I know people here don't like Matt Taibbi for reasons I can't remember
I think it's the same reason that a few people have that vague negative sentiment towards Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby. All that jolly stuff at the Exile parties finally stopped being good nihilistic fun and started being viewed as a little questionable.
Taibbi has also become an anti-anti-Trumper. The deep state is more dangerous than the president, doncha know.
1: wait, like he's a rapist? Or just what 2 is saying as well?
The story I heard from him and the women who worked with him was that they stuff they said they were doing to women at that time was in the traditions of gonzo journalism and not real. A lot of people think he is an abuser of women for real.
Also he is a heretic on Russiagate and related matters Julian Assange et al.
I still read him. I'm less sure he is worthwhile than I used to be.
Roger's got it. I'm talking about garbage like this. Ajay is talking about garbage like this.
3: Yeah, what Roger said. Taibbi published a bunch of purported non-fiction journalism with accounts of wacky misbehavior that includes sexual assault -- you know, the fun irreverent kind. When people brought that up after #metoo got rolling, Taibbi said those parts were fiction. That doesn't seem absolutely impossible to me, but "I was lying when I claimed to have sexually assaulted women, I just made it up because I thought it sounded cool" is still a bad look.
Oh right. I'm remembering now - you guys have walked me through this before.
It throws me when former commenters link to him on FB, because I tend to assume they are good about things like this, but I will try to remember to stop linking to his stuff.
He has had some good lines over the years. "Giant vampire squid" is immortal.
Maybe I'll edit out the emphasis on Taibbi on the front page and just say here that the original version linked and excerpted a Matt Taibbi piece, which is where I got the original Broken Windows link from.
If you're reading this later: I originally quoted from the "via" link, and said something like "I remember we don't like Taibbi but I don't remember why?" which prompted the first 6 comments above.
He has had some good lines over the years. "Giant vampire squid" is immortal.
Even that - AIMHMHB it's maybe not great to pick the Jewishest sounding bank on Wall Street out of all the others and refer to it in a way that neatly encapsulates a) the octopus-like Jewish conspiracy secretly ruling the world b) the Jewish parasite drinking the blood of Christians and c) the repellent money-crazed Jewish financier.
(The vampire squid itself, Vampiroteuthis infernalis, is so called because it has a cloak-like membrane between its tentacles. It doesn't drink blood, it doesn't have a blood funnel, and is about the size IIRC of a tennis ball.)
"Broken windows" policing drives me nuts as a term, because what it specifically refers to -- harassing people who the police believe are likely future offenders by aggressively enforcing minor violations against them, or at least threatening to where the cops can't find or invent anything -- is counterproductive and evil.
On the other hand, there are crime-control strategies that are harmless and I would bet (don't know the state of the research) are effective, that it would make just as much sense to call "broken windows" strategies. I buy that the perception of order does have a real effect on crime, and therefore that attention to maintenance of the environment is big. Fixing broken windows quickly; street cleaning/garbage pickup/ plantings in parks -- making everything the government can control look and feel like an orderly, valued area. That's not policing, but I'd believe it's crime control. (I don't know if there's good research on this kind of thing).
And non-policing attempts to pre-empt future criminality -- standard dumbass dogooder stuff like midnight basketball and academic tutoring. I don't think there's anything wrong with identifying, e.g., underemployed adolescent boys and young men hanging out as a plausible source of social disorder and future criminal behavior, it's the idea that the way you break that cycle is by having cops harass them and bring them into the criminal justice system before they've done anything wrong at all, or seriously wrong, that's so evil.
That's not policing, but I'd believe it's crime control. (I don't know if there's good research on this kind of thing)
There is! But damned if I can remember the name of the sociologist. IIRC he did a study of Bryant Park that led them to take down all the high shrubberies that were great places to hide out if you're looking to mug someone.
edit out the emphasis on Taibbi
Cancel culture in real time!
For the past couple of days we've had protests of a few hundred people in my not large town. I think the cops moved one guy who was standing in front of traffic. At least that's what Tim told me. I walked by yesterday evening and saw 2 police officers with their bicycles, but it was pretty chill. I do worry about the State police, so maybe that's an area where I can advocate.
Is cancel a verb or an adjective there?
And when I say it drives me nuts, it's because the term is a much better description of the tactics I support than of "broken windows" policing as practiced, and I think the term is a bad faith attempt to get support from people roughly aligned with me. If "broken windows" policing makes you think about fixing things rather than about shoving some Dominican kid's face into a brick wall while a cop searches him without probable cause, as a nice liberal you're more likely to support the concept generally.
this snarky twitter post contains, in the replies, a rare actually informative conversation about the introduction/legacy of "broken windows".
i have been having a great time racheting up the pressure with local-state pols here in sf, agitating to have them all pledge to no longer take police union, pac or other $$, and to donate any they've received thus far for the Nov election to bail funds. i usually find our local dsa types unhelpful bc i disagree strongly with their housing policy but they do field viable candidates and they don't take police $, so it is great for fucking once to have some political room to manoeuvre.
haven't flipped anyone yet but enjoying making the argument that the public deserves to know that their elected reps are undertaking police reform free of any hint or whisper of police $ influence.
I very much believe in something like broken windows as applied to police behavior: that a police force that feels empowered to flout traffic/parking laws and engage in other minor antisocial behavior without consequence is a police force that's going to hurt people.
Not quite what Barry is talking about in 12, but Mark Kleiman wrote a book called When Brute Force Fails that's at least adjacent. From his publisher's summary:
"But, says Kleiman, there has been a revolution--largely unnoticed by the press--in controlling crime by means other than brute-force incarceration: substituting swiftness and certainty of punishment for randomized severity, concentrating enforcement resources rather than dispersing them, communicating specific threats of punishment to specific offenders, and enforcing probation and parole conditions to make community corrections a genuine alternative to incarceration. As Kleiman shows, "zero tolerance" is nonsense: there are always more offenses than there is punishment capacity. But, it is possible--and essential--to create focused zero tolerance, by clearly specifying the rules and then delivering the promised sanctions every time the rules are broken.
"Brute-force crime control has been a costly mistake, both socially and financially. Now that we know how to do better, it would be immoral not to put that knowledge to work."
Kleiman was also a noted blogger, back when bloggers could be noted. He passed away in 2019, and his co-bloggers wrapped up The Reality-Based Community over the course of April 2020.
We talked about the book here. My actual post was a minor quibble about something, but I think the discussion was okay.
Here: http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2010_06_13.html#010606
23 Of The Organization Man fame. He wrote a book called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.
It was. In that nice space of thoughtful and bringing solid information to react to from an essentially good-willed moral perspective, but just often enough wrongheaded to be interesting to argue with.
some helpful ideas here as well, you may not agree with all of them but succinctly articulated reasoning that you can use to work through your own positions & priorities: https://truthout.org/articles/police-reforms-you-should-always-oppose/
Has anyone seen good proposals that plausibly increase community (Not just demographic) representation within police forces? This seems both hard to achieve unless by fiat, and may be a necessary to achieve meaningful reform.
The idea of a form of liability insurance carried by individual officers is interesting, but thorny.
Thorniness can surely be only an improvement.
26: Drum fills that role for me now. RBC had a blogger who was very good on pretty much any subject besides economics, and was insistent on blogging economics and getting wildly offended at basic correctives in comments. It was frustrating enough that I had to stop looking at the blog altogether.
I've never seen much of anything other than the usual "live in the jurisdiction" rules, and I have a vague belief that they get struck down by the courts or not enforced.
Don't know if you could make it stick, but a hiring preference for graduates of the jurisdiction's public schools would maybe be a good thing? I have not thought this through, though.
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Is there a word for that thing where your skin is dry and the corner of your mouth cracks down to blood when you smile?
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Being a minor character in a horror movie? I'd look into a genre change.
Avoid eating sharp potato chips.
Neither potato chips nor horror movies are involved. I understood chapped lips to be the thing were little bits of your lips kind of die and peel off. I don't have that.
I can't find which of the replies 17 is referring to, so here's the WaPo version.
