You have to have been raised pretty sweetly to not have known this kind of racketeering was a 'thing' for a very long time. Pressure to hire cops is rampant. 'rent-a-cop' is not aimed at the fact that security companies apply aggressive mimicry to their people, but that these people are themselves often off-duty cops. Security companies are strongly "encouraged" to hire off-duty cops, and find themselves left out to dry or otherwise 'convinced' if they try to resist.
Before you add 'Why don't [you|they] do...' responses, recognize for a moment that the police in the U.S. are largely out of control, have undue control of local government and politics, and have an ideology that enforces self-righteousness and an 'enemy at the gates' siege mentality, and oh yeah, are able to apply violence at a level unmatched in society. These are not polite people, and the way one 'deals' with them has far more in common with radical militias rather than state bureaucrats. If you haven't encountered that, you're just lucky enough to have never threatened their interests.
It's pretty eye opening to watch every bill pushed through in the name of firearm safety turning out to have massive exemptions for off duty and retired cops. They're such a powerful political force that it's outright expected they should have a disproportionate ability to deliver force even after they're retired.
My favorite part is that California has a roster of handguns approved for sale. The pretext for its existence is consumer safety (it is entirely separate from bans on stuff like assault weapons or large magazines), but the actual effect is that you have a very limited selection in stores, and most of the designs are very dated.
But if you're a police officer? You get an exemption! Apparently, the state has no regard for your safety as a consumer, and allows you to buy whatever you want...
And importantly, as a cop, you're allowed to buy off-roster (modern) handguns and then turn around and sell them to the public at a profit. You have to be slightly careful because the ATF doesn't like non dealers buying and selling tons of guns, but it's a huge racket where cops will make a few thousand dollars a year selling modern/desirable guns to the pubilc (through FFLs).
Another reason why I left California. You can't buy a Canik's as a non-LEO. Also,
criminals get whatever guns they want and carry them while law-abiding citizens can't do anything except wish not to be mugged or murdered with strong objections. It's completely absurd given how violent America is.
There's a saying, "An armed society is a polite society."
The reason is because of perceived threat. If very few people are armed, people are more likely to act a fool because they don't fear the consequences from npcs. Risk taking along these lines increases as does the physical delta. But as the probability of random npc folks carrying approaches one, suddenly there is a very real chance that acting a fool carries permanent consequences.
And now consider other situations that tend to be heated where folks overreact: road rage, etc. Folks may be less likely to escalate things when they believe the other party has the ability to respond with deadly force.
This same hypothesis applies to mugging. While the mugger may get the drop on their victim, others nearby that are armed may be able to appropriately intervene to stop the initial assault.
Allowing the general public to not only be armed but carry the same stopping force as the baddies reduces the imbalance, leveling the playing field.
And as usual Americans fail to spot that they have one of the best armed and least polite societies in the world. I'd put the case that a polite society is unarmed.
> I'd put the case that a polite society is unarmed
The supreme irony lies in the fact that this statement is completely reversed from the real state of things: it is a pathologically impolite society that feels it necessary to arm itself, against itself. Unhealthy tolerance and passivity toward mundane, petty assholery and dominance-seeking behavior is going to destroy this country.
This is not actually true. The level of violent crime in 99% of the USA is the same or lower as most other developed countries.
For reference, more people kill themselves with guns in the USA than are killed by other people with guns. If gun violence were truly a huge problem, you'd think that suicides would be outnumbered by gun murders, but they're not.
The numbers look big because it's a country of 330 million people, but ultimately the number of people killed with guns is pretty low (and it's something that can actually safely be completely ignored if you remove gang-on-gang and drug trade related violence, which is the vast majority of firearms deaths). For example, Obama killed more children with drones in 8 years than children were killed with guns in the USA in 20 years. (In both cases we are talking about absolute figures <1000.)
The "USA has a gun violence problem" is one of those "everybody knows" memes, however, so good luck convincing anyone to the contrary.
You make it sound like suicide is totally fine and harmless. Isn't it shocking that lots of people kill themselves with guns?
Because that's the thing with guns: they make killing easy. They also make suicide trivial. I know people who have struggled with depression and survived multiple suicide attempts. If they had access to guns, I don't think they'd be alive right now.
The numbers don't just look big because the US is a large country. Corrected for population size, gun violence in the US is still at least an order of magnitude larger than in other countries. I know of no other country where schools practice shooter drills.
> For example, Obama killed more children with drones in 8 years than children were killed with guns in the USA in 20 years. (In both cases we are talking about absolute figures <1000.)
That does not seem to be even remotely true. Not for any part of that claim. Well, maybe the part about children killed by drone strikes being less than 1000, because I can't find figures about that, but the number of civilians killed by drone strikes in the last 20 years seems to be 10k-20k.
According to [0], 31780 children have been killed by guns between 2000 and 2020. According to [1], the number of children dying from firearms is rising and now larger than the number of children dying from cars or cancer.
Your entire suggestion that people killed by guns is not really a problem sounds incredibly callous about human life.
You want to talk about callous? Calling people who commit suicide "Killers" is callous (https://concealedcarrykillers.org/). Using suicides to pad statistics to push magazine capacity bans or bans on ergonomic features is callous. You pretending that children being pushed to take their own lives is the same as being killed as bystanders in gang violence or killed in school shootings just so it can be all called "gun violence" is callous.
I am not the person in this conversation who was suggesting that people killing themselves was not so bad. Are you suggesting it's callous to take suicide seriously?
Sorry, but your rhetorical trickery over people's lives is sickening.
So, just so I understand, bad guys all have guns. And you wish you could have one too, for protection against said bad guys. But why is a firefight preferable to a mugging?
There's that little something called "dignity". You know, trying to do something about your situation instead of rolling over and praying for the meanies to be lenient with you.
This. I used to live in an area that was overrun with a biker gang and had friends who had slight involvement with them and ended up getting intimidated into giving them their nicer positions like furniture and TVs. Classic bully shit but a grown adult coming into your house and taking your shit.
I had a retail shop in the community and also lived next to a bar and a property where they would congregate and some would roll into town and stay there. Very tense environment. When I first moved there I had no idea that it was like this.
At that point I armed myself and made the decision I was not going to take any crap off anyone.
Thankfully, no one gave me any shit but I have plenty of more stories from my time there.
The only choice for me was to arm myself. The cops were scared shitless and were unreliable for other reasons. One of the gang members had already opened up on one of the cops with an AK-47 in front of my store. He lived because it jammed.
