from Hacker News

Police are out of control. It’s time to hit them where it hurts: their budgets

by smacktoward on 6/5/20, 2:59 PM with 12 comments

• by davismwfl on 6/5/20, 3:27 PM

  I'd say it is two fold but the primary change needs to be in their training. Stop the military style training, tactics and supplies. Stop all the military threat engagement and move more towards the social worker style of training. No I don't mean make cops all defenseless, but the fact is over the last 30 years we have militarized our police and forgotten to teach them to use their words to disarm people and instead given them more and more training on how to get physical with people.

  Cops are literally trained how to yell and how to intimidate people and given military style equipment and training -- so what do we expect them to do?? How about instead, we teach them to use their compassion and voice to reason with the vast majority of people. No not all problems can be resolved with compassion and reason, some require a gun and someone willing to use it, but we shouldn't start there. It is called escalation of violence/force and police used to be trained to prevent it, anymore it feels as though they are the ones to escalate resolvable problems into all out fights.

  I am not saying all cops are bad, there are a huge number which will first use their words and compassion, the problem is as a group, it feels like those who will use their brain first are no longer the majority.

• by sacks2k on 6/5/20, 3:08 PM

  As long as the castle doctrine becomes federal law and we make it really easy for citizens to get a firearm to protect their families in every state.

  Wealthy activists, politicians, and movie stars have private security. They don't care if we have less cops to protect the average person or we make it impossible for the average person to protect themselves.

  I have no issue with the protests. My main issues is with radical separatists groups like BLM that are going to make the average citizen unsafe and ruin the city around them to prove some sort of point.

  They also want to abolish all prisons.

  If this does happen, people like me will just get weapons illegally and take our chances.

• by codeddesign on 6/5/20, 3:09 PM

  This isn’t like taking a child’s allowance away. Less budget means less police, and less training for those police. Hitting budgets is an easy rebuttal but a poor one.

• by ideophobia on 6/5/20, 3:33 PM

  Like some others I'm a little skeptical of the budget argument. A lot of the equipment that one would typically see employed for a protest or riot response (riot gear, crowd control weapons, armored vehicles) are often obtained via funding from federal Homeland Security and DOJ grants. Hitting the local city/county budget wont impact the militarization argument, and with a president like Trump, I can easily see an increase in federal grants swooping in to offset that, at least partially.

  My second concern is that pay for police is often considered not great. Hitting the city/county budget will likely impact salaries, pay increases, health care benefits, vehicle maintenance, and many other areas. Sadly the fastest thing to get cut from municipal agencies is often training, so I'm skeptical we can "defund" the police while simultaneously adding additional training requirements around mental health, de-escalation, etc.

  I'm not inherently against the defund argument, particularly when it involves shifting those funds toward more community services that would reduce crime and poverty anyways. It just seems like the problem has less to do with the amount of money police departments actually have and more to do with a lack of oversight on how they're spending it.