In 1969, social psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo published research that became the basis for the controversial broken-windows theory of policing, which emerged in a 1982 Atlantic article penned by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. These two social scientists used the Zimbardo article as the sole empirical evidence for their theory, arguing, "If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken."
The problem? Wilson and Kelling distorted the study to suit their purposes. In short, the broken-windows theory was founded on a lie.
IFLWDHB,B it's impressive what passed for social science research in the 60's. Leave one car in the Bronx and wait for it to be vandalized, leave another in Palo Alto where nothing happens, leave a third in Stanford with an already-smashed window to see if that speeds things up, then your grad students get bored and start smashing up the third themselves, and there's the data for your paper. And then Wilson and Kelling twist it into something completely different on top of that 15 years later.
Their misleading recap of Zimbardo's study not only conflated the Stanford and Palo Alto experiments but also so distorted the order of events that it routed readers away from Zimbardo's conclusions. In their version, "the car in Palo Alto sat untouched for more than a week. Then Zimbardo smashed part of it with a sledgehammer. Soon, passersby were joining in." What they conveniently neglected to mention was that the researchers themselves had laid waste to the car.
And now I want slap chips. thanks, heebie.
The tweet is overstating the case, sure, but B7A comes immediately after B7 has primed the audience with the fact of the burning of the police precinct and we've got 17% justified, 37% partially justified.
Those numbers, for this population, are absolutely bonkers, far, far higher than I would have ever dared to imagine.
Wow, wrong thread entirely. My bad.
When I first heard about Broken Windows I thought, in my naivety, that the conclusion was the cities should actually fix actual broken windows.
38: this one and the reply by Grizwald, replies to it, etc.
Haven't we talked about Zimbardo's epic fakery before?
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Over 50 farmers have so far raised complaints about the islands which they say have started to sweep away their cages.|>
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"Methodology: The patient was initially evaluated by a psychologist, psychiatrist, neurosurgeon, and GI endoscopist, who excluded brain and gastrointestinal disorders, with complete medical record, blood tests, upper gastrointestinal endoscopy with biopsies and neuroimaging. With informed consent, a fMRI was accomplished before and in the beginning of a possession induced by exorcism performed by a Catholic priest."
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I can only gesture vaguely, but parallel to Kleinman's stuff, there's the public health model of policing. The assumption is that violence is contagious and you do the same things people do for other contagious diseases. Identify the source and prevent spread; after an outbreak institute a short quarantine for people in contact w the source (lockdown for a few days for a cooldown period).
I think, but am not dedicated enough to look up, that Oakland, Stockton and Sacramento are radically reducing homicides with an all-encompassing mentoring program, better than a 1:1 ratio, that makes help available at all times for a few years.
And, of course, that other massive crime-reduction program: reducing environmental lead.
43: Well, I mean they totally should! I agree with LB in 11.
49: There was a good region-wide analysis of gun violence from the Guardian. Rates are down significantly across the entire region, but some exurban areas have seen increases, so some of the shift is likely displacement, some possibly better prevention.
I suppose someone has to be here to speak up *for* broken-windows policing. If we prosecuted minor white-collar crimes with harsh prison time, we wouldn't be facing the epidemic of accounting control fraud (the largest form of property crime, by value!) worldwide. We've nurtured these criminals, who go out and rob, loot, and pillage our economy, our workers' pensions, our states and municipalities' budgets. Our tolerance of their minor iniquities has yielded this bitter harvest. Broken Windows Policiing on Wall Street!
[aka: "Jump now, FUCKERS!"]
OK, OK, I'm mostly tongue-in-cheek. There's no evidence that broken-windows policing worked to deter street crime. But I'll bet it deters some cushy hedgie with his Exeter and Harvard degrees, from breaking securities laws, knowing, KNOWING that he'll do hard time.
52.1: That version of broken-window policing reminds me of the saying, "Steal a little and they throw you in jail/Steal a lot and they make you king" (Dylan used it in "Sweetheart Like You", but I don't think he made it up).
Honestly, if the stealing is from a snake cult that uses human sacrifice, who's complaining?
53: The one I heard was about debt and banks. If you owe a little, the bank owns you. If you owe a lot, you own the bank (because defaulting would screw the bank's finances).
"The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own On" -- Bill Black (guy who led the cleanup of the S&L mess).
Whatever Taibbi's intent, the impact of "vampire squid" was anti-Semitic. JP Morgan is not any better, but they have a nice WASPy name, and somehow it's Goldman that became the symbol of evil bankers.
Oh, I'm sure his intentions were pure. You can totally spend more than a decade working and socialising with horrific Russian fascists like Edward Limonov and still be vehemently opposed to anti-semitism.
If we prosecuted minor white-collar crimes with harsh prison time, we wouldn't be facing the epidemic of accounting control fraud (the largest form of property crime, by value!) worldwide.
No, no. Harsh penalties don't deter crime! See the Jon Swift line about how one of the riskiest places in London for pickpockets was in the crowd watching the public hanging of a pickpocket. There are already pretty harsh sentences available for white-collar crime. The problem isn't that; it's that we don't prosecute them. The US is actually slightly better than the UK here (the SFO is a joke and has always been a joke) but still not nearly good enough.
59, 60: Yeah, now that it's brought up again, I remember criticism of the squid line as anti-Semitic because of being directed at Goldman specifically being raised before and it seems fair.
It isn't wrong to criticise Goldman - they do seem to have a much better revolving door into the US government than other banks. They were involved in some dodgy stuff with the Greek government, and their "big short" deal, though legal, leaves a bad taste in the mouth. But Taibbi went way over the top in his article - both in the assertions he made, and in focussing so much on GS. And when you're looking at a room with Lucky Luciano, Capone, Dillinger, Mad Dog Coll, Bumpy Johnson and Bugsy Siegel, and your immediate reaction to this scene is "Siegel is a terrible person! He is responsible for all the organised crime in the US!" then it does look a bit odd.
63.last What am I, chopped liver?
No, but you are a notorious antifa activist: https://allthatsinteresting.com/meyer-lansky-punch-a-nazi
No disrespect meant to Meyer Lansky, Lepke Buchalter, Kid Twist, or any of the others who I'd have to google to remind myself of.
re: 65
He might be an antifa activist, but he's no Vidal Sassoon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidal_Sassoon#Wartime_activities
Did that limey barber build Las Vegas?
65 inspired me to remind myself of the wartime activities of Henry Kissinger - if he'd only stayed in academia, he'd be an absolute legend in his own lifetime. Volunteered for hazardous intelligence work as an infantryman at the Battle of the Bulge, ran (as a 20-year-old sergeant) a city in occupied Germany, hunted Gestapo fugitives...
There's almost certainly a NYT opinion piece deploring the incivility described in 65, right?
It isn't wrong to criticise Goldman - they do seem to have a much better revolving door into the US government than other banks.
I haven't read Taibbi's piece in a long time, so I may be misremembering the tone of it, but Goldman really is a special case, even in a rogue's gallery. For one thing, in an era of robber barons, Goldman Sachs has been unusually successful.
Off the top of my head, I'm thinking maybe JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon has the kind of pull that folks like Steve Mnuchin, Tim Geithner or Hank Paulson have had. Here's a more measured, less polemical rundown of Goldman Sachs alums' influence in government.
I don't know how much the newer thread deals with the link in 27, but I just want to say: on the list of "reforms"* to support, reparations to victims of violence is IMO a bizarre #1, especially when #2 is liability insurance. Like, are you making a statement about justice, or are you engaging in wonkery? There's no way that #1 is the most efficacious first step, nor any way that #2 is the second-best way to enact justice.
TBH, I find police/prison abolitionists to mostly be engaged in the two-step of terrific triviality: most of them either don't have serious answers for how things would work after abolition (bouncers and antifa would keep the peace!) or back down and acknowledge that there really would be police and prisons in their ideal outcomes (or call for throwing cops into prison). It's fine to go with the catchy slogan but, as with #M4A, it swiftly turns into holier-than-thou one-upmanship--"Oh, you're for police reform? Well I'm for police abolition. Suck it, appeaser." Note, again, the use of scare quotes around the word reform in the linked article, pegging anyone advocating for reform as essentially unserious.