No idea. However, this area is a lower income blue collar country area on the edge of a really nice suburban area, but it certainly isn't without VERY nice homes and farms. It's just hard to say. Lots of drug issues, you get these pockets. I have lived around the area for my entire life but it wasn't until I got involved as a merchant in the area and really got to know people that it escalated like this. Having a small business of just about any kind will expose you to nearly everyone in a smallish town. Lots of drama can come of that.
I got robbed several times while I was there and I ended up in jail myself. Most of this stemmed from drama emenanting out of the opioid and heroine epidemic around the early 2000s.
The whole notion of using a gun for self-defense sounds insane to me. The criminal is the one starting the violent interaction and is therefore prepared for it, probably has their gun ready or within easy reach. For me to then want to draw my gun sounds like a recipe to get shot. Being not a threat to a dangerous idiot and getting out alive sounds far preferable to me than dying like a wannabe John Wayne.
Everybody being armed ups the stakes for everybody, and I'd expect criminals to be more likely to shoot in that situation. And having guns for everybody, but only the best guns for criminals, sounds like the worst idea of all.
Best of all would be to make it harder for criminals specifically to get guns by having every gun and gun transaction registered and verified. Every loophole is going to be abused.
The United States was founded with the principle that (from a legal sense) the primacy of power and responsibility belonged to individuals, not government. The lack of connectivity between different societal groups allowed relatively peaceful interactions between groups, (unless you were a Native American or a slave, sadly).
From this framework, people (men, largely) were expected to provide for themselves and their families. Food, shelter, “retirement” (or putting provisions in place for old age), and yes, personal security from threats, both from other individuals and from any future possible oppressive government, as well as being responsible for being personally armed to repel foreign invaders.
In modern times, being armed either in or outside the home (or place of business) gives us a few things. It continues the principle of being responsible for one’s own personal security, rather than relying on societal pressures for bad behavior (!) or dependence on the timely and enthusiastic response of local law enforcement.
I think we would agree that part of the responsibility for firearms ownership is safe storage, mental and legal preparation for an event, and continuous training. With rights come responsibilities. Not everyone will choose to own a firearm, and that’s ok, each person should be allowed to make their own decisions.
Law enforcement efforts are reactionary, not proactive, the negative effects of which are exacerbated by out failed criminal justice system, the full fruits of which have been on display since the 80s, depending on who you believe.
Simple possession of a firearm does not make every (legal) defensive use a quick draw contest or result in a hail of bullets. There is a deterrence affect in locales where lawful weapons carry is legal. FBI statistics, depending on year, will tell us that “civilian” display of a weapon will stop a threat upwards of 93% of the time, without any shots fired. When the “civilian” fires a weapon in self defense, the average number of shots remains less than 3 (although trending upwards..) Law enforcement fires far more rounds per encounter, with the resultant display of (excessive?) force and possibility of downrange consequences.
There are people who would rather draw their weapon to defend themselves and / or their family than depend on the rationality of a person threatening them, who is statistically likely to be in an altered state of mind, mentally ill, or has been released from the criminal justice system un-rehabilitated (or any combination of these).
In a country that can’t even keep drugs out of prisons, as well as other failures to enforce public safety, trying to restrict firearms from being possessed by anyone is not a reality.
As the public failures to enforce existing laws continue to be documented and published, most citizens develop a jaundiced view of the law in general. I think it was societal and family expectations that reinforced morality, not laws, and substituting laws for morality is folly also, given who writes and influences the laws, as well as the tyranny possible by governments selectively enforcing laws.
As you say, everyone being armed does up the stakes, but it ups the stakes for the right group of people - those people who would prey on others.
That's a lot of great theory but the stats just don't play out, an armed society does not in practice make a polite society.
Americans seem to not believe me when I say my fear of being shot is zero, but it's literally true. I don't even recall if I've ever even heard a gunshot outside the vicinity of a firing range.
There are some criminals with guns, but they almost exclusively use them against other criminals. I have zero concern that someone breaking into my house will have a gun, and everyone I know who has ever actually spotted someone breaking in to a place has had the criminal run away immediately rather than initiate any kind of violence.
Which is why you should practice carry and conceal, and hopefully never have to draw on it.
You can always just give the muggers everything, including your gun.
You can't barter back your (or your family's) life, and putting the massive asymmetry in the benefit of the doubt of a known assailant is maddeningly naive to a point of near literal cuckoldry.
If I'm always giving the mugger my gun, why carry it? Seems like the danger from having a gun on my person and in my house vastly outnumbers the chance I become Dirty Harry for an evening, no matter how thrilling that thought is. And I won't be Dirty Harry, I'll be Bernie Goetz. No thanks.
> asymmetry in the benefit of the doubt of a known assailant is maddeningly naive to a point of near literal cuckoldry
Don't try to impress people with words, impress with ideas.
Do you put your seatbelt on when driving? I do. Not because I expect to be in a situation where I'll need it, but because if said extremely rare situation happens, I'll be happy I did; the consequence:probability ratio is just too big, as my life (and that of my family if I had one) has a value of ∞.
Having a weapon on yourself in preparing for the worst case scenario. "Hope for the best and plan for the worst", you know.
Not really a good comparison. Seat belts save lives, guns take it. The fact that a gun is a real threat to the mugger, makes it a threat to you. Because the mugger knows that you might be carrying a gun. I'm pretty sure that muggers and burglars in the US use a lot more deadly force than elsewhere, exactly because of the chance their victim may be armed.
Of course given that muggers expect you might be armed, you might as well be. But I'm still not convinced they actually make you safer; lots of Americans get killed by their own gun.
> If I'm always giving the mugger my gun, why carry it?
That's just your perspective and talking point. Parent was clearly trying to say that there may be a situation where you DO need it to protect yourself or family from being killed/raped/etc.
It started as a program where you had to pay the state a pile of cash to have them carry out a number of tests, like repeatedly dropping the gun to see if it goes off on its own. They kept adding stuff, culminating in microstamping requirements that no manufacturer could or wanted to comply with - so only a small subset of pre-2007 semi-auto pistols could continue to be sold.
California's Unsafe Handgun Act is ostensibly intended to protect consumers from cheaply manufactured handguns that might malfunction or otherwise be unsafe to operate.
