BLM defunding of the police.

[Kitmerow]

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

In the US, 1 in 1000 black men are killed by the police (0.1%). www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793.

Defunding the police is about using the money to invest in areas that will create social justice and social cohesion. As others have said, defunding the police isn't a call to disband police forces.

BLM is a US movement.

My god. It’s the scariest idea I’ve ever read. We need to fund more police, not reduce funding. There are so many bad people out there, of all races, and to even suggest reducing our police force is absolutely the stupidest thing I’ve read. I really think some people are losing the plot.

I’m sorry but I disagree, it is simply that most do not carry guns. There have been similar incidences in the UK, harassment is not uncommon and force is disproportionately used on black people.

If the police are do not provide the same level of protection for all citizens, are targeting citizens and are therefore not fit for purpose why is it stupid to trial another model of social protection. The police were wildly unpopular in England when first conceived.

I don't know enough about the US system. But in the UK this would be a disastrous idea. My rationale:

1. police in the UK are already underfunded. They have had their numbers absolutely slashed over the last five years. When you look at USA funding, this includes the insane amount of fire arms, tanks, etc. all police are provided with, plus the much higher amount of police per capita compared to the UK.

2. If we really care about reducing black deaths, 13 black people have died in police custody in the last ten years. As a contrast in 2019 alone we had the highest number of fatal stabbings since records began (285) - of this 25% of the victims were black. This isn't even going into things like black women being five times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Obviously ideally we will get to a place where we don't have to make these choices but while we have limited resources shouldn't we target them where they will have the highest effect?

3 ) I therefore think we need to be really, really careful what we ask for. It would be so easily for someone like Boris to try and tick easy win boxes by saying 'yes I'm listening to you, so I'm going to devote xyz to reducing the amount of black people that die in custody.' But....many of the people (black and non black)who die in custody don't die due to use of force, but from drug or alcohol complications. Therefore you could easily reduce the numbers by de-arresting someone the moment they look a bit ill rather than getting them first aid/taking them to hospital which police currently are supposed to do. Of course this would be a horrific and inhumane thing to do, but it would get the numbers down, and be a great soundbite without actually addressing the problem....is that really what we want?

4. This isn't saying that we shouldn't put more funding into alternatives, such as social work, mental health provision, early intervention in schools, etc. We definitely should. But this shouldn't come at the expense of defunding the police. At the end of the day better funded social support schemes should hopefully decrease knife, gun, gang related,crime and violence, whether that is black on black, white on white, other BaME, white against black, whatever. But if someone comes waving a knife towards you you're not going to call a social worker - you're going to call 999, and you need a service that is funded enough to respond to you.

5. It's also not saying that we don't have a lot of improvements to make in the UK regarding race - we absolutely do, and the police force aren't exempt from that. But I don't think it does us any good to directly extrapolate America's problems onto ours because it raises the danger of sidelining our own, more relevant issues

Surely one of the reasons armed police officer are attached to schools in America is due to school shootings?

I understand it to be a call to reallocate resources away from enforcement and towards prevention, ie, towards something more like the rest of the world's rich nations. Less money for guns, more money for social workers. Sounds very sensible.

My concern is that the current debate, heated as it is, will assume that all other countries have precisely the same problems as the US and to the same magnitude.

Surely one of the reasons armed police officer are attached to schools in America is due to school shootings?

Not really, no. I've just been reviewing the request our school board made for a School Resource Officer, and 'preventing school shootings' wasn't even listed.

From a practical point of view they rarely are able to help. Usually there's one SRO assigned to a school system that's spread over several campuses. The chance of them being in the right place at the right time is not all that great.

5) It's also not saying that we don't have a lot of improvements to make in the UK regarding race - we absolutely do, and the police force aren't exempt from that. But I don't think it does us any good to directly extrapolate America's problems onto ours because it raises the danger of sidelining our own, more relevant issues

I agree - but is anyone actually calling for the UK police force to be defunded? I would strongly disagree with that happening.

@ThrowawayNoKids

I’m sorry but I disagree, it is simply that most do not carry guns. There have been similar incidences in the UK, harassment is not uncommon and force is disproportionately used on black people.

