Defunding police an overreaction
By Letter to the Editor on June 25, 2020.
Bowing to mob demands, the mayors of Los Angeles, NYC and Minneapolis cut funds to their police forces. This is one of the worst political ideas ever. It won’t reverse the powerlessness, the failed self-worth, the fear at being unable to successfully reverse an attack against one’s own person.
George Floyd attempted to make a purchase using an obvious counterfeit $20 bill. It was police business to apprehend him. But it was out of line to put a knee down and crush the life out of him.
We saw a lesser extreme with the May 4 Stormtrooper – a girl in a costume who began crying when officers trained guns on her. She, too, got the knee, disingenuously reported as “a minor injury that did not require hospitalization”: she was pressed into the pavement until her nose bled. Great visual. It should have ended when that plastic toy gun clattered. The online ridicule was fully earned.
But “defund the police?” That’s a nuclear option, blindly reactionary and way overblown. It’s impelled by a child’s-level desire to punish. Not just offending officers, but everybody else, too, who’d find themselves powerless and without lawful recourse. Truckers already refuse to deliver goods to Antifa’s unlawful Seattle stronghold.
The replacement enforcers act without the oversight of superior officers or a police commission. They have far fewer resources, almost no chain of command for accountability, little crime investigation ability, and want to wrap a case quickly. They’re primed for a rush to judgment on anyone they apprehend. The good news, for President Trump, is that this meltdown and the politics driving it occur in Democrat districts. He’ll offer the presidential election as a referendum on how they’re doing.
Police have a vital protective role. We enjoy the outcomes of their work without realizing its effort and cost. It’s thankless for them all, when any are exposed as wrongdoers. This inflamed, indignant demand, if met, would be only the beginning of an injustice inferno. Cancel culture has never been so stupid.
Tom Yeoman
Lethbridge
10-9
I agree defunding may be a overreaction but better controls are needed. I appreciate what law enforcement does and we definately need them. But we cannot continue to have police police it is not working. Internal police investigations are secretive and unlikely to see the light of day unless outside factors demand it. How do we do that? Bodycams are one route as long as there are strict controls on when they are active and who gets to view them. Someone who is involved in the incident MUST be given the opportunity to do that. Better civilian oversight is another good idea as long as we get people who don’t tow the party line. Transparency is lacking in investigations. We can’t have single word conclusions to them. I have read unfounded or justified in these decisions and wonder what brought them to these conclusions. We all have a lot of work to do and should do it an active and productive way, reactive decisions don’t tend to turn out well.
What we need is for the police to enforce the laws of the land as written by legislators and get out of being social workers, mental health workers, resource officers, etc., and then the so called “experts” who crap on the police for just about any perceived “injustice” will have to be accountable. The way things work now, the police are in the crosshairs of every situation. Let the mental health experts be the first thru the door. Let the social workers do the welfare checks. After all from the sidelines and after the fact are they not the real “experts”. Their degrees will tell you they are. Step up.
What heresy is this! Are you suggesting that the government actually properly fund social services? Goodness!
Fescue said:
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Are you suggesting that the government actually properly fund social services? Goodness!
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Fescue, since your rephrasing. I present a rephrasing of your comment that represents it in a more accurate and truthful manner:
Are you suggesting that someone should be forced to work and pay for someone else? Goodness!
So Fescue, how is forcing someone to work and pay for another not a fundamental human rights violation? How is that not a form of slavery?
If you are comparing paying taxes to slavery or a violation of human rights, I’m not in agreement. If you were to deescalate your metaphor to feudalism you might be on to something.
As for me, I’ve always been pleased to pay my fair share taxes and see this money help create a safe, healthy and informed society.
I think libertarians, in general, overplay their autonomy from society.
You voluntarily agree to work and pay for another, and that’s a wonderful thing. However, in a truly just and free society, no one would be FORCED to do so (as we are now). Your appeal to emotion logical fallacy of, “creating a safe, healthy, and informed society” is not only subjective and easily argued against, but it’s also irrelevant to my point.