Here is California's Attorney General explaining it:
> “California’s commonsense gun safety laws save lives, and the Unsafe Handgun Act is no exception,” said Attorney General Bonta. “Accidental shootings are preventable. The fact that children under five are the most likely victims makes these accidental gun deaths even more tragic and inexcusable. As weapons become faster, more powerful, and more deadly, this risk only increases. Flooding the marketplace with unsafe semiautomatic pistols that do not meet necessary safety requirements poses a serious threat to public health and safety, especially for children and young adults.”
> The UHA was originally enacted over two decades ago in response to the proliferation of low-cost, cheaply made handguns that posed consumer safety risks. Under the UHA, the California Department of Justice (DOJ) compiles and maintains a Roster of Certified Handguns that meet certain public safety requirements. Generally, a handgun must appear on the roster to be sold by a California firearm dealer.
> When the UHA was first enacted, revolvers and pistols were required to have safety devices and pass drop safety and firing tests at independent laboratories in order to be added to the roster. [...] The UHA has since been amended, adding additional safety requirements for semiautomatic pistols including that a new semiautomatic pistol must have:
> A chamber load indicator that indicates if the pistol is loaded; A magazine disconnect mechanism that prevents the pistol from firing when the magazine is not inserted; and Microstamping capabilities that allow law enforcement to trace a shell casing to the pistol that fired it.
So this law is ostensibly intended to protect people who buy handguns and those around them. But cops are exempt, because... cops never drop their guns?
It's worth considering that this is the same attorney general who recently doxed all law abiding concealed carry permit holders, applicants, and others (including but not limited to home address, phone, DL number, etc.) many of whom are victims of domestic violence, stalking, and sexual assault.
My point was that a gun doesn’t make you more safe, but the opposite. Anyone talking about buying a gun shouldn’t be discussing safety, they are unrelated concepts.
You're [deliberately?] misinterpreting the stated intent of the law. A gun that goes off when dropped is substantially less safe than a gun which doesn't. People who buy guns are in fact justified in considering such factors.
I think there's a real case to be made that the Californian law is duplicitous and is actually intended to reduce the availability of handguns in California, but that's not the point being raised here. The point is that for some reason Californian cops are exempt from from the law. That's like exempting cops from the lawn dart ban, it makes no sense.
I don't know why you're jumping to nuclear weapons as your analogy when gun control laws in other countries make a far better comparison point. Australia is probably a good example here: they have urban and suburban centres in the cities, but they also have vast rural areas. Guns are not banned but limited and regulated. They do not seem to have had this issue where people have been left defenceless by crazy people with guns.
In fact, are there any countries that have implemented gun controls that have had this problem?
Australia didn’t have that problem before they banned them either.
For countries with major issues who do have strict gun control? Off the top of my head, Mexico, Brazil, South Africa. Plenty more if I looked, I’m sure.
If I could snap my fingers and make all the guns disappear tomorrow, I would. Until then, I've looked down the barrel of another man's gun and been attacked by neo-nazis and the police have disappointed me every time, so I'm gonna carry my own.
They were a group of local teenagers and young adults with a shitty little clubhouse along a trail in the woods with some swastikas painted on it. They tried to corner me and my friends with what ended up being air guns with painted tips (since I wasn't into firearms at the time I completely thought they were real) because they thought we got too close to it. They probably weren't part of any organized nazi gang, but when they identify their property with swastikas, I'm gonna call them what they pretend to be. The police took and melted the air guns, but it didn't go any further than that. They've still got their hunting licenses, judging by their Facebook pages.
The other incident with a real gun I was referring to was a man pointing his revolver at me while I was picking up his daughter for a date, talking about how a man has to protect his daughter. At that point, I wasn't even scared so much as I was concerned what I was getting into. But since he didn't directly threaten me I was told that it was "negligent use of firearms" at worst, and didn't want to push it.
We should just stop having the police cus I survived just fine without them.
At least having the option to defend myself would make me more comfortable standing in front of my friends trying to take a bullet for them. Made it easier to recover getting sexually assaulted knowing I could forcefully stop him if it truly escalated to a point where I had to.
The police pretty much never prevent crime, they investigate it after it happens. Robberies aren’t stopped by heroic police officers with their guns, despite what TV says.
And I’m not asking what would make you feel better, I’m asking if you truly believe that producing a gun in the situations you described would have made you safer?
Whatever your ideology it seems a little craven to not want guns that happen to be out in circulation to be as safe as possible from incidents like misfires from accidental dropping.
The market failed to innovate on safety for years. And the issue with a market based solution is it can be much cheaper to just not include any of those safety features.
Some things can be below your personal risk tolerance, but be well above the acceptable risk tolerance at a social level.
The market based approach states that if the demand is there, supply will come online if profitable. In this case it doesn't seem like the cost is more than $100-200 incremental, which isn't outlandish.
If enough people buy unsafe firearms and then are subsequently jailed for negligence, or the companies are sued out of existence, I would imagine the safe version would organically emerge.
Harm reduction is not a single tactic. For gun safety harm reduction means requiring guns not to fire by accident, AND having gun owners take training that includes all the information about the risks that go up once you own a gun (especially to others in your household), AND requiring or encouraging gun owners to lock their guns up AND to store ammunition separate from guns AND ideally even to store them somewhere not in the house, AND reduce the number of guns in circulation.
When it comes to drug abuse, harm reduction can mean providing clean needles and other supplies to the user. The person isn't going to stop just because they're denied clean supplies. In the same way that you can't stop people from acquiring guns, but you can help prevent them from purchasing guns that are fundamentally unsafe to operate.
No, you literally cannot stop people from acquiring guns in the United States, as it's baked in the Constitution. Please make arguments based in reality.
I agree with all of the points you just made, and don't wish to be anywhere near a gun, personally. This does not change the fact that there are some people that feel the opposite, and will obtain a firearm regardless. If I can, I'm going to incentivize them to choose the safer option.
Most of the reason for cops being security and being excluded from most firearms safety bills is because rhey already have a credential that was more strenuous to achieve than what the proposed bill is. That training, whether effective or not, is also seen to mitigate risks around litigation when they work security due to how our courts work (how things look can be more important).
Although there are other laws that do illustrate what you are saying.
In many cases (especially magazine capacity laws, the stupidest of all restrictions), cops are exempt while nobody else is exempt. They're simply a caste above you.
Yeah, but I wouldn't consider stuff like mag restrictions as safety or security training. I would say that falls under the "other laws" part of my comment.
True. The point is to eliminate waste. For example, if you already got a psychological evaluation as part of being a cop, they use that one for the security license requirement in my state. At least in my state they still make you get the license, but they trim out the redundant portions.