If the police are do not provide the same level of protection for all citizens, are targeting citizens and are therefore not fit for purpose why is it stupid to trial another model of social protection. The police were wildly unpopular in England when first conceived.

You don't know what you're talking about. Even those in the UK that do carry guns barely use them. Until last year I used to attend police training as part of my job (I wasn't police, worked for an independent charity). I saw firearms training in several forces - the vast majority of firearms officers in the UK needed frequent training BECAUSE they never actually discharged their guns. Ever. The whole ideology behind UK police is just so different to the training police in the USA receive - an element of their training is literally called killology.

Same with tasers - more and more officers use them yet they rarely ever discharge them. I'm not saying that police don't use force, nor that they don't use it inappropriately on occasion, nor even that they may not use it disproportionately against black people. But the difference between the number of deaths in the UK and USA is not solely down to our police not having guns.

And as for 'The police were wildly unpopular in England when first conceived.' Yeah, in the 1820s. The suggestion that you shouldn't stick kids up chimneys and down mines was also wildly unpopular then. The idea that black people shouldn't be subject to enforced slavery was also 'wildly unpopular' at least in the US at that time. What kind of bizarre argument is that?

I hope not in the UK. What is going on? My god people here have been complaining about police cuts and blaming on this for the gangs and knife crime. At least that it has been the mayor of London excuse.

BLM is a US movement.

They are here too.

Sorry - that should have said re: tasers - more and more officers are trained to use them, not that they actually use them.

HoldMyLobster yes - some protestors in London were calling to defund the police and there was an article in the Guardian also suggesting it. However I also heard on one of the video recordings of protesters throwing bikes at the police on horses a protester shouting at the officer 'You did this - you started this by killing innocent people.' I'm very doubtful that particular met police officer had anything to do with George Floyd's death which is why I'm concerned about people assuming the race issues in the UK are exactly the same as those in the US.

Due to coronavirus the govt are going to need to make huge cuts to the public sector - I am very concerned they will target the police on the basis of 0.01% of the population (but a vocal percent) apparently asking for it.

It's a reason not to blindly import US-specific rhetoric.

Defunding the police might make sense in places where the police force has been militarised. Less money for military toys, with the money redirected towards social services can only be a good thing.

In the UK, Canada, NZ, AU - we don't have the same issue re militarized police forces. Defunding police doesn't mean the same thing in our countries as it does in the US.

Just another reason I really loathe the way non-Americans parrot US specific messages.

@solidaritea

In the US, 1 in 1000 black men are killed by the police (0.1%). www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793.

Defunding the police is about using the money to invest in areas that will create social justice and social cohesion. As others have said, defunding the police isn't a call to disband police forces.

BLM is a US movement.

Why are people protesting here then?

@Kitmerow

I think it's a myriad of reasons, though I guess the only way to actually know would be to ask a range of protesters (I'm not one; I've never attended a protest for anything).

My understanding is that people are protesting:
That UK gov should put pressure on US gov to ensure a prison sentence for George Floyd's murderer and potentially the other officers at the scene
That UK gov should put pressure on US gov to de-fund the police

But also...
That UK police address the racism within our own force. Death rates in custody are less of an issue because they are low overall but use of force situations disproportionately involve black people
That UK more generally addresses systemic racism and the history of racism in the country (as can be seen from the statue in Bristol)

Some people may not know why they are protesting, but are protesting because they are angry about racism. Some people are protesting for no real reason. Some people are probably protesting because they are bored.

HoldMyLobster yes - some protestors in London were calling to defund the police and there was an article in the Guardian also suggesting it.

Hmmm I can't actually imagine what the UK police would be left with if they were defunded any further. It seems like they've been cut to the bone already.

Hmmm I can't actually imagine what the UK police would be left with if they were defunded any further. It seems like they've been cut to the bone already.
I dont think you're grasping what defunding means in this context (honestly, I wonder of defunding is the best term to use, because it seems to invite misunderstanding).

Defunding the police would means reducing the police's responsibilities, so that they are only undertaking the kinds of tasks for which a trained police officer is most suited.

Simultaneously the mandates of other agencies/professionals, who are better suited to carrying out some of the functions currently performed by the police, would be expanded and their funding increased.

