Police and Prison Abolition Thread

[myDeaconmyhand]

It’s Democratically controlled major cities, with Democratic City Councils and Democratic mayors that militarized the police in the first place, so why and how in the fuck are these “reformers” so quick with advice on how to solve a problem that they created. You got your war on crime, your war on drugs, your carceral state, your gentrification, your white flight, your globalist trade agreements that send jobs out of the country and NOW you want to control the anti-police activist message as well? Get fuuucked.

[myDeaconmyhand]

I’ll say that a big part of the division on this topic is between older Democrats,
Black and White, who portray this problem
as strictly racial, and younger liberals and leftists who see the problem as systemic and authoritarian. If our policing problem is strictly a matter of racism, then all those older Democrats can absolve themselves of it, but if it’s a systemic authoritarian issue, than those Democrats are complicit in building and upholding it. Acknowledging the legitimacy of the defund/abolish movement would require them acknowledging their own complicity in the problem.

Reforming the police is a stance of those who believe that American policing is good system corrupted by individual racists. Defunding the police is a stance of those who believe that American policing is a bad system no matter who controls it, that needs replaced.

So if you really, honestly want to compromise, start by acknowledging the legitimacy of the defund demand. If you can’t do that, then you don’t really want to compromise.

[PhDeac]

All that’s correct but any defund or abolish argument has to address this basic question. “What do I do when I don’t feel safe?”

No matter how people feel about the police, their answer is to call the police. You can talk about every social issue you want but it comes down to providing an alternative.

[Shooshmoo]

It’s Democratically controlled major cities, with Democratic City Councils and Democratic mayors that militarized the police in the first place, so why and how in the fuck are these “reformers” so quick with advice on how to solve a problem that they created. You got your war on crime, your war on drugs, your carceral state, your gentrification, your white flight, your globalist trade agreements that send jobs out of the country and NOW you want to control the anti-police activist message as well? Get fuuucked.

Now this is how you get shit done!

[myDeaconmyhand]

Now this is how you get shit done!

I wasn’t proposing a solution. The current debate is about rhetoric towards an end, but there is no agreement on what end is sought. My argument is that those who haven’t demonstrated a good faith effort towards achieving the same goals that activists are trying to achieve, defunding & depowering the police, don’t have any place to determine activists rhetoric. This is just another in myriad examples where liberals dishonestly claim to have the same mission as leftists, so that they might take some control over a leftist movement they view as detrimental to liberal aspirations.

The only energy on the American political left is radicalism, and Democrats are desperate to harness those radicals energy without making any ideological sacrifice for it. Not only that, but Democrats want the radical lefts energy while openly dismissing their efforts and disrespecting them, in order to appease the rightwing of the party.

[MHBDemon]

Police reform for those who want it!

[tiltdeac]

This comes pretty close to my current feelings:

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/ac...lice-defunding

And it seems to me that what needs to be done is to reorient the police away from punitive actions and integrate them more peacefully into the community. That doesn’t make a good slogan, but I think it would make good policy

U.S. cops are out of control. Violent crime in America plunged in the 90s and continued to drift downward, but in the 2000s police killings soared (from about 1000/year 20 years ago to about 1800/year now). As a result, police killings went from about 4% of violent U.S. deaths at the turn of the century to about 9% in the 2010s. This happened despite the fact that American citizens were shooting far fewer police officers than they used to. American cops have cultivated a “warrior mentality” that teaches them that they’re always under siege, about to be ambushed and killed, and that they need to deter this by responding with savage, sudden, overwhelming force.

That savage force, of course, is deployed more harshly against Black Americans. Stone calculates that Black people are greatly overrepresented among police victims in America, even after taking violent offense rates into account

But while the two-decade police riot in America needs to be put down somehow, abolishing the police is not the way to go about it. The reason is that police serve essential functions in society — deterring crime and preserving public order. If we abolished the police, someone else would start performing those functions. And it would probably not be someone we liked.