You have a citation for your interpretation of "rent-a-cop"? I am intrigued but cannot find any use of the phrase other than something to the effect of "wannabe cop". Even the 1987 movie by that name is a former cop who works private security (fair warning I have never heard of the movie until reading the wiki summary a few minutes ago).
I live in a different country where this sort of racketeering would be extremely illegal and a national scandal if it happened. I find this article far too mild in calling out the blatant crime that these police officers openly engage in. With full knowledge of the city. People should be going to prison for this. A lot of people. That this is allowed to continue so openly is incomprehensible to me.
Don't forget if none of that gets them whatever it is that they want then they can just lie about whatever until they get it. Supreme court stamp of approval.
Yes, but this epidemic of urban crime is very new for our generation. We haven't had these "catch-and-release" policies with violent criminals. We haven't legalized shoplifting for sums under $950 before. We haven't had DAs in many major cities that are opposed to jailing violent offenders for "diversity and equity" reasons.
> We haven't legalized shoplifting for sums under $950 before.
One of the main reasons for this is because mobile phones keep getting more expensive, and high school kids frequently steal other high school kids' phones. The limit keeps getting raised so that 18 year olds don't end up with felonies on their record.
> have undue control of local government and politics
Now, some facts:
In North Carolina at least, the Council-Manager form of government provides that the police chief is hired/fired by the city manager-- who is hired/fired by and reports directly to the city council. Depending on the city's charter, the manager may hire/fire the police chief with or without approval of the council.
Apparently there are a few city councils who have a charter that requires the police chief to be hired/fired directly by the city council.
This council-manager form is by far the most popular form of city government in NC. IIRC, there are only two other forms allowed by state law-- one is a city council without a professional manager (only an administrator with the elected council making all the important decisions), and one other one which I can't remember atm.
So on the local level, local sheriffs are hired/fired by the local government-- either directly, or by a professional manager who reports directly to the council.
County sheriffs are elected in NC. But the day to day goings on in a municipality-- i.e., any politics related to businesses hiring 'rent-a-cops'-- would be handled by local police officers. (Outside of perhaps one or two counties out of a 100, and unincorporated towns.)
Apparently, the council-manager form of government comes from a template for local governments that is used by many other states in the U.S. The only way I can think of that NC is special is that there are no county roads-- only state and town (which, again, puts citizens in contact with local police way more often than county police).
In conclusion, the very popular form of council-manager government is counter to your claim that local police have "undue control over local government and politics."
> These are not polite people, and the way one 'deals' with them has far more in common with radical militias rather than state bureaucrats. If you haven't encountered that, you're just lucky enough to have never threatened their interests.
I don't have the stats on radical militias. But I'd wager at least two orders of magnitude lower chance of being killed for threatening retaliation to a police officer in the U.S. than for threatening retaliation to a member of a radical militia.
Edit: threatening retaliation, as in their job/livelihood, to fit with your general statement "threaten their interests."
> Santamaria was later required to come up with security plans outlining the number of officers needed per night. The officers insisted on getting paid cash, she said. She feared if she didn’t oblige, she’d lose her license.
> Eventually, another officer helped schedule off-duty work: Derek Chauvin. He worked security at her club for 17 years.
> ...
> She sold the club in 2019. When Santamaria saw Chauvin pinning George Floyd on the pavement in the video that shocked the world, she recognized both, because Floyd worked as a bouncer inside the club in 2019.
That is an interesting connection. I didn't know that they worked together.
One theory I read is that Floyd and Chauvin were part of the same counterfeiting ring operating out of that club, and Chauvin murdered Floyd in order to keep him quiet. (Recall that Floyd was originally arrested for suspected use of a counterfeit $20 bill.) I think maybe part of the idea was that nightclubs are interesting to counterfeiters because they deal with so much cash.
(Racism still plays a big part in the Floyd story even if this is true -- Chauvin presumably thought he could get away with it, and his fellow officers mostly didn't try to stop him.)
Chauvin was obviously in the wrong from pretty much every angle, but the chances of the a person actually dying under those circumstances are actually fairly small. If it was an intentional pre-meditated murder then it was either an incredibly piss-poor plan or some 4D chess master move.
That said, it's certainly possible he simply wanted to be a dick to Floyd, possibly just for incredibly petty personal reasons, or something like that.
From what I understand he was convicted for second degree murder, specifically "unintentional second-degree murder while attempting to commit felony assault". So he may not have intended for George Floyd to die, but he did intentionally assault George Floyd who died as a result. So that's not intentional premeditated murder, but it's nevertheless a form of murder.
(He was also simultaneously convicted for third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter, but not first-degree murder.)
You're asking me to believe that this man feels a certain way and committed a racist murder based on a general tendency? Even if I grant you the ridiculous premise that this tendency is real, that line of thinking isn't close to sound.
I see I'm getting downvoted here by the typical good dogs, but this has always bothered me about the incident. The racism was presented to us by the media with no explanation, and most people just took it to be fact. No curiosity, no convincing required. I've asked several people, nobody is able to make a case that's even remotely compelling, similar to how you failed to do it here.
>The racism was presented to us by the media with no explanation
There were hours and hours and hours of explanation. You just decided that you didn't like the explanation and decided to ignore the facts. Assuming you're asking in good faith which is extremely doubtful. You're being downvoted because the murder happened 3 years ago, Chauvin was convicted by a jury of his peers, and its not worth anyone's time to explain it personally to someone who is "just asking questions". You take the time and do your own research.
He was convicted of murder, I don't question that. He was not convicted of racism.
If it's so obvious and self evident and I've merely ignored the facts, surely you could explain it to me succinctly. You can't, of course, because you don't know why you believe it, and there is reason to believe it.
> You're asking me to believe that this man feels a certain way and committed a racist murder based on a general tendency?
No, no. This man might have had other motives for his murder too. I’m merely saying a contributing factor is that society (and the law/police in specific) seem to be more accepting of violence when committed against minorities.
There is a difference between recognizing that racism exists, and saying that racism is at the root of a particular problem (rather than "merely" something that also exists).
This is one of the big problems with this kind of stuff, because as soon as racism merely exists it becomes completely taboo to offer any other sort of explanation as the root cause.
So whenever anyone suggests a racial motive in a specific case, where this is no supporting evidence in that case, your stance is to just go along with it, because racism pervades our society?
If you can only think of a single example of the police being excessively violent against a white person, then you are woefully under-informed. I'm not surprised though, I blame the media.
