This was in the Washington Post today:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/07/defund-police-heres-what-that-really-means/

This was in the Washington Post today:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/07/defund-police-heres-what-that-really-means//blockquote >

Thanks, but that's only available to subscribers. Cut & paste????

 

In many large cities the local officials are signaling they plan to remove many millions of dollars from their police departments annual budget and shift that money to support benevolent programs for depressed and minority neighborhoods. And remove protections for police officers so it will be easier to sue a police officer for his or her treatment of you personally. And certain methods of restraining a person will be banned.

Minneapolis, Minnesota has announced they will defund and dismantle their police department and replace it with neighborhood watch saftey squads but this morning the mayor has decided it's a bad idea but he is receving heavy criticism for other city leaders and protesters.

Los Angeles plans to defund the LAPD and clip it's wings, deverting the money saved which is in the millions to minority neighborhoods to improve lives and living conditions.

But hold on! I won't post the video but anyone who is interested, go to YouTube and view one of the videos on the 1997 Bank of America bank robbery in North Hollywood where two long time criminals came in with high powered weapons with armour piercing bullets and out gunned the police in a spectacular hour long shoot out on the streets of Los Angeles killing and wounding police officers and citizens. I say retrain the police and remove tactics that could kill or severely injur someone being arrested, but don't defund. The bad guys will take advantage of soft spots they identify. And some school districts and universities are planning to kick the police off their campuses. The next school shooting will make that change regrettable.

I wouldn't live in a city without a well funded and equiped police department. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters?? Not me.

I wouldn't live in a city without a well funded and equiped police department. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters?? Not me.

Thanks for the explanation. At least it doesn't mean disbanding police altogether as what Minneapolis sounded like it wanted to do.

I still think the diversion of funds to social/community services is misguided. Anyone ever tried to get assistance for seniors? Sure, the city promises (& maybe has) all kinds of services, but the wait list is 2 years long, has absurd eligibility requirements, & the person at the other end of the phone yawns during your explanation/request. Ever called a suicide hotline (for "someone you know" as the PSA recommends) & been put on hold? Is throwing more money there going to stop crime? Or jerks like Chauvin? Certainly, examination & redeployment of police resources makes sense; transferring funds to another overburdened bureaucratic agency doesn't.

Sorry - here is the full article:

By Christy E. Lopez
June 7, 2020 at 6:37 p.m. EDT

Christy E. Lopez is a professor at Georgetown Law School and a co-director of the school’s Innovative Policing Program.

Since George Floyd’s death, a long-simmering movement for police abolition has become part of the national conversation, recast slightly as a call to “defund the police.” For activists, this conversation is long overdue. But for casual observers, this new direction may seem a bit disorienting — or even alarming.

Be not afraid. “Defunding the police” is not as scary (or even as radical) as it sounds, and engaging on this topic is necessary if we are going to achieve the kind of public safety we need. During my 25 years dedicated to police reform, including in places such as Ferguson, Mo., New Orleans and Chicago, it has become clear to me that “reform” is not enough. Making sure that police follow the rule of law is not enough. Even changing the laws is not enough.

To fix policing, we must first recognize how much we have come to over-rely on law enforcement. We turn to the police in situations where years of experience and common sense tell us that their involvement is unnecessary, and can make things worse. We ask police to take accident reports, respond to people who have overdosed and arrest, rather than cite, people who might have intentionally or not passed a counterfeit $20 bill. We call police to roust homeless people from corners and doorsteps, resolve verbal squabbles between family members and strangers alike, and arrest children for behavior that once would have been handled as a school disciplinary issue.

Police themselves often complain about having to “do too much,” including handling social problems for which they are ill-equipped. Some have been vocal about the need to decriminalize social problems and take police out of the equation. It is clear that we must reimagine the role they play in public safety.

Defunding and abolition probably mean something different from what you are thinking. For most proponents, “defunding the police” does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety, and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight — or perhaps ever. Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence interruption programs.

Police abolition means reducing, with the vision of eventually eliminating, our reliance on policing to secure our public safety. It means recognizing that criminalizing addiction and poverty, making 10 million arrests per year and mass incarceration have not provided the public safety we want and never will. The “abolition” language is important because it reminds us that policing has been the primary vehicle for using violence to perpetuate the unjustified white control over the bodies and lives of black people that has been with us since slavery. That aspect of policing must be literally abolished.

Still, even as we try to shift resources from policing to programs that will better promote fairness and public safety, we must continue the work of police reform. We cannot stop regulating police conduct now because we hope someday to reduce or eliminate our reliance on policing. We must ban chokeholds and curb the use of no-knock warrants; we must train officers how to better respond to people in mental health crises, and we must teach officers to be guardians, not warriors, to intervene to prevent misconduct and to understand and appreciate the communities they serve.

