Free ebook download:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing
Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing.
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Just give them a LITTLE MORE MONEY and they’ll fix everything /s
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I love how often Rightists tell Leftists how to do their job in a way that “might work better.”
Seriously. It’s such bad faith bullshit.
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But what about sex offenders and domestic abusers?
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JFC.
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Not to say this isn’t worth discussion but this case is over two years old.
There’s also a follow up here:
And it’s not exactly as cut and dry as the story was initially made out.
Still, the police should not have paritally handcuffed a heavily intoxicated person in a mental health crisis who is under the influence of multiple drugs in a car where drugs and her boyfriend’s gun were still unsecured. That’s just asking for trouble.
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You do not win either by alienating the middle. While “Defund the police” is a good actual strategy if you are talking about ‘the current U.S. police apparus’ is probably a good idea, people hear it as ‘defund the idea of police’. Which sounds utterly unrealistic to a lot of people.
QuickBrownFox is right. It’s an idiotic slogan from a marketing pov. Being right is not the only thing that counts, you also need to make people believe you.
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If the middle is “people who want to keep trying the “reform” that hasn’t been working for decades, and thus are OK with the current rate of police murdering unarmed Black Americans,” then fuck them.
How’s that for a slogan?
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Nah.
We tried the whole “reform the police using input from public and make them into people who we’re proud to have instead of people we’re terrified of” for 30+ years. We yelled about that after every single “cop gone bad and got paid vacation for it” situation. It was like screaming at the ocean and making it stop.
Suddenly we say “defund the police” and people are actually asking if that’s possible, cities are actually defunding them, people are wrecking through police departments and there are mass resignations and low morale at police departments that have major issues.
It seems to me it’s great marketing. Us saying, at this point in time, “defund the police” has moved more things forward in the last 3 weeks than we got in the last 30 years of quietly asking for reforms in the current system.
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Maybe there could be a better slogan, sure, but in practical terms it’s already too late.
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Good interview with Vitale here:
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Centrists lost their claim to a veto on everybody else’s ideas when they let Trump get elected
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For the infamous “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” centrist, defunding the police should be a no-brainer. It is blatantly obvious that American police are hugely overfunded, and heavily stripping their budgets is the obvious “fiscally responsible” solution. Unless, of course, the whole “fiscal responsibility” schtick was never anything more than a thin and insincere justification for “fuck the poor, maintain the hierarchy”.
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Defunding the police also makes obvious sense from a “socially liberal” perspective. American police perform many functions that are handled by non-police agencies in other countries. Animal control, school security, psych intervention, etc. Fewer cops equals fewer opportunities for cops to exert their authoritah, equals fewer dead Black people.
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Demilitarising the police is an obvious financially sensible, socially beneficial, small-c conservative thing to do. Cops rolling around in armoured vehicles are super-expensive, as well as batshit crazy.
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“Centrist” is very slippery word in US politics. The center of the country overall is slightly to the left of both parties. The DemGOP swing voters are a small faction that are massively unrepresentative of the country as a whole.
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“Middlers”? “Windsocks”?
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See, the funny thing is when I say I believe in actual fiscal responsibility from government, I mean it.
That means spending money where it’ll do the most good for the least cost. So, things like housing and healthcare (including vision, dental and mental health) eliminate a lot of the need for police expenditures. Spending money ensuring people are housed saves money on healthcare. One of the reasons my province hasn’t exploded under COVID-19 and economic shutdown, despite being an Asia-Pacific gateway and sitting right next to a COVID hotspot and being notoriously short on healthcare beds is that they moved to ensure people remain housed (fallout when the pandemic is over could be brutal, however).
Money now saved in Housing and Healthcare (because people are fed and housed and maintenance is cheaper than crisis management) can be spent on infrastructure management. And again, since maintenance is cheaper than crisis management (despite what private industry acts like, because they know that in a crisis they can turn to the public purse so we pay, not them) and we can expand other social programs. And since happy, healthy, fed, housed people don’t tend to require so much policing, we don’t need to spend so much in that arena, or on prisons, so that public money can go into making sure people are happy, healthy, fed, and housed and that our shared spaces are so much nicer and…
Storage and maintenance for MRAPs in a city of less than 100,000 (well, at all, but I am aiming at the egregious) is not fiscally responsible, even if the MRAP itself was free.
Fiscal responsibility also does not include having governments services be self-funding. That just encouraged those agencies to find ways to bring in more money as the expense of the powerless.
Funny how the same folks who spout things like “fiscal responsibility” and “anyone who would give up a little liberty…” are the same ones freaking out at the thought of removing one of the least liberty-granting and most blackhole money-suck institutions.
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This amazes me too.
The whole militarization of the police force comes from two different things:
- The excess supply of military weaponry we continually build because of massive defense contracts and defense spending. That’s a waste of money, so they just offload it to the police at a discount.
and
- The fact that even the military, to some level, has standards that most police departments don’t come close to requiring before the person is ever let near civilians. And even THAT has massive problems in the military. All the bullies I knew in high school got their asses kicked out of the military but are doing JUST FINE being small town cops. One of them raped his girlfriend multiple times in high school. Another repeatedly assaulted teachers. And now they’re cops.
BOTH of these situations are not even remotely fiscally conservative, and yet, conservatives seem to line up behind them and their hundred million dollar budgets but decry when us liberals are like “Hey maybe we should feed prisoners actual food” because it’ll cost $3.00 more per prisoner per day.
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Or, hey, maybe we could save on costs by not having those prisoners there at all.
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ETA:
What you describe isn’t fiscal conservatism, which is inherently risk-averse. Spend little, get even less. What you are describing is ROI - return on investment, which is what smart people do. Invest in positive outcomes, and prioritize projects and spending where the least amount of investment yields the greatest return. The further left on the economic spectrum you trend, the better you are at this. The further right you are, the worse you are at this. Conservatives (capital “C”) will spend $1M to lose only $100k of it. Progressives will spend $12M (causing Conservatives to shit their pants) to get $144M in benefit from it.
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