All right, today's new members of the day are Dimitrios Minneapolis and John Hall.
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OK?
We have to talk about the rapidly spreading meme or demand or talking point, this idea
of abolish the police.
And this has basically three forms.
Sometimes it's literally abolish the police.
Sometimes it's defund the police.
And sometimes it's simply called A.S.A. be.
All cops are bastards.
Some version of this is essentially what we're talking about here.
Now, I believe that this catchall is completely miscalculated.
I believe it's inaccurate.
And I believe it dramatically helps Donald Trump get reelected.
If it were to become a prominent theme of Democrats, and I can't believe Joe Biden would
do it.
But if Joe Biden were to adopt this in the time remaining between now and the election,
I'll tell you why.
And then we can talk about it.
We have a problem with police brutality in the United States.
We have a problem with lack of proper training for police.
We have a problem with militarized police departments in this country.
We have a problem with lack of police accountability in the United States.
We are seeing overwhelmingly peaceful protests demanding that these issues be dealt with.
And that's a beautiful thing.
They were catalyzed by the horrific killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
And protests like this and rallies like these have not been seen in the United States for
a long time.
And it is a great thing.
But abolish the police, defund the police.
Sometimes the messaging can seem inspirational or catchy, but it doesn't actually make any
sense.
And it's not popular.
And it is a huge risk.
If the left is going to adopt this as part of a platform heading into November, abolish
or defund the police is using a sledgehammer when what you need is a velvet glove.
And I'll explain why and I'll defend my position on this.
And then if you disagree, I want to hear from you.
The problem is just not as simple as police have too much money.
And if we take the money away, we solve the problem.
The problem is not as simple as police need to be eliminated.
And then we would be much better off, including replacing police altogether with social service
agencies or community watch groups or whatever the case may be.
The problem is sometimes too much police funding for the wrong things.
The problem is sometimes lack of training.
The problem is not enough funding in some cases, and that can actually be the cause
of the problems we're trying to solve.
So let's just get really specific about it.
Let's start with one example.
Many police departments have become militarized like armies.
This is something I talked about last week and I mentioned last week, and this is superimportant
police training in the United States is too short and doesn't deal with how police officers
should actually be trained to be better stewards of their communities and to de-escalate situations
rather than escalate situations in many countries, police training as much longer than in the
United States.
That costs more money.
But that extra training should not be focused on riot control with rubber bullets.
It should instead be social work type training.
If police were trained more like social workers and less like soldiers, if police were equipped
with de-escalation tools rather than military vehicles, then we would eliminate many of
the disastrous outcomes that we have because the first instinct of more police would be
to de-escalate rather than to say, is this a time to pull a gun or to use a Taser, Taser
or to pull out a nightstick or baton or shield or police a militarized military vehicle.
But the reality is that could cost more money.
It could cost more money to better trained police for longer.
If you double the amount of time police officers spend in training from 13 to 26 weeks.
It's likely that is going to cost more money, not less.
And so the sledgehammer of abolish the police or defund the police fails to actually achieve
what we want.
I mentioned militarization when a police department is militarized.
They see themselves more like a military force than as members of the community, and they
solve problems with the tools that they have.
Again, shields, military type vehicles.
Riot control tactics, pepper pepper spray balls and the like.
In this case, we need to demilitarize the police.
Now, you might do that by strategically cutting funding for certain types of training and
equipment in order to achieve the demilitarization of police.
Beautiful.
Brilliant.
I'm all for it.
But again, defund the police or abolish the police does not actually leave us better off.
Now, in some police departments, the problem is they don't have enough funding.
They can't hire enough officers.
They can't do community activism and involvement.
So when a police department is underfunded, they resort to the cheap policing of what
we call low hanging fruit.
If you are underfunded and police aren't properly trained and you don't have the resources,
you need to get police involved in the community, you basically just send up tons of cops to
poor areas.
You send the cops, you have to poor areas.
And as we know, those areas are disproportionately nonwhite and they hang out there.
Maybe they do stop and frisk or similar type tactics and then they just rack up arrests
simply by saying, you know, we we don't.
We send people to the areas where we believe there is the most crime.
And of course, because that's the only area they are in, they find crime there and nowhere
else.
And it gets up there, arrest numbers.
And it's the self-fulfilling prophecy, prophecy that we know so, so well.