*their scare-quotes, not mine
Oh wait, there is no new thread. I got confused.
Thanks, Heebie.
FWIW, here's my take on fixing American policing: It's needs to be root-and-branch reformation, and the essential ingredient is eliminating police as we know them from their role as first responders. Especially without radical gun control, armed peace officers (ha) will be necessary. But there's absolutely no reason for those people to be the first on the scene for most of the things people call 911 about. This isn't 1985, the number of people who'll start shooting at anyone who shows up is incredibly low. But armed, belligerent people who put others in danger do still exist, so sometimes you call in the guys with guns. But the person calling them in should be the actual first responder, who is someone trained in first aid, de-escalation, conflict resolution, and needs assessment. They're well-trained and well-paid.
On top of that, I'd like to see neighborhood social services "walking the beat"--local residents (like, literally, the job description is that you're walking distance from your beat) with some of the same training as the first responders, but whose basic job is to identify issues before they become crises--recognize when the homeless guy who's generally not a danger is using again and needs help, notice when a group of kids are escalating from harmless hanging out to minor vandalism, check in on the old lady who hasn't been outside in a few days. 11.last stuff, basically.
Backing this all up is much more robust social services, funded by cutting your armed police force by 90%. And on the criminal justice side, I'd like to think that this system would undermine the poisonous DA/police symbiosis, but if not, then you need to find another, part of which surely involves a state-level special prosecutor who's called in for any serious citizen complaint against a cop. But aside from that, apply Kleiman-style policies to sentencing: swift, certain, relatively brief punishment.
There's a lot of micro stuff that may or may not apply in this model, but to me you need to completely change the paradigm that applies everywhere. And I don't think you can do that if the guys with kill training are also the guys who show up when somebody's having a mental health crisis.
75: are there any countries in the world that have this model?
On top of that, I'd like to see neighborhood social services "walking the beat"--local residents (like, literally, the job description is that you're walking distance from your beat) with some of the same training as the first responders, but whose basic job is to identify issues before they become crises--recognize when the homeless guy who's generally not a danger is using again and needs help, notice when a group of kids are escalating from harmless hanging out to minor vandalism, check in on the old lady who hasn't been outside in a few days. 11.last stuff, basically.
This is the sort of thing that sounds great if you imagine someone really bright, creative, and pro-active in the role, but which could be completely useless if you have somebody who's dull, conventional and officious.
As I'm thinking about it this morning, I think the key elements are:
1) Making sure that the police feel invested in the community, and the community feels invested in the police -- which involves some version of Peelian policing.
2) Thinking about everything that the Police do in terms of Risk management. Paying attention to the question of what risks they're trying to manage (which should include risks to the community, as well as risks to oficers, and how they go about doing it. I've worked with big companies who have regular safety meetings and they talk about both the safety pyramid (bad things happen as some fraction of the minor incidents, so preventing minor incidents will also help prevent major incidents) and the swiss-cheese model of risk management. The idea that any safety process will have holes in it (will fail sometimes), which is why you need many layers of overlapping safety instruction so that you should only have an incident when multiple failures line-up.
Obviously there are challenges implementing that when people are working in small groups in potentially chaotic situations, but the goal should be to have a clear set of steps outlining how to manage risk before they end up in a violent situation (as well as policies for what to do in a violent situation), and the organization needs to be committed to tracking and reducing the small problems when somebody escalates unnecessarily.
I want to tie 2 things together, about police abolition and my last para in 75. Last week I saw a claim from a police abolitionist* about how policing works in affluent suburbs that was somewhere between ignorant and dishonest, and it made me wonder if there are some fundamental errors in the whole movement.
The claims--sorry, I can't track down the original tweets--were along these lines: in affluent suburbs, you literally never see cops unless you call them. They don't cruise around in cop cars, they don't go looking for illegal activity. They sit in their stations and wait to provide helpful, polite service to citizens who might call upon them. The argument, from the premise, was that suburban whites already live in a world of police abolition, and all abolitionists want is for urban and Black & brown people to be able to live that way.
And that's just not how things are in the suburbs. Cops 100% cruise around in their big SUVs with bull bars. They are armed and trained on the same bullshit as their urban colleagues. And they're looking for trouble. Trouble is defined differently, of course, but 3 teens in the school parking lot after hours? A cop will come, and depending on their attitude and his mood, he will be more or less shitty to them. And *obviously* if they see a nonwhite person, they're likely to harass them.
Are suburban cops more deferential to residents? It's all how you look at the question. Urban cops are perfectly deferential and polite to white homeowners, just like suburban cops. The difference is how many interactions cops have with people outside that category.
I don't think all prison abolitionists believe that suburban whites live in some Mayberry fantasy world, but that thread was really revealing to me because it showed that, despite claims of understanding structural issues, she didn't get it at all. Suburban policing doesn't represent any kind of model, or even analogy, for a world without shitty cops. IT's just a world where shitty cops are shitty to fewer of their citizens.
*a fairly serious one, not some red rose rando
76: I'm sure not! But American society is so gun-crazy, and American cops so fundamentally fucked-up, that I think it is literally impossible to move to just a kinder, gentler version of what we have. As long as the person who comes when you call 911 is an armed American, you're going to get roughly the outcome we have now. Getting rid of qualified immunity would help, breaking the back of the police unions would help, but I don't think they actually solve the problem. I mean, QI is less than 40 years old, cop unions weren't this strong in the '70s, but American cops were awful then.
"Originated as slave patrols" is way too pat, but I don't really see any IRL model for American policing that's benign.
76: US policing is pretty much an outlier. I don't know if looking at more effective forces will be the solution, if you don't have a viable path from A to B. Maybe a radically new model is more likely to succeed? Or maybe the path to A and B exists, given the political and financial will - but I can't see it being easy.
80.1st (at least, an outlier among countries whose policing I can imagine wanting to emulate)
The UK is embarked on an experiment in partial police abolition - there are now around 20% fewer police than there were ten years ago, and that number will presumably fall much further with subsequent rounds of cuts. I am not in a position to say whether this has made things much better for BAME people or indeed non-BAME people in terms of police violence, but Labour has been agitating for more police spending, and more police officers, for a while now, pointing at rates of violent crime that are rising rather substantially.
One thing that came to mind about the Cooper incident is: you'd never get that happening in London, because if you tried to intimidate a black guy in Hyde Park by calling the police and saying you were being attacked by him, the police simply wouldn't turn up for at least 45 minutes. She'd have had to follow him home, or arrange to meet him back in the same place in an hour or so in order to be beaten up. ("In the meantime, just go and get a coffee or something. There's a Pret over on Gloucester Road.") The idea that you can call the police and actually expect to have a police car turn up within minutes - albeit one full of bizarre armed racists - is like some sort of utopian dream.
78: Depends on the suburb, I think. We had a family zoom for what would have been my grandmother's birthday and my aunt in wealthy suburban BFLO (who's a DA and thus well-connected, so mileage probably varies) called her local cops because her recent-college-grad son had told her that he heard a large rodent or something in the house. Within fifteen minutes, "both cars" were there, though no beast was ever located. I can't think of a time I've seen police patrol when visiting my grandparents there. My parents' street doesn't really get patrols, though in his teens my brother was cited for possession of tobacco by a minor because they were checking everyone in trench coats. I wouldn't even say my technically urban street has patrols per se, though the county jail is in the next block and so we do see plenty of police drive by. Nia and friends got pulled over (she was the darkest, but it was a mixed-race group) for jaywalking and almost getting hit on the main drag and they just got a lecture, though I happened to be driving by near the end of it myself and stopped to make sure everything was okay and then made her get in my car instead of walking home.
82: Well, they didn't actually show up in a timely fashion, she just hoped they would.
This interview with the author of The End of Policing is good.
What is (or was, I suppose, re: 82) the clearance rate for crimes in the UK? Are most murders or other violent crimes solved? Stats in US cities seem pretty dismal.
Oh, also, maybe someone can tell me this: how were crimes actually handled prior to the establishment of the police as a thing in England? I've been reading The Making of the English Working Class and there are some references to opposition from multiple corners to the establishment of a police force around the turn of the 18th/19th century*, and references to justices of the peace prior to that, but (obviously, that's not the business of the book) no explication of how things actually worked if you thought a crime had been committed.
