I have friends that believe that the only solution is starting a war just to provide the cultural outlet. Destroying warrior culture altogether is not an answer either (and a foolish idea besides), but I hope we can discover some other answer before the next war. Aliens maybe?
I just think you need to filter out the nut-jobs that think they're Rambo and view the streets as a warzone.
My suspicion is that the kinds of soldiers who become problem police officers are the soldiers who didn't actually face combat abroad. I imagine it's the kind of soldier who fantasized about front-line service but wasn't quite cut out for it for one reason or another and they've directed their disappointment about that into being an abusive police officer.
The archetypical "warrior cop" is a non-veteran who likes military imagery but has no experience with military discipline or subordination.
That said, yea, glory hounds would make really scary police officers.
Cut personnel in each branch by half, significantly consolidate bases, and modestly increase pay for the people who remain.
Then, redirect the enormous savings to actually useful jobs programs. Build roads instead of running around in circles in rural Alabama/North Carolina for four years.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/01/14/169364733...
Europe's not going to afford to carry out a successful land invasion of Russia anytime soon, but if that's the level of defense spending Trump was looking for, I'm glad he was told to pound sand.
Not true. The popular comparison is the US spends about as much as the next 10 countries combined. US is ~38% of the world's defense spending.
https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...
As a percentage of GDP US defense spending is near its post WW II low.
In other words 4% of the world's population and 40% of its defense spending. Fucking jesus these feel like silly numbers to discuss -- the USA's military dumbassery puts Rome to shame. The latter collapsed because of its over-reach (well, unless you attended a conservative seminary, in which case it was clearly the "lack of morality on display in the Roman bath houses" or some such similar Very Serious Sociology/"Church History" That's Definitely Not Just USA Christian Nationalist Ur-Fascism.)
Economy size to defense spending is probably more a relevant ratio than population. 23% of the world economy, 38% of defense spending.
Defense spending is near all time lows. It didn't collapse the country in the 50s when it hit 11.3% of GDP. It didn't collapse the country in the 60s when it hit 8.6%. It didn't collapse the economy in the 80's when it hit 5.7%. We at sitting just over 3% now. If really you are worried that 3.4% going to cause the country to collapse, you can rest easy.
Trump wanted to raise it to 4%.
The problem is every time this is brought up, it's met with talk of how reform is possible, reform is the answer, you can't disband the police because $(blatantly_ridiculous_reason).
The police in this country are unaccountable, in a literal sense. There is no mechanism to hold them accountable; what exists to do this is inefficient, inaccessible to most people who may need to use it, and also largely ineffective even in the rare cases it does work.
And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons.
Policing in the United States is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was always intended to do: abusing poor people in the interest of the owning class. You can't reform that which is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
And if you hold officers accountable, then they won't overpolice minority neighborhoods, they won't beat people to death for sleeping in front of your buildings, they might hesitate to shoot someone in the back for stealing a $5 beer. I.e., they become less effective to the owning class. And that's why it doesn't happen.
Until this cultural gap is resolved, where we acknowledge not just what is happening but why it's happening and that it's happening was the intended, desired outcome, we can't move forward on it.
Became a complete hellhole as calls to burglary, home invasion and death threats would take an hour or more for county sheriff.
After numerous incidents sherif us told to get a gun; but gave a lot of warnings about how we would go to jail if we defended ourselves. Unless a very narrow range of criteria were met.
Moved as far as way as possible.
The highest case clearance rates were for violent crime and aggravated assault (45.5% and 52.5%, respectively). These crimes typically occur between people who already know each other, and yet it's basically a coin flip whether the police will deliver a case for prosecution.
Think about how attractive a crime is when you have a 0.01% chance of going to jail for it vs a 13.9% chance of going to jail.
A clearance rate could be only a few percent and still be an effective deterrent if the marginal benefit of the crime over some other activity is enough worse than the punishment.
Also consider that a significant fraction of all crimes is committed by a small portion of the population. Even if we fail to send someone to jail for 90% of crimes they commit, eventually they are caught and removed from the community, preventing their future crimes -- stopping all the crimes they would have otherwise committed. The end point here isn't necessarily jail-- either, if they're caught once and scared straight the same thing applies.
