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Re:There's a growing call to defund the police. Here's what ... by egypturnash on Sunday June 07, 2020 @10:40AM (#23447659)
Then every other city toying with the idea watches them for the next year or so. What does happen when you take a major chunk of the budget of a city and reallocate it from "beating the shit out of your poorer citizens" to "helping your poorer citizens"? What happens when you no longer have people roaming the streets looking for someone to accuse of a crime because they have a quota of arrests to fill?

If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting, then other cities toying with the idea decide to follow suit.

Eventually you even get to a place where even the rightwingers are proposing this in the slower-moving places, if marijuana legalization is any kind of model - I'm in a state with a very loose medical marijuana bill sitting on the Governor's desk that will be de facto recreational legalization, which was proposed and pushed through by Repubs, and that really kinda blows my mind.

Re:There's a growing call to defund the police. Here's what ... by AnimalMuppet on Sunday June 07, 2020 @02:08PM (#23449278)
Here's the problem: People are not angels. This applies to the police (as we're seeing).

But it also applies to the non-police. They aren't angels, either. And in the absence of police, they aren't going to become angels. They're going to still beat their wives, they're going to still mug random strangers, they're going to still do protection rackets. And they may do even more of those things when they don't have to worry about being stopped.

And then, the victims aren't angels, either. If they use a Second Amendment defense to those problems, they're not going to do it perfectly. They're going to do it in anger. They're going to do it with vigilante justice, hitting more people than they should, and hitting some of the wrong people.

> If the results are anywhere near as good as the groups pushing for police abolishment are projecting...

In light of human nature, I'm not banking on the results being wonderful.

Re:There's a growing call to defund the police. Here's what ... by egypturnash on Sunday June 07, 2020 @06:00PM (#23451263)
Well, it looks like Minneapolis is gonna make a go. https://theappeal.org/minneapolis-city-council-members-annou...