You can probably draw some broad, population-level conclusions from statistical data that shows more police violence against minorities, though some can be explained by other socioeconomic factors as well. In general, I'd say that American police are simply violent to everyone.
I wonder what combination of "they get shot with a gun lifted from an evidence locker" and "the IRS descends upon the local police department for widespread tax evasion" would have happened if the victims of the shakedown rackets simply reported the cash payments like any other wages.
When I learned that I was suspicious that Chauvin was settling some personal score (and that explained why Floyd seemed to believe that Chauvin was going to kill him), but I don't know if any evidence for that came to light. Possibly an under-investigated angle, I'm not sure.
Already, police do this exact shakedown on cities. There are numerous incidents (anecdotal) of US police threatening city officials to reduce enforcement during election cycles, demanding increases in police force budget.
Broadly, the US needs to eliminate corruption. There are many broken feedback loops right now from the grand (lobbying and campaign finance) to the minuscule (niche price fixing, bribery, police-ran protection rackets), all compounding unfavorably, all seemingly booming. It's astonishing the degree to which the public tolerates such forms of ineptitude and subversion – it has a direct impact on everyone's bottom line.
The SF Police Department bombed the mayor's house in 1975:
"In early August 1975, the SFPD went on strike over a pay dispute, violating a California law prohibiting police from striking. The city quickly obtained a court order declaring the strike illegal and enjoining the SFPD back to work. The court messenger delivering the order was met with violence and the SFPD continued to strike...
The ACLU obtained a court order prohibiting strikers from carrying their service revolvers. Again, the SFPD ignored the court order. On August 20, a bomb detonated at the Mayor's home with a sign reading "Don't Threaten Us" left on his lawn. On August 21, Mayor Alioto advised the San Francisco Board of Supervisors that they should concede to the strikers' demands."
> The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association Riot, also known as the City Hall Riot, was a rally organized and sponsored by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association of the City of New York (PBA) held on September 16, 1992, to protest mayor David Dinkins' proposal to create a civilian agency to investigate police misconduct. Approximately 4,000 NYPD officers took part in a protest that included blocking traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge and jumping over police barricades in an attempt to rush City Hall. Rioters were observed to be openly drinking, damaging cars, and physically attacking journalists from the New York Times on the scene. Rioters also chanted racial epithets towards the African-American Mayor Dinkins. The nearly 300 uniformed on-duty officers did little to control the riot.
Federal law enforcement (FBI etc) has a tiny amount of manpower compared to local police. In theory the national guard could have been called in but that would be a huge escalation and I doubt the elected officials wanted to go there.
The Supreme Court is responsible for a lot of this, it has institutionalized immunity for law enforcement and prosecution and unlimited corporate money in politics so that it would require overriding that lever of power which doesn’t seem likely since democrats just rolled over when the gop wouldn’t allow Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice.
They could have changed the rules when they got the majority and they could have pushed for alternatives with some random ideas off the top of my head a.) just putting their appointed justice on the court while Obama was still President since the constitution does not specifically say approval just consent so with the anything goes interpretation of original intent that the current supreme court uses why not, b.) packing the court after they got the majority, c.) deciding to make term limits for supreme court justices - the forever a justice is not in the constitution.
It like the current situation where one senator Tuberville can block the mass appointment of military leadership, they could change the rules or do it one by one but the leadership is too afraid of changing the way things have always worked around here.
I'm not one to ever defend the institution of policing or the court system that feeds and protects it, but cops do not have general immunity. They have qualified immunity from civil cases in some places. The primary friction from prosecuting police for criminal behavior has been and will continue to be DAs unwilling to prosecute (for various reasons, some reasonable, and some nefarious).
There are many reasons why police serve the role they do in society. Neglecting other reasons other than blatant racketeering—the role they play in preserving the institution of private property, the role they play in filling prisons, the role they play in preserving the illusion of justice—serves nobody.
The genius of American political life is in defining problems out of existence with ever more complex legal and rhetorical terminology, while working overtime on training people to affirm that they are the freest country in the world.
It’s widely believed in New York (I’m not knowledgeable enough to know whether it’s true, but it’s at least widely believed) that the police have been on a “soft strike” since 2020 and have been refusing to deal with anything but the most egregious situations, for political reasons.
Anecdotally, my camera system alerted me and I witnessed someone enter my neighbors vehicle. I got my neighbor and we got the dude out of the car and I asked him unkindly what the hell he was doing and if he had stolen anything.
When police arrived much later the perp actually showed back up down the street and I pointed him out. It was a struggle to get them to go see who he was and investigate, even though I had photo and video evidence of the crime.
Later that night, that same guy broke into another neighbor's house and they came in much hotter, with shotguns to clear the house and they were able to arrest him not far down the street.
>It's astonishing the degree to which the public tolerates such forms of ineptitude and subversion – it has a direct impact on everyone's bottom line.
The George Floyd protests were huge. I don't think it's a simple matter of the public being too complacent.
I'd say that insofar as the protests were unsuccessful, it's because their energy wasn't being directed strategically. There was so much discussion of "defunding the police" without anyone offering a clear, compelling alternative approach to public safety and deterring crime.
From a systems-level perspective, telling everyone that police officers are jerks seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice people place a high priority on being well-regarded by others; jerks enjoy opportunities to abuse their power. The "ACAB" slogan exacerbates the problem it describes.
One question I wonder about is whether jurisdictions where the chief of police is elected tend to function better than jurisdictions where they're appointed by the mayor. There are so many dimensions along which mayoral performance can be evaluated, and public safety is just one of those. By squeezing all the dimensions into a single vote, we're limiting the amount of signal that voters can send to their government.
I don't think policing inherently needs to be a malicious activity. My impression is that police quality is higher in Europe than the US for instance, and that police quality changes depending on which US municipality you look at. One wild idea I sometimes dream about: Imagine if each city had multiple competing police departments, and every cop wore the logo of the department they worked for prominently on their shoulder. Then for each local election, voters vote for one or more logos, and police work + funding gets distributed to the competing departments accordingly. Every time you call to report a crime, it gets assigned semi-randomly to one of the departments, and you're told which department got the assignment. Basically, make police brutality and police corruption into a customer satisfaction issue. The very best police chiefs could make millions of dollars starting police companies which effectively served and protected cities across America.
