But the "defund" quickly ran away into "remove all funding", which of course is a lot more radical and less palatable for any but the further left. Also doesn't help that it made an easy strawman for opponents to this kind of reform to prop up and spread.
Definitely curious if anyone else has a different experience/chronology of events.
"Abolish the police" is the message of a much smaller group.
And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law.
The idea is that you remove half the police work load, hire half the officers, and use that savings to assign that removed work load to more appropriate people like social workers, unarmed traffic enforcement, etc.
Cost per officer doesn't have to change.
It has been fully adopted and distorted by right wing commentators. As the people actually yelling about “defund the police” are poorly organize and have no message, they are drowned out by the people criticizing them, and enabling union action like work to rule stuff in places like NYC.
People in high crime areas don’t want to be abused by police. Police need to behave to professional standards. Pandering to activists and not enforcing the law doesn’t benefit the actual people living with crime.
So now in many places we have police not acting on crime because Johnny Crackhead can trivially jam them up with frivolous complaints, yet police departments obviously struggle with self-policing. Good old fashioned audit and accountability is the oblivious, non-sexy solution.
Granted, social program funds haven't increased, but there's no world in which we invest more in education or mental health services or anything else and it makes up for the drop in policing with respect to deterring crime. If you keep policing in tact and invest more in public services, maybe over decades you'll see a significant improvement (because investing in public services doesn't pay out immediately), but if we divest ourselves of policing, then crime becomes a much more powerful and immediate drag on underserved communities than the lift afforded by investment in (non-policing) public services. We need policing and public services.
> And any count of crime surge should also include crimes committed by police under color of law.
Even if you count every police shooting as an unjustifiable homicide (on the order of hundreds), they are completely dwarfed by the non-police homicides (on the order of tens of thousands). Indeed, the increase in annual homicides is about 10k since the pre-BLM era (a ~60% increase)--the increase alone completely dwarfs all officer-involved shootings.
Where are you getting this statistic? A quick google search doesn’t show any such surge in the murder rate in the United States. 60% is a very large increase. I would expect this stat to have huge ripple effects if it were true.
Here is the murder rate graph - note that the most recent year is flagged as not fully reported yet.
https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...
Up 60% isn't far off, depending on when "pre-BLM days" starts, but it takes a big leap to connect it to BLM.
Also, if you look at the rate since the early 90's we are doing quite a bit better, so you get to pick your favorite trend line.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-h...
My 60% figure was grabbing the homicide count in 2014 from the FBI UCR (14,249 per https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-....) and comparing it with the stats from 2021 (22,900).
As an example... I was standing in the street to meet my kids... my wife called the cops for no reason and 4 cars showed up in about 60 seconds... they ended up giving me a criminal trespassing warning even if I was on public property
They do like to hide though so you can't see their presence
The previous city I lived in had a population of about 20k and they had two armored military vehicles (mrap / Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles)
They are trying to get to a police state without the majority of people noticing... In the end, it will break the economy.
This is from a 2020 paper from Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...
> Not that we actually defunded them, but we have sharply reduced the quantity of policing (not usually through official policy as much as pressure on police departments to sharply reduce discretionary, proactive policing) which is what 'defund the police' aimed to do
> The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.
This is from a 2020 paper from Harvard’s Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...
I've read similar in other papers as well, but I can't recall them off the top of my head.
Maybe you mean "there isn't evidence that the reduction in policing is caused by 'pressure'", which seems kind of absurd considering the near-decade of nationwide protests. What's the alternative hypothesis? That police around the country spontaneously and abruptly reduced their discretionary policing and it's merely a coincidence that it happened following major protests aimed at reducing the quantity of policing?
EDIT: even more, unfiltered data directly from the FBI crime DB: https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/cri...
It is impossible to see 2014 as anything but a deviation from the mean rather than some bizarre starting point for BLM ruining the country when you look at the data for more than 5 minutes.
As for your proposed solutions, every single drop of funding sent to police departments goes towards their further militarization. There are many small rural towns with tanks now. Anti poverty programs have never been popular in the U.S. No neighborhood wants to host the abuse prevention or mental health centers. So where do we go?
> For nearly a year, Richard Rosenfeld’s research on crime trends has been used to debunk the existence of a “Ferguson effect”, a suggested link between protests over police killings of black Americans and an increase in crime and murder. Now, the St Louis criminologist says, a deeper analysis of the increase in homicides in 2015 has convinced him that “some version” of the Ferguson effect may be real.
> “These aren’t flukes or blips, this is a real increase,” he said. “It was worrisome. We need to figure out why it happened.”
