No

Yes in some ways they should.

It is a false dichotomy. One doesn't need to cut the police budget to pay for social services. The reason the organizers tie these things to "defund the police" is because they want to defund the police.



Which is defunding the police. I don't know why people try to run from something that has a clear and unambiguous definition.

The police are simply not that well funded, and social outreach programs that they manage are normally the first to go. Are there random frivolous spends on equipment in the occasional police department? Sure, but cutting $1 bn from the NYPD is not coming out of tanks, it means fewer officers on the street.

We probably should take officers off the street. We have more now than we did in the crime wave of the 90's (although roughly the same per capita) and crime is far lower.

It would do us good as a country to lower the number of police and put that towards more efficient services.

Police spending is one of the most efficient allocations of public spending, and it's not particularly close.

Crime is now at decade highs in many of the same urban centres that were at ground zero of the defund the police movement. I'm not surprised.

Yeah, almost like when you massively over police communities and don't hold those policing accountable people stop respecting the police and start marching against the system.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Dec 4 2020 10:44pm

Black support for police over the din of the "defund the police" crowd has been telling. No one wants crime in their communities, and policing crime is not over policing. There is far more crime in poor areas, and there are a lot of poor blacks. What everyone wants is for accountable police departments, and we should be targeting the public sector unions that make consistent accountability impossible.

Police unions as they currently exist are definitely a problem, but they are far from the only problem. Police unions should not be allowed to negotiate for police to be treated any differently from anybody else when they are accused of a crime is a big thing I think clearly violates equal protections.

Institutional problems also exist, like the prosecutors that hold the police accountable also work with those police officers and rely ln them in other cases, and the fact that police are highly discouraged from and often times actively punished for speaking up against the actions of other officers, and the fact that they are massively over-trained to use force and not trained to recognize non-criminal mental problems, and the fact that the laws that caused there to be "a lot of poor blacks" as you call it were directly enforced by the police (you can tie a straight line from slave patrols to modern police departments).

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Dec 4 2020 11:00pm

There are a lot of poor blacks because they're a historically poor community and breaking generational socio-economic trends is hard. Historical racism played a large role, but it's the frosting, not the cake.

Tying racism to police departments is an odd non-sequitur, police are ubiquitous across the world and historic racism is not a good reason at all to defund the police.

Police are underpaid and undertrained, that requires funding, and more funding, not less. That, combined with the unions, largely explains why there's a dearth of talent and subsequently poor results. Unions are the death knell of meritocracy, and without hope of advancement, talented individuals focus elsewhere.

"Blue-wall" criticisms are largely a function of lack of proper oversight, and again, we end back up at unions. Prosecutors are in their own bucket, so I won't lump prosecutorial reform into this thread.

Not well funded? some us police have ATV's.