You're exactly right. Not just reform. Straight up defunding:

"In 2018 the city issued a report outlining all the procedural justice reforms it has embraced, like mindfulness training, crisis intervention team training, implicit bias training, body cameras, early warning systems to identify problematic officers, and so on. They have made no difference. In fact, local activist groups like Reclaim the Block, Black Visions Collective, and MPD 150 have rejected more training and oversight as a solution and are now calling on Mayor Jacob Frey to cut the police budget by $45 million and shift those resources into community-led health and safety strategies.

...It is time for the federal government, major foundations, and local governments to stop trying to manage problems of poverty and racial discrimination by wasting millions of dollars on pointless and ineffective procedural reforms that merely provide cover for the expanded use of policing. It’s time for everyone to quit thinking that jailing one more killer cop will do anything to change the nature of American policing. We must move, instead, to significantly defund the police and redirect resources into community-based initiatives that can produce real safety and security without the violence and racism inherent in the criminal justice system."

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/defund-police-protest/

"Since May 29, at least 125 press freedom violations have been reported nationwide by journalists covering the demonstrations against the death of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis police custody. The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a nonpartisan website of which CPJ is a founding partner, is investigating each report and will publish confirmed incidents to its database.

The violations under investigation, including 20 arrests, were collated from social media accounts, news reports, and direct contact with some of the journalists affected."

https://cpj.org/2020/06/at-least-125-press-freedom-violations-reported-over-3-days-of-us-protests/

That Tweet's been doing the rounds. And it's true - not only do cops have a domestic abuse problem, they have a white supremecy problem as well:

"In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report on right-wing extremism and its relationship to “violent radicalization” in the United States. The report’s principle researcher on the subject, Daryl Johnson, later told The Intercept:

“Federal law enforcement agencies in general — the FBI, the Marshals, the ATF — are aware that extremists have infiltrated state and local law enforcement agencies and that there are people in law enforcement agencies that may be sympathetic to these groups.”

This may not be a coincidence.

An investigation published in 2019 by the Center for Investigative Reporting found that hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers are members of Confederate-sympathizing, anti-Islam, or anti-government militia groups on Facebook. Within these private groups, members often are openly racist".

https://www.justsecurity.org/70507/white-supremacist-infiltration-of-us-police-forces-fact-checking-national-security-advisor-obrien/

That you see the sort of stuff you mentioned becomes pretty understandable once you take this into account.

More on following the money - state prosecutors can accept money from police unions in the US, which some places are only just trying to curb, thanks to the protests:

"Prosecutors in three of California’s most heavily-populated counties, as well as a candidate for district attorney in Los Angeles, are lobbying the State Bar to prohibit District Attorneys from accepting donations from police unions, citing the possible conflict of interest this poses.

The letter, signed by District Attorneys Chesa Boudin, of San Francisco, Diana Becton, of Contra Costa, Tori Verber Salazar, of San Joaquin, and George Gascon, the former San Francisco DA running to be Los Angeles County’s top prosecutor, says that their proposition comes “in the wake of mass protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers.”

The letter reinvigorates an issue that has surfaced in recent district attorney elections in the Bay Area. In 2018, District Attorney Nancy O’Malley was criticized for accepting union contributions from departments her office was investigating in police killings. Gascon, too, has accepted police union money while his office investigated police shootings, something he pledged to stop doing at a news conference Monday."

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/01/in-wake-of-george-floyd-killing-ca-prosecutors-lobby-to-stop-das-from-accepting-police-union-money/

Protest 4ever.

:grin:

https://www.gq.com/story/cops-cost-billions

"New York City spends more on policing than it does on the Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development combined. In other major metro areas, the trend continues: Oakland PD receives nearly half of the city's discretionary spending( $264 million out of $592 million), dwarfing every other expenditure, including human services, parks and recreation, and transportation combined. A whopping 39 percent of Chicago's 2017 budget went to police, and still the department got even more money, peaking in 2020 with a 7 percent increase to nearly $1.8 billion.

In Minneapolis, the city council and Democratic mayor Jacob Frey passed a $1.6 billion budget for 2020, bumping up the Minneapolis Police Department's funding by $10 million (to $193 million) in order to add an extra class of recruits. But according to the local ABC affiliate, programs and agencies that could actually prevent crime get a relative pittance: $31 million for affordable housing, $250,000 for community organizations working with at-risk youth, and just over $400,000 for the Office of Crime Prevention."

Cops kill by virtue of their sheer existence as black holes of state funding.

