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iNow

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Posts posted by iNow

  1. Posted

    5 minutes ago, MigL said:

    Have we now replaced police authority with mob authority ?

    Perhaps a better, more situationally relevant question is: Have we given police too much authority to serve without either check or balance as judge, jury, and executioner? Have we abandoned our constitutional right to due process under the law in favor of quick conclusion at the receiving end of a standard issue field pistol in the hands of an underpaid, undertrained representative of the state?

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  2. Posted

    Expecting an announcement tomorrow or Wednesday. 

    Last weekend, Michigan Governor, Gretchen Whitmer flew to Wilmington, Delaware so she’s at least under consideration. Karen Bass is apparently who Pelosi is hoping to advance. 

    I’m still leaning toward Susan Rice. 

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  3. Posted

    As the troll has been placed on involuntary holiday, perhaps now we can return to the actual topic.

    Will the New York effort to dissolve the NRA work or lead to any meaningful change? I'm not optimistic on that front. 

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  4. Posted

    1 hour ago, drumbo said:

    Once a riot is out control, maximizing the police presence is almost certainly the only way to maximize the protection of property, and that is juxtaposed with minimizing the number of harmful interactions with rioters.

    Interestingly, this too is mistaken. Decades of evidence shows rather consistently that the riots get more out of control and the property damage gets worse the more police are present.

    From 50 years ago:

    https://belonging.berkeley.edu/system/tdf/kerner_commission_full_report.pdf?file=1&force=1

    From 5 years ago: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/01/when-police-ratchet-up-the-force-riots-get-worse-not-better/

    And from 5 months ago: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/06/01/why-so-many-police-are-handling-the-protests-wrong

    Quote

    Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave—and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force—wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters—it doesn’t work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. 
    <...>
    There’s 50 years of research on violence at protests, dating back to the three federal commissions formed between 1967 and 1970. All three concluded that when police escalate force—using weapons, tear gas, mass arrests and other tools to make protesters do what the police want—those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent. 

     

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  6. Posted

    1 hour ago, drumbo said:

    I originally claimed that it was not possible to maximize both the protection of property and the potential to rehabilitate criminals, and that we needed to decide what should be prioritized in order make a logical and coherent policy. We can only maximize one or the other within a constraint where we do not allow the potential to rehabilitate criminals to fall below a certain level, or where we do not allow the protection of property to fall below a certain level.

    But this is untrue and remains a false dichotomy regardless of how frequently you reintroduce it

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  8. Posted

    31 minutes ago, drumbo said:

    Are you seriously claiming that additional interactions between suspects/criminals and police does not lead to a greater amount of negative outcomes for the suspects/criminals?

    No

    32 minutes ago, drumbo said:

    Your refusal to acknowledge that premise puts you at odds with most of the political left in the US at the moment,

    I’m really not bothered by being at odds with just about anyone, especially not with the political classes.

    I also am not refusing to acknowledge anything. I’m simply poking at obvious holes in your rather remedial and illogical arguments. 

    35 minutes ago, drumbo said:

    you just have a completely odd position which makes little sense.

    As I said. I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you. Would it perhaps be easier for you if I used fat crayons and construction paper instead? 

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  9. Posted · Edited by iNow

    More interactions with police increase the odds of a poor interaction occurring. That does not, however, mean additional interactions lead to negative outcomes. It’s not a function in the way approach, technique, and style of police engagement are.

    Hundreds of thousands of cops manage to have positive outcomes every day and often across their entire careers, so now you’ve added the hasty generalization error and confirmation bias to your use of fallacies. Just because you hear more about negative interactions on the news does not mean they’re occurring everywhere all of the time, yet that’s the core of your current position. While I acknowledge it’s more common in some communities than in others, violence with the police is the exception yet you keep asserting it’s the rule. 

    I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you. 

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  10. Posted

    11 minutes ago, drumbo said:

    More policing results in more confrontations between police and citizens, resulting in more deaths and injuries for them before they can be booked into any system.

    Those outcomes are not a function of how many police there are or how many interactions with police there are. Those outcomes are a function of how the interaction goes and what steps the officers take to de-escalate. 