* I mean, from the end of the 1700s into the 1800s, which I guess is the turn of the 19th?
This is the sort of thing that sounds great if you imagine someone really bright, creative, and pro-active in the role, but which could be completely useless if you have somebody who's dull, conventional and officious.
Absolutely. It also sounds a lot like (the semi-mythical ideal of) traditional beat policing.
Oh, also, maybe someone can tell me this: how were crimes actually handled prior to the establishment of the police as a thing in England? I've been reading The Making of the English Working Class and there are some references to opposition from multiple corners to the establishment of a police force around the turn of the 18th/19th century*, and references to justices of the peace prior to that, but (obviously, that's not the business of the book) no explication of how things actually worked if you thought a crime had been committed.
Isn't this where the "hue and cry" comes in? I think there was a legal obligation for people in general who witnessed a crime to raise an alarm which attracted the attention of other people, and then there was an obligation for able-bodied men to assist in arresting and detaining the criminal until they could get the attention of the local sheriff or Justice of the Peace. And of course raising a false hue and cry could also be a crime.
87: off the top of my head, you had a few mechanisms.
Public order was the army's business. If there was a major riot (and that happened a lot back then) the army or militia were called out, and a local official - eg the town mayor - would read the Riot Act. Specifically, a bit of the Riot Act which made unlawful assembly a felony punishable by death. That gave the rioters an hour to disperse, after which the troops would open fire. (We still talk about "reading someone the riot act" meaning to give them a severe telling off.)
Crimes in progress were covered by the hue and cry. Anyone seeing a felony in progress was legally obliged to raise the alarm and pursue the felon, and anyone in earshot was legally obliged to join in the chase.
Patrol duties were covered by the watch, whose job was to enforce curfew. Each householder in a parish had to take his turn to patrol the streets of his parish at night. Later on they tended to club together to hire a professional watchman so they could all stay in bed instead.
Investigation of crimes after the fact was covered by the victim, or his family. If someone stole your horse, you'd either investigate yourself or, more likely, hire a thief-taker - a professional. (And, often, a criminal themselves, who might negotiate the return of your horse with the thief, for a cut of what you were paying him.)
86: for murders, good - virtually all murders are solved because there aren't that many and they throw a load of resources at each one. It's not just one overworked Bunk Moreland juggling three or four cases at once, it's a whole team.
For others, it varies - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-49986849
Overall the clearance rate has halved over the last ten years or so. About 8% of violent crimes are solved.
re: 92
The collapse in clearance over 10 years is striking. I wonder what the cause might be?*
* I'm not wondering, of course.
I'm glad that for murders, Lewis is proving as capable as Morse.
Yes, in the provinces the situation was much as it was in the Wild West: hue and cry, and in extremis the Sheriff could call out the Posse Comitatus. It had been so since about the 12th century. In London Henry Fielding took time out from writing Tom Jones to establish the Bow Street Runners in 1749, and that model was built on until Peel grabbed it by the scruff of the neck in 1829.
Have we discussed the Watchmen miniseries here?
Our affluent exurb had cops who hung around the village centers or near the high school. Reading the police blotter in the town paper was hilarious. From the most recent one I can find online, which is last summer:
Middle School student was injured when he was struck in the head with a basketball
A driver who did not use his turn signal did not appreciate being beeped at by a fellow motorist. The driver got out of his vehicle and began yelling at the woman who had beeped at him. She drove away from the confrontation, but the man sped after her, she told police. The woman said she was nervous but did not wish to pursue further investigation.
Woman told police that four bank accounts had been opened in her name. The possible fraud was reported to the bank, which put a lock on her credit. The woman said she did not lose any money.
Resident told police her neighbor's mailbox had been knocked down and that mail was scattered all over the road. It turned out, however, that the mail was from seven different residences in the area.
Resident complained to police about a man and woman who frequently walked along their road. The couple often littered their cigarettes and cigarette packages. They also possibly performed a sex act in public, which was witnessed by the resident's wife and 10-year-old son.
Police responded recently to two separate reports of cars peeling out or doing donuts in town parks. In both cases the cars left before police arrived.
How it worked in a public order context is nicely shown up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
"The Manchester & Salford Yeomanry were relatively inexperienced militia recruited from among local shopkeepers and tradesmen, the most numerous of which were publicans. Recently mocked by the Manchester Observer as "generally speaking, the fawning dependents of the great, with a few fools and a greater proportion of coxcombs, who imagine they acquire considerable importance by wearing regimentals", they were subsequently variously described as "younger members of the Tory party in arms", and as "hot-headed young men, who had volunteered into that service from their intense hatred of Radicalism."[38] Socialist writer Mark Krantz has described them as "the local business mafia on horseback". R J White described them as "exclusively cheesemongers, ironmongers and newly enriched manufacturers, (who) the people of Manchester .. thought .. a joke."....One officer of the 15th Hussars was heard trying to restrain the by now out of control Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, who were "cutting at every one they could reach": "For shame! For shame! Gentlemen: forbear, forbear! The people cannot get away!"
According to What Hath God Wrought, urban police departments in the US began to develop in the 1830s in response to a widespread wave of rioting, mostly by working-class white men. The form they took was influenced by Peel's reforms around the same time. "Developed out of slave patrols" seems to be flatly false at least for urban police (indeed, it was the rioters who were generally more supportive of slavery, and many of the riots were in response to activity by abolitionists), though slave patrols did of course also exist and there may be more of a connection with the role of rural sheriffs.
If you liked Watchmen, I can't recommend The Leftovers (especially Seasons 2 and 3) highly enough. It's not topical to BLM, but it is very topical to the pandemic. (Season 1 is not nearly as good, though I'm not sure you can just skip it. Watchmen really benefited from Lindelof learning from The Leftovers to skip redoing the book you're adapting from and just start direction with the stories you want to tell set in that world.)
(Hrm, just remembered the main character is a cop in Season 1, so maybe now is not the time for Season 1. Someone should make a cut of season 1 down to like 2 or 3 episodes so you can just get into Seasons 2 and 3.)
I thought the main character was a naked blue guy.
Watchmen=naked blue guy.
Arrested Development=never nude blue guy.
are there any countries in the world that have this model?
Well, I'm saying abolish the police, which I understand as part of a system of decriminalization (drugs, sex work) and vast social support and reconceptualizing a bunch of current police functions. Privately though, I'll admit that I don't understand how to get at the hardest 5% of the problem and maybe a crew of people authorized to use violence are necessary. I suggest that we solve that problem last.
Also, I don't think we pay enough attention to the power rule-like situations. Like this one, Why Crime Runs in the Family. I mean, assign every kid in one generation a dozen tutors, coaches and therapists and be done with it.
When I envision "abolishing the police", which I'm coming around to, I envision salami tactics. All the stuff they they do that is literally social work, like hanging around in high schools? Hire social workers, shrink the police force because they have fewer responsibilities. Develop more services people can call for help who aren't police, along the lines we've been talking about -- now we don't need police for every 911 call, and shrink the force again. Everything you see a cop doing, brainstorm a way for it to be done by someone without a gun and without the authorization to use violence to compel obedience -- if you can come up with something, set it up, and shrink the police force.
There is probably something left at the end of that process, but once we get there, we can think about next steps.
Turn over a bunch of detecting to genetic scientists and genealogists; they're the ones solving cases these days.
106: Yes, but once they solve the case what do they do then?
Take off their sunglasses and make a bad pun.
104.2: The author of that item completely overlooked the Trumps.
Turn over a bunch of detecting to genetic scientists
ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Genetic scientists are useful to do the DNA testing. I guess the genealogists decide who pays for the crimes of their forefathers?
I volunteer to store all the information! Also, now hiring ghostwriters for a Ronan Farrow expose and sales types to pitch my optimal client pricing service for insurance companies.
"Developed out of slave patrols" seems to be flatly false at least for urban police (indeed, it was the rioters who were generally more supportive of slavery, and many of the riots were in response to activity by abolitionists)
This trope has been driving me insane. Especially since, AFAICT, there is/was no transmission from the slave patrol-descended police forces of the South to the extremely problematic urban forces of the North & West. Darryl Gates didn't intern under Bull Connor.