Yeah, I know HN dislikes capitalism. But it's interesting that policing as an industry has very little capitalist competition -- it's entirely organized by the government -- and yet no one seems satisfied with it. I'd argue capitalist competition can work great if companies are competing to succeed at the correct metric. Alleged failures of capitalism often strike me as failures of the competition metric rather than failures of capitalism per se.
> without anyone offering a clear, compelling alternative approach
A minor gripe: asking protesters of a utterly shitty, but long standing, complex and entranched situation, to come up clear, simple and compelling alternatives is generally unfair.
In particular the political process should work in reverse: people voice issues, and their governing bodies come up with viable solutions. That's their job.
> police quality is higher in Europe
It can be utterly shitty too. The difference could be that they're not armed with military grade material and protestors aren't willing to let things slide, even as pretty gruesome confrontations happen (people killed, losing eyes, limbs etc.)
> In particular the political process should work in reverse: people voice issues, and their governing bodies come up with viable solutions. That's their job.
I get what you mean but the governing bodies of the people are the people. In a democracy, we are in charge of our own institutions, at least in theory.
I agree that we can't lay the full burden for solving injustice on the people affected by that injustice, and I think finding solutions for injustice is something that everyone should take part in, and there is a particular responsibility for those with the most amount of power to act. But often the people most affected by injustice are the ones who can see the flaws in the existing system best, and who have the best ideas as to where a solution might come from.
> Local police are mostly controlled by local institutions, no?
No, they are mostly not controlled by anyone except themselves, and aren't accountable to anybody, because they can disobey and/or corruptly coerce and/or retaliate against people, including elected government officials, who try to hold them accountable, with no repercussions.
I see your point that it's the role of governing bodies to find solutions to complex issues raised by the public. However, isn't there also some responsibility on the part of the protestors to articulate what specific changes they'd like to see, rather than resorting to extreme actions like property destruction? After all, clear demands can make it easier for those in power to act effectively.
while not everyone agreed on everything, there was unambiguous consensus to end the invincibility of corrupt cops engaging in police brutality (and to end the police brutality itself)
that's a pretty clear problem for government officials to figure out how to solve
> My impression is that police quality is higher in Europe than the US for instance
My impression is that that’s because in Europe it’s a skilled job that requires a degree. In the US it’s where everyone that can’t get another job goes.
I think your idea has many flaws, but I am very surprised and happy to see novel approaches here, and it absolutely represents my favorite part of HackerNews.
Probably the reason policing is sub optimal is due to the fact that it is funded by the city, so more prosperous areas can pay more, and recruit the best cops, while the areas with less income often can't pay as well, (or enough to offset the risks).
Compare this to schooling, where it's largely funded through the county, so the county often pays less in the nicer areas, knowing the job is easier.
sorry I don't see what the links have to do with what I said. In my area of CA, school funding is provided by the county and police is funded through the city.
> I think your idea has many flaws, but I am very surprised and happy to see novel approaches here, and it absolutely represents my favorite part of HackerNews.
Really appreciate the words of encouragement here!
If you want to encourage me further, you should give details about the flaws and challenge me to address them :-)
sure. I'm not at all thinking my flaws are insurmountable, but I think the problem is you are unlikely to get enough data to draw many conclusions, at least in places that aren't incredibly dense and crime ridden.
I'm thinking of the suburb outside of LA I live in. It's somewhat spread out, and some areas have small amounts of violent crime, while some neighborhoods are incredibly rich and most neighborhoods are gated or have private security etc. Having 3 departments be able to serve such a large land area to ensure that response types are evenly distributed seem challenging.
But, maybe in a place like San Francisco (more dense, also more crime) this could work?
Sure, if an area is low crime, I'd say your policing strategy doesn't matter a ton, assuming your cops don't engage in police brutality or corruption. Probably in a low crime neighborhood, competing departments would focus on friendly interactions with the public and making really sure that none of their officers look bad in viral videos.
I know I mentioned randomization, but I don't think uneven distribution is necessarily a problem. Ultimately, a voter who looks at 3 different logos on the ballot is going to think back to interactions they had with the cops, and what their friends tell them about the cops, in order to figure out which logo to vote for. Different voters are going to see different distributions of police presence, but that's probably fine. In the same way people tend to vote for the incumbent candidate, I would guess that voters will tend to vote for the logo they see the most in their neighborhood, assuming that logo seems to be doing an OK job.
Another way to approach it is that each competing department could have a different service area, and the service areas grow or shrink every election based on election results. This could be done algorithmically by splitting the city in to precincts and finding an assignment of precincts to departments that approximately conforms to the election results, while also keeping service areas for any given logo contiguous through time and space as much as possible (minimize travel and switching costs).
All this stuff could work for schools too btw. It achieves the "skin in the game" aspect of charter schools while reducing the ability/incentive to shuttle problem students elsewhere in order to juice your school's numbers (potentially, depending on implementation).
> Compare this to schooling, where it's largely funded through the county, so the county often pays less in the nicer areas, knowing the job is easier.
Most school funding comes through property taxes - it’s a nice way to avoid saying “we’re funding schools in poorer areas using fewer resources” while saying absolutely that.
> it’s a nice way to avoid saying “we’re funding schools in poorer areas using fewer resources” while saying absolutely that.
This is not true in California. Property taxes are collected by the county in CA, and then distributed to the cities most in need. Beverly Hills doesn't get more school funding than East LA just because their property tax revenue is 10x higher.
The quality at the end of the day may be a bit better, but overall it's the same system. You can only speak for specific country. I know someone from France that was pulled out of a car for having an Arab name.
When Floyd died paris pd changed policies and the police broke the law in order to protest. Lets not look at Europe through rose colored glasses. This can be quite hard to do on HN, because you are often silenced.
Your reply has a big claim, namely that they have had a "wild success". Instead of giving sources for this claim you provided us with contextual information that proves nothing
I don’t have sources readily available but several programs across the country have reallocated parts of their police budgets to mental health crisis services, among other things, to seemingly good success.
There are also places that tried defunding and then quietly voted for _more_ budget for policing.
> The program is producing paradigm shift results. In its inaugural year, STAR has successfully responded to 1,396 calls. Of those, there were no arrests, no injuries and no need for police back up. We've learned from these calls that expanding the program can help further reduce the need for law enforcement and emergency medical services to respond to 911 calls in certain crises, like intoxication, welfare checks, indecent exposure and more.
>Multiple cities have already implemented trial programs to replace police services with mental health and EMT professionals to wild success.
That's chill, but it doesn't seem nearly as radical as the "abolish the police" slogan? What fraction of police calls have been replaced with mental health/EMT calls in these cities?
