This all seems really good for gun sales. I think I will buy stocks in gun and ammo manufacture.
This all seems really good for gun sales. I think I will buy stocks in gun and ammo manufacture.
I do think there will be changes in policing. How effective those changes will be is predictable IMO: not very. By this I mean the changes won’t satisfy you, Rob, and they won’t be especially pleasing to me, either.Originally Posted by gimmethesimplelife
As a supporter of the police I can understand your not liking changes coming to policing. I don't agree with you - but given your stance I can grasp that you feel this way.
What has me intrigued is that you seem to believe I won't like these changes. Could you be more specific? (Snarky line but I don't mean snark, IL. I'm genuinely curious and trying to understand). Rob
I'm not particularly a "supporter of the police". But I'm not against the idea of law enforcement, either. As in most things, I see things in shades of gray.
I see changes coming, some long overdue. But the political penchant for the quick fix, though often well-intentioned, is not going to be as transformative as people like you, Rob, would like to see. And it certainly will not occur as quickly as you would like. George Floyd will not be the last POC killed by a bad cop. Or, likely, the second-to-last. Just my hunch based on history. The needle has moved further with the Floyd murder than I expected, but it can move only o far.
As a gay man, Rob, you've seen how long it takes to transform culture. Even landmark Supreme Court decisions and riots and marches that marked the history of the gay-rights movement took decades to result in true behavioral change -- and I'm sure you would agree that the country is not yet 100% on board even now.
I see the same thing here. There are forces that law enforcement officers need to deal with in the U.S. that go well beyond anything a mayor or City Council can mandate as a response. Tying officers' figurative hands in responding to those issues will not move us toward the goal of better policing. Alan already has touched on a couple of these.
And my personal experience after 40 years in a workforce that was nowhere near as dangerous as police work is that, for every "one-minute manager" you will find several "59-second employees". That's not a threat; that's a human reaction to bureaucracy and a perceived lack of understanding of how things work at street level. Let me be clear: Derek Chauvin was flat out wrong to knee George Floyd the way he did. Based on a long documented history of issues he's had with black people (not all POC; just black ones) he should not have been still wearing the uniform. Ditto for the officers that literally executed the no-knock warrant on Breaonna Taylor's home. And those are just recent examples. Things need to change. But if the changes made for both sides fall victim to pandering and soundbites and quick political fixes, neither the beleagured public nor the law enforcement community will make any lasting progress. This is going to take time; probably a couple of generations. It's been a long battle and it isn't near over yet.
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington
As long as there are cops, there will be bad cops. You can’t reform, abolish or protest your way to perfection. But we can always improve. And no one who isn’t selling some sort of nonsense thinks we can have law without law enforcement. The question in my mind is, if you screen out all the performance art, are we doing better or worse than twenty or fifty years ago?
Camden NJ fired everyone in 2012. Then they hired the best 100 back. They had a huge crime rate and poverty problem. The rest of the money paid for social workers, mental health counselors, etc. Their crime rate went down, due to community policing the cops know and interact with the citizens and people aren’t getting murdered by the police. It’s definitely a win-win.
Camden added cops by breaking the union and reducing compensation costs. No more Woketopian than that.
As townships, cities, and counties deal with the economic devastation of the pandemic and ensuing recession/depression, not to mention the financial shenanigans that went on before in the name of "economic development", I'm thinking comprehensive initiatives like Camden's are going to be difficult to execute and, increasingly, be supported among taxpayers who were already strained.
Not that that is an excuse to do nothing. There are plenty of things that could be done to rachet down the tone considerably. Some of them will take a fair amount of time. But I would be happy to see people point at more models than Camden.
Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome. - Booker T. Washington
Steve’s post #14 covers it.
Rob much reform is needed but we are not experiencing Third Woirld policing. If you educate yourself on what has happened in places like Brazil and the Philippines you will see the difference.
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