AB dropped Iris off at a protest across town but then a huge storm came through and broke it up, so now she's going to get her. All the cop violence here has been after the breakup of the main protest, so I felt reasonably comfortable telling her to stay to the end and then get the hell out (and she was meeting friends).
83: Oh surely. A big factor will be size, I think: under a certain size, you only have 1-2 full time cops, 2-3 part-timers, and something resembling the Mayberry model is conceivable. But suburbs with thousands of people? They're going to tend to have real police forces that are miniatures of urban ones. Whether or not they are militaries will probably be highly contingent--what kind of person the chief is, how near the nearest scary city is, etc. It's not that I think no suburbs are lightly policed, just that I think they're the exception rather than the norm.
I endorse the salami in 105, and while I think detecting should be recast into something more like the TV fantasy (smart problem-solvers, rather than patrol cops graduating upstairs*), I also know the TV fantasy relies on some impossible stuff, like blood splatter analysis, and improbable stuff (like patrol cops perfectly maintaining crime scenes).
*maybe that's a TV myth? I honestly don't know where most urban detectives come from. I'm guessing they have/need more formal education than patrol officers.
Absolutely. It also sounds a lot like (the semi-mythical ideal of) traditional beat policing.
The difference being that beat cops did not actually have all of that social service, keeping-an-eye-on-things stuff as part of their jobs. Some of them did it because they had neighborhood affinity, some of them did it because they wanted to (goodness of their hearts and/or believing it kept the peace), but it wasn't the actual job.
A good friend of mine does street outreach to the homeless for a very small organization, and I'll admit that what she does informs my thinking, even though I know she's an unusual person. But interacting with the broader array of people in a community doesn't require such unique talents. You'd need supervisors who were pretty talented, sort of like a good principal, but the everyday job is mostly being visible, approachable, and keeping track of things a bit. Maybe it's a fantasy, but I think often about an old BdL post where he talks about IIRC Justinian and legibility--whether the Emperor in Byzantium could read and therefore rule the provinces. How does the state know what's happening in neighborhoods? I think that, in modern cities, that knowledge is severely compromised, relying on dubious data gathering, squeaky wheel phone calls, and a limited number of politically-connected people with specific agendas/POVs. Neighborhood groups were the post-1960s answer, but they don't work. Lord knows NextDoor can't be the answer. So what is?
This trope has been driving me insane. Especially since, AFAICT, there is/was no transmission from the slave patrol-descended police forces of the South to the extremely problematic urban forces of the North & West. Darryl Gates didn't intern under Bull Connor.
A lot of urban legends are spreading about how everything under the sun in the US is rotten at its core because it's related to slavery. Now, this is true of quite a lot of things, but it turns into complete hopelessness in some quarters. Also, some things are bad despite not being related to slavery.
Example: The Star-Spangled Banner. The third verse expresses disdain for "the hireling and slave" and celebrates America defeating said people. This entire verse is about celebrating the defeat of the British. "Hireling" means mercenary and "slave" refers to the British army being mere pawns of the King, unlike the free men fighting for America. Probably not the best word choice even then, but it rhymes with "grave".
Nobody even knows the second verse.
During the Battle of the Bulge, sentries would demand soldiers sing the second verse and capture everyone who got it right.
How do civilians with guns fit into abolishing the police? I don't like how many people carry weapons. It's one thing to call a social worker to deal with a drunk angry guy, but what do you do with a drunk angry guy waving a gun? Is it implicit in this conversation that guns are being reduced somehow?
I got an e-mail from Ed Markey about a Senate Resolutuon against qualified immunity. He claims that the doctrine is contrary to the Civil Rights Act of 1871. I don't know enough about the law to know if that's so, but I think it would be worth it to reach out to your Senator.
119: lep disproportionately commit dv.
bc of our cultural insanity re guns, the gun control movement is reduced to harm mitigation.
an effective harm mitigation policy in our benighted circs is to require gun surrender by dv perpetrators. but lep lobbying makes this politically impossible *unless* lep are exempt.
if we eliminate lep exemptions we'd have fewer guns floating around in the hands of violent misogynists.
in addition you might want to explore the thinking of those, particularly by of woc, who explore, analyze & advocate for non-carceral policies to address dv.
119: lep disproportionately commit dv.
I was curious to see what the numbers looked like and, in case anyone else wants to know, here's what I found.
As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, "Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general." Cops "typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim's safety," the summary continues. "This 'informal' method is often in direct contradiction to legislative mandates and departmental policies regarding the appropriate response to domestic violence crimes." Finally, "even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution."
What struck me as I read through the information sheet's footnotes is how many of the relevant studies were conducted in the 1990s or even before. Research is so scant and inadequate that a precise accounting of the problem's scope is impossible, as The New York Times concluded in a 2013 investigation that was nevertheless alarming. "In many departments, an officer will automatically be fired for a positive marijuana test, but can stay on the job after abusing or battering a spouse," the newspaper reported. . . .
...
A chart that followed crystallized the lax punishments meted out to domestic abusers. Said the text, "Cases reported to the state are the most serious ones--usually resulting in arrests. Even so, nearly 30 percent of the officers accused of domestic violence were still working in the same agency a year later, compared with 1 percent of those who failed drug tests and 7 percent of those accused of theft."
Law Enforcement definitely, I'm guessing the P is Personnel.
Somewhere along the way I figured out it must be Law Enforcement Police. Oh well.
Anyway, to be more serious, I don't see how 121 answers 119. I'm not saying that drunk angry people with guns are a reason that we need police. I'm saying that if we're crafting an argument that we don't need the police, what's the framework for handling drunk angry people with guns?
Does it mean that abolish police movements are inextricably tied to the gun control movement, or is there a method of handling these situations without dealing with the fact that the drunk angry person has a gun in the first place?
Even if we need police, we don't need so damn many of them.
I live in a little town of about 500 residents about ten miles from the next nearest little town. There was a demand by many residents that we needed a town cop. I suggested and carried out a crime survey from the residents of town and discovered there had been two crimes committed in the last 30 years. Two chainsaws had been stolen. They were not satisfied with these results. They said something could happen so we still need police. Fortunately they were voted down.
Today's illustration of why we really don't want cops performing social worker duties:
Indigenous woman killed by Edmunston police during wellness check
That's some Orwellian headline.
At a related city council meeting a resident complained she was worried about crime because people were out walking around town after dark. I informed her that I walked around town almost every night and I never saw anyone.
Obviously, she's worried about you.
My neighborhood is full of people walking around after dark, mostly emptying their dogs.
Does it mean that abolish police movements are inextricably tied to the gun control movement . . .
I think it does, but I certainly can't speak for the movement.
Drunk/angry people with guns should be handled by unarmed police.
That the police are *not* in the top-10 most dangerous professions is a tell. They should be progressively disarmed until they get back in there.
As long as we're being radical, we could also improve the safety of other dangerous professions!
133, 138: Oh hell no. Socialist/anarchist gun culture is a huge thing.
That the police are *not* in the top-10 most dangerous professions is a tell. They should be progressively disarmed until they get back in there.
This reminds me, a while back I was mulling over a terrible argument* (unlikely to convince anyone, and likely to offend most people) that I found interesting. Here is where I started:
I was thinking about the argument that life begins at conception and that any abortion involves terminating a life. I realized that, the law does allow for cases in which somebody can choose to end a person's life without suffering consequences.
For example, what if we thought of pregnant women as being similar to police officers, in that the responsibility that they take on may involve making decisions of life of death for other people.
One of the arguments for why the police have the discretion to use force (including potentially lethal force) is that they also accept a great deal of risk in their job. Attempting to quantify the level of risk I see that 144 police officers were killed in the line of duty in 2018.
As far as I can tell there are ~800K law enforcement officers in the US. That means the number killed was 18 per 100,000 (over a 12 month period).
The maternal mortality rate in the US is somewhere between 17 and 26 per 100,000.
So being pregnant is way more dangerous than being a police office. Pregnant women should be allowed to use lethal force to protect themselves
* Somewhat related to comments LB has made here, but I can't blame her for this.
