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It is time to acknowledge "Defund the Police" means **exactly** what it says ...

NatMorton

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From the NY Post, quotes from "The Squad" over the Wright killing (emphasis added). These are not the words of over-heated protesters in the street. These are supposed to be sober federal legislators:

Rep. Rashida Tlaib condemns Daunte Wright shooting as ‘government-funded murder,’ wants police abolished
By Emily JacobsApril 13, 2021 | 9:02am | Updated
Members of the “Squad” are ramping up calls for dismantling the police following the shooting death of a 20-year-old black man at the hands of a white officer in Minnesota — saying it amounts to “government-funded murder.”
In tweets Monday, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) reacted to the killing Sunday of Daunte Wright of Brooklyn Center, Minn.
“It wasn’t an accident. Policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist. Daunte Wright was met with aggression & violence,” Tlaib wrote in a tweet.
“I am done with those who condone government-funded murder. No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed,” she continued, reiterating her position that the police, as currently trained, cannot protect their communities and must be defunded and replaced.
“We are sick and heartbroken. In the closing days of Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, Brooklyn Center police killed 20 year old Daunte Wright, another Black man, during a traffic stop,” Omar’s tweet began, referencing the white officer facing trial for killing George Floyd, an unarmed black man whose death last year sparked a summer of racial justice protests — and calls to defund the police.
“This violence is a basic part of police interactions with communities of color,” she continued. “It must stop.”
Pressley, meanwhile, kept her message short, writing, “From slave patrols to traffic stops. We can’t reform this.”
All three lawmakers have previously voiced their support for defunding the police.




These are not calls to make policing better. These are not calls to augment police work with enhanced social services. These are the reckless ravings of political nitwits. As a group they should be openly mocked and then shunned.
 
The police really do seem like a left-over version of slave patrols. Reform is desperately needed.

White folks' devotion to this form of state violence reflects a real fear of The Other. Its long past time we faced our past by dealing with its consequences in the present.
 
Mischief obtains with 'blanket' phrases and talking points.

Few would disagree with the benefit to be gained by having some types of situations currently handled by police in some jurisdictions transferred to those with greater abilities to deal with them. It's the reason we go to specialists as opposed to general practitioners in certain situations in the area of medicine.

So far, so good.

If, in a police force that's large enough to permit this, the force, as a whole, will require fewer officers because of a transfer of responsibilities, it is reasonable to reduce the force and use the money freed up to fund the specialists.

Any questions?

Regards, stay safe 'n well.
 
"...reckless ravings of political nitwits...they should be openly mocked and then shunned."

What should be done with the LEO escalating, brutalizing and shooting in situations involving unarmed black people and with the police depts that don't do enough to correct such behavior? When such has been going on since day 1 of the existence of America, I'm not surprised at more radical corrective measures being recommended.
 
Stop training cop like they're soldiers.

Traffic citations should not be issued by armed personnel looking for excuses to entrap people.

Stop citationing the poor to death for the sake of revenue lost to tax cuts for the rich, which turns the police into a debt collection agency.
 
Stop training cop like they're soldiers
If cops were actually trained like soldiers, this may not have happened. It’s ridiculous that most cops get only a few weeks of training when they first go through academy and then a handful of days per year to keep up certifications. Soldiers are in training constantly. As anyone entrusted with the discretion to use deadly force should be.

I agree with the OP that the squad are complete nitwits on this and most issues. Abolishing the police is a complete nut job solution. I would recommend requiring police to train on deescalation and other tactics 2 days a week and passing gun control legislation so cops don’t have to be so legitimately worried about getting shot as better solutions.
 
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Congresspeople should SHUT UP about Public Safety and Police organizations outside their own home districts. The functioning bodies that authorize local police are local authorities. The Congress of the United States has nothing to do with it.
 
If cops were actually trained like soldiers, this may not have happened. It’s ridiculous that most cops get only a few weeks of training when they first go through academy and then a handful of days per year to keep up certifications. Soldiers are in training constantly. As anyone entrusted with the discretion to use deadly force should be.

I agree with the OP that the squad are complete nitwits on this and most issues. Abolishing the police is a complete nut job solution. I would recommend requiring police to train on deescalation and other tactics 2 days a week and passing gun control legislation so cops don’t have to be so legitimately worried about getting shot are better solutions.

The missions of the police and of the military are quite different.

Well, they're a tad extreme in their rhetoric, but it surely reflects the view of many of their supporters. And for the most part, for some of the reasons I have mentioned above, they are absolutely right.

While policing is quite a bit safer than it used to be, you raise a good point about gun control:

"Significantly. The scholars noted a wide divergence between firearm assaults against police at the state level. Mississippi, the state with the highest average rate of firearm assault on police over the six-year period, recorded 2.29 firearm assaults per 1,000 officers, while Connecticut, the state with the lowest number of assaults, recorded .06 firearm assaults per 1,000 officers. (The national mean is .47 firearm assaults per 1,000 officers.) Other states with high rates include New Mexico, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. States in the Southeast and Southwest had elevated rates compared to the national average.