It's insane to me that people would rather dump hundreds of millions of dollars into a pointless effort to try to terrorize communities into law-abidance rather than invest that money into addressing some of the material desperation and crises in mental health which would actually make our communities nicer to live in for everyone.
Nah. This is completely reasonable. We tend to have punishments that are large multiples of the benefits of committing the crime, because people know they will not likely be caught. So, you face the situation of doing something that you 90% know you'll get away with, but the remaining 10% is really, really inconvenient. And if you keep rolling the dice, you'll get caught eventually. (And in a perfect world, would be rehabilitated).
> Would you pay 30% of your salary to go to a hospital that historically only cured 3% of patients
NNT's tend to be pretty high for most medical interventions. e.g. statins. No mortality benefit, you need to treat 217 to prevent one nonfatal heart attack, and you need to treat 313 people to prevent one nonfatal stroke-- so about 0.5% see a benefit.
We pay a small percentage of our income to what becomes city budgets, so I think you're engaging in hyperbole to compare this small percentage of our salary that goes to policing to spending 30% of our salary.
I am paying a bunch of money for home insurance and it only rarely helps anyone...
This is another fantasy. It's only true for certain types of people. Are the punishments for crimes committed by police officers scaled based on the likelihood of punishment?
> NNT's tend to be pretty high for most medical interventions. e.g. statins.
I would not pay 30% of my salary for statins.
> We pay a small percentage of our income to what becomes city budgets
All of the money that cities use to purchase police service comes from taxes. The question is not what percentage of an individual's income goes to police, but whether, from the perspective of the city, the overall allocation is an effective use of public funds.
No, but they should be.
> I would not pay 30% of my salary for statins.
Do you pay 30% of your salary for policing?
> The question is not what percentage of an individual's income goes to police, but whether, from the perspective of the city, the overall allocation is an effective use of public funds.
That's an.. ahem.. interesting way to look at it. So if the city wastes twice as much money elsewhere, policing becomes a better deal?
Or if the city gets 30 pennies, and uses 33% of it to stop a fraction of crime, that's a bad deal?
It might be better to look at the services that residents receive in exchange for the amount they pay in taxes, instead of using some ridiculous metric based on fraction of one political entity's tax income.
Otherwise we come up with ridiculous silly comparisons. The sheriff is a tiny proportion of my county's expenditures, and police are a big proportion of my city's expenditures... by your metric, the sheriff is more cost effective, despite costing nearly the exact same amount per capita for the people they're first responders for. (Because the county gets a much bigger share of tax income and spends a bunch on other services that my city doesn't have to pay for).
Or if we're going with the health analogy-- we spend the overwhelming majority of our public health "income" on things with very high NNTs.
"Effective" to me means "achieves desired outcome". You seem to be using a different definition.
If a city represents the interests of its residents and the residents share an interest in material safety, then the question becomes: which strategies provide the residents as a whole with the most safety for the least expenditure? And which strategies are the most in harmony with the resident's other interests (e.g., equality, human dignity)?
For a given outcome: it's the same deal whether the city spends 33% on policing and it's 100x dollars, or if it spends 33% on policing and it's 1x dollars? Surely the proportion of residents' money spent on policing is what matters.
> "Effective" to me means "achieves desired outcome". You seem to be using a different definition.
Basically nothing achieves desired outcome. Case clearance rates are hardly a figure of merit for policing: I think it's likely that you believe as such, too. Or do you think the system would be better if it threw more people in jail?
Argue in good faith. There's plenty of an argument for different police policy without going through ridiculous gymnastics ("percentage of income", arguing low case clearance rates makes policing ineffective, etc). Otherwise, you end up losing the people who might mostly agree with you-- maybe on purpose, are you just trolling?
Similarly, most fines don't scale with wealth. So a speeding ticket might be a terrible blow for an impoverished individual, but completely inconsequential for the super rich.
Regarding what United States cities spend on police, Mother Jones has some information here: https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2020/08/the-blue-b...
Honestly, the numbers are surprising to me. Example: Normally, New York City is quoted as having the largest police force in the United States. However, NYC only spends 8% of its city budget on police. I lived in Manhattan for a few years, and it was normal to see police on foot/bike/car patrols even in wealthy, relatively crime-free neighborhoods.
Also: In the Mother Jones article pie charts, Oakland spends 44% of its city budget on police. But in the historical graphs below, they spend about 8%. There must be a subtle difference in what they are measuring, but it is unclear to me.