> All 10 cities that saw sudden increases in homicide had large African American populations, he said. While it’s not clear what drove the increases, he said, he believes there is some connection between high-profile protests over police killings of unarmed black men, a further breakdown in black citizens’ trust of the police, and an increase in community violence.
> “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” Rosenfeld said. Now, he said, that’s his “leading hypothesis”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/13/ferguson-eff...
I have more links, but I don't have time at the moment to dig them up.
You're taking a data source that is already known and acknowledged to be flawed by the publisher, cherrypicking years that seem significant to you, and using it to draw conclusions about trends across the country when the data set itself acknowledges that individual cities and even blocks within those cities skews data all the time. Again, it's lazy data analysis.
Here's Vox on Travis Campbell's research:
> Campbell’s research also indicates that these protests correlate with a 10 percent increase in murders in the areas that saw BLM protests. That means from 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.
Source: https://www.vox.com/22360290/black-lives-matter-protest-crim...
Here's Harvard's Roland Fryer and Tanaya Devi
> We estimate that these [police shooting protests] caused almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies. The leading hypothesis for why these [police shooting protests] increase homicides and total crime is an abrupt change in the quantity of policing activity. In Chicago, the number of police-civilian interactions decreased by almost 90% in the month after the investigation was announced. In Riverside CA, interactions decreased 54%. In St. Louis, self-initiated police activities declined by 46%.
Source: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w27324/w273...
Note that these are both nationwide studies. I'm not sure what you mean by "cherrypicking years that seem significant to me", but yeah, looking at policing and crime before and after BLM protests seems pretty germane to understanding the effect those protests have on policing and crime.
> you're taking a data source that is already known and acknowledged to be flawed by the publisher
I think it's more likely that crime researchers better understand the limits of crime data sources than you do, and they probably aren't as lazy as you propose. But by all means, publish your rebuttal (and please link it here so I can read it)!
> You would have a great career in TV journalism!
Tragically, I have a face for radio. :/
* Federal level police (should be policing state/local too).
* Intelligence gathering
* Cyber security
They need more daylight/oversight and a lot more accountability. The DEA can go to hell (legalize all drugs) and the ATF can pound sand (their subjects of interest could be rolled into the FBI).
We need a happy medium between the excesses we have today and having none of those needs addressed.
The more interesting question is to consider why Trump would hold this view, especially if you disagree with him on other things. Perhaps you don’t have the same assumptions about the reasons why as he does.
We also know that an FBI attorney falsified information to get warrants against his campaign advisor.
We know that the FBI urged the media to actually censor negative news about his political opponents.
It would be difficult to them trust such an organization to them perform fair investigations against you after those occurrences, regardless of one's political party.
According to who? Trump?
Investigating leads is conspiring against you?
I don’t know the veracity of the claim that the FBI told the media to censor negative news. The media was definitely on guard for being manipulated following the DNC/Podesta email hacking and use of media by Russia in 2016. And so were our counterintelligence agencies. It’s literally their job.
Not focused either way on Trump, just thought that there actually was something to the GPs post.
Edit: Wasn't it Zuckerberg himself that said the FBI reached out to him about limiting the visibility of certain news?
No. The FBI reached out to Facebook to let them know how Russia tended to try to influence US citizens with fake news or by amplifying fake aspects of real news using social networks, including Facebook.
A lot of folks thought this was bad because it led to Facebook not amplifying (not removing, not blocking, just not promoting) the Hunter Biden laptop claims, because the story met the hallmarks of what the FBI pointed out to the team. It still does.
Out of curiosity (honestly), how does it?
“The media's treatment of the dubious laptop story when the NY Post first published it in 2020 was actually 100% correct and there is zero basis to re-examine that conclusion. First much of the alleged story wasn't even news, as a significant amount of what the laptop purportedly contained was about business dealings that were publicly known about for years to the extent that they had been investigated by a GOP controlled Senate committee that cleared Biden of any corruption allegations. Second, it looked exactly like another Russian influence operation that should be treated cautiously and it looks the same way today. I was actually encouraged by the notion that the media may have learned something from 2016 as evidenced by the caution demonstrated in their reporting and treatment of the story, especially with Rudy refusing to allow journalists he wanted to write about it access to authenticate the materials.