The U.S. doesn’t have nearly as many cops per person as many European countries, in fact — 238 per 100,000 people in 2018, compared to 429 in France, 388 in Germany, and 295 in the Netherlands (though we do have more than Sweden, Denmark, or Canada!).

The problem is how American cops behave. Despite the fact that we have fewer police per capita than Germany, and a murder rate only about 5 times as high, our cops shoot civilians at a rate 25 times as high as cops in Germany.

To me, though, the most interesting reforms involve changing what functions the police are expected to perform in society. Many of the reforms involve taking cops out of schools. In Berkeley, cops will no longer handle traffic enforcement (an idea partly credited to the excellent activist Darrell Owens). San Francisco is taking police off of 911 calls involving mental health and drug addiction, and replacing them with unarmed responders.

To me, this seems like exactly the right thing to do. Time will tell, of course. But there seems to be no reason why armed police should be the people to issue traffic tickets or help calm down a mentally ill person. And cops in schools are just dystopian. By removing these functions from police departments, we reduce the chance for violent escalation, and thus remove opportunities for police violence. And hopefully police departments, chastened by this reduction in their duties, will work harder to crack down on brutality.

This is real police defunding, since the money that would pay police to perform these functions will now go to pay unarmed responders. It’s not police abolition (sorry anarchist friends!), but it is a partial de-policing of our society.

Police still need to arrest crime suspects. This is part of the essential deterrent function of cops, because people need to know that crime will be punished; there is plenty of evidence that the existence of police officers does deter crime.

But there’s probably another way for police to deter crime more peacefully, while also integrating themselves into the communities they serve — police boxes and foot patrols.

In America, the police mostly drive around, looking for people to pull over and waiting to respond to 911 calls. In Japan, however, lots of police walk around on the street, or stay in police boxes known as koban (交番). And this totally changes the dynamic of police-community interaction!! In Japan, you can (and people often do) ask cops for directions! You can stand around and chat with cops if you like! You can even ask cops for recommendations for local shops and restaurants. And the cops themselves have a totally different experience — instead of only interacting with civilians when something bad is going on, they see thousands upon thousands of people peaceably going about their business, and interact with many of these people.

In addition to creating routine, positive police-community interactions, police can deter crime just by walking around. Experiments with police foot patrols have found that they reduce crime substantially. In Camden, New Jersey, famed for firing and restructuring its police department in a way that cut both crime and brutality, a robust and peaceful foot patrol presence was part of the formula that worked.

But if cops become a more regular part of the community, it will hopefully cause them to shed their “warrior mentality”, and bring U.S. policing more in line with the less violent policing done in other countries. That’s in addition to things like civilian oversight boards, strict hiring and punishment procedures, ending qualified immunity, making it much easier to fire bad officers, removal of military equipment, more and better training, and stricter rules around the use of force.

Some will object to foot patrols and kobans, of course. The events of the past few years have convinced some Americans that police are an inherently violent and racist institution, and that the way to make policing better is to get it out of the community as much as possible, rather than integrate it more closely with the community.

But this is still very much a minority view. Even in June, while the George Floyd protests were still going strong, only 25% of Americans (and only 42% of Black Americans) favored cutting police budgets by even a little bit. So police are here to stay. And because police are here to stay, it’s crucial to use a whole lot of different levers to make sure they protect and serve the community instead of beating it down. Defunding — by shifting police functions to unarmed responders — is one important lever. Changing police work from crisis response to foot patrol and community integration is another. Real change is possible

[MHBDemon]

Both of his links suggesting police deter crime link to a Matt Yglesias article at Vox.

[tiltdeac]

Both of his links suggesting police deter crime link to a Matt Yglesias article at Vox.

There is quite a bit of research out there showing this relationship. The Yglesias piece he linked (I assume so he didn't have to link all the individual studies) has several direct links to scholarly works. Here's another example that's relatively recent:

https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi...2/rest_a_00889

I don't think the data are overwhelming, but I think the bulk of the research suggests that in general, greater police presence, especially presence on the ground, decreases crime.