While the authors say the reasons for regional differences merit future study, their working hypothesis is that the most violent areas for police may correlate to the number of guns in circulation, permissive concealed-carry laws, and open carry laws."


 
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If cops were actually trained like soldiers, this may not have happened. It’s ridiculous that most cops get only a few weeks of training when they first go through academy and then a handful of days per year to keep up certifications. Soldiers are in training constantly. As anyone entrusted with the discretion to use deadly force should be.

I agree with the OP that the squad are complete nitwits on this and most issues. Abolishing the police is a complete nut job solution. I would recommend requiring police to train on deescalation and other tactics 2 days a week and passing gun control legislation so cops don’t have to be so legitimately worried about getting shot are better solutions.
Well specifically the cops are trained like warriors prepared to face a fallujah like battlefield, the battlefield mindset is the wrong mindset.
 
Well specifically the cops are trained like warriors prepared to face a fallujah like battlefield, the battlefield mindset is the wrong mindset.
Most cops aren't trained like warriors to face a fallujah like battlefield, but yes deescalation needs to be a much higher focus in training and the training should be constant, not one day per year.
 
If cops were actually trained like soldiers, this may not have happened. It’s ridiculous that most cops get only a few weeks of training when they first go through academy and then a handful of days per year to keep up certifications. Soldiers are in training constantly. As anyone entrusted with the discretion to use deadly force should be.

I agree with the OP that the squad are complete nitwits on this and most issues. Abolishing the police is a complete nut job solution. I would recommend requiring police to train on deescalation and other tactics 2 days a week and passing gun control legislation so cops don’t have to be so legitimately worried about getting shot as better solutions.
I heard a story about a US soldier being trained to use weapons, their trainer said to look at all the bullets on the ground, thats how many people you killed. The important lesson in this is any bullet you shoot can potentially kill someone, so make sure you know what you are doing.
 
Cops aren't trained like warriors to face a fallujah like battlefield, but yes deescalation needs to be a much higher focus in training.
Ummm... did you ever see the warrior cop training seminars? There was a big debate within LEO field going on about the warrior mindset. Remember during the riots LEOs were going into neighborhoods and opening fire with pepper bullets for a curfew?
 
These are not calls to make policing better. These are not calls to augment police work with enhanced social services. These are the reckless ravings of political nitwits. As a group they should be openly mocked and then shunned.
You're taking them at their word. In all likelihood, the real goal is to commisarize the police, requiring them all to have diversity officers and ideological training. Saying "defund the police" is a way to cast that as the moderate and reasonable argument.
 
Ummm... did you ever see the warrior cop training seminars? There was a big debate within LEO field going on about the warrior mindset. Remember during the riots LEOs were going into neighborhoods and opening fire with pepper bullets for a curfew?
I've seen some of those videos, and I don't support that type of training, but I don't believe most police departments utilize them. If you have stats though I will stand corrected.
 
You're taking them at their word. In all likelihood, the real goal is to commisarize the police, requiring them all to have diversity officers and ideological training. Saying "defund the police" is a way to cast that as the moderate and reasonable argument.
So from your perspective the choices are:
A) Commenting Congresspeople actually mean "defund the police" in which case they are making their cases in the wrong forum. If they have a beef with their own home district Public Safety or Police organizations that is where their case should be made. Several local communities have in fact defunded their Public Safety or Police organizations in order to get out from under absurd Union contracts that completely subvert the Community's ability to determine its own destiny with regard to those organizations
B) Its rhetorical flourish on an absurd level to make somebody's more reasoned position seem....... well .......reasonable. We need more rhetorical flourish in this country like we need a hole in the head
 
These are not calls to make policing better. These are not calls to augment police work with enhanced social services. These are the reckless ravings of political nitwits. As a group they should be openly mocked and then shunned.

It's a position which on the stupidity scale lies somewhere in the same region as the 'War on Drugs' which criminalizes all recreational drugs except those popular with middle- and upper-class white folk of the 19th and early 20th centuries, creates vast amounts of both local 'crime' in the form of users and dealers and deadlier international crime in the form of cartels, has been one of the major factors in making Americans one of the least free/most heavily incarcerated people on the planet, ripped families apart and destroyed endless lives supposedly in the name of 'protecting' them.

Funding of the police in the USA has remained at a steady share of government spending since the late 1970s despite no clear correlation to the dramatic rise and fall in violent crime rates (which seems to correspond much more closely, with a ~20 year lag, to the use of lead-based neurotoxins in fuel and paint, disproportionately affecting those living in inner cities, near major roads and older, unrennovated housing).

