ShivaX
4497
Impact munitions fired directly at people again in Seattle.
Because whatever I guess.
It’s a miracle it hasn’t happened yet (with live ammo). Not sure how long our luck holds out.
Nesrie
4499
radical social platform of Black Lives Matter
He’s got a long ways to go, and there’s nothing pure about it. Had he spent just a few minutes thinking and listening to someone who is not white of his ideology, he could’ve strengthened his daughter and helped spare her from what she experienced. No matter how shocked he was, she was likely more so.
It should not require a white person to personally feel something, to hit their orbit, in order to just know the lives of black people do, in fact, matter.
ShivaX
4501
I feel like the trite saying is “if you’re explaining, you’re losing”, and the point of my comment was to show that it isn’t really true, that politicians explain all the time as part of campaigning, and they even win while doing it; and that objecting to Trump as an example is kind of missing that point. So forget about him, and can we agree that that most politicians use campaigns to explain what they mean to do, and that half of them win, so explaining doesn’t necessarily make them lose?
Hear, hear. They’re not doing it right is probably not the optimum response for relatively safe, wealthy white men to be making about either people protesting against police violence or their calls to defund the police.
Yeah, that was a powerful episode. Honestly, the part that stuck with me was the very end, where we’re lucky that black people are looking for equality, and not revenge.
Also, along with defunding, we also need to disarm and de-union the police.
Arm the police like soldiers, they see everyone else as the enemy.
If you have to read an essay to understand a slogan, it’s a bad slogan.
Ultimately, I think the whole disband/defund thing (and the ease with which it can be divorced from its intended meaning) is how the right turns this around, and they know it. It’s how all the work, and pain, and sacrifice that’s gone into these protests, and all the progress made from them, gets quashed. Message matters.
Someone pointed out Camden County of NJ as a good example the pathway that can be taken.
Obviously you need some kind of police entity. But as mentioned above, you don’t really need an armed cop for the majority of the stuff they currently do.
But the rot is so widespread that the only way you’re going to fix anything is to start over. We don’t need cops that respond with force at the drop of a hat. We don’t need cops that have millions and millions of dollars of military equipment. We don’t need cops that view people of color with more suspicion. The calls to disband police departments are less an admission that we don’t need police and more a realization that we don’t need these police.
Disband them. Whatever we come up with next will be better.
I have P&R on mute (for all our benefit) but I had to drop in and say that I never expected to see the day when demilitarizing the police and breaking unions would go mainstream. Amazing!
As an eternal optimist, I see a potential win-win here as police don’t want to be called for petty shit or mental health cases anyway. Policing is also one of the most visibly decentralized government functions, which gives us the opportunity to experiment with different approaches instead of trying to solve life’s problems all at once with the federal government. I’ll still keep one hand on my wallet with a gun tucked away in my safe, but this is all very promising.
I can’t help commenting on the new slogan: years later we’re still explaining what Black Lives Matter means, so it’s probably too late to hope for anything better. I guess screaming at people on social media will get the job done eventually.
Hope everyone stays safe out there.
This is the key point. We’ve tried “fixing” it repeatedly. The most recent fix - bodycams - hasn’t stopped them, merely given proof that some cops are really stupid (planting evidence while the cams are running) and others are cruel on purpose (turning the cams off before brutalizing the public). It’s easy for us to say that we should keep trying to fix it when statistically it’s not QT3’s main demographic whose lives are at risk.
I’m very interested in how Minneapolis proceeds and what the results are. With police unions being one of the main issues with holding cops accountable - is disbanding the force a way for them to do an end-around on the unions?
I do not envy Minneapolis’s government their situation, that’s for sure. Whatever they do here is going to have national impact - it’ll either be held up as a successful way forward (fingers crossed) or as a disaster that dissuades others from substantial action.
Not to get too far into the woods, but cameras have helped, and police brutality is trending downward.
Just not fast enough to be valued.
Timex
4513
If this is the case, then my city would only have 8 cops for a city of 40,000 people. Like, the entire police department would only be 8 people.
I don’t see how that would possibly work.
This doesn’t work. Most homeless interactions are already being done by social workers via homeless outreach, but those folks also rely on the police to provide support in cases where you’ve got homeless who are disturbed for various reasons (drug addiction, psychological issues, etc.)
You’re going to send social workers and psych majors into situations where domestic violence is actively taking place? Are you going to arm them? Because it’s gonna be pretty shitty for them to go into a violent situation with no protection.
I agree that getting rid of police is pretty much burn it all down and start over. That does seem to be the theme of the age though, on both sides of the isle.
I’d like to see actual proposals from “the other side” about what to do - what they have to understand though is that the status quo isn’t acceptable.
The problem with politics in America is that one side says “that’s too far” and basically offers no alternative. Just - no, not that. And then shrugs, and sits backs, and waits for the status quo to return, with fearful or angry trepidation.
That’s why I’ve said during this whole ordeal that the US political system doesn’t respond to anything but force. Arguably the driving impetus behind the Civil Rights legislation was fear - fear that African Americans would justly rise up and resort to violence when all they received was violence in return. The call to send in the troops is just a way of saying, no, we’re afraid, but we have a solution, and that solution is force. Go away, problems we don’t want to confront, want to admit, want to deal with, and have no answers for.
People need to be scared in America to change. And they need to be more scared of not changing. Fundamentally changing the police is scary. People need to be more afraid of not changing the police than of keeping them the same with barely any tweaks. In a rational system, we wouldn’t need to be so extreme. But America is if anything ground zero of irrational politics. If the rhetoric one side needs to use is “no police and guillotines”, then self interested fear will find huge swathes of America more than willing to make fundamental changes.
We’re only explaining it to the people who are determined to misunderstand it, though. Maybe that’s the part of the situation to examine more closely?
KevinC
4516
I think this is spot on. The problem isn’t the slogan, the problem is the “All Lives Matter” people don’t care and don’t want to care. It’s just their way of saying “Whatever, shut up and play football/basketball/entertain me”.