133, 138: Oh hell no. Socialist/anarchist gun culture is a huge thing.
That's true. It's not a vision for defunding police that I, personally, find attractive, but I'm sure it's out there.
Now I'm wondering how many violinists are shot by the police.
hg on my little phone keyboard i offer the following -
what's the context of your drunk with a gun sitch? you might want to figure out how much *reported* violence of that type is male violence against a female intimate partner. if iyou find out it's a substantial chunk, add the unreported incidence.
(and then add some more male violence inflicted on women by lep when there is no pre-existing intimate relationship. like being raped after being taken into custody, or sexually assaulted by lep aftercoming in contact with lep by making a dv complaint.)
these aren't trivial proportions of the violent crimes committed in the us. so yes i think the lowest possible bar of gun control is involved, taking their guns away is important.
also, there is just a *lot* of thinking and work out there, much of it by woc, about non-carceral ways to address violence in our communities. check it out!
an
Socialist/anarchist gun culture is a huge thing.
So there would still be armed police, they would just wear black instead of blue.
I guess "Black is the new blue" would have been a pithier formulation.
Anyway, I think heebie and dq are talking past each other. I take heebie's question to be more about maintaining public order and safety, while dq is talking more about crime control and prevention. Both are important functions that are currently entrusted mostly to the police, and both would need to be addressed somehow or other in a world without police, but they're different.
I'll admit that I don't understand how to get at the hardest 5% of the problem and maybe a crew of people authorized to use violence are necessary. I suggest that we solve that problem last.
Megan, IIRC the two times you've described calling the police were both for property crimes. If you lived in a neighborhood with a third world country murder rate, do you think you'd still think the violence would come last?
Nathan, what's the plan for recruiting the people who are supposed to go interdict drunk gun toters while being unarmed themselves?
well well well. And indeed, gswift's question comes up:
"If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police, I invite you to reflect," Bender wrote in a Tuesday tweet. "Are you willing to stick with it? Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?"
hg's hypo was a drunk angry guy with a gun! and i am abso fucking lutely talking about maintaining public order and safety! if your concern is angry drunk men with guns i'm saying a whole hell of a lot of that category of crime is men committing violence against their intimate partners and dependants. and guess who is disproportionately represented among perpetrators of this important category of violent crimes hg is worried about? the fucking cops! and introducing more of them-with their propensity towards misogynistic violence-into the problem set of angry drunk man with gun has a checkered history at best.
and to say it loudly for those in the back maybe ponder 1) this untethered angry drunk guy with a gun - who is he threatening in your mind if *not* his intimates? i mean exactly how common/likely is this crime outside the dv context? is it angry drunk armed robbers or forgers or fraudsters i'm supposed to picture? and 2) why the hell aren't violent crimes against intimate partners and dependants a public order and safety issue?
i've thought about this particular piece of things bc i live with a smart experienced gun control advocate (ret.) whose policy proposals re gun surrender by dv perpetrators were heavily lobbied against by the cops until the cops got their fucking exemption. that's why i responded to hg with some detail.
i am not going on re alternative policy proposals for non-carceral approaches bc i am not as knowledgeable and also bc hg is an adult with access to search engines and lastly bc my god for once could someone read "hey woc do interesting things here" and think oh wow cool let me check that out.
all the swears brought to you by this magnificent thread: https://twitter.com/monaeltahawy/status/1268557509767434242?s=19
😏
Cops are more receptive to non carceral DV alternatives than I would guess many of you think. Mandatory arrest on anything qualifying for DV is the norm for quite a long time now. All the cops I know think it's a stupid approach.
DV related consequences of body cams? Upside: much harder for LE to get something like a DUI or DV swept under the rug. Downside: much harder to direct low income families towards non jail solutions and resources.
who is he threatening in your mind if *not* his intimates? i mean exactly how common/likely is this crime outside the dv context?
Besides DV the biggies are disputes outside of bars, clubs, large parties.
I don't think police abolition means "no public employee should ever confront an armed private person with their own weapon," but armed confrontation cannot be the model everything is built on.
We could theoretically do the needed reforms linearly/incrementally, but never with the leadership/culture LEAs have now.
I do think it's a bit evasive when I see people elevate fixing the underlying social conditions of crime as if we wouldn't still want some kind of reactive institution to be around, but it's true we need to put a shit-ton more resources into the preventive social side.
hiring preference for graduates of the jurisdiction's public schools would maybe be a good thing
Not specifically to this idea or to LB, but to the general idea of recruiting from inside policed demographics:
1. On its own this doesn't appear to do much of anything, witness HK or the minority-white city police departments you all complain about.
2. Such recruiting exposes the police to intimidation or infiltration by organized crime. TBC, I imagine this would be a trivial problem in most places, but would still need to be accounted for. Such accounting would involve really robust internal investigations and intelligence, which you want anyway for all the other problems.
Cops doing an amazing job of keeping the streets clear of mildly confused elderly men who are unconscionably remaining upright: https://twitter.com/sikhprof/status/1268717861641564160?s=21
Note the care and diligence with which the servers and protectors spring into action to help. Heroes, truly.
I don't think DQ and I are talking past each other, either. She more-or-less satisfactorily answered my question with:
also, there is just a *lot* of thinking and work out there, much of it by woc, about non-carceral ways to address violence in our communities. check it out!
which I took to mean this is a legitimate issue that takes some careful thought, and isn't readily answered.
I know cops like to use the word "LEO" because it conveniently combines police and other law enforcement who technically aren't police into a handy term, also it sounds cool. Is "LEP" the equivalent that people use who don't like the police?
it's what i inconsistently use bc default is bad phone typing. call 'em cops, don't particularly care tbh.
151, 158: Okay, fair enough. Glad that exchange worked out.
Can we go back to calling them the fuzz?
156: That proposition might have some good effects in smaller jurisdictions like Ferguson. Already happening in a lot of big cities. NY City, Chicago, LAPD, all minority white police departments. I haven't actually looked for data, but anecdotally I'm pretty confident in saying these aren't a bunch of private school kids getting hired on.
162: For me, if you announce my entrance to a stop or any scene with a reference to "the fuzz", you've already dramatically increased your odds of getting out of there with no legal consequences.
Megan, IIRC the two times you've described calling the police were both for property crimes. If you lived in a neighborhood with a third world country murder rate, do you think you'd still think the violence would come last?
Well, I read Ghettoside, so I understood the concept that extralegal violence is the result of under-policing.
But at this point, I have so many objections that I don't know where to start.
1. Police don't get there in time to prevent violence. They arrive after, or not, if you aren't in the rich white neighborhood.
2. This week we're exploring whether the police reduce violence, on net. The answer appears to be No.
3. It would be unconscionable for me to call the police at this point. I could get someone killed. I nearly didn't the other night, but my friend had her catalytic converter stolen twice, so I did and I haven't heard that anyone got hurt because of it. That was last week though. Now I wouldn't.
4. The people who do live in the neighborhoods with the high violence rate are telling society to defund policing; maybe they would like the type of good policing described in Ghettoside, but it doesn't appear that we can get there from here.
I'll also give the evasive answer that Minivet dislikes. I want to see the results of about a thousand times more of all the preventative things before I'd need to decide what circumstances would convince me of the remaining need for a small portion of cops that are authorized to use force.
Reference for cop violence, which I evidently didn't close.
Right now my favorite incremental reform proposal is paying civil settlements out of the police pension fund. But the new one I saw tonight is to seize police pension funds for victim restitution. Tomorrow I'll suggest that to my state legislator.
Gswift, do cops realize how much damage they've done to themselves this week?
168.2 Yeah, there's been a major shift in the public perception of the police. I'm amazed to see it.
Remember that UC Davis cop who casually pepper sprayed Occupy protesters. He was everywhere, then nowhere.
I do remember that. There were no lessons learned. (Or, maybe there were, for U.C. Davis. Lessons that didn't make it as far as U.C. Santa Cruz this past spring.)
I must be misreading the quote in 150, because I can't come up with a reading that is not astoundingly racist.