Things are quite different in the US. I appreciate that from a British perspective this seems absurd (if anything a bit more money would go amiss). But I can see how in the US if seems ridiculous to spend so much money on police problems that they made no attempts to fix. Instead of throwing money at police why not ban gun ownership and put more money and effort into mental health intervention.

I dont think you're grasping what defunding means in this context (honestly, I wonder of defunding is the best term to use, because it seems to invite misunderstanding).

It seems a little ironic that you're saying I don't grasp what defunding the police means, then repeating almost exactly what I posted earlier to explain what defunding the police means :-)

Policing in the US and the UK is worlds apart. They are nothing alike, and the defund movement is regarding US police. I’m a Brit in a southern state, and I’ve told (American) DH that I would NEVER approach a police officer cold for help here in the same way I would in the UK. They are not approachable.

I’ve worked with police officers here (the school resource officers that a PP mentioned) and a lot of them are very nice people when you engage with them on a professional level in a work situation. But they are very ‘ask questions later’, and aren’t the community service-oriented organization we Brits are used to. Probably because anyone they interact with could have a firearm and are always on high alert.

DH and I were watching one of those police reality programmes, I think it was 24 Hours in Police Custody, and DH absolutely couldn’t believe arrested people were offered a tea or coffee. He found it hilarious.

The defund argument has some merit. Not to completely get rid of policing because that would be ridiculous, but definitely to funnel some money into preventative programmes, social workers and most importantly (in my mind) addiction services.

A lot of prisons here are private and for-profit. They have shareholders who influence politicians who make sure the prison pipeline is always flowing. If you’re convicted of something here you’re marked forever. It’s very hard to get a decent job, a place to live, all kinds of things. I had to request the equivalent of a CRB check for a guy I hired recently and a possession of cannabis offence from when he was 18 came up flagged. He’s over 40. The system is definitely flawed.

Some of these things are worth looking at, but I think as a "movement" it doesn't make a lot of sense. There is a fair bit of variation in police forces across the US, and sometimes underfunding is the problem, or the allocation of funding. Training can be woeful, hardly more than a month.

But this tendency to these blanket solutions, and then people pick it up in places like the UK or Canada and start saying the same thing, when it may make zero sense.

Ffs this sort of thing pissed me off. There is money enough for decent policing and youth workers and preventative measures. We choose at the moment to value bailing out banks and aiirlines whilst letting lots of companies avoid taxes, squander billions on brexit that will shrink the economy and then say there is no money for the basics for the people.

It's Tory ideology that's shrunk everyone's thinking. We are selling ourselves short. Be ambitious people, expect better from your government. Demand it.

In some areas, cuts could be catastrophic. In my area it takes hours for the police to come, sometimes they don't come at all. DH was talking a while back to PCSO and he said "We've lost control in this area" which is quite scary. It means that if you call there is a good chance you won't be heard. Drug dealing etc is very open on my street, it's a fact of life. I do agree that we do need some kind of initiatives for especially older teens and not just sports clubs as not everyone will find that interesting and it would have to be free as it's simply getting beyond many families to fund even smaller amounts.

My dad was a police officer years ago ( I reckon he's been retired well over 25 years) and he stayed on a couple of years after retirement age as they let you sign on year by year subject to fitness tests. He said towards the end he could see a change in the mentality of the newer officers they were getting and not a good one. He decided to quit at that stage and he didn't regret doing so.

That's not to say there aren't good officers, there will be and quite honestly the job is not one that many would like to do. But all customer-facing roles are harder now even our local Tesco staff have body cams and the stories they have to tell would curl your hair!

I think cuts to the police would be the death knell for us even trying to stay where we live, it will become too dangerous.

I agree with it

We need to decide what it is we want our police to do. I want them catching criminals and protecting public safety.

You dont need the time and cost of training 2 police officers so they can write parking tickets or speeding tickets.

Police are not social workers or health workers etc. They shouldnt be dealing with those issues- social workers and health workers should

Defunding the police is the most ridiculous way to put it. Redirecting funds or supporting communities would be a much more positive way to put it and be recieved better.