Can you point to a program in the 40 year history of “police reform” where that has demonstrably worked? The only recent experiment in alternative policing that has shown both a decrease in crime and police violence is Camden - which reduced police budgets.
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The issue is that going by past actions none of that will happen.
Give the police more funding and they will just buy more military equipment or dystopian robot dogs. They will still turn off or manipulate body cams. They will still hire the lowest IQ applicants for the job, and their training will still be subpar. And the hypothetical beat cops who arrive first on the scene will still immediately resort to violence, rather than making any attempt at de-escalating the problem.
None of your proposed ideas are actually viable, because they have all been tried before, and it hasn’t made any real difference to anyone who isn’t part of the protected class.
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This is what “defund the police” is intended to do. Since they clearly can’t handle the load they’re under now, throwing more money at them is going to get the same inefficient, incompetent response. So, if we establish crisis lines and teams to deal specifically with mental health issues, we’re bound to get a better result than we have now, with people dying because the police have proven, over and over again, that they cannot handle this issue.
Defund, not defend. Autocorrect strikes again!
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How our particular agency worked (back in the 1980s) was that we were contracted by hospitals. If a case came in that needed our expertise, we were paged and part of the agreement was that one of our specialists would be there within 30 minutes.
Nowadays, it could even be a text. Easy peasy.
Oh, and we never needed weapons.
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Nice cartoon!
You’ve probably already seen this, but @NewNow , it might be new to you:
We already have people trained to do this stuff. We can’t expect police to be able to be trained to address every conceivable situation they encounter in the current system, even if they did all have the best of intentions. (Which, IMO and experience, they really don’t.) Better to funnel the calls to the appropriate responders. And fund them accordingly.
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Now that I have to see (although I really don’t want to, actually).
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I’m talking about death by asfixiation by thugs in uniform arm handling you. Very common if you are poor and black in Brazil.
A cursory Google brought at least five cases these last years that made the news.
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In at least one of the cases, the security agent using a mata leão to strangle the victim didn’t know the difference between “subdue” and “kill” and even when people said that he was killing the boy he ignored them and kept strangling.
If people that feel entitled to “authority” have a weapon, even if that weapon is a martial art, they will use said weapon to hurt people they perceive as less than them or as “disrespecting” said authority.
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Eric Garner can confirm.
This is why San Francisco has wisely prevented the SFPD from carrying tasers. The police force simply isn’t responsible enough to avoid using them as compliance tools.
I have recently been spending time reading the ProtectAndServe reddit. The officers are trained to call their martial arts tools DTs, Defensive Techniques. No matter that they are mostly about injuring people.
There is one DT that is very hard to abuse: running away from danger instead of towards it. Cops are clearly wussies. The only reason running toward danger even makes sense to them is their culture and training lionizes this self defeating stupidity.
Everyone agrees that officers don’t want to get hurt.
“Back the police off” would have made a much better motto than defund. Heck it even sounds enough like “Back the blue” that the low info crowd could get behind it.
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Right, and cops tase people to death too.
Less lethal and submission techniques are better than lethal force. Any use of force, lethal or less lethal, can be abused and used incorrectly. (Which is why we shouldn’t allow choke holds for police.) I think it should still be an option and correctly applied would make for better policing.
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