What do Black people think about crime and policing? According to a new Vox poll, they think:
- Violent crime has been increasing.
- Most police officers can't be trusted.
- Police are more likely to use force against African Americans.
And yet, there's also this:
Everyone wants more police patrols. It's true that white communities want them most of all, but 65% of Black respondents and 70% of Hispanic respondents want them too. They may think police can't be trusted and are too quick to use force, but by a very large margin they still want them around.
Perhaps I'm misinterpreting this, but I'd say it speaks loudly for trying to reform the way police interact with the Black community rather than defunding them.
(Although it's also the case that large majorities of all races support "reallocating portions of police budgets to create a new agency...to deal with issues related to addiction or mental illness that need to be remedied but do not need police." So there's that.)
"Perhaps I'm misinterpreting this, but I'd say it speaks loudly for trying to reform the way police interact with the Black community rather than defunding them."
Why is this so hard to understand? 'Defunding' is just the two-by-four to make the police pay attention - to reform the way the police interact with the black community, as you write.
Depends. Reform has been the mantra for 20 years. I hasn't helped.
Defunding is more of a "tear it down and start from scratch".
Not for everyone. Some people mean it. I think Cori Bush means it.
Cori Bush has Big Golden Duke Awards energy.
Most of the Squad* does.
*The Usual Gang of Idiots -- Always On Camera, Ihlan Omer, Rashida Tlaib -- plus Bowman, Jones, Jayapal, & Katie Porter.
It's why I'm a big fan of trying out the idea of non-violent first response patrols and responders. It doesn't prevent entirely the risk of an encounter with police going deadly, but it makes it a lot less likely - especially if you emphasize the "talk them down" aspect of training with the new responders.
Although I don't think it's strange at all that people might think police are deeply flawed, but don't want to abolish them. That could describe a lot of institutions in our daily lives.
I would say the main issue is police recruitment and the kind of people who often either want to be police or think they are the police.
There should be an emphasis on psychological evaluation as the first step in applying to a police academy and weeding out psychotics and people who are joining only because they think it gives them a license to abuse people.
(a) There's nothing new here. It was a commonplace in the 60s that actual black people wanted more police (they were, after all, disparately the victims of crime). But a certain type of American knew better, knew what they REALLy wanted, and fought tooth and nail against this, with the usual stories about how "increased police presence in black areas was racist", and the sorts of statistics that "proved" this, that if there were more patrols in Harlem than on lower Park Ave, that was obviously because Whitey just wanted to harass Brothers.
(b) 99% of America's woes today stem from the fact that, again that certain class of people, simply will not accept that some human beings are a**holes, most are not. That policeman behaving that way? It's almost certainly because he's an a**hole, not because of "systemic racism". That serial womanizer? Probably because he's an a**hole, not because of "the patriarchy".
But
• There is a sexiness to fitting data into a framework. It's something that justifies your Woman's Studies or Black Studies degree that wouldn't be there if you admitted that your understanding of the situation was every bit the same as that of pretty much any human ever.
• Once you have the framework, you can use it as a club. You too can be an a**hole, only you can get away with it.
And so we have the situation we have today. Rather than accept that there are a**holes in the world, and try to limit their damage, instead every incident becomes an excuse to cause more anger and hatred by throwing out terms like White Privilege, thereby converting the incident from one dick behaving dickishly, to be punished appropriately, into a Race War.
White privilege??? Another useless term. Jews create the wealth, their banking dynasties started after the black death in "white monarchies" . Who the eff is going to own the wealth then??? I mean, are you retarded???
Just say No to anti-semitism.
Why do we need the bigoted comments?
Define "Actual Black People", LOL.
Secondly, you came so close to being self aware. You admitted that this is a problem that dates back decades, but then say these issues that keep ongoing is the result of just a few individual "assholes". Well, if assholes haven't been dealt with in 60 years (!) we can safely say these aren't the same assholes, so what we have is not a few individual bad eggs, but an institutional systemic problem.
Right, it is both a job that attracts assholes and turns people into assholes for various reasons (assholery encouraged, you see the bad side of people every day, power corrupts).