[ConnorEl]

We aren’t going to get rid of police or policing.

No matter what.

Makes sense to grow or enhance other public services and work to make policing better.

[MHBDemon]

We aren’t going to get rid of police or policing.

No matter what.

Makes sense to grow or enhance other public services and work to make policing better.

[ConnorEl]

Sounds more like an abolitionist perspective.

[myDeaconmyhand]

“police officers deter crime” is an over simplistic factoid devoid of any relevant context. That’s like saying rain deters baseball games. Lots of things deter poverty and drug crime - Wealth, education, affordable housing. What deters white collar crime? Do police officers deter wage theft? If you have a citizenry more concerned with criminals than crime, the problem isn’t policing.

[Pilchard]

For those who want progressive change, anything connected to the "defund the police" movement is a lethal issue.

So far, the Dems lost 10 seats in the House in 2020 (when it was expected that Dem control would increase), with a couple more likely, and under performed in the Senate races. Despite Biden's win, those results will make it difficult for significant change over the next 4 years (in 2 years, Dems man not even control the House). More than any other issue, defund the police issue (often misinterpreted by the electorate and exploited by Republican candidates) was used to defeat Democratic candidates or make races that should have been easy wins close.

As an example, if Biden hadn't tip-toed around the defund the police label that Trump tried to pin on him. Biden loses the election. Four more years of Trump appointing judges, and tearing down democratic institutions.

Those who want to move the country or their state or locality to the Democratic side and away from Republican control are missing the big picture when they push the defund the police issue. All it does it gin up support against Democratic candidates and makes it more likely that voting districts will continue to be gerrymandered, that laws restricting voting will be adopted, that Biden's judicial and cabinet appointments will have to be more middle of the road, that issues like protecting universal healthcare and raising the minimum wage will have a more difficult time getting adopted. Understand the desire to want to change everything, but it's got to come in baby steps. Pushing the defund the police issue now only makes it more difficult that such issues (and other similar issues) will ever be adopted.

[MHBDemon]

By and large, defund the police activist are not democrats, so they should not care how their message impacts the electoral chances of democrats. Though i think your analysis that it hurt Dems, is withou evidence.

[Pilchard]

By and large, defund the police activist are not democrats, so they should not care how their message impacts the electoral chances of democrats. Though i think your analysis that it hurt Dems, is withou evidence.

Just an example, Cameron Webb, the Democratic candidate in VA's 5th District lost to a former Assistant AD at Liberty, Bob Good, who was a complete zero. Webb was far more credentials, a fund-rasing advantage and led the polls for the last month before the election. Good primarily ran on one issue, Cameron Webb and his fellow Dems will defund the police. Even though the allegation was baseless, it had legs because defund the police had become a national issue. Here is an excerpt from a Washington Post article on the subject:

The ad had all the trappings of a left-wing boogeyman fever dream: “He’d defund the police, end Medicare, force you into socialized medicine, double your gas prices with a Green New Deal.”

“Cameron Webb: way too radical.”

The rhetoric, deployed against a Virginia Democratic candidate for a U.S. House seat, is exactly what Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) was talking about last week when she told her colleagues they needed to avoid using language that became fodder for Republican attacks.

“We [need to] look at the things that they say about us,” Spanberger had said in the call with House Democrats, in audio obtained by The Washington Post. “Because whether we think it’s just an attack ad and that’s what it does . . . it doesn’t matter, because it works.”



“We thought we neutralized [the defund the police attacks] with some of our own spots,” Webb said in an interview, referring to advertisements focused on law enforcement and his efforts to treat coronavirus patients during the pandemic. “But that did shift the conversation. And what it did is it brought more national discourse into our race here in the 5th as opposed to focusing on local issues.”


To a lesser degree, Republicans also used “defund the police” rhetoric on Spanberger, who defeated state Del. Nick Freitas (R-Culpeper) by a narrow 2 percent of the vote, according to unofficial returns. They occasionally tried to link the former CIA officer with her freshman colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who does want to defund police and proudly identifies as a democratic socialist.