Even if we assume the crazy sounding laptop repair shop story were 100% true, we had partisan political operatives shopping a story to journalists about the supposedly scandalous revelations cribbed from the contents of someone's stolen email communications and electronic data in the midst of a presidential election campaign homestretch. The fact that some of the information has since been authenticated by the nYT or WaPO as belonging to Hunter Biden doesn't change anything. The Clinton emails that were dumped by Wikileaks in 2016 were also authentic. Didn't make them any less stolen or render their release combined with the gross misrepresentation of their contents to feed unsupported narratives less problematic, nor did their authenticity make it any less a part of a Russian influence operation.”
> In spring 2017, Mr. Page, denying he was a Russian agent, told reporters that he had provided information to the C.I.A. about Russia. An F.B.I. agent who was preparing to sign a factual affidavit to accompany the fourth wiretap application asked Mr. Clinesmith to obtain clarity about whether the C.I.A. considered Mr. Page a “source.” That led to Mr. Clinesmith’s interactions with a C.I.A. counterpart, who sent back an email referring to Mr. Page’s status as an American citizen and citing the memorandum from August as a place to find more information. Based on that exchange, Mr. Clinesmith told the agent that the C.I.A. had explicitly said Mr. Page was “never a source,” something his C.I.A. contact later denied saying. When the agent wanted to see it in writing, Mr. Clinesmith inserted the words “and not a ‘source’” into the email before showing it to his colleague. The agent was satisfied and signed the wiretap affidavit without adding any disclosure about Mr. Page’s relationship with the C.I.A.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/us/politics/kevin-clinesm...
The problem is that partisanship and racism made it OK to investigate left-wing and black leaders on spurious grounds. However, eventually a right-wing leader managed to ignore the law blatantly and importantly enough to be investigated : and at that point the right turned against the FBI.
There's no principle, only partisanship. Kind of a disaster for the rule of law.
But hey, let’s cross that bridge when we get there.
I’d have a lot less of a problem with some of these federal agencies if they’d prosecute the criminals in their own ranks.
I think my slide into cynicism regarding humans who achieve power, regardless of their stated political philosophies and alignments, started after finishing "The Dictator's Handbook". I read here some posts advocating getting rid of this or that, or saying we should do it "this way", but even though I agree in a wishful kind of way, it's just not how human beings are wired... No matter how virtuous a system may be, it seems to take only the inevitable one or two odd instances of corruption to start the rot that will bring it down.
This seems to be based on the premise that there could ever be a system that was somehow perfectly free or corruption to begin with.
I think that’s far fetched. I think all human systems are messy and are going to contain some instances of corruption.
The question is simply whether the level of corruption reaches the level that cancels out the benefits of the system as a whole, or not.
I like to think of it as wishful thinking. I fantasize about winning the lottery, too.
>> The question is simply whether the level of corruption reaches the level...
Yeah, agreed. I couldn't point to a single instance where an attempt to eliminate corruption did not eventually spawn unintended (bad) consequences. Working to manage it seems to be the best alternative.
Yeah - I tend to agree.
The major trend in these comments is the FBI and the government were bad, and are still bad, and the only solution is to dismantle them, but these commenters are too late. Where were these revolutionaries in 1968? Hoover died in 1972 and so did his fascist policies.
But you nailed it. While the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, institutional racism in executive agencies was still the rule rather than the exception.
I think it is interesting how that contrasts with minority member success stories in entertainment. In this[1] rehearsal take for a track on Franklin's debut album, we can hear fascinating avant garden social hieracrchy.
Remember that in 1960, even though first developed in the 1940's, multitracking was cutting-edge technology, and multitrack decks were still rare. The modern recording process of scratch track replacement and instrument isolation and separation hadn't yet been developed. Music performances were recorded live in the studio with all the musicians performing in the same tracking room, playing simultaneously together with or without being physically separated by gobos ("go betweens"). Franklin sits at a piano, playing and singing simultaneously, with her own single microphone, and the Ray Bryant Combo itself probably only had one microphone, with both ultimately mixed down to mono. There is no monitoring for the artists, no headphone mixes, and everyone still has to be able to hear everyone else, and Franklin has to play and sing above the accompaniment to be able to hear herself. Hammond speaks from the control room over a PA in the tracking room in deference to Franklin.
But what it is abundantly clear is that, judiciously but humbly so, Franklin is in charge. Columbia Records and producer John Hammond put a young 18yo black woman in charge of a band's and her own studio performances in late 1960," while 8 years later the government is still notably racist and paranoid.
In any regard, while institutional racism still exists in government, it is a shadow of its former ubiquity, except perhaps in unsophisticated rural sheriffs departments. In comparison of then to today, the FBI is now one of the more enlightened agencies, even with only about 20% of its agents minority members. Institutional racism remains, but it has become the exception, and racist policy and language and acts are held to scrutiny; participants are held accountable and extirpated from the ranks.
