BLM defunding of the police.

[Kitmerow]

AIBU to think that the majority of people would agree this is a disastrous idea?

Defund the Police means instead of upping their funding, fund other projects, which have shown to be more effective.

It's very true that what we don't spend on youth projects, we spend in the justice system.

Less "check your thinking" visits because of tweets and more youth projects. I'm in.

The history and perceptions of police forces in the usa is very different to that of UK forces.

There is maybe a bit more focus on de escalation and supporting people with mental health issues here in Scotland.

So it doesn't necessarily track that well across the pond.

However I would say that with more conviction if there had been a more thorough investigation into Sheku Bayoh's death

Research what it actually means.

Which site is this though. When looking I found 1 American and 2 uk . ! from the uk looked like it was fake.

So it,s the general one not the uk site.

This is a good news piece.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/07/defund-police-heres-what-that-really-means/

From the article

"For most proponents, “defunding the police” does not mean zeroing out budgets for public safety, and police abolition does not mean that police will disappear overnight — or perhaps ever. Defunding the police means shrinking the scope of police responsibilities and shifting most of what government does to keep us safe to entities that are better equipped to meet that need. It means investing more in mental-health care and housing, and expanding the use of community mediation and violence interruption programs.

Police abolition means reducing, with the vision of eventually eliminating, our reliance on policing to secure our public safety. It means recognizing that criminalizing addiction and poverty, making 10 million arrests per year and mass incarceration have not provided the public safety we want and never will. The “abolition” language is important because it reminds us that policing has been the primary vehicle for using violence to perpetuate the unjustified white control over the bodies and lives of black people that has been with us since slavery. That aspect of policing must be literally abolished."

An example in my local US community - in this year's budget it was suggested that our town pay for a School Resource Officer to be present in the schools - this means an armed police officer whose first line of reporting is to the local police organisation.

Since the protests started, this idea has been dropped.

Schools in the nearby city that do have SROs are looking at replacing them with more appropriate roles like youth workers, counselors, social workers, etc.

I agree more funding should be put into projects within community and schools etc, but the police here as so woefully underfunded anyway, they can't respond to most crimes. Taking more funding away here would be ridiculous. America, however, throws a tonne of money at them, so it probably isn't as ridiculous as it initially sounds.

We should not be defunding the police; they need more funding, not less.

Quite honestly, this is just another ridiculous idea to come out of all this.

@Starbuggy A PP has put a good summary of it above and it’s a ridiculous idea.

Why is it ridiculous to suggest things like putting social workers and counselors in schools rather than police officers?

Really interesting Q and A with a sociology professor on this and who has had written a book about why policing in the US needs to change including defunding many areas of it and replacing with support.

www.thenation.com/article/society/alex-vitale-defund-police-interview/

A piece by a former cop, in favour of defunding. Worth a read

medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759?source=social.fb

Are we on about the US or the UK then?

The petition in the OP is about defunding the US police.

It's on the US-based BLM site asking for a national defunding of police. Not an international defunding.

In that case sure, they need to do something. As long as it doesn't become a thing here people are pushing for, and the police are already defunded (sadly without the money being diverted to valuable services).

What is ridiculous about the idea as it is being posited in America? Having lots of armed police officers is a blunt instrument. Their understanding of the law they are paid to uphold is not always ideal. They are not specially trained mental health workers, youth workers, drug abuse workers etc but a lot of their work involves these issues. Yes of course we need some 'beat cops' to an extent but more than that America needs specialised, unarmed trained and educated support workers with an interest in the communities they work for. (I'm American btw)

If the US police have tanks they have too much money!

Selling the tanks and opening some Sure Start (or US version obv) centres in impoverished neighbourhoods seems like a good, practical idea. There are places in the US with no streetlights but an Iraq-style military occupation going on via the local PD.

The UK police are a very different thing.

So much for supporting our emergency services. Thankfully the uk Police are nothing like the American Police.

Yes jokolo I agree. In my UK village we have 1 PCSO sometimes and that's it I think. Going to high school in the US we had police officers outside the school every day at 3.00. I never questioned why or thought that it should probably be someone else's job to make sure kids didn't mess about after school, and that the people doing that job probably didn't need to be armed.

The UK and US are not comparable on this issue

@GalesThisMorning

Yes, I spend some of my time in the US and have a lot of friends and family there (friends mostly NY but family all over), so I've seen some of this, you know, slightly. People in the UK do not grasp the threatening nature of US police. And I say this as a white woman, like, I'm NOT their target, but I have as a passerby seen them hyped and yelling in a way that just seems out of control - they just go 0 to 60!

The idea of patrolling/threatening children at school with armed men is already completely off the wall, like, how did we get there.

I do love the US but it must be said that the contrast between the shiny, jacked up, militarised police and the, frankly, shabby public services is stark and startling. The roads are shit, the bridges are falling down, the public transport is either 50 years old (NYC) or non existent, let's not even talk about healthcare... but they've got TANKS to deploy against their own citizens*. This is crazy and dysfunctional, at best.

The above goes for all people but WRT BLM, the absolute indignity of being taxed to fund your own murder and the murder of your children is just breathtaking. It is a special quality of injustice.

*Did anyone else think of Tiananmen Square when the tank rolled by?

'People in the UK do not grasp the threatening nature of US police. And I say this as a white woman, like, I'm NOT their target, but I have as a passerby seen them hyped and yelling in a way that just seems out of control - they just go 0 to 60'

Yep.

I remember once I was getting medicine for my toddler who was in the car. We were in a Walgreens (chemist) car park.
In a suburb.

The car backfired and a police car penned us in within seconds.
Someone was towering over me seconds after that.

It is so different.

Even when you are doing nothing wrong, there is no respect. Outright antipathy mostly.

And police can be 'campus cops' or state police or various flavours of scary - not a coherent organisation with one complaints commission. It is so hard to work out who has which jurisdiction, as a foreigner.

But they have military origins like gendarmes or carabinieri, as I understand it.
Not like peelers here.

time.com/4779112/police-history-origins/
This suggests a link with patrols to catch enslaved people who had escaped.

It is so hard to work out who has which jurisdiction, as a foreigner.

I'm a local, and I work with police forces periodically, and I still struggle to work out who has jurisdiction sometimes.

There are more than 18,000 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies in the US. Apparently all with their own rules and regulations.

The more I read the more it seems perfectly sensible to defund the police in the US.