99, 100: Huh, de gustibus as always. I'd have said the lesson of The Leftovers that paid off and made Watchmen so excellent was "stop after one season if that's all you've got." S1 was coherent, somehow believable, and for me, so emotionally potent I for once couldn't bear to binge. After that, it was like "let's take the plots in enough nonsensical directions that people will just assume everything is symbolic in some profound way that doesn't bear examination." I almost couldn't keep watching but I liked the acting a lot so I soldiered on. S1, though. That was some unnerving, relevant-feeling shit.
The people who do live in the neighborhoods with the high violence rate are telling society to defund policing
Source? (I don't have time to read the Granta piece now, but on the face of it it doesn't cover that claim at all.)
American rates of gun homicide seem to me to make any discussion of an unarmed police force completely unrealistic. There just aren't enough community minded would-be suicides to staff such an institution. Demilitarising an armed police force is a much more attainable goal. But that's a cultural thing, and thus, by definition, a slow and incremental change.
I suppose that if the police were only armed with "sub-lethal" or less lethal weapons -- tasers, plastic bullets, tear gas and so on -- there might be fewer deaths, but it is easy to imagine a culture in which there was just as much brutality. So the problem isn't primarily the guns, except, perhaps, in some of the DV cases that DQ cites. Even then, the vast majority cannot involve shooting the victims.
Also, while recruitment from the communities policed does stop urban areas being policed from the suburbs, it need not on its own do anything about violence. In communities where violence, especially between men, is a recognised form of communication, the police recruited from such backgrounds will communicate that way too. [This is not a disguisedly racist point: in England, at least until recently, it was a class thing]
I suppose that if the police were only armed with "sub-lethal" or less lethal weapons -- tasers, plastic bullets, tear gas and so on -- there might be fewer deaths, but it is easy to imagine a culture in which there was just as much brutality.
That sounds like a real improvement? I mean, brutality bad, but death worse.
174 me.
In general ISTM that much of the American problem is that police forces are too numerous and too small, and especially too tribal -- self-reproducing, -regulating, -protecting. To my mind that calls for less localism, bigger forces covering wider areas, more career tracks allowing geographical movement. None of which necessarily, or should, preclude local recruitment, but I think you need both.
US police seem to have no difficulty needlessly killing people with tasers, batons, vehicles, bar hands...
AFAIK almost all developed countries have armed police, but none of them have violence like America.
bare hands. I'm not sure what bar hands are, but they sound dangerous.
US police seem to have no difficulty needlessly killing people with tasers, batons, vehicles, bar hands...
Nor do UK police for that matter. And they are at least as racist as US police, if not more so.
But having a population without guns means IIRC that the UK is about as violent as the US but far less murderous. Why shouldn't the same be true of police forces?
AFAIK almost all developed countries have armed police, but none of them have violence like America.
The US certainly has a much higher rate of killings by police than other developed countries: 4.66 per million per year, in the company of DRC-Congo and Angola and Nigeria; most other developed countries are down below 1 per million per year. But police violence generally would be much harder to quantify.
I definitely think, and I've said this before, that getting rid of the guns is a prerequisite for getting rid of police guns, as well as being necessary in itself.
||
Has any interviewer/interviewee pairing got further up their own arseholes than this one?
I would have needed rather more than one valium to keep a straight face throughout.
According to Helen Lewis, from whose Substack newsletter I pinched this, they later married.
|>
177: How much nepotism is there in police forces? My anecdotal impression is "a lot", but I don't know for sure.
Further to 181.last, I note with surprise that this means you're more likely to be killed in the US by a police officer than you are to be killed in Japan or Singapore by anyone.
183: Holy shit, I loved that interview. If all interviews were that deranged I would read them all the time.
re: 181.last
As far as I can tell, the UK rate of death by police -- not just including shootings but including deaths in custody, deaths by taser, deaths while being restrained, etc -- is something like 0.27 people per million per annum. The disparity is vast.
Shootings alone the UK number is so low it's basically zero. Typically something like 3 people a year are shot by police, in the entire country of 65 million people. There are years when no-one is shot by the police.
Shootings alone the UK number is so low it's basically zero.
Also for Germany.
I think about this a bit, on a family/personal level, rather than just in terms of wider society, race, etc.
I have a younger close family member who has a history of mental illness, which has sometimes included doing some things that could reasonably be perceived as threatening or dangerous. He has been forcibly detained by police several times, but also, picked up by police and taken to hospital when he phoned them himself in the grips of distress, and, at one point, repeatedly retrieved from a house* where he'd become obsessed about some religious/numerological thing about the house number. He's a 6ft 4, 250lb guy with a shaved head. He's not just theoretically a bit scary looking to someone easily intimidated.
In pretty much all of those situations, including ones in which he was threatening to the police, he was treated with care and with delicacy and tact. Including, for example, the police seating him in the front of the car when taking him to hospital, to make clear to him that they weren't judging him or treating him as a criminal. When he was retrieved from the strangers house, even, they treated him really well.
If we were in the US, he'd almost certainly have been killed.
* he didn't know the people who lived there
172: "If you are a comfortable white person asking to dismantle the police, I invite you to reflect," Bender wrote in a Tuesday tweet. "Are you willing to stick with it? Will you be calling in three months to ask about garage break-ins? Are you willing to dismantle white supremacy in all systems, including a new system?"
Is your worry about racism that this assumes it will be people of color breaking into garages? Because I don't read it that way. I think what's being argued is that people of color who are committed to police abolition know what they're getting into, especially in a city with the economic and physical segregation Minneapolis has. Comfortable white people need to think about what this may mean in their own lives, that they won't be able to rely on the police in ways they comfortably had before as a tradeoff for the police no longer killing people. Is that going to sound like an easy tradeoff when it means your car gets rifled through when you leave it unlocked overnight or someone takes your porch decorations (as comes up CONSTANTLY on my old neighborhood listserv, and typically the people caught on security camera have been white, as are all the people complaining) and you have to figure out how to deal with that yourself in an ethical way? Are you willing to give up the policing that benefits you to get rid of the parts that are wrong? That seems like an important question to ask and I don't read it as racist. (I also don't think comfortable white people are the only ones who need to reflect on that, but I didn't read that as implicit in Bender's statement either.)
190: All of the interpretations I could come with on my own were incredibly bad. If she means a temporary interruption in policing (so literally, the police won't be able to respond three months from now because that's when the big re-org happens), then that makes sense.
Though it's a weird point to emphasize. In the TV show "Galavant", one of the characters tries leading a village in rebellion against an awful ruler with a song. In the beginning they're all fired up to join, but the leader's lyrics keeps emphasizing that the chances are good that they will all die in the attempt. Slowly all the followers drop away until he's all alone. This is like that.
189: That's amazing that under those circumstances, you feel that he's consistently been well treated. That kind of answers my question from the other thread.
153.1: This isn't the least bit surprising. Of all criminal behaviors, domestic violence may be the one that police traditionally have taken the least seriously. This may be related to the statistics cited in 127.
It was because of this that so-called carceral feminists pushed for rules for mandatory arrests. It's not surprising that cops don't appreciate having their discretion taken away, but that may be for good or bad reasons.
re "abolitionism" -- the abolitionist I'm most familiar with is Mar/ iame Ka / ba. dq has cited to her work. She seems to me to be an amazing person that does a lot of good in the world.
Having listened to her being interviewed a few times, my understanding is that her version of abolitionism is a rebranding of anarchism. I'd be curious whether the avowed anarchists of Unfogged agree.
Rebranding sounds odd to me, but very tightly linked, yes. It's the same idea (and god knows I shouldn't speak for anarchists because I'm not one) of devolving power from a central authority authorized to use violence to community structures that get their power from the consent of the people participating.
195: So Ferguson and Minneapolis and Buffalo don't have elected governments?
Ferguson elected a government that decided to fund itself by fines on minority group members. It was explicit in preying on the people it was also inflicting violence on.
Democracy without rights for all is a fucking disaster.
I think you should have a dedicated federal internal affairs agency with agents embedded in every force of any size (and the pissy little forces consolidated until they're big enough for this to make sense). The agents move around the country, their career paths independent of the organizations they investigate. I assume the DOJ and some state agencies do some of this, but patchily.