Spanberger “votes nearly as much with socialist AOC,” charged one attack ad from Club for Growth PAC, which spent millions helping Freitas. “Why would Spanberger take so much money from defund the police extremists if she truly cared about Virginia?”


Spanberger told her caucus Thursday that it needed to do an autopsy on how such attacks affected some of the vulnerable Democrats who lost their seats.

She said Democrats should avoid phrases like “defund the police” and instead explain policies they support more clearly to better protect themselves in 2022 — and posited that they should also “not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again.”

Elaborating in an interview Tuesday, Spanberger said she was not placing blame on any particular candidate or idea but believes her comments have been mischaracterized as opposing certain progressive policies.

“The position I was stating was we have to better explain what we are for,” she said, contrasting specific police reforms, for example, with the phrase “defund the police.” “Here’s a phrase that doesn’t begin to represent what we’ve actually done. In the cause of equal justice, in the cause of police reform, we in the House of Representatives passed a good bill that every single Democrat voted for, as well as some Republicans.

“And yet if you were to say to your constituents, what is it they have done in the area of police reform? People just won’t necessarily be able to say, because the conversation has been consumed by slogans — and frankly they are also slogans that have been weaponized by our political opponents.”

Spanberger said the millions of dollars spent on “defund the police” attack ads against Webb indicated “there had to be some pollster or some strategist somewhere saying, ‘This is how we will beat that man.’ ”

Some, like House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Rep. Conor Lamb (D-Pa.) have agreed with Spanberger that slogans such as “defund the police,” as well as calls to ban fracking, for example, hurt Democrats. But others in the party’s more liberal wing said they felt like they were being blamed for losses, or that the voices of their constituents — many of them minorities — were being silenced.


“To be real, it sounds like you are saying stop pushing for what Black folks want,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said to centrist colleagues on the call. Ocasio-Cortez, whose name and face hovered in the background of some GOP attack ads in Virginia, tweeted that the “ ‘progressivism is bad’ argument just doesn’t have any compelling evidence,” noting that many Democrats who co-sponsored Medicare-for-all or the Green New Deal won reelection.

“When it comes to ‘Defund’ & ‘Socialism’ attacks, people need to realize these are racial resentment attacks,” she wrote. “You’re not gonna make that go away. You can make it less effective.”

She added in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” that she was not denying that Republican rhetoric has been effective in hurting Democrats but said the party could be more resilient against the attacks — for example, with better digital campaigning.


“The source for many of the “defund” attacks against Webb stemmed from a television interview Webb gave this summer, when the Democrat expressed support for racial justice protesters and said the “defund the police” language that was flooding the streets then should be used “appropriately.” Thereafter, he found himself repeatedly denying that his comments amounted to support for defunding the police.

But Webb had no regrets about his words, saying he found it important in a conversation about racial justice to at the very least acknowledge the viewpoints of people across the district who both supported and opposed calls for “defunding” police.

“That’s something that is sometimes incompatible with our hot-mic politics, but it’s so important for us to be able to do from a healing perspective,” he said. “The key here is being able to hold space for the range of views that exist and say, how do we move forward?”

[MHBDemon]

Like i said, it lacks evidence.

[Liquid Karma]

By and large, defund the police activist are not democrats

Correct. They are the lunatic fringe and should be disregarded as such.

[myDeaconmyhand]

Yeah, there’s no electoral leverage for Democrats to enforce that biased conjecture - they lose for a million different reasons and never blame themselves. If Republican messaging completely determines a Dem candidates electoral identity, then that candidate could presumably do whatever they wanted to. Is it not odd to anyone that the same tactics don’t work in reverse? Perhaps those Democratic candidates should be pointing the fingers at the conservative constituency they’re trying to...fool? Instead of bitching at left activists with sincere policy goals.

[myDeaconmyhand]

Correct. They are the lunatic fringe and should be disregarded as such.

Hey Pil, this is the voter that Spanaberger is so consumed with winning. Good luck. Enjoy that.