Suppose someone is suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill -- does Denver now call a mental health or EMT professional for that person?
>Proponents of capitalism seem to have never encountered Goodhart's law. [1]
The severity of Goodhart's law depends on the mismatch between what you want and how you measure it. If you're able to measure what you want very accurately, Goodhart's law is not as much of an issue.
Goodhart's law doesn't just apply to capitalism, it applies in many social domains -- including the political domain. The grandparent comment states:
>There are many broken feedback loops right now from the grand (lobbying and campaign finance) to the minuscule (niche price fixing, bribery, police-ran protection rackets), all compounding unfavorably, all seemingly booming.
Lobbying, campaign finance, price fixing, bribery, and police-ran protection rackets only relate to free-enterprise competition in the vaguest possible sense ("they all involve money").
I brought up the logo police idea for discussion because I think it's possible that it could align feedback loops better than the status quo. I invite you and everyone else to shoot holes in the idea, and guess how specifically it could fail. It could be that it fails in predictable ways, yet is still an improvement on the status quo.
One of my hot takes is that it's good to rotate your metric on a regular basis, in order to flush out actors who are purely optimizing for the current metric and nothing else.
Unfortunately, any beneficiary of the status quo has a strong incentive to maintain it even if it's flawed, and random members of society only have a weak incentive to fix it. That creates friction that prevents rotating metrics.
From an incentive engineering perspective, this meta problem seems like the highest-leverage thing to solve. If we could fix that public goods problem, we could keep tweaking incentives on a regular basis and hopefully outrun Goodhart's Law faster and better than we are currently able to do.
I wonder if mechanisms for solving public goods problems, like dominant assurance contracts, could be helpful here.
Ultimately standard left/right debates sound pretty tired to my ears. In an ideal world, "incentive engineering" would be just as rich of a discussion as "software engineering" is today. The current situation is like if every HN post about software engineering was either an argument for why static typing sucks, or an argument for why static typing rocks. There's a much bigger world out there people. The heroes vs villains frame that people want to apply to every problem is often an impoverished one, IMO.
> That's chill, but it doesn't seem nearly as radical as the "abolish the police" slogan? What fraction of police calls have been replaced with mental health/EMT calls in these cities?
Since we’re talking about defunding, not abolishing, what’s your point?
And that fraction depends on the municipality - it varies from program to program.
>Since we’re talking about defunding, not abolishing, what’s your point?
Is there a difference? If you defund the police completely, isn't that basically the same as abolishing?
If protesters just wanted to reduce police funding, their slogan should have been "reduce police funding" instead of "defund the police". "Reduce police funding" is much less ambiguous.
This ties into my point about how energy wasn't being directed strategically. "Defund the police" is great as an edgy slogan, but that's about it.
>And that fraction depends on the municipality - it varies from program to program.
> Is there a difference? If you defund the police completely, isn't that basically the same as abolishing?
It’s hard to believe you’re being genuine only because, since the beginning, “defund the police” meant reallocating funds to reduce the amount going to cops. I’d understand if this were the first time you’ve heard of this, but it’s been a slogan for years and has been implemented in enough places that a cursory look into it would’ve explained it.
I’m not here to defend the language used (fwiw I’m fine with it), any movement requires nuance once you get past the flashy slogan.
> What's the rough average?
From what I recall, and this is very rough from the top of my head, one such program to use mental health advocates fueled around 1,000 calls in a year. Out of those I think they in turn requested police backup under 10 times.
This video from Some More News goes into detail about what defunding has looked like, for better and for worse, https://youtu.be/3irrROBg7Sg
>It’s hard to believe you’re being genuine only because, since the beginning, “defund the police” meant reallocating funds to reduce the amount going to cops.
Why so many hits for "defund and abolish?" on e.g. Twitter then?
>So, now say you're someone who exists in a left-adjacent social space, who's taken up specific positions that have arrived to you through an "SJW" space - if these are vital ideas that everyone has to adopt for moral reasons, how do you defend them to people who don't exist in any of your usual social spaces? You don't understand these ideas completely, because you absorbed them through social proof and not by convincing arguments. But they're ones you're confident are right because you were assured there's mass consensus behind them.
>When people are correctly pointing out that the arguments behind the position people around your space are advancing fail, but you're not going to give up the position because you're certain it's right, what are you going to do?
>I'm arguing you're going to sanewash it. And by that I mean, what you do is go "Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]".
...
>From what I recall, and this is very rough from the top of my head, one such program to use mental health advocates fueled around 1,000 calls in a year. Out of those I think they in turn requested police backup under 10 times.
Not the number I was asking for. I want to know what % of total police activity has been replaced by counselor/paramedic activity.
>your example is someone committing a non violent crime that the federal government handles anyway?
Are you saying that people suspected of counterfeiting should not be arrested? Or do you believe it's fine to arrest them, as long as the arrest is performed by federal employees rather than city employees? If so, why is that supposed to make a difference?
>Do an ounce of research into the existing programs and ideas.
If you make a claim the burden of proof is on you to support it.
No. SAG-AFTRA members, with the notable exception of Alec Baldwin, can't shoot people and get away with it. Police have special privileges, and should be snapped back into last century before we allow them to abuse them.
Friend of mine runs a drone photography business (think instagram people on vacation or house photography for real estate). The city requires he hire an off duty cop for $100/hr to “manage the set” and the minimum time per engagement for this rent-a-racketeer service is four hours. The shoots are usually about 30 minutes.
That sounds so far from the realm of being in anyway necessary, and not just outright racketeering that you/your friend should contact local media, the DOJ or both.
That’s a good way to get your business license paperwork lost.
Edit: not sure why the downvotes here. If you’re a small business owner you are trying to get through your day and your day gets a lot longer if you piss off casually corrupt city officials who can shut your business down by slow walking needed paperwork. This is a group that happily added 200% to your operating costs via ransoming your business license for a thinly disguised bribe. You think they won’t retaliate if you put them on the spot publicly?
Thanks for surfacing this. While your friend has better things to do with their time, I hope someone with the time and money to challenge this will try to run a drone photography business just to levy this lawsuit in Florida. If I lived in Florida I might be intrigued.
I think that if what you were describing was true, a federal DOJ investigation would result in a lot of people spending time in federal prison, and your friend walking away with enough money that your friend can drone all he wants from a private beach in the Bahamas while you both sip mai tais.