According to that list police budgets make up an average of 30% of overall spending.
But pension obligations are a pretty significant component of the price of policing, so excluding them in these calculations doesn't make a lot of sense.
20%-30% is pretty typical. Almost all cities with lower numbers have enormous transportation budgets (e.g., NYC -- they do spend a ton on police, but they also have transportation budget that's comparable to many states).
If someone picks your pocket, that’s theft. If someone steals something from your house while you’re at work, that’s burglary.
Second, as I understand burglary, it is a property crime, like breaking & entering into a home, business, or car. Robbery is person-to-person theft (stick-up by knife, gun, etc.) If we think about burglary for a moment, most burglaries happen when no one is around. Thus, imagine how difficult it is to have enough evidence to even lay a charge against someone. Vanishingly small. I'm not sure that is a good way to judge the effectiveness of police. I lived in an apartment building many years ago where someone got to the roof, then entered an open window and stole some things. The chances of catching this person are incredibly low. The police came to our building to ask questions and look at the inside of various apartments. The effort was made, but it would be nearly impossible to lay charges with so little tangible evidence.
Third, think about robbery. When I think about robbery, I think about "wrong place, wrong time" -- on a street alone at night. What are the chances the police will be able to gather enough evidence to lay a charge? Again, vanishingly small.
Lastly, about this clearance rate for these two crime categories: How does it compare to other high income countries like Canada, UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Korea, Taiwan, Japan, etc.? I'm sure it is also fairly low.
The point is that we should take the massive amount of funding that police receive in the US ($5.1 billion of which has gone towards military vehicles and equipment through the DOD 1033 program) and reallocate it to strategies which extend to people other options beyond a cycle of crime and punishment.
See, e.g. here I'd agree with you totally: almost the entirety of that money spent on the militarization of police is worthless, or, worse, actively harmful. You don't need to make bullshit arguments to support it. Indeed, you weaken people's perceptions of the strength of the case when you give them bullshit arguments.
And the average clearance rate for murder is around 60.
Given that police prioritize some crimes over others, one should be careful in using the stats for things they don't place a priority on as a basis to pass judgement. If the violent crime rate could be lowered for example, say by removing the ability of a violent gang to operate (i.e., arrest and convict them), this frees up time to go after other crimes. We are looking at the current equilibrium achieved as a result of all their efforts, not some law of nature that happens either way (i.e. fixed clearance rates).
Had my bike stolen DIRECTLY in front of a security camera in Seattle.
The police didn't even bother to look for the plates on the car in the footage identify the person. They also wouldn't let me see the tape. They just showed up and said, "This is a cold case" and then left.
I guess the illusion of them showing up gave me some sense of validation.
People committing property crimes will trip themselves up and get caught eventually, even if the probability of any individual case being solved is low.
Perhaps only coincidentally, the department is struggling to hire and crime- both violent and nonviolent- is up. My friend's workplace just finished reinstalling bullet proof glass due to the rise in shootings and rock throwings.
That is nothing like what is being suggested here. The police haven't been abolished yet, but only because nobody can agree on what to have instead.
Most common suggestions are to have neighborhood watch, plugs social workers to be dispatched for most crimes- unless a gun is held to someone's head, there are city board members suggesting that police shouldn't be dispatched at all. Even in cases of rape, they're saying that social workers are better suited to "deescalate if necessary and to deal with the emotional trauma".
This is what the "abolish" advocates around here are pushing for- "abolish" not "start over with new offices in the same capacity as the old ones".
> We need to disband all of the police forces and start again with a new culture based around a guardian mindset and community service
There are indeed people who want to abolish the police. There are those who don't. That's why I said "depends who's suggesting a replacement": in this particular case the top-level comment was calling to create a police force with a different institutional culture, not to create some non-police institution.
About Camden: a rebuilding of the department involved massive cultural change, selectively rehiring to weed out bad influences, recreating the hierarchy to put more civilian-friendly people on top, and breaking the back of the police union. Rebuilding an organization to do the same task from the ground up let's you accomplish that. You're still going to end up hiring from the same talent pool, but those individuals can behave very differently in a different organizational culture.
Why should the same logic not apply to police forces?
Moreover, the threat of this happening would help whip a lot of other forces into shape.
