As we wind down police forces, due to both the political climate and the ever shrinking pool of recruits; mass surveillance is the inevitable stop gap.
For the record, I’m not saying whether or not the movement is good or bad, I’m just saying it exists and it has enough political weight for the mainstream media to cover it. I am trying hard to be neutral even though our politics likely align
Why would the mainstream media waste its and our time covering a whacko fringe movement such as "the Earth is flat" rather than things that actually affect the world or the local community in a real way.
People who think the earth is flat, or we've never landed on the moon, or that the world will end when the Mayan calendar runs out of days, just don't matter and should not be recognized as if they do.
Nobody is winding down police forces, is what I said, not that you couldn't find some group of people on Twitter saying that we should. I'm not worried that any public school in the nation is going to teach about the atmosflat, and you don't need to worry about police abolition.
Yes, let’s completely ignore the Guardian article.
The difference between the two is that one is a source of amusement while the other group has already affected public policy and budgets. It’s estimated that there are 3 million flat earthers in the US, while there are approximately 50 million people who supported the defund the police movement in 2021.
Unlike the flat earth people, the defund the police populist movement actually has political clout and they have changed budgets for several police departments. If you stick your head in the ground, the progressive populists don’t magically go away
I think you might be on tilt. It's just a message board; I think we can be comfortable with what the thread says about our respective arguments, and wrap it up right here.
I am not on tilt. It’s more like you might have a problem ever admitting that you’re wrong even when it’s really obvious. You have nothing backing up your argument. The only thing that you’ve proven is that your ego is really fragile, and that you lean on personal insults when you’re losing arguments
You crossed into breaking the site guidelines far worse with this comment than anything else I've seen in this thread. That's not cool. Please don't do it again, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is.
All you're pointing out is that, amongst large groups of people, you can find (relatively) small numbers of people that share implausible beliefs. All anybody here is pointing out to you is that police departments aren't being wound down; the winding down of law enforcement is not, in fact, something we need to plan for or accommodate with technology.
Yes: they are a very small group of people, repudiated so decisively in the last Democratic primary cycle that Brandon Johnson had to run anti-defund in the Chicago mayoral runoff. Nobody is winding down the police. You've gone a little on tilt here.
This doesn't really mean much. People mean wildly different things by the term "defund", or by "redirecting resources". My municipality will start redirecting resources to non-police response in the coming year, in particular for after-the-fact responses to things like minor residential burglary (people stealing weed whackers from garages). Is that "defund"? People will say it is, but you know who else supports the move? Our local police department.
Police departments have been complaining for decades that they've been drafted into all sorts of roles they're not trained to do (or that are less important than the crime suppression role they're meant to have). Long before George Floyd, my cop acquaintances were complaining about how police are pulled into mental health wellness checking. The centerpiece of most named "defund" movements around the US has been non-police mental health response --- which, again, is something police generally agree with.
Here's one example [0]. I'm not sure what, if any, dent this makes relative to historical budget levels in US police forces, or if it truly counts as "winding down". But there are headlines
That’s two years old. Several of those cities have reversed course. NYC just gave a huge increase to the police, and a new Texas law forced Austin to refund. Others are mentioned as “planning to” which never happened.
Your linked article says they're struggling to hire enough cops. This seems like the opposite of winding down a department; they're attempting to grow.
No. Police forces have had shortages since the mid 2000s. It’s gotten worse since then. It’s been a regular news feature since about 2010. It’s old news
I think you should review how you came at this argument. 'Winding down' something and having a shortage of one of that thing's inputs are two very different concepts, and you seem to bounce back and forth between talking about it as a hiring problem vs an abolition effort.
Nobody is "winding down" their departments. At the absolute most, departments arent getting the same level of funding increases that theyre used to getting. Plus virtually all of the top national leaders, and all of the state/city level leaders are still pushing for overall increases in police funding.
Most people have no intention of "winding down" police forces. In fact, a lot of "defund the police" proposals would free up police resources that can then go toward catching criminals by not using them for things we don't need police involved in.
