounds, and I think everyone would agree that the MPD needs to be brought to heel. As far as I can tell, even Fray is firmly behind THAT effort. The disagreements appear to be about the approach, not the goal.

I'd say the difference is about the word "occasionally". The police are not abusing their power "occasionally." Driving while black isn't a thing because occasionally a cop stops a black person. Stop and frisk wasn't racist because a few black people got frisked. These were basic, every day violations. And the problems with the police are literally every day.

Yes, the more major violations you see about on the news are less frequent, but do you think a cop who kneels on a black person until they're dead has any problems stopping a black person, claiming "broken taillight" and searching their car? Or "finding" a dime bag in the car? Twisting their arm until it hurts while arresting them, then if they move their arm that's in pain claim they're "resisting arrest" (moving your arm while you're being handcuffed is resisting)?

You have to be a pretty major fucking psychopath to murder someone. There's a lot of less psychopathic but still bigoted behavior going on. Read this article: https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759

Even stuff that's not bigoted is a problem. Like games where they find the most obscure law to charge people with? Planting evidence? These are not okay. It doesn't matter what the color of the victim's skin is, they're being victimized by the police. Yeah, it's gonna land on poor people and black people excessively, but that's because you don't want to pull that shit on a $500,000/year lawyer. They're gonna eat your innards. A $25,000/year guy working at Home Depot? What the fuck are they going to do to you? And when they look like "a typical thug"? Well, they're not gonna be treated well, on top of the normal shit you get with public defenders (public defenders have very limited time. When you "look like a criminal" they're going to assume you're a criminal, they literally have 4-10 times the workload they're capable of doing).

Look, at the moment, do we have all the answers? No.

And that's fine. We're mortals, not demigods. Nobody is expected to have all the answers. But when you are in a position where you don't have a LOT of the answers, sometimes its not such a bad thing to take some time to see if you can't gather some.

As far as I know, (and believe me, I'd love it if you could correct me on this) what Minneapolis is attempting to do has never been done before in a city remotely that size. Yes, I'm well aware of the Camden experiment, and of its successes and failures...but Camden only has 70,000 people in it. The Minneapolis metro area has something like 3.5 million. I fear the Camden approach simply won't scale appropriately. (and besides, Camden ended up ultimately rehiring most of the officers on the force. I'm not sure that's what Minneapolis is looking to do.) That doesn't mean they shouldn't do it, like I said, the MPD is clearly out of control. But I can certainly see why Fray would want to move slowly. To do this right, the police union will almost certainly have to be broken, but Minnesota is not a right to work state, so that's probably going to be difficult.

Rehiring many of the officers is not the problem. As I've said many places, the reason that "all cops are bastards" is that the police are structurally broken. A great example of this is Alex Kueng. Alex Kueng was one of the four officers at George Floyd's death, and was half black. He joined the police department, he said, to reform it. He wanted to make the MPD less biased, from the inside. Interestingly one Derek Chauvin increased his training duration because he was 'spending too much time with another rookie'. The other rookie, who was white, did not get his training time extended as far as I can tell (from Seattle, minority officers 'scrub out' of training at a far higher rate than white officers. The SPD will not open their records as to why).

And what did Alex Kueng end up doing? Standing there watching while another cop murdered a black person. Had he laid one finger on Derek Chauvin as he murdered George Floyd, he probably would have been thrown off the force, put in prison, arrested, and probably sued. It's happened before. And Kueng certainly knew that. So he became part of the problem.

All cops are bastards, because the system makes them bastards. The system is broken. We watched Alex Kueng commit felony murder when, in a better system, he might have been one of the good ones. Rehiring the Alex Kuengs of the world is not a problem. Putting them in an environment where they become murderers is a problem.

This is complicated topic, and a highly localized one. Many books have been written about it, and I'd love to do a deep dive with you. But by every metric we can collect, you are in fact safer now than you have ever been in the history of this nation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States

Pick a category of crime, and it's decreased over time, at least at a macro level. Please don't take that as an endorsement of our current criminal justice system, which has all kinds of problems. But if you live in America, the odds are overwhelming that crime has noticeably decreased in your lifetime.

But has it decreased proportionally everywhere? In other words, has this overpolicing actually accomplished anything?



This is an interesting graph. Crime peaked around 1990, and after that trailed off.

The 2014 increase was driven largely by crimes in a handful of cities - cities with some of the worst, most violent police departments. Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Vegas. None of them known for their "nice police" in any way. In fact every one known for shitty, violent, abusive police.

In fact if you compare areas with "tough on crime" bills versus areas without them, there's almost no evidence that "tough on crime" bills actually reduce crime. Cities that are less tough on crime do not see corresponding jumps in crime, cities that are tougher on criminals don't have reduced crime.

It's really like there's something structurally wrong that creates crime, and that having police hit people with sticks doesn't actually solve the greater structural issues. Things that are effective at reducing crime:

Alcohol consumption reduction - Alcohol is linked to 40% of crimes. Even alcohol taxes are effective. So is replacing it with drugs like weed. Or reducing consumption in general.

Increased community patrols - every statistic says that more cops walking the beat in hot spot areas equals less crime. Chasing 911 calls doesn't reduce crime, cops walking the streets reduces crime. That's a HUGE part of community policing.

Housing improvements and social programs - look, putting people in a nice living situation, giving them opportunities, and making them feel like valued members of the community decreases crime. I know, surprising, right.

What doesn't work:

Broken windows - has been scientifically discredited for decades. Aggressive enforcement of minor crimes and overpolicing just makes everyone resent the police. Arresting someone for jaywalking and tossing them in a squad car for a booking doesn't make the neighborhood safer. It makes quite a few people who hate the cops.

Excessively long sentences - So someone has been in prison for 10 years, everyone they know is an ex-con, most places won't hire them, they've missed 10 years of social change. Wow, they drift to crime. What a surprise. This is how you turn someone who used to sell weed to fratboys into a hardened criminal.

Violent policing doesn't reduce crime. It makes people hate the police. And when people hate the police, guess what? They won't 'snitch', they won't talk to the police, they won't help the police. Because they know the police are shit. You can't pee on them and tell them it's raining, if you want them to help the police you've gotta have helpful police first.

[Madner Kami]

Mob rule is when 51% tells 49% what to do. Democracy is when everyone gets a voice.

Mob rule isn't the rule of the majority. Mob rule is the rule of the vocal crowd, the rule of those who make themselves heard via bullying and violence.