Yes, we are. That's what "abolish police" means.
Could we please abolish the police force? They do far more harm than good.
Ref: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-jersey-city-disband...
> Camden and Newark, two cities in New Jersey, are among those that have been held up as powerful examples of positive change. The two cities have seen structural reforms to their police departments and a steep drop in crime, both within the communities and inflicted by the police.
Clearly it was an effective structural reform. But it does not constitute "police abolition" in a way that would be meaningful to police abolitionists.
And Newark didn't even do that. They just started actually investigating police abuses and imposing actual consequences for abuse.
If anything, it goes to show that you don't need police abolition to make an improvement. But you do need to make changes that amount to more than lip service.
Nearly ten years ago, Reason posted a comparison of police recruitment videos from Decatur, Georgia, and Newport Beach, California. They illustrate beautifully the two mindsets you describe.
https://reason.com/2012/07/06/voting-with-your-feet-police-e...
The videos don't play on that page any more, so here are direct links.
Decatur: https://www.youtube.com/watch/cIgt8pmh7CU
Newport Beach: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_rKA6ROAVk
Please provide a source for this. No need to rewrite history. I believe most historians agree that American policing was based off of the London policing system:
“The first police department in the United States was established in New York City in 1844 (it was officially organized in 1845). Other cities soon followed suit: New Orleans and Cincinnati (Ohio) in 1852; Boston and Philadelphia in 1854; Chicago and Milwaukee (Wis.) in 1855; and Baltimore (Md.) and Newark (N.J.) in 1857. Those early departments all used the London Metropolitan Police as a model.”
If anything poor neighborhoods that have high crime need more police not less, there’s a reason Chicago and Detroit have problems and it’s not because of overpolicing.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/police/Early-police-in-the-...
Somewhat independently the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 created an income stream for groups to capture escaped slaves and return them to the south. Critically, southerners needed to fund these activities. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 swapped this by requiring northern states to actively capture escaped slaves. It essentially mandated large scale institutions of government backed policing.
The south had a separate but related system of slave patrols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol Interestingly at the same time the north was required to hunt for escaped slaves a trade patrol was actively suppressing the African slave trade going back to 1891.
Anyway, this stuff is may be relevant in terms of the history of specific institutions, but it’s arguable how relevant this is in a modern context.
The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system. Some of the primary policing institutions there were the slave patrols tasked with chasing down runaways and preventing slave revolts, Potter says; the first formal slave patrol had been created in the Carolina colonies in 1704. During the Civil War, the military became the primary form of law enforcement in the South, but during Reconstruction, many local sheriffs functioned in a way analogous to the earlier slave patrols, enforcing segregation and the disenfranchisement of freed slaves.
From Wikipedia [2]:
For approximately 150 years, union organizing efforts and strikes have been periodically opposed by police, security forces, National Guard units, special police forces such as the Coal and Iron Police, and/or use of the United States Army. Significant incidents have included the Haymarket Riot and the Ludlow massacre. The Homestead struggle of 1892, the Pullman walkout of 1894, and the Colorado Labor Wars of 1903 are examples of unions destroyed or significantly damaged by the deployment of military force. In all three examples, a strike became the triggering event.
These aren't the only influences on modern policing in the US, but it's hard to argue that the history of US policing isn't deeply intertwined with slave patrols, union busting efforts, and more generally protecting the interests of the ruling class.
[1] - https://time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...
https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-...
My experience showed me some of the horrendous things they have to deal with. There’s some genuinely dangerous people out there - I can’t imagine living somewhere without armed resistance to deal with it.
With that said it’s critical officers form a relationship with the community they’re policing. That’s what good policing is and unfortunately the drug war has made it difficult.
Most of us do not consider apprehension of violent criminals to be a “blatantly ridiculous reason.”
> The police in this country are unaccountable, in a literal sense. There is no mechanism to hold them accountable; what exists to do this is inefficient, inaccessible to most people who may need to use it, and also largely ineffective even in the rare cases it does work.
This is true.
> And none of this can surprise when you know the past of most police offices lies in slave patrols and union busting Pinkertons.
This is false.
> Policing in the United States is not broken, it's doing exactly what it was always intended to do: abusing poor people in the interest of the owning class. You can't reform that which is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
This is a leftist talking point that is designed to avoid recognizing that abuse of authority is not a consequence of a specific country’s troubled history but a consequence of the existence of authority. They do this because they can, not because some oligarch somewhere wants them to.