There are cops all over the country standing in solidarity with the protestors... — creativesoul

They are. Only to teargas protestors as soon as the news vans turn off. This is Philly one moment:

And about 5 minutes later:

Don't fall for the PR. It's the same shit abusive boyfriends do, buying flowers after punching their partners. Or in this case before.

Yeah I read about this. Apparently the protestors travelled back in time to ensure Floyd would die and then kick off the good stuff.

When police unions are being run by trash like him, is it any wonder that American police are murderous thugs who beat their wives?

Ahhh so much good literature being published right now:

"American liberalism has a distinctly contradictory relationship with black protest. On the one hand, liberals imagine themselves the best friends (in contemporary parlance, “allies”) of the cause of black equality. On the other, since at least the 1930s, liberals have recoiled from black militancy, convinced it served little purpose but to strengthen the hand of reactionaries... Though liberals like to talk a lot about the value of listening in moments like these, they’ve made it abundantly clear that they’d prefer not to."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/06/rioting-george-floyd-liberals-black-lives-matter

Hey I found an excerpt from Vitale's book that I mentioned!:

"It is largely a liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys. As the veteran police scholar David Bayley argues: "The police do not prevent crime. This is one of the best kept secrets of modern life. Experts know it, the police know it, but the public does not know it. Yet the police pretend that they are society’s best defence against crime and continually argue that if they are given more resources, especially personnel, they will be able to protect communities against crime. This is a myth."

Bayley goes on to point out that there is no correlation between the number of police and crime rates... The reality is that the police exist primarily as a system for managing and even producing inequality by suppressing social movements and tightly managing the behaviours of poor and nonwhite people: those on the losing end of economic and political arrangements. Bayley argues that policing emerged as new political and economic formations developed, producing social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal and informal processes. This can be seen in the earliest origins of policing, which were tied to three basic social arrangements of inequality in the 18th century: slavery, colonialism and the control of a new industrial working class."

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/7kpvnb/end-of-policing-book-extract

Oh yes and then there was that study where about 40% of cops are domestic abusers, can't forget that one. One assumes when they come home from beating up protestors, they beat their wives as a digestif to help them sleep more soundly.

Cute that "liberatrain" in this thread is of course crying over cops. Because as we all know libertarians stand for nothing and are literal public bathroom scum.

Fair enough. Not that it's exactly distinguished company that the US keeps around itself - Pakistan, Mexico and Iran, among others.

It is of course unsurprising that the most murderous police force in the world has PTSD problems. It must of course be traumatizing to have to continually kill and main your own citizens in public. And of course cops can quite literally walk out and quit their jobs - unlike those who they regularly murder, who cannot quit being black or poor.

I don't think that the US is incomparable. That is of course too strong. But it is nonetheless unique in scale and political engineering that encourages the problem.

The only thing extremist is the list of dead black men that continue to pile up in the street on video - and not on video - every other day. And the unchecked police brutality is currently being exercised on the streets of the US and being documented all over.

Police in the US are a public health hazard. In fact, US police kill more in days than other countries do in years. This is of course ridiculous, but not for the reasons you state.

If you want some big-picture reading, Verso are even offering a free ebook on the topic right now, which you might use to educate yourself with.

Facts don't care about your feelings.

Cops are racist and bad and overwhelmingly violent.

No, I put in a fair amount of effort in that post, if you can't be bothered to have read it, then I can't be bothered to do more lifting for you.

I gave you stats and references, you gave me anecdotes. Want to try that post again?

If anyone has the stomach to follow the hundreds of incidents of police brutality captured on camera in the last couple of days in the US alone, they can all be tracked here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/2020PoliceBrutality/

It's these that really drove home for me how footage is, as it stands, totally ineffective.

Don't pretend you give damn.

Correct. The US is orders of magnitude more barbarous than the rest of the world, when it comes to their cops, as reflected in their social policy, quite specific to the US.

The lesson I took from it is - look institutionally. Solutions pitched at an individual level don't work. Body cams don't work because the institutions in place are not set-up to make their footage significant. Training people to be 'good cops' doesn't work unless the institutional mechanisms of accountability are in place to match, etc etc.

Again, I gave my reasons. If you can't address them, that's OK.

So far the status quo looks far better than anything you guys have offered. What a lost opportunity. — NOS4A2

A dead black man is not an opportunity.

You have to understand that the police does the same thing in other countries as in the US. — ssu

No it does not. I wrote a couple of paragraphs on it. Perhaps you can address what I said.

This is alot of words for "I'm a shill for the status quo".

I take the point that I get a bit sweary. I endeavour to couch my insults in higher degrees of innuendo and metaphor, with only the occasional direct one thrown in every now and then at select individuals.

