Chicago, NY, LA all stand out as places where the PD have unspeakable power and have been allowed to run wild, despite proving every day they are corrupt and unfit for the job. These cities also seem like the prime places to start the ball rolling on defunding. The police are actually required for only 1/20 calls that they receive, and so their funding could be cut proportionally. NYPD has a $6B budget. What could New York do with $5.7B a year in budget? Solve homelessness? Improve public schools? Retire Rikers Island in favor of a humane jail system? Create enough parking so that you don’t need to sell a kidney to park within 10 blocks of your destination?
I was going to post this on the defund the police thread, but its closed.
This story hits so many points of American society. There was a shootout at the Jefferson Gun Outlet – a gun store, training facility, and firing range in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie. 5 were shot and 3 killed, and although the details are still unclear the initial report is that a man shot and killed an employee that told him to unload his gun when in the store and not at the range.
The point that struck me the most, though, were the photos of the scene (all uneventful shots of people standing around outside afterwards). I count ~20 different LEOs in the pictures, most men and ALL white. New Orleans metro area is 50% white.
For anyone that hasn’t memorized probability tables, the odds of randomly selecting a particular 50% chance 20 straight times is just under one in a million.
You’d think a gun shop would be about the safest place in the world, what with all the responsible gun owners around protecting and self defending and all
ETA: Let’s also add that this is yet another example of a white male mass murderer being taken peacefully into custody by police. No SWAT team in sight, or no-knock raid, or 37 shots fired because he had a cell phone. It’s not that I want the police to kill this shithead - it’s that I want them to stop killing innocent and unarmed people.
I just want to sit with this clarification for a moment. We feel the need to say things like this because we’ve all gotten, “so you want the police to start shooting white people?” arguments. And it strikes me that this is a gauge of just how much some people cannot fathom humane treatment of non-white people.
And the police excuse machine of “they were no angel” or “I feared for my life.” Bullshit, all the way, and just goes right back to your last sentence.
Oh, this makes sense. It’s from the usual GOP/GQP playbook. Take a government service, screw it up*, wait for the complaints about how screwed up it is, demonize government-provided services, push to privatize it, set up a private company (in which they’re invested or getting kickbacks) to take over the work, get an overpriced contract, cut the service quality and increase costs over time to pocket more profits, complain the private firm can no longer do the work because their costs are too high (or have firm close/file for bankruptcy), and finally cancel the contract to dump the work back on government with a lot of debt or wildly inflated costs that have to be covered by public funds. This worked for prisons, parts of the military, and charter schools. They’re just moving on to another market in their profit-at-the-public’s-expense pipeline.
I’m looking forward to all those LEO GQP supporters finding out that leaders of their party have plenty of former military and private security contractors to fill these jobs. They might see articles like this, think it means a new career path for them, and support it - at first. Once word gets out that firms like this won’t be hiring people with records that could cause the company to get sued, they’ll be commiserating with unemployed miners, factory workers, and retail associates. Just imagine the clauses in app agreements or client and employee contracts with companies like this in terms of liability. Remember how responsible Uber was in following safety, legal, and insurance requirements when they started and how much the company has improved over the years since then?
*All those changes in hiring practices and educational standards were NOT a mistake, but part of the plan. Showing fear-mongering ads to the public, encouraging the use of security cameras, and promoting neighborhood watch sites/vigilantism also helps their cause.
Maybe the movement to defund and reform would gain more traction if copaganda TV shows were eliminated or adjusted to reflect reality. I’m imagining a season where the leads are being investigated and asked to explain their actions during past cases. Maybe department leadership could spent episodes reviewing why they do such a terrible job with certain types of crimes. That might lead viewers to reach a conclusion that reflects reflects research on the subject, instead of getting the false idea that all cops are competent, caring, or concerned about protecting members of the communities they patrol.
