Re:FBI Monitored Aretha Franklin for Years, File Shows
by throwaway894345 on Wednesday October 12, 2022 @11:53AM
(#33178824)
Completely agree. There's a huge swath of moderate "non-sexy" solutions that the public could get behind--in 2020, something like 90% of Americans favored police reforms according to Gallup, which necessarily includes a bunch of Republicans. We could have got some combination of "require more police training", "reorganize internal affairs", "weaken police unions", "end qualified immunity", etc but instead progressives prioritized their personal catharsis to the detriment of everyone, but especially the communities of color who have to suffer the most from the crime surge, who never wanted a decrease of policing in the first place (80% of black Americans opposed de-policing in 2020), and in whose name progressives demanded a reduction in policing.
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.