So I have been thinking about this bit. Is there any reasonable expectation that this time around, there will be Bipartisan support for change? That the republican establishment didn't even seem to blink at Trump's suggestion to send in the army isn't encouraging.

And there is the question of how much good reform does in the short term. Police departments cannot retrain, much less replace, their entire staff overnight. And arguably the police violence is another symptom of the huge economic disparities.

So if the political will isn't there for not just police reform, but a change of economic policy, then what is the next step? The elections aren't until November, and whoever does get elected will not necessarily change much. If the political will doesn't materialize, and I don't think it will, what level of disobedience to the system is justified & effective? Will property damage cause enough disruption to force the holders of economic power to the table? Will just being out in the street, refusing to comply with curfews etc. continue to build pressure?

Thinking about it, it's hard to maintain any hope that anything can cause the necessary change. Just like with gun control, climate change etc. — Echarmion

There are no easy answers but a couple of points are well worth making. First, that 'political will' is not something that pre-exists, but is forged - sometimes in fire, necessarily. Given the fact that the US has dragged their feet on this for, well, decades, the lack of will is simply a fact of nature that any good political strategy must take into account. It is less an obstacle than exactly the problem to address.

Second, the actual elements of reform exist. As I linked to in my previous post, there is empirically baked research on what does and does not work. It's not a matter of starting from scratch, and more noise needs to be made about the concrete design elements of reform. That the US State is entirely mum about his ought to be a spur for further protest, quite frankly.

Third, there are no guarantees about how any of this is supposed to proceed. In fact, given historical precedent, what's happening right now is more likely to fail to secure change. But this is nothing new for progressive causes. "Try again. Fail again. Fail better"; that's been the percept for the longest time now. Defeatism will simply lay you back in the same quagmire, only perhaps even more widespread and more violent next time.

Fourth, as I tried to lay out way back - at the big picture level, the problem goes beyond borders. The US is unique in the way it has taken seriously the imperative to gut social provisions and replace them with class terror, and it's ultimately only by redressing that system-wide neo-liberal policy strategy that the problem will be tacked in earnest. It goes beyond Trump, beyond elections, and beyond institutional reform limited to police.

Some interesting proposals from someone who seems to know their stuff:

Some highlights - Body cams don't work; Training programs don't work; Demilitarization works; Development of alternatives to policing works; Less shady police union contacts work. There's more in there.

The whole Twitter thread is short and an interesting read. Click to read the rest.

--

On a related note, and something I'd meant to mention previously - I think the current events make clear just how little body cams do work in the current regime of accountability. The stratospheric rates of police violence across the US right now are being recorded from multiple angles. George Floyd's death was recorded from multiple angles. The police are well aware of this. They simply do not care, because they know the footage won't amount to anything. For body cams to work, it seems like they can only do so in the context of institutional reform where there are real threats of sanction that follow. Until that is in place, body cams are placebos.

Oh, which reminds me -

In a way it's banality ought to make its point ever starker - like... how hard is something as simple as that to acknowledge?

The Police is part of social policy in every country, StreetlightX. — ssu

C'mon man, I just wrote you a whole thing about the specific function and employment of the police as a matter of social policy in the US and all you can muster up is 'there are police in every country?'. You can do better than that.

These issues have taken root long, long, long before Trump came into picture. He is at best an accelerant, but certainly not a root cause.

I - nor any mod - don't simply ban people for insults or hostility alone. I would would be long gone were that the case. To be clear about the order of events, I warned Chester - in my capacity as a mod - that it was unacceptable to continue simply engaging in argument-by-label: 'leftists this; democrats that' and so on, when literally no one was even talking about that stuff. There was no question of addressing issues, only ever sticking a label on something, dragging discussion into wrangling about said labels. It was incredibly poor quality posting.

His expletive laden post was a response to that warning, and was effectively - as Un noted - suicide by mod. That'd probably be an auto-ban regardless of posting history. And as for the comparison of my posts with Cester's - it's a point beneath engagement. Sushi has had it out for me for a while now, and that's his problem to deal with.

Guys and gals, can keep Chester talk in the banning thread please?

Gee I dunno, have you stopped beating your wife?

Apparently so, especially when people like you repeat their talking points verbatim. Allies indeed.

"people who criticize the riots Vs people who don't" is a great way to hobble your own movement. — Echarmion

Y'know what is a far more effective way to hobble a movement? To suck all discourse around it into a black hole over 'rioting and looting' when saying nothing about anything else. Fox News already does that job - and they sure as fuck aren't 'allies'. Don't talk to me about 'ideological purity' when you pearl clutch over broken Targets and stay utterly mute about police violence or solutions. With 'allies' like that who need enemies?

He's no longer around to respond.