Why must we work on parallel tracks? First, all police will not be defunded or abolished anytime soon, and we cannot wait to make changes that will save lives and reduce policing harm now. Experienced advocates know this. This is why, for example, Campaign Zero just launched the #8cantwait campaign, which urges law enforcement agencies to immediately adopt eight use of force reforms, even as it continues its divest/invest strategy to end police killings.

More fundamentally, we must continue with reforms because abolition doesn’t go far enough. Policing didn’t invent America’s institutionalized racism, social inequity or stereotyped masculinity: Policing harms are a product of these broader pathologies. If we were to get rid of policing tomorrow, those pathologies would remain. And they would continue to be deadly: Race bias in our health-care system has likely killed far more African Americans and Latinx via covid-19 than the police have this year. Successful police reforms help us learn how to identify and mitigate the harms of these structural features, even as we work to remake them.

In this moment, we have a chance to make not just policing, but our entire country, fairer and safer. We must think creatively and educate ourselves. We must ask hard questions and demand answers about public safety budgets.

We should have unflinching debates about when, where and how to seek police reforms instead of defunding. But we should move forward on both tracks so that we can save lives even as we transform the police.

Sorry - here is the full article:

By Christy E. Lopez
June 7, 2020 at 6:37 p.m. EDT

Thanks. Very reassuring. I had the impression re the Minneapolis City Council that they were, indeed, planning to eliminate the police force overnight with their veto-proof supermajority.

Sorry, but community policing makes me think of the George Zimmermans of the world - roaming neighborhoods w/loaded guns & hot tempers.

Ms Lopez is wrong. So someone determined to live on your porch and block your door, you don't call the police and have the trespassers removed, you go out and offer them love and food and drink and financial support or talk them into moving to a nice shelter paid for money shifted from police budgets?

This lady is WRONG!!! The criminals of all races and stripes with quickly identify these soft spots in our cities and crime and murder will run rampant.

We must have strong and well trained and budgeted police departments. Training and perception of people's station in life need to be reworked ONLY. This lady wants to decriminalize much behavior and respond to it with money, compassion and a helping hand. That won't work. I will need to call the police to remove the man living on my porch and demanding I feed and cloth him. But when the police arrive, rather than throwing the man up against the squad car and taking him to jail, take him to a place funded by taxpayers that will give him treatment and food and hopefully put him back on the street later as a man healed and headed to a job they helped him get. .

[Edited on 6/8/2020 by blackey]

Defunding = disbanding. No one is going to show up for work if they don't get a check. The biggest hurdle will be about pension liabilities. I'm guessing the courts will get involved at some point in all this.

My initial take after hearing all the talk of defunding was that this was a very reactionary response and one that likely won't have legs.

But after listening to a good report on NPR this morning hearing from the Minneapolis activists influencing city council members to vote the way they did, I am more open to the possibility than before. That community has experienced a series of George Floyd-esque incidents, and claims to have tried every reform possible but none of it has worked. This is what it has come to.

They claim to have analyzed every 911 call and determined that the large majority of citizens' requests for police help can be addressed with means other than police intervention. I can think of several examples like what others here have mentioned that couldn't possibly be addressed WITHOUT trained police but am curious to see what they come up with. There's just a ton of questions that remain to be answered and it sounds like City Council has a year to come up with a proposal.

Every community is different and I don't think there's gonna be a one size fits all solution.

It is the stupidest idea going. Just flat out insane. Yeah this would be just so great without police. It is bad enough with them. But I guess these black lives don't matter?

18 murders in 24 hours: Inside the most violent day in 60 years in Chicago

https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2020/6/8/21281998/chicago-violence-murder-history-homicide-police-crime

Agent Orange is on the ropes and this proposal is a lifeline. Doesn't anybody know how to play this game?

Agent Orange is on the ropes and this proposal is a lifeline. Doesn't anybody know how to play this game?

I told a friend the other day this talk is one of the kind of things that Dems do to f up an all but sure thing. You watch as this stuff will backfire BADLY on the left. So the answer to your question is no they do not know how to play the game and nobody hitches their wegons to a losing horse better than the modern Democratic party.

I don't know the intention of defunding or even exactly what that entails. Seems like the kind of idea that will create a surge in gun sales to folks who probably shouldn't have them. People are liable to perceive this as an outright elimination of police forces and arm themselves for personal protection. It just sounds kinda drastic.

I don't know the intention of defunding or even exactly what that entails. Seems like the kind of idea that will create a surge in gun sales to folks who probably shouldn't have them. People are liable to perceive this as an outright elimination of police forces and arm themselves for personal protection. It just sounds kinda drastic.

If you have not seen this some of these folks are dead serious. Mayor got booed out of a rally for indicating he would not do that.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/07/us/minneapolis-mayor-police-abolition/index.html

That community has experienced a series of George Floyd-esque incidents, and claims to have tried every reform possible but none of it has worked.

I posed the question because I, too, wondered how cities would function w/o police forces. I now know this has been an academic theory for a while, but as I said in my original post, it still sounds like something some idealistic 13 yr olds dreamed up.