Commentary on this article https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/05/defunding-the-police-us-what-does-it-mean
Most places around the world do not have the type of policing the U.S. has. The obvious exception being repressive regimes that use police to maintain a political structure rather than to police.
In the United States there was a trend towards feeding more and more money to police departments for decades.
This led to police reimagining their role and coming up with all sorts of new jobs for themselves.
Today policing in the United States has become one of the biggest and most lucrative scams.
A gang of people are given power without accountability, along with lots of money and the implicit notion that as long as they are obedient to their group they are 'heroes'.
Around the country, police have become intoxicated with their imaginary authority and more and more dangerous. Their primary goal is to find criminals, creating them more often than not.
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Step 1) Disarm the police. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/disarm-police-nypd-slavery/
Eliminate 90% of police and hire local people to deal with the trivial issues that make up 95+% of policing. In most places police are the biggest gang, and their cover is 'law enforcement'.
Step 2) In areas that have high crime, simply subsidize guns where necessary.
Cities like Chicago have dozens of gun deaths a week because police avoid high crime areas. If the residents are encouraged to carry guns there will be shootings still, but everybody will have a reasonable chance and civilized behavior will start to set in eventually.
When a poor person in a high crime area has problems, generally they cannot trust the police. It is very common for the police to commit robberies and similar mischief in high crime areas. Offering poor people an affordable gun will give them security that can be trusted.
Gun violence is often the result of having too few guns, not too many. Rebalancing that would certainly create a learning curve. For a while, years maybe or even decades, there would be an increase in shootings, but in the long term widely available guns create discretion and equality.
Just as police hide behind their guns to appear powerful, others do as well. But when gun ownership passes a certain threshold, maybe 40% or so, there is no longer an arrogance and swagger in the walk of people carrying guns.
Step 3) Restrict incarceration to physically predatory/violent people only, and use social sciences to figure out specific solutions for those people. Putting non violent people in jail is moronic.
Step 4) Stop invading countries under the guise of promoting democracy. These wars created under fictional pretenses teach young people that armed actions are a scam that they should invest in.
All of the United States recent wars were for the purpose of preserving colonial interests, pumping up petroleum prices or other silliness. Not one recent war has been even remotely about promoting democracy.
Young kids are taught by the military to be gangsters. Then they are offered a new gang to join when they leave the military. Using militards to police domestically is no different than using them to do political actions abroad in support of petroleum companies.
Step 5) Eliminate 90% of the pseudo police at the federal level. These are almost exclusively entitled people without basic values who believe that their false authority justifies their actions.
There are crimes that need to be investigated for sure, and complex things that require some bureaucratic structure. But having hundreds of agencies to do everything from enforcing fishing licenses to managing Native tribes does not work.
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From the comments on articles like https://news.yahoo.com/minneapolis-council-majority-backs-disbanding-233744273.html it's clear that most people see police as their only 'security', when in fact the opposite is usually more true.
Regardless, a city with a 'defunded' police department will still have people to deal with genuine emergencies, but the people will be local and non bureaucratic. In some countries there are community patrols of young people who are capable of handling almost all issues that arise. If something happens that they cannot control they can make noise to attract more people, or telephone a more formal group in very rare circumstances.
It is extremely unusual, in a civilized country, to have the sort of violence that occurs daily in cities like Detroit and Chicago. That violence is the direct result of the policing which encourages it. Shifting to effective limiters of violence, like easily available firearms, and taking away the incentives for violence, makes more sense.
As long as people know that they have a reliable way to provide enough money for their family, and also know that violence is less likely to be productive, communities are safer.
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Will guns really reduce crime?
In recent years there is only one time that I needed a gun.
I was camping on somebody's property, with their approval and knowledge.
Late one night, well after midnight, I saw a car on a nearby hill cut off their headlights and coast to a stop just behind some trees. There were no houses nearby, so they obviously cut off their lights specifically for me. I watched for a bit and shouted out asking them if they wanted something. No answer.
Obviously they were up to no good, sneaking around and not responding to me.
One of them stepped out and started to sneak into the woods. At that point, if I had had a gun I would have fired a few 'low' warning shots. After a bit I saw it was a police car.
There have been a number of vaguely similar incidents, and each time it is a police officer trying to play some idiot's game.
A while after that incident I was going to be camping in an area that had a few bears. A friend offered me a gun for the bears, and I told him bears have never bothered me. They are always polite when they come around my camp. I told him that the only thing I might have cause to shoot would be police, based on my experience, and so I try to avoid carrying a gun where there are police.
Most people, if they had a gun, would shoot under certain circumstances. In my experience the one group that most often commits offenses that any reasonable person would respond to with gunfire, are cops.
There certainly are dangerous criminals in the world. But in most developed areas of the United States it is police who commit most offenses that should be met with fire.
If a criminal were to try to rob me, I have no gun to defend myself for the simple reason that I know that most of the 'criminals' lurking around are cops trying to pretend they are 'policing', and shooting them is dicey, so it's better to avoid defense. Maybe at some point I will be able to move to a more civilized area.
Like millions of Americans, I wish curses and death on cops who intrude under the guise of policing. Like millions of Americans, when I hear that a cop has been killed, my first thought is that he probably deserved it.
Is this democracy? Liberty?
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In Progress