But that's speaking in idealisms, in practice they probably didn't give a shit and moved on to other things. Just another car crash / drug case.
My car was stolen about 15 years ago in Seattle. The block I lived on at the time was a popular place for car thieves to both pick up and drop off cars.[1] When it was recovered, there were a bunch of stolen credit/debit cards and other potential evidence inside.
The officer who took the report said I could try calling the detectives who were responsible for that kind of investigation, but he didn't think it would go anywhere, because either the mayor or the chief of police (I don't remember which) had told them to deprioritize car thefts. Sure enough, calls to that line went straight to voicemail, and I couldn't even get a call back telling me they weren't interested.
[1] The day I discovered my car was stolen, there was a silver Civic parked across from it in the spot where a neighbour usually parked her silver Civic. That day, it was not hers. It was a nearly-identical silver Civic that the car thieves had ditched before stealing my car.
They ain't gonna store them, or search for the owner... heck, they have tons 100 times more serious cases on hold...
Some of the most useful self-work I’ve done, for sure.
Anyway, if you want to explain what you meant, great.
You have disagreed with absolutely everyone for no reason!
Of course, everyone's different like that, I'm the stoic (or emotionally repressed and stunted) one in the house.
> “If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
Then it happened. They got my TomTom and my digital camera, plus _the entire backseat and hatchback full of old computers and printers that I was taking to e-waste the next day_.
The moment I pictured the thieves walking into a pawnshop with that stuff, and getting laughed right back out, I couldn't be mad anymore. I was still annoyed that I had to go get the window fixed and buy a new TomTom on eBay for $35, but the actual results of the theft just sent me into giggles every time. Still do.
Note for others: if you're in a jurisdiction that has decriminalized car theft, and you find your stolen car, just get in it, drive home, and tell the police you recovered your own vehicle.
Is this a thing?
comes to mind, though I seem to recall similar other stories. Between the reactionary changes due to the public perception in the past few years, the defund movement undermining morale and other sundry causes, several major city departments are very understaffed and property crime investigation gets deprioritized pretty quickly.
Edit: removed the editorializing paragraph prior to the article. It was largely redundant.
The defund movement didn't spring from nowhere, it is a reaction to terrible policework. The police created the defund movement. Fix the police and it will go away.
They certainly need fixing, but I'm also not convinced that doing so will make the defund movement go away. Voices within what we are calling the "defund movement" range from "change how funds are allocated" to "abolish policing entirely".
Ilhan Omar, as an example, said “The Minneapolis Police Department is rotten to the root, and so when we dismantle it, we get rid of that cancer, and we allow for something beautiful to rise, and that reimagining allows us to figure out what public safety looks like for us.”
It isn't exactly a call for abolition, but it is saying get rid of them and we'll figure it out later. Her voice wasn't alone; the Minneapolis city council voted 12-0 to completely defund the department and replace the police with "peace officers" who presumably would have had different obligations in terms of interacting with people.
That ended up never going anywhere; a spike in violent and property crime led the necessary city charter amendment to fail (Minneapolis city charter currently mandates a minimum staffing level of police, which it hasn't been able to meet since 2020).
The political motivations behind this far end of the "defund" movement argue that policing simply cannot be successfully reformed - that there is no "fixing" the police.
Yeah, but your original statement is kind of a lie-by-omission. You're saying they're not able to hire because a bunch of people mistrust the police, as if the blame lays with those people for being mistrustful. But you're leaving out that they mistrust the police because of the police's own actions to earn that mistrust, repeated over decades.
> the Minneapolis city council voted 12-0 to completely defund the department and replace the police with "peace officers" who presumably would have had different obligations in terms of interacting with people
I live here and you're way wrong. Lisa Goodman would never have voted to "completely defund the police." In fact there was never a vote to "completely defund and replace [MPD]". As you said, they couldn't do that without changing the city charter. There was a long and bitter fight over that charter amendment, with the conservative wing of the council and the conservative mayor fighting and continuing to fight tooth & nail to shield MPD from all reform attempts. I can't think of any meaningful votes on this topic that went 12-0. I wonder what vote you are actually thinking of.
