JoeMemphis wrote: ↑Tue Jan 31, 2023 9:15 am
Your first paragraph is just you being an asshole. Typical.
Yes, but it was a real point. This time five cops murdered a man. Another tax hike, and we can have ten cops in on it. Our system is broken, and just more money and more cops won't fix it. And poor communities can't afford higher taxes in order to pay for more cops to murder them.
I mean, did your higher taxes pay for the Scorpion Squad? How did that improve anything?
Anything involving people can be corrupted. The federal government has its share. So shifting more power to the Feds does not eliminate corruption nor is it any guarantee against corruption. It just federalizes corruption. If you bother to look at real “police” states you will note that they all involve a nationalized police force. So if you don’t want a police state, you don’t want a nationalized police force. Secondly, state and local laws and state and local law enforcement do not fall under federal jurisdiction under the Constitution. I highly doubt that state and local governments are going to cede that responsibility to the Feds. I don’t blame them. Here lately the Feds have a rather peculiar way of not enforcing federal laws.
Looking at history, and what the cops did in the Jim Crow South WAS a police state, as far as black people were concerned - and many white people too. First, if you have qualification, testing, training, oversight and funding nationalized, you can still have local elected leadership. But the departments can be more accountable.
As I said, I am open to discussing reasonable reforms to qualified immunity. I do not favor doing away with it completely for the reason I stated previously. The police have been vilified for the last 2 1/2 years and many departments the defunded now can’t hire enough police officers to fill their needs.
Okay, that statement is false. No Police Departments have been defunded. How about we deal is FACTS, not right-wing lies.
Reality:
Republicans have spent the past two years accusing Democrats of trying to defund police departments. But the facts show that the police have not been defunded. In fact, not only have Democrats put more money into policing since fiscal year 2019, but they also spend more on policing than Republican-run cities. Here are the facts that disprove this myth:
Democrat-run cities spend more money on policing than Republican-run cities, with the 25 largest Democrat-run cities spending 38 percent more on policing per capita than the 25 largest Republican-run cities.
Of the 25 largest cities, 20 saw increases in their police budgets from FY 2019 to FY 2022. Twenty-one of these cities are run by Democrats.
The 25 largest cities saw their police budgets grow by a total of 5 percent from FY 2019 to FY 2022.
Democrat-run cities have more police per capita than Republican-run cities. The 25 largest Democrat-run cities employ 75 percent more police officers per capita than the 25 largest Republican-run cities.
At the federal level, President Joe Biden and Democrats sponsored and secured passage of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which provides federal resources to support police departments. Republicans voted against President Biden’s ARPA, which included $350 million in federal funding to hire more police.
Cities across the country, both big and small, are using funds provided by President Biden and Democrats under the American Rescue Plan to support law enforcement. For example:
The city of Houston used ARPA funds to create the Domestic Abuse Response Team program to address “rising domestic violence during the pandemic.”
The ARPA allowed Kansas City to hire up to 150 police officers and put aside $12.4 million for the Violent Crimes Division.
In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the mayor used funds for a number of crime reduction efforts, including “gun violence reduction strategies in areas dominated by gun violence and increase community policing.”
In Whiteland, Indiana, the Whiteland Police Department plans to use $409,200 to buy “six police cars, 14 laptops or tablets to be installed in the cars, 15 body-worn cameras, a body-worn camera for the department’s K9 officer, 14 ballistic vests and helmets, 15 tasers and cartridges, up to two drones, four desktop computers and $15,500 worth of miscellaneous supplies.”
Despite the rhetoric, Democrats are the ones who have placed an emphasis on funding law enforcement. The rest is just a political myth.
That and the fact that crime has risen in many of these communities doesn’t speak well for the current strategy or lack thereof.
As for your continued prattle about crime going up, that's not factual either.
Reality:
Now, some cities, like New York, have seen an uptick, but on the whole, crime is down. But every election season, the GOP has to try to scare everyone.
The only ones needing to be scared are the black people cops like to murder.
So putting people in a position where they need to make split second decisions with no support and no protection is unreasonable. Such a strategy will make it even more difficult to hire good cops. No reasonable person would take such a risk.
Why would being held accountable for your actions be something a reasonable person would risk? I mean, I've had to be accountable for my actions in every job I've EVER taken. As a union rep, I even had to purchase insurance if I were personally sued in my line of work, which happens a lot. People will sue the union AND the union rep. And no, I was never sued, but many were. But we aren't given any immunity for our actions.
Hell at one of our shops, where we had more than one union, a Business Agent of another union got pissed at a member in the facility parking lot and beat him up. He was sued AND went to jail.
So your argument falls flat. I ask again, what things would you keep in Qualified Immunity? Let's be specific.
My spending priorities would be simple: personnel, training, equipment. In that order. By personnel. I mean street cops, firemen and EMTs.
So, you just want MORE of what is causing the problem now. Just more cops, but not more oversight.
And most departments, even small towns, have military-grade equipment. I mean, Alvorado TX had it's own SWAT team and training and full gear, but they stood outside and let children get massacred, while they waited for the Feds to arrive to actually rescue the children left alive.
But how does a town of less than 4,000 people have a SWAT Team? I'd say they're getting their money from the feds, no?
So it seems to me you're not really looking for any ACTUAL solution.
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