    I’m hearing / reading you just fine, but merely repeating inaccurate points and incorrect assertions doesn’t magically render them valid. 

    14 minutes ago, drumbo said:

    maximizing the protection of property in an absolute sense likely involves a well funded police force.

    Perhaps, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with rehabilitation or the original point you were trying (and failing) to make. Stop trying to move the goal posts. 

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  11. Posted

    17 minutes ago, CharonY said:

    In other words, it would make sense to defund the areas dedicated to the most aggressive measures (say, military equipment, heavily armed plainsclothes units and so on) in favour of hiring folks that get to know the folks that they are policing.

    Or hire more social workers and substance abuse & related counselors (or all of the above) 

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  16. Posted

    It was counter intuitive to me, too. Where I landed as I worked through that in my own mind was that they want “effective” police presence and “appropriate” police presence and “just” police presence, while in parallel not just wanting more of the “current” or “bad” or “asymmetric” police presence. 

    Just because the umpires in a baseball game aren’t calling balls and strikes fairly doesn’t mean we can’t still want to play or attend a game. I suspect that sentiment largely applies here on the policing question. 

    1

  19. Posted · Edited by iNow

    You know me better than that, MigL. We’re now on page 7 of this thread. My position should be clear and has been articulate.

    Summarized:

    Defund the police is stupid branding for a set of otherwise good ideas. 

    The idea is to focus dollars into approaches which are more effective and which more efficiently help us improve. Throwing the mentally handicapped and drug addicted and poverty stricken into cells and fining the poor forcing them to pay into a system thousands of dollars they simply don’t have doesn’t achieve that.

    The idea is to increase social and anti-poverty programs and reduce asymmetric punishment; to reduce the way black communities are more heavily punished for the exact same crimes committed by white communities. 

    The idea is to eliminate qualified immunity so police can still be held accountable for their actions when they do something wrong; so police are no longer treated as above the law in the US just because they’re a key part of the apparatus which enforces it. 

    Specifically to the survey, of course people want their communities to be safe. Of course they want help from the police when things go wrong. Of course they want bad actors removed from their environment. Those facts are not mutually exclusive with being tired of getting targeted by police or being treated asymmetrically by the justice system at large due solely to the color of ones skin.

    Yes, defund the police is a dumb slogan. It’s ignorant marketing and bad branding for a set of otherwise good ideas which would almost certainly help us to realize  and achieve a massively improved ROI if we actually implemented them.

    Also yes, of course people want the police to be more respectful. We all surely agree there, and that respect is critical. More than that, it’s foundational, but also currently lacking. Good policing is about trust and community, and respect is the glue which binds those things together. We need to reduce the funding for those who can’t be respectful and who fail to EARN that trust.

    So I sigh because so many of us keep focusing on HOW people are protesting and by doing so we keep ignoring the reasons WHY. Focusing on the HOW is a distraction. See also: The focus on Kapernick kneeling at football games instead of the focus on black families consistently being torn apart when US police officers keep murdering (or locking up for eye rolling reasons) key members of them.

    So what if the slogan is dumb? It’s not as dumb as the tea party morons who said “keep the governments hands off my Medicare!” When we focus on the slogan we forget the reason it’s being chanted or supported in the first place and we make it more likely that we’ll all simply continue on with the current unacceptable status quo.

    There is merit worth discussing on this topic, but we never will if we keep getting triggered when we hear/read the word “defund” and keep short circuiting the conversation any time that word gets introduced. Abolish. Defund. Whatever. We need to fundamentally improve how policing happens in the United States, and we need to transfer a significant amount of the revenues they receive instead into social, rehabilitation, and anti-poverty programs.

    It makes me sigh because even people I very much like, enjoy, and respect seem to keep doing it... to keep focusing on HOW the protests are happening instead of WHY.

    But sure... this is clearly all about me ignoring points which don’t conform to my personal narrative because I’m incapable of having a mature discussion on an online discussion forum. 🙄

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  25. Posted

    Simplest way to make NRA go out of business is not to "dissolve" them, but instead to take away their tax exempt non-profit status. Same outcome, fewer rage conversations with 2nd amendment worshipers 

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