Defunding My Mistake — LessWrong
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Confessions of an ex-ACAB • • Until about five years ago, I unironically parroted the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB) and earnestly advocated to…

Choice quote:

Putting “ACAB” on my Tinder profile was an effective signaling move that dramatically improved my chances of matching with the tattooed and pierced cuties I was chasing.

  • corbin@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    NSFW time! I am continually floored by the sheer lack of nuance that these folks have. Here, my guy is conflating three separate concepts:

    • ACAB: Police culture has the “thin blue line,” the concept that cohesive policing is the main force preventing modern society from collapsing into lawlessness and chaos. As a result, police cannot be trusted to respect non-police. Our friend here might benefit from knowing that ALAB as well, due to the oath that lawyers profess upon admission to the bar.
    • Defund the police: In the USA, many cities have steadily increased spending on police over the past century or so. This has not correlated with a drop in crime (and it can’t cause a drop in crime, since police respond to crime but don’t prevent it!) and so there is a call to reverse spending increases.
    • Militarization: Our friend doesn’t explicitly say it, but police have become more violent over the century as well, equipping themselves with ever-more-dangerous tools. This also isn’t correlated with a drop in crime, and some of those tools are illegal to use outside of war, leading to a call for partial disarmament.

    Don’t get me wrong; some law enforcement is necessary in a lawful society. Try having a trial court without a bailiff, for example. But it sounds like our dude is a recovering ancap, and he just can’t see shades of grey.

    • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      I spent ages writing a comment that I accidentally deleted (>_>) so apologies if this is a bit too long:

      I’ve read that a lot of violent urban crime in the US takes place in poor, majority-minority or majority-black neighbourhoods. Those neighbourhoods are “overpoliced and underprotected” areas where cops rarely respond to crime reports & rarely go unless they are conducting a raid in SWAT gear, & people rarely make crime reports either because they don’t expect the police to do anything or expect them to make things worse if they do turn up.

      Increase police funding, decrease police funding, it doesn’t change the approach the police take to those neighbourhoods & it doesn’t change the social, political or historic factors that determine the relationship between neighbourhoods and the police.

      & re: defunding, surely a libertarian should understand that government money is not a bottomless bucket…Some (not all) cities facing budget issues have increased police funding while cutting mental healthcare, social services or other parts of the safety net. this has 2 effects

        1. more people fall through the safety net, resulting in more crime. Poverty/adverse childhood experiences/untreated (mental) health problems => drug addiction & crime => traumatized, impoverished, addicted, parents who have to fight just to stay out of jail & keep custody of their kids => adverse childhood experiences as their kids grow up with absent, neglectful or bad parents &/or are farmed out to relatives, foster homes, shelters for homeless youth or juvenile detention with all the potential for abuse, trauma and induction into crime that those environments offer => the cycle continues. People talk about “virtuous spirals” in economics and sociology - well, this is the opposite.
        1. Police become first responders to every social problem as funding for emergency services and social services are cut - some crisis lines also automatically call the police. Police appear at scenes of poverty, homelessness, overdose or illness where their training is basically useless & where all they can really do is put someone in a jail cell or give them a fine. Worse than that, because of the “thin blue line” mentality (& “killology” style training), police turn up heavily armed at scenes where someone is suicidal, in severe distress or just behaving strangely, believing that it is better for them to kill that person than to be injured themselves. In “overpoliced and underprotected” areas, cops come in heavily armed, wearing kevlar or swat gear, & act more like an occupying military than police. Disabled & mentally ill people - particularly disabled or mentally ill black people - have been brutalized and killed by the police in these areas because their difference is seen as a sign of danger by trigger-happy police. And people who are the subject of repeated callouts due to mental health issues, addiction or minor crimes are treated with contempt by cops. All coppers aren’t bastards to everyone, all the time, but the people who see the most of them see the worst of them.
    • gerikson@awful.systemsEnglish
      41·
      1 year ago

      As a non-American unversed in American political rhetoric, “defund the police” always struck me as a weird call for action. Read without nuance it basically means “don’t pay for policing”, not “reduce the relative funding going to LE in favor of other funding”.

      • Mike Knell@blat.at
        4·
        1 year ago

        @gerikson It’s also really about changing the things that the police do get funded for over and above the fixed line items for salary, uniforms, thin blue line patches, squad cars, donuts etc. Fund them for better screening to weed out control freaks and all the other people who shouldn’t be cops. Fund them for week-long courses in situation management, unconscious bias, deescalation, and basic psychology with a passing grade a condition of continued employment. Fund them to train and maintain a small, highly professional and highly skilled tactical intervention unit rather than giving every bozo who can’t even write a ticket correctly a two-day course and a shotgun and calling them the SWAT team. Don’t fund them for what they are way overfunded for in the US - military surplus tanks, armoured cars, tactical gear, offensive weapons they should never need but will end up using anyway because they’re there, and poor quality paramilitary training. Properly fund community services, 24 hour mental health crisis teams and addiction / homeless / etc outreach. Build proper inter-agency responses to mental health crises. Do this and you’ll save more money and save more lives than pretending you’re in a real life Call of Duty.

        But hey, Chief says we can get a tank and a margarita machine out of the training budget instead of this classroom bullshit they want us to do! U-S-A! U-S-A!

      • maol@awful.systemsEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        it’s not a great slogan. In the summer of 2020 there was a mad rush to find a slogan that was radical enough to be credible but not too radical to be popular. It was a bodge.