From Josh Marshall, an example of what non-police community law enforcement would look like, from an area in the U.S. where police are few and far between (although the police do show up at the end).
I don't think it would be an improvement.
197-8: Exactly. That's what decentralization and democracy appear to have defaulted to in too many jurisdictions.
re: 192
My own experiences with the police are somewhat mixed. I remember being thrown in the back of a police van as a teenager and threatened to "confess" to some bullshit about a burglary that clear had nothing to do with us. Other friends had similar experiences. Also a few experiences of them being somewhat dismissive when I reported some stuff.
But, there's quite a few positive ones, too, not always even when you'd best expect it, either.
I remember a friend calling the police when he was burgled. My friend was a long-haired stoner muso type. The police turned up at the same time I did. My friend, stressed at being robbed, had forgotten he'd left a load of drug paraphernalia around. The police went through the whole thing pointedly ignoring the ash-tray, the board where he rolled his spliffs, etc. One of them made eye contact with me and then looked pointedly at the stuff, but they didn't do anything about it. Made some conversation about his hi-fi, asked him about his band, and left.
The cops where I'm from (if, hypothetically, they had ever shown up) would have made eye contact, pointedly winked, and taken the weed.
Is that going to sound like an easy tradeoff when it means your car gets rifled through when you leave it unlocked overnight or someone takes your porch decorations
Dude. That's constant for us (car rifled twice in the past two weeks) and we do have cops. Cops don't prevent things like that. There's no trade-off.
The abolitionist theory is that people are doing that shit to get money for drugs. So vastly expand addiction services and decriminalize drugs. If they aren't doing that to get money for drugs, but are doing it because they need money, institute UBI. Again.
After fixing addiction and poverty, then see if there are still people rifling cars and stealing porch decorations maliciously or recreationally and decide whether the solution is policing.
Nextdoor exists so that people can report teenagers standing near cars.
Not sure if this has been mentioned here before, from an interview with Nixon aide and Watergate convict John Ehrlichman.
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
I haven't actually gone deeply into what police abolition means, but like any body of work, I don't have to assume it means the dumbest, most reductive interpretation. Even before reading a lot, I can guess that it doesn't mean 'After Firing Day, it will be all anarchy and vigilantes!'.
In February when I had my car broken into (ran into Whole Foods to buy one item and didn't think to bring my bag with me) the police said to call the non-emergency number and they'd call me back later. Got a phone call about 4 hours later, no cop left their desk in the entire process.
you have to figure out how to deal with that yourself in an ethical way?
I need the movie of this now. Unfogged sets out to find the guy who robbed it and...address his emotional problems in an ethical way. It's Unfogged's distinct take on the tropes of the classic Western.
Unfogged sets out to find the guy who robbed it and...address his emotional problems in an ethical way
There is a story in the archive (which I do not have time to find now) about the time somebody broke into my house.
I had cops show up a couple of hours after I was burgled once. Nothing useful happened, although they did imply my absent roommate was a prostitute (asked what she did for a living while holding up some of her sexy underwear the thieves had scattered.)
I will say that the time I was mugged at gunpoint the cops showed up fast. Maybe a couple minutes for multiple cars. But not fast enough to catch the guy. They then spent a while obliquely saying that I should call the cops whenever I saw black people in my neighborhood, and that it's a problem that people in Berkeley don't do that because they don't want to be racist. Then they arrested a random black guy who was much too tall and didn't have my bike. Never did get my bike back (or the $120, but that's no surprise). Then two months later the police stopped me for (perfectly safely) jaywalking and fined me (and at least six other people in couple minutes it took them to write a ticket) another $120.
I think if a cop ticketed me for jaywalking it would take me a very very long time to understand what was going on. That is such a bizarre thing to treat as illegal.
214: Didn't Giuliani try to ticket jaywalkers for a few months? Yes, 1998. Link on police resistance to the directive.
I have also been fined $120 for jaywalking in Berkeley. Broken windows!
Hah, Randy Mastro quoted in that article. A man who has shouted at me a lot.
Berlin police found and returned a bicycle of Kid One's that was stolen from the nearby commuter train station. That's a minor miracle. The two or three other times a bike has been stolen, we've filed a report for insurance purposes (and the insurance paid up! German organizations tend to do what they purport to do) and nothing further happened.
I have returned a thing or two to the nearish precinct. One was a set of keys that Kid Two found out on the frozen lake. The desk officer said we should wait for an all-clear from the city before going out on the lake (there were dozens if not hundreds of people out on it when we were). I asked if they ever officially said that frozen lakes were safe. Desk officer said, Well no, and I said, Well then, and that was that.
On the other hand, a Berlin cop just got busted for giving internal information to AfD, the current semi-Nazi party. On the other other hand, he did in fact get busted.
218: this is the guy who was a former East German border guard, right?
To be clear, I'm on the dismantling/abolition side and was just trying to restate the quoted tweet from 150. I should have just linked to that tweet, which I'm doing now so you can read what comes after that. She's saying shit is going to stay racist unless white people stop being racist, dismantling or no dismantling.
219: I don't follow it closely enough to say whether "Der Beamte Detlef M. soll Mitglied der AfD sein..." is a former border guard for the DDR.
https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/kontraste/anis-amri-polizei-berlin-afd-101.html
Demilitarising an armed police force is a much more attainable goal. But that's a cultural thing, and thus, by definition, a slow and incremental change.
A ... cultural thing, you say? The police are militarized culturally, sure, but also by the whole thing where they both have, and have to use if they want to keep, literal military equipment.
AIHMHB I've actually been rescued by a police officer. As I was exiting City Center Mall (no longer exists!) on my way back to work after lunch, a young man came up to me and punched me in the face. As I slowly processed what was going on, he punched me in the face again. While I was still trying to figure out what to do, a police officer ran over and tackled and handcuffed the young man.
She's saying shit is going to stay racist unless white people stop being racist, dismantling or no dismantling.
As always, the problem with America is Americans.
214: It was also a very NYC type of jaywalking, highly analogous to crossing a street with no cars coming when walking along an avenue. (In NYC it's actually rude NOT to jaywalk in that situation, while in downtown Berkeley the sidewalks are wide enough relative to the number of people that you're not really blocking traffic by not jaywalking.) There were like 8 cops there handing out ticket after ticket but they were still only ticketing like a quarter of the jaywalkers because they count stop new people while they were writing a ticket.
222 Well first you have to fight and win the relevant election on a platform of taking those toys away, surely.
220: The whole context sounds much better. (NextDoor should be destroyed.) But the original tweet sounds terrible. People calling the police because someone broke into their garage are not automatically against dismantling white supremacy in all its forms.
Loosely related, but I read LB's description of police abolition a couple of days ago and I thought "well, that makes sense". But then I read a bunch of arguments more recently on the Other Place, and all of the arguments were of the form "Wait, are you saying we should have no police? What happens when someone gets murdered?" And then the reply is usually 15 paragraphs of blah, blah, blah. Now, I agree with the blah, blah, blah, but it made me wonder -- are liberals just bad at politics? How do we always end up adopting some edgy slogan that we have to immediately backtrack from?
Do you know what was good politics? Medicare for All. Green New Deal. You say those, and people want to know what you mean. Say "Abolish the Police" and people want to know what you're smoking.
Well, score one for edna k., I guess!
223: AIHMHB, my first boss went there most days over lunch. She liked her shopping. Also, I saw Les Wexner in that mall.
She would also go to Caribou Coffee every morning and get a large coffee and ask for two cups to keep her hands from burning. Then she's pour half of the coffee into the other cup and fill both cups with milk.
I actually think Medicare for All is a bad slogan because what they really want is more like Medicaid for all but wanted it to sound palatable to middle-class people with vague good feelings about grandma or whatever. This is a big sticking point with a lot of disability activists I know, not just me being obnoxious (for a change).
Maybe they're trying to win over doctors because they get paid more for Medicare?
232 and 233: Private practice docs generally don't take Medicaid, and the rates are too low for the most part. Most places make it work by overcharging the commercially insured.
That's why the police have been knocking over the elderly. That way they only beat up people with good health insurance.