That right there is an institutional problem that you can help to tamp down by changing things so you attract fewer assholes and show far less tolerance for assholery.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-like-the-ideas-behind-defunding-the-police-more-than-the-slogan-itself/
Blacks have been getting large improvement with police handlement since the mid-90's. Most of the whining and crying is still over resentment from the 1865-1967 period which their activists use incidents with a crappy cop and silly media coverage to announce their racism and grievances. It's why social nationalism should replace progressive policies on the left pronto. It would triangulate these types and essentially make them irrelevant as media coverage would have to use white victims of crappy cops as a balance. Black activists would lose interest.
It's no wonder why Democrats are losing black voters. They care more about the activists themselves more than black people.
Democrats are losing black votes let alone votes? Who has won the popular vote in 8 out of the last 9 elections?
Funny how you cons always say that racism happened in the past. I bet you guys were saying racism was a past thing in 1960 too! LOL.
Cons??? Social Nationalism has a rich history back to the 18th century. We support the white working class and indeed seek to educate them from commercial lies spewed to them. Social Nationalism thus rejects Jewish materialism instead for ecological cleanliness. When somebody asks me what makes weak masculinity, I say anything that creates hormonal imbalance: fossil fuel pollution, estrogen driven industrial pollution, low progesterone ,not eating your broccoli. Republicans want to destroy the male endocrine system and turn us into fat pot belly losers like the Russian financed Proud Boys fags. It's time for the real white man to rise.
Gosh, sometimes fascists disagree with each other. Who knew?
The fact that the numbers who think they will be safer with the police are so low :
65%, 70% and 80% respectively, we have a problem. Ideally that number would be in the 90s. High 90s if we actually had an effective police force.
Secondly, Kevins post mixes up the theorectial concept of the police with their actual practises. Look at the Capitol Insurrection. Everyone agrees we should have had more police there and they should have arrested the insurgents rather than letting them go, but that's not the police force we have. Instead the police force we have goes heavily against peaceful protests and "stands back and stands by" when criminals run amok.
This.
I'm sure black communities would like more policing and having cases solved, not an "occupation".
Look at clearance rates between communities.
“They may think police can't be trusted and are too quick to use force...”
this is QUITE an aside, isn’t it? along with the one you’ve deleted re: the change in response when “defund” is instead worded as “reallocate”.
That last question, about whether a portion of the police budget should be reallocated to agencies that will handle problems that don't require police intervention contains the usual pollsters' mix of tautology, implicit assumption, and tendentious framing. Should agencies other than the police handle problems that don't require police intervention? Obviously. Are such agencies underfunded? Who knows: that conclusion is implied but not substantiated. If so, should the police budget be cut to increase that funding? That would be one of a dozen options, not offered in the question. I suspect that the option of funding mental health services by taxes on tech companies would poll better than the option of cutting police budgets for that purpose.
Two things could be done to greatly improve policing:
1) Better, longer training - The minimum length of training programs for police officers needs to be greatly increased from the 8-9 months of typical programs. It's a high-stress job filled with dynamic, life-or-death situations. The training should reflect that.
2) Stricter gun laws - Because firearms are so ubiquitous in the US, the police correspondingly respond with a military-like level of armament and must continuously be on alert that even the most mundane confrontation could become violent. Mistakes and excessive uses of force are bound to happen in such an environment. If we remove the majority of firearms from such situations, the chance of violence will be greatly decreased.
What the answers are telling you is that people want the police to do better:
1) Stop killing people for minor stuff; no need to kill someone for supposedly passing a counterfeit $20.
2) Stop killing people who are no serious threat to others, when less lethal means can be used, like, talking. If the police aren't trained for this, use people who are.
3) Weed out police who have logged dozens of complaints of excessive force.
4) Stop targeting people based on color; test and teach them about implicit bias.
Yes, defund them. Move the spending to where it's needed. And make them actually patrol.
There was an opportunity to reform police -- back in the 1960s, when they first went on (undeclared) strike demanding unaccountability. Instead, they were made unaccountable. No opportunity ever comes more than once.
> I'd say it speaks loudly for trying to reform the way police interact with the Black community rather than defunding them
Kevin speaks out in favor of police departments having military surplus hardware to use against citizens in their community.
It would be useful and interesting to add a question to these polls: Would you like to see more, or fewer, Black and Hispanic police officers?