"What do you mean to be specific?"
You are asking a question especially when you already know the answer. Even when he said he wants it defunded, what is your point? In fact, is it this instead?:
'Anyone who agrees with him is a trump supporter'
I do not care if Trump, Biden, Jan 6 rioters, BLM rioters, Antifa, or anyone says that. The point is, that it is quite clear that the FBI doesn't care and is on no-one's side.
If I said that, you’d be able to point to where I said it, rather than lying by pretending to quote me but in fact writing something of your own that I didn’t say.
If you want to argue with someone who holds that view, you need to look elsewhere.
If you have a question about what I actually said, feel free to ask it.
I did not say 'you said that'. I said: "What is your point? In fact, is it this instead?"
So if that isn't your point, then I'll ask you again before you dodge my question, with an even clearer one for you:
Even when Trump did say "Defund the FBI", What is your point then? Especially when you already knew the answer before asking it?
You are now asking what my point is, which shows that you don’t actually know, so you were obviously stating a falsehood when you claimed to know as a ’fact’ what my point was.
> Especially when you already knew the answer before asking it?
Believing you can read other people’s minds is a symptom of psychosis.
Did you even make a point in the first place with your original question? Or are you still knowingly dodging mine? I made myself perfectly clear in the second reply to you, and yet you're still unable to directly answer a basic and simple question.
> Believing you can read other people’s minds is a symptom of psychosis.
You choosing to dodge, leads me to think you weren't even making a point in the first place. If you believe you had a point to make, then I'll ask again:
Given that it is true that Mr Trump said "Defund the FBI", What is your point then? What point are you making on your question in the first place?
There are many interesting possible answers to the question. You are welcome to offer one, or as I have already said ask a clarifying question if you don’t understand.
From the guidelines:
“Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.”
I suggest that you might want to stop looking for political ‘points’ to argue against, and consider just having an open discussion.
Except that I directly answered your question, rather than avoiding it or dodging them which is what you are still actively and currently doing with my question:
'Given that it is true that Mr Trump said "Defund the FBI", What is your point then? What point are you making on your question in the first place?'
What part of this question don't you understand if my first seemingly 'complicated' question "What is your point on this?" was very difficult for you to answer?
> There are many interesting possible answers to the question. You are welcome to offer one, or as I have already said ask a clarifying question if you don’t understand.
You: "Isn’t this the view of former president Trump?"
Me (Second reply): "Even when he said he wants it defunded, what is your point?"
Me (Second reply): I do not care if Trump, Biden, Jan 6 rioters, BLM rioters, Antifa, or anyone says that. The point is, that it is quite clear that the FBI doesn't care and is on no-one's side.
I have already answered it. Everything else is you dodging my question and your inability to even directly answer it.
> “Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.”
So assuming you took the time to read the guidelines, surely your question wasn't flame-baiting, or was it since you still don't have a point for asking your question?
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes."
> I suggest that you might want to stop looking for political ‘points’ to argue against, and consider just having an open discussion.
That starts by answering basic questions, like I did. Rather than dodging them like what you are doing, which isn't good in a discussion. I already told you what I think. Now you can begin by giving a direct answer to my basic question to continue this "open discussion".
What basic question do you claim I didn’t answer? Try asking it in once sentence.
He is probably the only person who might actually get to enact this policy, whereas nobody in the current administration is even talking about it.
How could it be more relevant?
I similary don't care about what the president in 2029 thinks.
Anyway, I have the compulsive need to explain it.
I'm not speculating about what an ex-president would do because he's not the president, and might not ever be. There's a good chance that speculating about it is a waste of time. It's definitely a waste of time now, because the earliest he'd become president again is 3 years from now.
The FBI exists. It continues to exist. I don't think it should based on a myriad of past actions. I can write letters to congresspeople and the president about the FBI, and they're people in power now that I don't need to speculate about.
So we have the intangible, and the tangible.
My point is that Trump may not be president now, but it seems you see that as a binary viewpoint.
He is currently head of a large political organization that pre-dates the FBI which made him president once and may do so again.
He hasn’t stopped existing, nor has the organization that supports him any more than the FBI has.
So I simply disagree that one is tangible and the other is not.
Organization that operate secretly will always provide some refuge for corruption. There are always blind spots for management.
If the public has no input, how can we ever trust them?
How would we be able to audit an organization (in a timely manner) that puts up as many roadblocks as possible?
The Fed needs to be audited, too. As well as their staff, starting at the very top.