> And if you hold officers accountable, then they won't overpolice minority neighborhoods, they won't beat people to death for sleeping in front of your buildings, they might hesitate to shoot someone in the back for stealing a $5 beer. I.e., they become less effective to the owning class. And that's why it doesn't happen.
It doesn’t happen because the ability to hold the police accountable is the same as the ability of the police to hold members of society accountable, i.e. coercion. And coercion always begets abuse. So your institution that holds the police accountable becomes the one who is responsible for people getting beat to death, etc, and the cycle continues because we can’t seem to come to terms with the idea that society shouldn’t recognize norms of differential status.
> Until this cultural gap is resolved, where we acknowledge not just what is happening but why it's happening and that it's happening was the intended, desired outcome, we can't move forward on it.
You’re never going to make any progress on this because you’re wrong about this being the desired outcome, and so any solution based on this premise is flawed.
That said, if you re-read your post from the perspective of someone living in Scotland, UK, it won't have the same impact. In theory, your thoughts should equally apply in the UK, but UK residents would probably disagree. I don't live in the UK, but I have some friends from various parts of the UK. There is such a different attitude about the police in the UK. Yes, they make mistakes, and there are a few bad apples. However, overall, there is respect. One of the key points is "police by consent". If you don't know about this concept in UK policing, I strongly recommend you Google a bit to read about it. Basically: The attitude of police is that they need to tread lightly in a community because they "police by consent". I know HN has many UK readers, so I would appreciate some comments about this!
A deeper question to ask might be: Why have some US police forces descended so much (so little public trust) versus other police forces in the UK? In particular, from my non-resident view, it seems Scotland police have a very strong, if imperfect, relationship with their communities. What could US police forces learn from their UK counterparts? A few years ago, a New York Times journalist followed some US police who traveled to Scotland. They observed how the local police were trained and how they behaved during patrols and arrests. In short: Very differently!
On a positive note: It is also worth looking at the Los Angeles police department. In the 1990s, it was one of the worst in the United States for community trust and police violence. After the Rodney King incident and riots that followed, there was a huge effort to "clean-up" the police force. The police leaders actively sought to rebuild ties with community and religious leaders. I have read multiple news and magazine articles about this relationship. When something bad happens in LA that might trigger inter-ethnic/religious tension, the LA police immediately reach-out to community leaders. They have public and private meetings to discuss the issue. My point: The community has a voice and feels heard. Yes, it is not perfect, but it demonstrates that real change is possible.
Some police officers want to maintain a safe and secure neighborhood, others just like having power and want to engage in military cosplay but real.
The police departments that maintain an effective community rapport are also going to be the ones that actively spend budgeted time and money weeding out the second class of cop. If you aren't vigilant about it, your PD will be chock full of the military cosplay types. Why? Well, a lot of the latter types are... well, I'm not going to say the nickname, since it's quite offensive in the UK (less so in the US). But they will often bounce from PD to PD. Once they wind up getting on the wrong end of an internal affairs investigation, they'll usually just resign to avoid punishment, move to another town, and sign up there. There's plenty of underfunded PDs that really aren't going to stick their nose up at bad cops.
This separation of police and civilian is the core of the problem. The citizens of a country need to be able to perceive members of the police force as "one of us", rather than "one of them". In some countries the only real obstacle to reaching that point is that some people won't strictly adhere to a policy of de-escalation. In other countries there are of course far bigger, institutional, issues at play.
In this situation there would be more armed citizens than disgruntled ex-cops so the problem should take care of itself in short order.
The issue isn't that the police are radicalized and disgruntled. It's that they have the budgetary and legal resources to operate with impunity. Take that away and they're just a gang. Other gangs will eat them for lunch.
Disbanding the Iraqi military was a very interesting event but the militia-like groups coming out of that action is more an issue of ceasing pay to folks with no other options in a pretty dysfunctional economy than anything else.
It's a similar problem (albeit much less extreme) to what's happening right now in Myanmar with the military. It's so difficult to defuse because the military and the civilians there have such an adversarial relationship due to the long years of dictatorship.
The solution in both cases is to reincorporate the warrior subculture (police or military) into civilian life. I just don't know how you achieve that.