How many baseball players get killed every year? Doctors? The only profession that has a higher murder rate is rapping in America.
If you tie their compensation to asset confiscation, you're going to have a lot more corruption. Cops getting paid based on what they take from citizens will only encourage them to seek out vulnerable people they can take from. And those who don't care about the rules will abuse it to enrich themselves. I agree that there's a racism problem. That's an even better reason to not tie police compensation to asset confiscation. Guess who they'll target? Respectfully, people should be able to carry as much cash as they want on them without having to worry about cops stealing it.
That’s only at funerals. Which is a super-ironic positive feedback loop. Although in reality, it’s more dangerous to be a country music fan. 60 kills and 400 others shot in one night might get you back way further than Sugarhill, and that was an actual gang!
Alex Parene follows up on the OP piece, and surmises that police are human and like the rest of us Lots of very smart (and even more not-so-smart) people have tried, over the years, to answer the question of what cops are for—whether they exist to keep us safe, to fight crime, to protect property, to enforce racial hierarchies, etc. I pose a simpler question: What do cops do? Having spent many years observing cop behavior, reading news about cops, and occasionally even asking them for help, I have come to a pretty simple but comprehensive answer: They do what is easy, and avoid what is difficult. Seen through that rubric, much cop behavior suddenly becomes much more explicable. Of all the improbable things about accused subway shooter Frank James’s last hours of freedom, the weirdest is how easy it is to imagine James still on the run, today, if he’d decided to do almost anything differently. Learning that he phoned in a tip on himself from a McDonald’s, and then that he eventually got tired of waiting there and left, was a sort of sublime punchline to the entire comic manhunt, in which New York City’s enormous and well-funded police department failed at basically every moment to stop or capture a dangerous criminal who literally told them where he was. Then, a few weeks later, another guy shot and killed a person on the Q. The shooter did so at what I’d consider, strategically, the worst time and place to kill someone on the Q: while it crossed the Manhattan Bridge, giving everyone on board both the time and ability to phone the police and have them ready to apprehend him the moment the train arrived in Manhattan. But when the train pulled into Manhattan, rest assured, the police were (according to one unconfirmed eyewitness) on the wrong platform. That shooter might still be on the lam, too, if he hadn’t turned himself in, an act the city authorities and a fame-seeking pastor with connections to the mayor apparently almost sabotaged. What Do Cops Do?
The point of policing is to enforce political ideas held by city and county leaders as well as generate maximum revenue. It's already been established in court police do not exist to serve and protect the public and in fact have no legal obligation to do so. It's also a fact that most crime isn't really solvable, it's simply not practical, for example, to expect to find stolen items unless the criminal is overwhelmingly stupid. Crime is supposed to be prevented at the family and community level, but that no longer happens. Families and communities need to return to shunning and humiliating criminals rather than ignoring and in some cases glorifying them. When every criminal has his friends and family in his corner saying "Free XYZ" then they can't turn around and complain about crime.
Doesn't the state decide who's a criminal? You said the point of policing is to "enforce political ideas held by the city/county." If I see those political ideas as hypocritical or just wrong, why wouldnt you ignore or glorify some of the people who are branded "criminal" by those people you see as fools, bankrupts and hypocrites?
In case no one has addressed this: NO. NO. NO. HELL NO. and Just NO. Worst idea I've heard in a long while. This goes on now and causes wholesale corruption and the unlawful seizure of private property. You may be innocent until proven guilty but your property is guilty and seized until you prove it innocent after spending thousands and thousands of dollars. Those Police so inclined know you won't fight for property worth less than the thousands and thousands. It is corruption inducing. Just no.
Its a bold move defending civil asset forfeiture, not even the most pro-law enforcement people on this board go there!
Because the way to change a law, let's use marijuana criminalization as an example, isn't to become a drug smuggler but to raise awareness, vote or perhaps even run as a candidate. Saying police exist to enforce political ideas is easily observable just by seeing which laws police are encouraged to enforce and which ones they are encouraged to ignore. Plenty of laws are ignored because the politics of the local government don't see them as important although they are written in the books the same as any other law. Anyways, the police are not your friends. Do not engage them unless you stand to benefit.
I dont think that's why people become drug smugglers. They do it because its a lucrative business and pays far more than "legit" jobs that will get you nowhere and keep you poor if you have little opportunity. And I dont know if people celebrate the drug smuggling so much as the material wealth and the prestige that it brings people in a society that glorifies wealth and power in general. Almost every gangster story is about trying to go "legit" after grabbing the money. There's really no difference in glorifying the guy who robs you with a gun or a guy who robs people with a pen.
Defund the police isn't a slogan opponents to this strategy came up with, it came from the proponents. With that said, I agree with this strategy. The police may do their job betters when they're actually asked to do their jobs, rather than spending so much of their time and resources rounding up confused psychiatric and dementia patients, drunks, and drug addicts.
I never said it was. I was answering regarding what the correct response to a law you don't believe in is. Not going to read the rest of your post as you obviously didn't read mine.
Do you know him? Have you ever spoken with him? I did some lobbying a few years back when he was a state senator.. we got him to sponsor some legislation. I spoke with him in depth, and therefore, I am in a slightly better position than you are to make an assessment. You don’t get to be mayor of NY by being dumb. He is one the shrewdest politicians in the nation.
I agree with the first part, but not the second. People have lost respect for police, teachers, and other government employees. But it is not because of the political discourse indicating that gov't is "bad or evil". At worst, many Americans think that government workers are lazy and/or incompetent. The real problem is that we've bred and raised a generation (or two) of self-righteous, entitled narcissists. Everyone places themselves not only at the center of their universe, but on a pedestal. "What I want is more important than what society (or anyone else) needs. If I decide to do something, then it is automatically right, and anyone who disagrees is automatically wrong." This is where road rage comes from. This is where diesel pickup truck drivers "rolling coal" on pedestrians comes from. Neither of these two things has anything to do with government, but has everything to do with not respecting fellow human beings. We've lost the concept of being willing to sacrifice for the common good. We've lost our sense of manners. We've lost our ability to empathize with other people. It used to just be teenagers and people in their early 20's who were like this--but people are not outgrowing their immaturity. Now you have adults who are helicopter-parenting their kids, demanding better grades from the teachers and going with their grown children on job interviews. Why? "Because I produced this child, and therefore he is someone special and he needs to be treated better than everyone else." Pure arrogance.
Yeah, I'm not seeing it. I'm not calling the man dumb, but shrewd politician is definitely not how I'd describe him.
Manners maketh the man Completely agree. Our National slogan should be “You’re not the boss of me” . Individual rights but dwindling individual responsibility and no value in the common good. Special interests and teams over country