It seems in the government, secrecy and corruption is the name of the game. That's unacceptable and needs to end. The US taxpayer should demand full transparency of all organizations including intelligence services, and the agencies in question should have no idea but to fully comply except in genuine, individual cases of legitimate national security, which would be assessed by an independent reviewer.
Accountability is further complicated by the fact that the entity is political in nature, so the FBI has actual partisan backing through politicians, the court system, and even down to individual jurists.
I honestly don't know what the solution is myself.
The fact that the head of the FBI is an appointee of an elected official, there is some public accountability through voters if there is enough transparency to inform voters of what is going on.
I suppose the same is true for most local police though. As it stands, we don’t get much transparency. For a democracy to work properly, the public needs to be informed. The stonewalling by law enforcement at all levels prevents the public from holding them accountable.
You cite transparency, which is one aspect- but the other interesting problem is the incestuous relationship that our intel agencies have with the media as well.
How much political news coverage was shaped by "anonymous sources" from these intel agencies?
I forget who it was- but I remember one retired agent speaking pretty casually about how the FBI leaks information to journalists by sharing information with retired agents that still hold their clearances.
If you modernize federal drug laws the DEA would lose at lot of its teeth. It’s up to the legislatures to change laws and take power away from federal agencies.
That's precisely what would happen. Look at what's become of the IRS. It's been systematically defunded, despite the fact that the government sees a huge return on investment when they spend dollars there. The IRS has stated publicly that they only go after middle and lower-class citizen offenders because they can't afford to investigate and prosecute the big corporations and oligarchs which are where the vast majority of tax fraud takes place (note: not avoidance, fraud). This is pretty clearly by design.
The good news is with the new "investment" of my tax dollars into the tax and audit arm of the government, they can no go after the top tax dollars AND middle and lower-class citizen "offenders"! Yea!
Let's kill the income tax entirely, it's a completely unfair system. Middle and lower class would thrive, and the "big guys" would not notice because none of their real "income" is taxed, it's designed not to be taxed.
Income tax can be seen as a tax on companies that can't be embezzled. Most people are honest and want to see their full income on documents so a company has to pay the full amount of the taxes.
This leaves the lower and middle classes with less money, but it also forces the market to offer the goods for less.
The alternative would be taxing the companies directly. People would earn more, but companies would also request more for their goods because they have to pay more taxes. But would the tax payout be the same if companies have an even bigger incentive to hide their profits?
Black-and-white thinking leads to very inefficient outcomes.
That is, it makes a lot more sense to reign-in, reform, and redirect intelligence and policing agencies than get rid of them.
I think we want to work on how to align their interests -- as individual agents, intermediate commanding officers, and agency-wide -- with ours as citizens.
• Down-classify everything by 1 designation. Top Secret / Secure Compartmentalized Information becomes Top Secret. Top Secret becomes Secret. Secret becomes Declassified. (I've heard overclassification decreases trust in government)
• Shorten the maximum secrecy timespan (some information is kept secret 50+ years to avoid political blowback against operations that the public would find inexcusable)
• Shorten the average secrecy timespan (see above)
• Ban ISP's from collecting, retaining, distributing, and selling netflow metadata.
• Ban all government agencies from bypassing fourth amendment by way of purchasing surveillance from private organizations.
Edit: if you're going to downvote someone for brainstorming less extreme ideas (not suggestions/demands) as a response to more extreme ideas, please at least offer criticism of the ideas themselves.
But there are other possible reforms, for example, I'd want them to record all interviews (which is currently against policy last I knew) instead of relying on FD-302s.
And I'd like their case management system put under the control of an independent agency that will audit for things like missing Woods files, so they can't just go "oops" on stuff like that. And if they delete something, someone else gets to restore it from backup and report to the courts who did the deletion and when according to the audit logs.
I'd do similar things with police body cam footage. It should not be under the control of the police and if someone has a habit of never turning theirs on, it should be addressed and the cop reprimanded long before it impacts a case.
Same goes for jail footage, as well. So "oops" Epstein's cell camera died just can't be a thing, because it's not under their control at all and they address such things right away, not just when it's a problem.
Not just "defund", but "abolish".
They've solved thousands of missing childen, sexual predators, kidnappings, etc
CIA tortures people overseas.
NSA has a habit of spying on every American. (Remember Snowden?)
ATF enforces all the weird gun laws, like how an AR15 is sometimes a handgun.[2] It also engages in sieges that end up killing kids.[0] [1]
DEA is all about the failed war on drugs.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Ridge