Does Lee Baca have a relative named Chuy?
3 Likes
We don’t know. Lee Baca, facing criminal charges, has developed sudden senility.
4 Likes
here’s another telling graph as well
if cops are supposed to be stopping crime and catching criminals, they’re not doing a particular good job.
[ edit: note that the clearance rates are as reported by the police. in practice, it’s even worse than the graph. clearence can mean everything from solving a case, to the prime suspect dying, to closing a cold cases, and also situations that went to trial but failed to proven in court. ]
10 Likes
So no relation to “Chew” Baca.
1 Like
He’s pretty tall, so maybe, but he doesn’t talk about the past, and pretends he can’t remember. “It was long ago…”
3 Likes
Of course it can also mean “we railroaded some innocent guy to boost our clearance stats” or “we didn’t think the victim was important enough to file a formal report in the first place” so it’s not always a bad thing when the rate goes down.
8 Likes
The problem is this is what the local government really, really should be. It should be an administration made up of local residents, with an equitable mix of (formerly) underrepresented folks. Honestly, it’s a violation of civil rights that it’s not. (And we really need to start pressing that.)
We are so bad at governments that we are constantly coming up with the idea of government to replace what passes for governments.
And if we have everyone in the community pitch in to pay for the services that we want our local community to offer… we’ve re-invented taxes again.
Can I just quote this here because I agree with it so much? 
And there, right there, that is the crux of the problem, the key to solving the rest of it: perhaps if we solved this there would be no rest of it because it would all fall into line.
The police work for us. They have forgotten that. They are our servants, not our masters. There should be no convincing required, just telling them the new parameters of their job. If they don’t like it, they can go pound sand. If they don’t do their job, they can go pound sand. This is what I mean when I say that the police are no longer under the control of the local government.
9 Likes
Around here, it seems they’re under the control of their union bosses and some entrenched politicians. Cleveland even had a Federal panel tell them they suck at their jobs and to do better, but I can’t see much improvement, except for more police cameras at neighborhood intersections.
5 Likes
That’s true, for the most part. Though in some areas, the police aren’t always from the area they are policing. IIRC in KC they are pushing policy to make that the case, at least for KC, MO.
Though this is a problem mainly in metro areas where you might live in a nicer area, and police a less nice area. But in smaller towns, at least, most cops live in the community they police.
I would be more concerned about the reverse.
2 Likes
I doubt there are many examples of the reverse.
As I understand it, reformers want police to live in the area they police. It is supposed to reduce the attitude of “me vs the community I police” and promote the attitude of “I am part of the community I police”. Not sure how well it works.
2 Likes
Beat me to it. Thank you.
well, if the unions ever agree to it… maybe then we’ll know.
the problem of course is that the most heavily policed areas receive the least other public services… so if you’re on a cop’s generally pretty decent salary… those are exactly the areas you don’t want to live in. ( and, of course, the tightly linked racial issues behind historic and self-segregation – coincidentally – involving those exact same areas and largely white police forces )
4 Likes
The problem with the US is that we don’t really have many actual communities. We don’t even have neighbors, we just have people we live next to. And it’s also full of racist assholes who think a Black man walking into his own house is a burglar. Real community policing is looking out for one another and living together, not snitching and bitching while hiding behind your curtains because you’re terrified of the person across the street whom you’ve never even met.
Police don’t stop crime. At best they clean up after it, and at worst they instigate and perpetrate it themselves. All the policing in the world isn’t going to save you from getting burgled. But living in an actual neighborhood with a community that knows about and checks up on everyone else very well might. There’s solidarity in that. Now, it would also help if we gave people the things they needed so that they would have less incentive to commit crimes in the first place, but “just give people houses” is even more of a radical concept than “we don’t need to be controlled by state-sanctioned wielders of violence” for some reason, so it’ll probably be a while before we get to that point.
6 Likes
‘I don’t want to be in a position to lose 5 to 10% of my chop-shop employees overnight on a “don’t steal” mandate.’
3 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