So that's an example where the police department might actually be better if they were better
funded not to get shoulder mounted RPG eyes and riot gear, but to actually have proper
levels of staffing, to be involved in the community, to be trained in de-escalation
like social workers.
Let me give you one more example of this.
A lot of police are policing places where they don't live.
And in fact, sometimes there's a big divide where you have officers who live in rural
areas outside of a city policing an urban area.
And this is not a good thing for a number of different reasons.
When you bring when you have community members policing their communities, you typically
are going to be much better off because you don't have outsiders coming in.
The people in the community are going to be better disposed to the police because it's
not these outsiders from some other place who just come in and do whatever.
And then they leave and they sleep somewhere else at night.
And you are going to have police officers that are more actually taking a stake in the
long term effects of their policing rather than just doing the easy stuff, the low hanging
fruit.
As I mentioned, but in big cities, you might need more funding in order to do that.
The reason a lot of police don't live where they are working is it's too expensive.
So this is not me saying give everybody raises, you know, umbrella.
But the point is, in order to achieve something that would improve, a lot of police departments
require some percentage of the force to live in the area that they police, it might not
be cheaper.
You may not be able to do that simply by defunding.
So I am as disgusted and enraged as you are by the horrifying videos of sick police brutality
from the last 10 days of protests.
My question is, is defunding or abolishing police really going to solve the problem?
Now, a couple other things that I want to mention.
We should have a central database of bad police actors so that when there are complaints and
when there are dismissals, it's harder for an officer to hide that when they go and apply
somewhere else.
And it's harder for the new to police department to say we had no idea.
You have a central database of bad police actors.
The unions will likely oppose this.
It would be a fight, but it would cost money to maintain such a database.
Civilian review, review boards for police, use of force complaints and police shooting.
Some cities have done this.
That can cost money.
Mandatory police body cameras that can cost money.
Now, hopefully you'd be able to reallocate funding away from militarization and towards
cameras, et cetera.
But again, the catch all of abolish or defund does not take into account any of these details.
One last thing here.
As Progressive's, we should before government and state involvement where it makes sense.
We want the government involved in health care, for example.
There are not enough involved right now.
We want the government involved in regulating industry.
They do not regulate themselves effectively when it comes to law enforcement.
We actually want government doing it and not the people because the people sounds nice
when you imagine neighborhood watches and and how that will work.
But you have two problems.
First.
The people in your neighborhood quickly become some private security firm with the best lobbyists
and can get the most weapons.
You know, Google cops, you get free with ads.
But to get better service, get Amazon Prime police.
And by the way, it comes with being able to watch some TV shows for free as well.
We don't want that.
It will become the police equivalent of private prisons or.
Private mercenary firms that fight wars overseas for us.
It's not the progressive option.
Secondly, there is no denying that sometimes you actually need the scope of state and government
missile defense as a private endeavor where neighborhoods decide here's how we're going
to defend ourselves from missile attacks.
Doesn't really work well.
And in the case of policing, you need these state and federal law enforcement resources
to deal with things that are big, like human trafficking.
It's too big and too complex for communities and private industry to deal with human trafficking
and the global, federal, state and local elements that need to be combined.
So the solution that is progressive is not defund or abolish the police.
It's elect the right people to fix the police, ensure that the police are working for us
in the way that we want.
And you do that in part by electing the right people to make those decisions change.
The mayor changed.
The governor changed the police chief.
Now, one more thing.
Should other areas have more funding?
Yes.
Do we need more funding for teachers and education?
Of course.
Do we need more funding for public health and public housing and homelessness?
And of course, we do.
That is a separate issue from defund or abolish the police.
Absolute last thing on this, defund the police is being hugely boosted by bots online because
they know it's divisive.
And I hate to tell you that it'll help Trump defunding the police as of two days ago, has
16 percent support in this country.
It's very low.
There is more support than ever for reforming the police.
We previously discussed that it makes sense in 2018 for Democrats to run on abolish ice,
even if you support it.
I don't believe that that would have been logical in 2018.
I see no evidence that abolish the police is a good platform, and I believe that it
will help Donald Trump to get reelected.
If Joe Biden were to adopt it, it would dramatically hurt his chances of winning in November.
If this is still a very prominent issue at that point, tell me whether you agree or disagree.