Where have you been? There was even a referendum on the matter proposed by the council as a direct result of their earlier vote that failed at the ballot on the issue, after the first version couldn't even get past the charter committee. I've seen a few different vote numbers- I think Lisa either didn't show for the vote, or it did end up at 12-1. She was pretty much alone in opposing the matter though; the vote to send the amendment to the charter was only 11-2 because someone wanted to be a little more moderate.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/06/12/minneapoli...
> https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/minneapolis-city-counci...
As a side note, calling Mayor Frey a conservative is hilarious in the US. He is a Democrat and about as conservative as President Obama is. Frey didn't go along with defunding the police because the people who wanted the police defunded make up a minority and there was an election to win. "Having a funded police department" is something that clearly crossed political boundaries in terms of support.
https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/File/3806/Transformi...
I found that link here: https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/12/us/minneapolis-city-council-r...
The actual relevant bit is, "[Be it resolved that] the City Council [of Minneapolis] will commence a year long process of community engagement, research, and structural change to create a transformative new model for cultivating safety in our city." There is nothing in there about funding levels or even the structure or presence of the department. I don't think you can characterize that as a resolution "to completely defund and replace the police department."
> As a side note, calling Mayor Frey a conservative is hilarious in the US
Everything is relative. Within the politics of the city of Minneapolis, Frey's positions are pretty far on the conservative end of the spectrum, which is still to the left of national politics, yes. He opposes police reform, he vetoed full-time bus lanes over the recommendation of the designers, he opposes rent control, big business owners fund his campaigns, his biggest wins are in the richest areas of the city. He wins thanks to Republican voters, who don't otherwise have a feasible candidate to vote for here.
There was no one in the city who had any delusion that the "research" would produce anything but the amendment to the city charter. The only real surprise was that they had done such a terrible job at writing the amendment - it was very vague and hand-wavy.
The point remains- city councils and noisy activists constantly rallying for police to be defunded was and remains a factor in the increase in early retirements, transfers out, and difficulty recruiting new hires.
There was also a recent HN submission where a blog post author used a GPS tracker to find their car but relied on the police instead of recovering it themselves, with predictable results. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30442044
In you are belted… most crashes you’d prefer it not go off, subjected you to any or all of: Powder burns, hearing damage, major dental destruction.
They should always go off if the front of the car is damaged as the description here.
At least that is what I have learned and which sounds reasonable.
- no seatbelt, you want the airbag to catch you (better than no airbag)
- with a seatbelt, ideally the airbag doesn't (need to?) go off, but if it is necessary you'll be glad of it
> They’re primarily intended to provide some protection for unbelted passengers
I don't think they're meant for unbelted passengers; they should be belted first. I once saw a program about the difference between regular airbags and airbags designed to be used without a seatbelt, and the latter were enormous monstrosities that could knock you out. They were determined to be a bad idea. (I wish I knew where I saw this, but it was decades ago and I don't.)
No phone-calls for you. * you're a chill person, i think you did everything perfectly, but gosh! how they must have suffered. Fuck 'em. Well done.
About 40 days later after my insurance written it off and the police called and said come pick it up from a junkyard. It had someone else's license places, and was severely damaged after a full-front hit on the telephone pole after apparently a high-speed police chase. Who runs away from the police in a Honda Civic?! Anyhow, even though it was hit hard in front, the airbag never engaged, so I guess I am glad it wasn't me. There was blood inside everywhere, clearly the two people who were inside were quite hurt. Anyhow, I opened the trunk to get my jumper cables and lo and behold - tools! in pretty good toolbags, too! Decent looking respirators! Strange chemicals! Lots of ammonia in large jugs! A wallet with lots of stolen checks in it. A small bag with some dude's underwear. But my old set of jumper cables is, alas, gone...
I brought everything home, including (perhaps stupidly? certainly my wife thought so) ammonia and powdered chemicals. As I discovered the powder stuff lye and clearly this was all meth-making equipment. The undies had to go, but I kept some of the tools and respirators. I freecycled ammonia. We made some soap out of lye, so that was helpful.
The people who stole it were put in jail for various offences for a couple of years, including stealing my car. The court asked me if I had any claims and I said naah, I don't want to add to someone's bad life choices... Then , except for the $500 insurance deductible, which they deducted from his jail wages for next 3 years, and kept sending me small checks for like $19.28 or $8.78 every few months. The checks followed me to another house even though I completely forgot to update the address with the court (nice) and stopped right at $500.