I’m rewatching the first 3 seasons of Better Call Saul, and I’m struck how they show the corruption of the police via Mike Ehmentraut’s storyline. He killed the two crooked cops who killed his son, when his son refused to go along with their schemes and that’s why he left the force in Philly. That strikes me as far more realistic than what L&O often depicts.
Who knew that, if we make these snowflakes mildly uncomfortable, they would defund themselves?
“You can’t FIRE ME!!! (and by that, I mean bring in properly trained individuals to conduct the aspects of my job that I neither want to do nor am qualified for), I QUIT!!!”
Kind of loses a little of its steam when you actually know what it means.
Well, good riddance.
they’re still getting paid, they’re just not doing their jobs
of course
There’s an interesting video on the “one bad apple” myth by James from the Internet. You’re not obliged to watch, but if you click through, you’ll see that the video is age-restricted. There is some footage of cops accosting teens, but it’s no worse than many other videos depicting police misbehavior.
(The parent channel has been demonetized, suppressed in YouTube listings, and James’ videos have faced two content strikes-- one was lifted on appeal, one stuck. Now his video got hit with age restrictions. Hmmmm… )
The team they resigned from got extra pay and lots of overtime. They don’t get that anymore, at least.
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City council debating how much to fund rehiring retired cops to fill shortfall. One council member added terms that the city could only rehire ones who had no use-of-force complaints against them and who did not take part in the anti-protest enforcement actions last summer.
So, basically, blocking all rehires.
that sounds awesome.
maybe that will force the council to take the opportunity to stand up new non cop jobs for city services that don’t actually require people with guns
though their mayor seems to believe having more cops will somehow reduce crime, and specifically murder. id love to see some statistics that back that up, because i suspect there aren’t any
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28202
tl;dr adding police does reduce murders but the effect is negligible compared to other things.
ingesting it while at work and home
bad work / life balance there, but i do appreciate going the extra mile to make sure that the drugs were real /s
sigh funny not funny i guess… don’t they all have to drug test on a regular basis?
honestly, given the fentanyl situation these days, he’s lucky he didn’t die from an od. rumor has it, fentanyl is starting to appear in pill form these days… in completely random dosage. so i guess if he really wanted to play roulette he would have a more direct way.
That’s in the budget, too, but it’s baby steps.
paywall, but the abstract definitely sounds interesting
We report the first empirical estimate of the race-specific effects of larger police forces in the United States. Each additional police officer abates approximately 0.1 homicides. In per capita terms, effects are twice as large for Black versus white victims. At the same time, larger police forces make more arrests for low-level “quality-of-life” offenses, with effects that imply a disproportionate burden for Black Americans. Notably, cities with large Black populations do not share equally in the benefits of investments in police manpower. Our results provide novel empirical support for the popular narrative that Black communities are simultaneously over and under-policed.
so many questions: what kind of officers? ( ex. patrol, or homicide detectives ) and over what time frame? is this able to separate increased arrests from increased police? ( as often increasing cops comes along with an effort to “crack down” on crime )
the time frame thing is a big one:
one would assume putting young men through america’s jails would have long term negative consequences for crime and violence, but i definitely could see if you get enough people off the streets ( whether potential or actual perpetrators as well as potential victims - since those can overlap ) the immediate situation might change
portland’s had a record 67 homicides this year ( no idea per capita ) so you’d need 300-400 more officers to bring things back towards normal. average cost per cop is 100-150k per year in salary, benefits, equipment, etc. so 30-60 million. interesting…
eta:
Some analysis of the paper here:
from that planet money link, the authors note arrests - especially of black youth - for non-violent crime goes way up, while both incidents and arrests for violent crimes goes slightly down. so they conclude it works by just having police, not actually having them solve crimes. oh, and it only works in cities that are overwhelming white. yikes.
they came up with 1-2 million in policing costs per future victim, but they left out things like the costs of jailing all the excess low level offenders and the reduction of household income. and the less quantifiable moral costs
and while the authors conclude that stopping homicides is good, to me that’s only a starting point for comparing other uses for that money: better schools, after school programs, jobs, drug treatment, infrastructure and quality of life
we could just put everyone in jail to stop all potential crime - but that hardly seems like protection
Like many other places around America?
Local media are acting like Portland invented crime and homelessness and they don’t exist anywhere else
truly. pretty much every city is pretending it’s a local issue, not like there hasn’t been some recent nationwide phenomenon that might be to blame. ( worldwide, even )
for portland, comparing raw numbers when the city roughly doubled in size since the 80s… it gives a misleading view.
i do understand cities wanting to do something, but flooding the streets with police is a terrible solution.
and if that paper were right, 300 or more new cops would be needed in portland to arrest enough people to get the violent crime rate down to pre-pandemic levels. that’s insanity. especially for a force that has fewer than 800 patrol officers to start with. [ thanks google 
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