That’s because these are two utterly different scenarios and you’re trying to make a single criterion fit.
Porkins (in white) there with an overhead strike. edit: @00:10
If we do that we will get court martialled.
overhead strike = head strike = possible death/concussion/permanent injury.
We are taught to go round the side and aim for the thighs preferably, torso/arms possibly.
It will still hurt you but you won’t be disabled.
vyshka
4297
There is a problem with the selection, training, and culture nurtured in these departments. I don’t agree that defunding them is the solution, law enforcement will always be a necessary function, but something has to be done.
“Yes or no. Will you commit to defunding the police?”
“Can you clarify that?”
“We don’t want no more police. Is that clear? We don’t want no more guns pointed at us from cops in our communities.”
“I can’t commit to that. I do not support the full abolition of the police.”
“Get the fuck out of here!”
One thing the protestors believe now- if they stop, the police will become even more brutal. They feel like this is their last chance to get change, and I think they’re willing to die right now.
I believe the police also know this, and are determined to crush this for good.
This is why I think this is going to last for a long, long time. I do expect governors to try and reimpose lockdowns on claims of pandemic but really to stop the protests, but it won’t work. No one will respect the new lockdowns. We’re going full herd immunity due to the failures of our society.
you don’t need less protests, you need more protests and a longterm protest, in order to get change. Pausing now would be the worst. Finally, change is in reach … US could do so much better and become a paragon for the world. You have a great country, with great people, but a lot of issues …
If people have religious beliefs that are so profound, they can ignore the rules and go to church and take the risk of being arrested. Just like the protesters are doing. This is civil disobedience.
Edit: If millions of people were to feel so strongly about going to church that they ignored lockdown orders to do it, there would be some arrests of priests / pastors / etc, but the police and authorities would quickly give up that effort when it became impossible to maintain.
‘Defunding’ has a particular meaning in this context, though I will grant that a lot of protesters don’t know that and are consequently asking for quite a bit more.
Are there any model cities that have fully abolished the police? What is the Denmark of police abolition?
(Not implying that Denmark is a city, but you get my gist)
I think when most serious people talk about abolishing the police, they are talking about abolishing the police as presently constituted. The idea being that policing is so fundamentally broken that reforms cannot fix it, so you need to completely reconstruct it. Rip it up and start again, basically. I am not sure if there are more successful models elsewhere, but it’s worth a try.
It seems like this is something that would require a great deal of thought, planning, and small scale tests with long-term studies before being applied broadly.
It would mean ending mass incarceration, cash bail, fines-and-fees policing, the war on drugs, and police militarization, as well as getting cops out of schools. It would also mean funding housing-first programs, creating subsidized jobs for the formerly incarcerated, and expanding initiatives to have mental-health professionals and social workers respond to emergency calls.
This article is a decent summary. The point of ‘defund the police’ is to point out the choices America has made compared with other countries. We choose a thin social safety net paired with a massive security state, whereas most other (free) countries have chosen a large safety net and a small security state. ‘Defund the police’ argues for the redirection of budgets away from the security state and to better, more broad social services. To that extent, probably any city in western Europe qualifies as an example.
It isn’t a new idea, it is what everyone else does.
I was referring to abolition, not reform. Both courses of action are being advocated for presently.
Why disband police?
Disbanding police altogether falls on the more radical end of the police divestment spectrum, but it’s gaining traction.
MPD150, a community advocacy organization in Minneapolis, focuses on abolishing local police. Its work has been spotlighted since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis Police custody.
“The people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises,” the organization says.
Rather than “strangers armed with guns,” the organization says, first responders should be mental health providers, social workers, victim advocates and other community members in less visible roles.
It argues law and order isn’t abetted by law enforcement, but through education, jobs and mental health services that low-income communities are often denied. MPD150 and other police abolition organizations want wider access to all three.
From that same article:
Does defunding the police mean disbanding the police?
That depends on who you ask, said Philip McHarris, a doctoral candidate in sociology at Yale University and lead research and policy associate at the Community Resource Hub for Safety and Accountability.
Some supporters of divestment want to reallocate some, but not all, funds away from police departments to social services. Some want to strip all police funding and dissolve departments.
The concept exists on a spectrum, but both interpretations center on reimagining what public safety looks like, he said.
It also means dismantling the idea that police are “public stewards” meant to protect communities. Many Black Americans and other people of color don’t feel protected by police, McHarris said.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me that there are is a spectrum of views encompassed in the term, but I don’t think that’s a reason to dismiss it as unworkable. The ‘test’ you spoke of, the gradual approach, could be picking a less extreme part of the spectrum.
I didn’t mean to imply that I was opposed to this. I was replying to @Dissensus, who wrote:
The Atlantic article was about reforms to fix the system, and I am not dismissing that train of thought. I was talking about abolition.
Ah, I understand, sorry.
Enough people are talking / writing about this and still no example of a true police-less city has come up, so I imagine that means there is none.
Yeah, sorry if my original post seemed like it was a reply to an ongoing discussion, and made it seem like I was implying something that I wasn’t. I just hopped in here after seeing the story about Frey and the CNN headline which talked about police abolition.
I do not know that there are any examples of an alternative way of policing. I am no expert here and obviously there are major hurdles to abolishing policing as we know it. As mentioned, reallocating resources could act as a stopgap while restructuring police. At the very minimum, most people could probably agree that police in the US are over funded, at least relative to other areas the money could be going. Likewise, things like police being demilitarized, being actual members of the communities they are policing, getting better training (maybe making a bachelor’s degree mandatory), having more strenuous psych evaluations, etc., all seem workable in the near- and mid-term.
On the other hand, when you have people legitimately living in fear of being murdered or brutalized by police, gradual change with a promise to do better in the future is a hard sell.
When restructuring and rebuilding the police, which people will work as a cop? Hopefully not the same racist cops like before. Either get rid of the racist cops, and if you cannot know which cop is which, you need every cop be accountable for his actions.
And how would that fix the case, where a judge orders a no-knock warrant. Cops smash into an appartment at night, get shot at, respond fire and kill the black woman “by collateral”, Breonna Taylor. I think the judge did not think his warrant through…