BTW- You didn’t answer my question.
Oh, so it’s not taxes? You must mean raising a family. Again, I think it is a longshot to call the nuclear family a human rights violation, even if you have to work and pay for others.
My bad, as they say.
Of course you mean capitalism, where the product of your labour is expropriated by the owner of capital. Wage labour – being forced to work and pay the idle class. Maybe that is a human rights violation!
HUH? I have no idea what are you going on about. lol
It was a simple question, but you seem to be trying to answer it with bizarre tangents and labels. I’ll rephrase it into a specific example:
Let’s say you have a teen age addict child. Would you tell strangers that they’re going to have to give you money every week to pay for his apartment, food, etc, and if they don’t, they will go to prison? I don’t think you would. Yet, the government does.
Now of course, if people want to voluntarily pay for your addict child, then that’s their prerogative. However, forcing one to pay for your responsibility is “wrong”.
EDIT- Here’s a more blunt example:
Let’s say the person in question is an incarcerated pedophile. Why should someone be forced to pay to house them, feed them, and give them full health care? And that someone also includes their victims.
Here’s a personal example:
I donate to various kid charities, but I wouldn’t force others to do so. Why? Because it’s not their responsibility. They didn’t create that child, so they shouldn’t be forced to be responsible for what they didn’t cause.
We owe each other everything, Seth.
In the end, that’s all we have.
in this discussion it is imperative that we delve long and deep into how and why we have institutionalised policing. one will then need to consider what it is that causes the brunt of society’s ills. we will need to begin with poverty, as in what causes poverty (and please, it is rarely laziness) and what are the consequences of poverty.
as well, we need to consider the sundry moral laws on the books, the ones that do not protect our rights and freedoms, but actually corrupt and subjugate them.
for example, we used to police sexuality – remember when homosexuality was a crime in canada (trudeau’s govt took that off the books only in 1969)? that law was wrong, expensive, and an offense to freedom and privacy. remember when marijuana was a crime (trudeau the jr.’s govt took that off the books in 2018)? that law was wrong, expensive, and an offense to freedom and privacy. the same can be said for most drug laws, and for laws that curtail sexuality, such as consensual prostitution (and curious, how much valuable time and expense goes into the ineffective policing of that nonsense, activities of choice among consenting adults, and how little goes into policing human trafficking – where there is no consent, but rape and kidnapping and abuse).
in a nutshell, if we had a fair degree of wealth, social, and human equality, transparency and reasonable honesty and laws to protect those tenets in govt, and if we had real privacy and freedom, and if our education system would teach empathy and compassion and fairness, well, i suspect we would need far less, and even very little, policing.
Biff, saying poverty is a brunt cause of crime, is really no different than saying guns are a brunt cause of murders. It doesn’t follow. It’s a logical fallacy.
For every 1 person that grows up in “poverty” and becomes a criminal or an addict, etc, there are 10,000 that grow up in poverty to become respectable citizens. Crime has far more to do with what kids are taught, rather than their parent’s income level.
Read this:
https://www.counter-currents.com/2018/10/poverty-does-not-cause-crime/
If anything we need to increase funding to the police in this city to get rid of the druggie and homeless scum that are destroying our city. I am not one for usually supporting increased government spending but in this case more should be done to get rid of this element from our city. Anyone who has been downtown and seen the gangs of drunks and drug addicted criminals free to roam around and hang out in place like the Mall and Galt Gardens can clearly see more needs to be done to get rid of them.
i’m for more police spending if it were to support a law to come that legislates the rounding up of the likes of the ignorant that think oh highly of themselves, and allows police to run them out of town. bad enough to be an ignorant lout, and ever the worse to not recognise such wicked shortcomings. but when one thinks one is perfect, or perfect enough, they cannot see past their nose.