Quote:
Originally Posted by
MumblesBadly
Ahem! If Minneapolis defunds its police department, that doesn’t mean that it won’t create a new department to manage public security. Some smaller cities in the US have done that, essentially firing its entire police department and in their place hiring a private security whose members do not have the overreaching protections of the police union. Meaning, it’s sort of like how some industrial companies in the 1980s and onward went bankrupt to get out of having a strongly unionized workforce, them reorganized in some fashion to operate profitably after bankruptcy without union workers (or with a much weaker union contract).
Hell! Republicans/conservative normally LOVE union busting and privatization! They should be all for the overly-protective-to-its-members public police unions in the US being dismantled/depopulated and replacing public police departments with non-union private security companies!
I was waiting for a Mumbles type to post something like this...
... and sure enough, we got it from Mumbles himself! Yay!
I assume you're referring to something like Camden, NJ -- one of the most dangerous cities in the US -- which fired its entire police department in 2013. Here's an article on a woke lefitst website about what happened:
https://marginalrevolution.com/margi...ng-camden.html
Here's part of it, describing the situation back then:
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Camden’s old city-run police force abused its power and abrogated its duties. It took Camden cops one hour on average to respond to 911 calls, or more than six times the national average. They didn’t show up for work 30 percent of the time, and an inordinate number of Camden police were working desk jobs. A union contract required the city to entice officers with extra pay to get them to accept crime-fighting shifts outside regular business hours. Last year, the city paid $3.5 million in damages to 88 citizens who saw their convictions overturned because of planted evidence, fabricated reports, and other forms of police misconduct.
In 2012, the murder rate in Camden was about five times that of neighboring Philadelphia—and about 18 times the murder rate in New York City.
The point of the article was to assure everyone that Minneapolis defunding the police has been done before in Camden, and that had a happy ending.
That's enough for woke leftists to share the article all over social media, so they can own those ignorant conservatives who are mocking the idea of "defund the police".
But wait! Read that story again. Turns out that the Camden police department wasn't fired because they were racist, awful, and brutal. Instead, it was the opposite. They were incompetent, lazy, expensive, and overly bureaucratic. Most of them worked desk jobs instead of the streets -- presumably because the Camden streets were so dangerous!
So yes, I totally support what Camden did. They took an incompetent, ineffective police force which wasn't policing, and replaced them with a county police department
which actually did police work!
This situation is entirely different. The Minneapolis police aren't accused of being incompetent, lazy, or overly bureaucratic -- they're accused of being too brtual, too militarized, and too abusive.
What's the difference? Camden wanted more policing, Minneapolis wants much less. Camden simply needed a police force which did its job. Nobody could argue with taking action to force that to happen. Minneapolis wants some hippy police force which doesn't really police or arrest people, but instead works with the community to convince everyone to be nice. They want to completely redefine policing. They're not just trying to replace Minneapolis PD with a more efficient force.
Apples and oranges here, and the comparisons I keep seeing like this are super-dishonest.