While Crime Fell, the Cost of Cops Soared | Bloomberg
US Police funding.jpg

Bloomberg's graphs are actually a little misleading in the use of absolute numbers of violent crime; in terms of crime rates vs. population, violent crime rates in 2011-2019 were well below the 1977 levels (and violent + property crime rates much moreso).

So the case for decreasing funding of police seems pretty clear. The hyperbole of those who want to abolish police entirely seems like a level of ignorance matched only by those who think that America's current police state is appropriate!
 
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Police are definitely overfunded, and there are too many criminal laws on the books. "Abolishing" the police is unrealistic though.

The police forces also desperately need reform by weeding clinical psychopaths from their ranks.
 
B) Its rhetorical flourish on an absurd level to make somebody's more reasoned position seem....... well .......reasonable. We need more rhetorical flourish in this country like we need a hole in the head

Good point. Sometimes compromise is reached by meeting halfway; but if America's conservatives aren't even willing to meet halfway with the reasonable position, maybe some liberal politicians feel they need to advocate an obviously extreme position so that one-fifth compromise by conservatives could at least be something? Probably not a wise strategy, but maybe that's the thinking behind it.
 
Two of the most dangerous police calls are domestic disputes and calls about people with mental health issues. You guys are saying that these calls should be handled by social workers, not cops. The truth is, any social worker that was realistic, would demand to have police backup when going into either of these situations. There are bad people out there, and there are dangerous people out there. These people need to be handled by someone. Someone who can meet force with force if necessary.

Be realistic. We can't just stop having police.
 
If we look for the commonality in the most recent police involved shootings (like in the last year), in each of them, the subject is the one that made at least one, if not multiple, bad decisions which escalated the situation to the unfortunate conclusion.

If there is a need for greater police training, it would seem logical that it be focused on how to better handle subjects who make bad decisions which escalate the situation.
But perish the thought that subjects might need 'training' (education - PSAs?) to not make bad decisions and not escalating the situation?

Every police / public interaction the cop doesn't know what they are facing, is in fact putting their life on the line, as we have seen from the New Mexico traffic stop video. (Pulled over subject pulls out an AR-15 and shoots the cop in the head). Lunacy to expect cops to face such a possible potential situation unarmed, or armed only with flowers and kind words.

There are some very bad, very dangerous people out there, and the cops are the ones that are usually the ones who have to face them and deal with them.

All this made far worse than it needs to be with leftist DAs turning the process into a revolving door and not detaining those that harm innocent people.
 
“It wasn’t an accident,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib said in a tweet.

This is extremely dangerous rhetoric that is going to get people killed.
 
“It wasn’t an accident,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib said in a tweet.

This is extremely dangerous rhetoric that is going to get people killed.
Irresponsible pouring of gas on an already raging fire.
The nation is not served by doing such.
 
“It wasn’t an accident,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib said in a tweet.

This is extremely dangerous rhetoric that is going to get people killed.
It's absolutely no different than Trump's claims of a stolen election leading up to Jan 6. It's a reckless lie.
 
From the NY Post, quotes from "The Squad" over the Wright killing (emphasis added). These are not the words of over-heated protesters in the street. These are supposed to be sober federal legislators:

Rep. Rashida Tlaib condemns Daunte Wright shooting as ‘government-funded murder,’ wants police abolished
By Emily JacobsApril 13, 2021 | 9:02am | Updated
Members of the “Squad” are ramping up calls for dismantling the police following the shooting death of a 20-year-old black man at the hands of a white officer in Minnesota — saying it amounts to “government-funded murder.”
In tweets Monday, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) reacted to the killing Sunday of Daunte Wright of Brooklyn Center, Minn.
“It wasn’t an accident. Policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist. Daunte Wright was met with aggression & violence,” Tlaib wrote in a tweet.
“I am done with those who condone government-funded murder. No more policing, incarceration, and militarization. It can’t be reformed,” she continued, reiterating her position that the police, as currently trained, cannot protect their communities and must be defunded and replaced.
“We are sick and heartbroken. In the closing days of Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, Brooklyn Center police killed 20 year old Daunte Wright, another Black man, during a traffic stop,” Omar’s tweet began, referencing the white officer facing trial for killing George Floyd, an unarmed black man whose death last year sparked a summer of racial justice protests — and calls to defund the police.
“This violence is a basic part of police interactions with communities of color,” she continued. “It must stop.”
Pressley, meanwhile, kept her message short, writing, “From slave patrols to traffic stops. We can’t reform this.”
All three lawmakers have previously voiced their support for defunding the police.




These are not calls to make policing better. These are not calls to augment police work with enhanced social services. These are the reckless ravings of political nitwits. As a group they should be openly mocked and then shunned.
1618585494670.png
 
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