So yes, they can retaliate against your friend. And your friend can retaliate against them and the difference is that their retaliation will cost your friend a few hours and a few hundred bucks, but your friend's retaliation will put them behind bars and destroy their careers and probably imperil their pensions.
The DOJ being notificed could result in a lot of people spending time in prison. It could also result in no action. Retaliation by local officials could be limited to a few hours and a few hundred dollars of lost income. It could also be a lot worse. Based on my personal experience I certainly wouldn't bet a few hundred dollars on the former in either case.
While I normatively agree with you that that’s the way it should work, that isn’t how these things go. This kind of pseudo corruption is extremely common because it’s easy to make shitty arguments that pass first inspection (oh we need the police there for public safety, think of the children, oh a bird! look over there!). They drag it out into a years long appeals process where they grind the plaintiff down and eventually they settle for no wrongdoing and attorneys fees and change, and now you get your business license back and have a hostile local PD.
is GGGP's comment about being forced to hire PD officers as security any different than the forced requirement that film producers in Los Angeles are required to hire ex-LAPD as security, that has been going on for years?
while the article i reference is from ~2008[0], as an LA resident living in Hollywood, i see examples of retired LAPD guys every week "guarding" film sets even in 2023:
Such talk has angered Todd -- who estimates that he makes $100,000 a year working on film sets -- and the other 150-odd retired cops who have the required LAPD-issued permits to assist movie and TV productions.
and
Melissa Patack, a vice president of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, said a wholesale change from retired to off-duty, active LAPD officers would seriously undermine the ability of directors and producers to stay on schedule and budget. Retired officers, who are not subject to the LAPD’s strict overtime limits, can remain on set for the typical 12- to 16-hour days. Patack imagines a scenario where producers instead would have to hire multiple crews of off-duty police officers and disrupt shoots to switch them.
why on earth is there a REQUIREMENT that a film set's producers hire one of retired 150 LAPD officers? based on my many viewings of these ex-LAPD guys, all they do is lounge around on their motorcycles -- not materially different behavior than a regular security person who similarly lounges around, yet is presumably paid much less than an ex-LAPD officer.
it's not just the cops that are corrupt, it's the people who require you to hire them.
> the other 150-odd retired cops who have the required LAPD-issued permits
I'd love to see whether it's at all possible for someone who isn't a LEO or retired try to acquire these permits, and just how brazen they are that this is a racket for cops.
Or it's because too many drone pilots were more than obnoxious. I'm a drone pilot myself and there's no way some of the shots on r/drones are even remotely close to being legal.
So that’s regulated by the FAA and I applaud enforcement efforts on that front. A local PD scalping overtime isn’t going to know a class bravo from his asshole so I don’t see the connection. Local PDs don’t have the knowledge or jurisdiction for this stuff.
Not drone law specifically, yes, but to serve as a contact point for "concerned" neighbors. Yes, it's nuts, but IMHO it's a knee-jerk response to an increased number of complaints.
This ordinance sounds like it was created to discourage people from flying drones and photographing residents without their permission. If I had to guess, some hobbyists probably tried to claim what they were doing was business-related. So, the city decided to set a high bar.
Hobbyist flying is not covered under these rules. You can still fly non commercial under the applicable FAA rules as anywhere else. This is just a petty local shakedown. They could come and yell at you I guess but there're no laws that would back that yelling up. The only stick here is the business license.
I know of a local Volunteer fire Dept that went that way; started having the head guy and a couple of his big cousins go around and tell people how much the VFD needed support, and how flammable their house or business looked.
Couple months after that started, the guy's house burned down. I heard the trucks came out twice, the second time there were more people responding and the police got into the guy's barn with a major weed grow. Not sure what the whole story was but the VFD moved and became a different entity after that.
The moral is that neighbors enforce the character of the neighborhood. Not cops.
I'm curious, how do they actually figure out who is behind a forest fire? Or even suspect that it was a criminal act in the first place. Finding who is behind a burnt house is one thing, but a whole forest is a lot of terrain to cover for proof!
I’ve always wondered, even in criminal cases, even here in France. Do they pin it on someone? Crime is prone to be pinned onto someone, it calms the populations, and it doesn’t matter whether he did it because he’s in jail, so of course he’s angry.
I personally know someone whose lawyer asked him for a large sum in cash in the 7 minutes before a trial, in the antichamber of the court.
They don't need to cover the whole forest, usually the fire is first seen when still small. But it's a lot of work, I don't know how often they are successful:
(I also know that forensic fire investigation for house fires/criminal investigations is basically a made up art with extremely unreliable results - not sure how much that overlaps with wildfire investigations).
"White male, age 17–25" is an entire trait. "Homosexual" is a *part* of a trait: "Alcoholism, childhood hyperactivity, homosexuality, depression, borderline personality disorder, and suicidal tendencies". It's significant because of the other descriptors it's grouped with in that trait. It would be weird to have "homosexual" as a trait on its own, but it's obviously weird to group it with these other descriptors in a single trait.
This report [1] is specific to "Firefighter Arson", so they're looking for things to screen for during hiring for firefighters. The section you'll be interested in is on page 20: "PREVENTION OF FIREFIGHTER ARSON". They list some actions departments have taken: background checks for arson; requiring an affidavit the applicant hasn't conducted arson; "scared straight" lectures on the consequences of being jailed; and screening firefighters with a questionnaire.
But yeah, the profiling section some sound like a way to pathologize arson. I found the motivation section and case studies more interesting. The only corroboration from the case studies is for the age; there's no evidence included for the personality traits.
What? There's no overlap between Crassus' strategy and the VFD's strategy as described above. The VFD asked you to pay recurring fees just in case your house ever caught fire, and when someone decided that was unlikely, they made it more likely by setting fire to his house.
Note that in this strategy, if someone's house catches fire, that's bad for the fire department, and on top of that it looks like they just committed a crime. The fire department is in the business of threatening people until they pay for a service that the fire department hopes it will never need to provide.
Crassus' strategy is completely different; he operates an actual fire department whose services are not available to other people. If your house catches fire, he'll buy it from you.
Theoretically, Crassus could benefit from arson too, but he really doesn't need it.
Crassus is in the business of buying things that have very little value to the seller (who has no way of extinguishing fires) but have a much higher value to him (because he does have a way of extinguishing fires). Unsurprisingly, this is very profitable for Crassus. But what's the similarity?
I do not know if the VFD would have or did indulge in arson. That was certainly the implication I felt when they were speaking to me. Which was amusing because I'd had to go out and take the dogs off them to let them out of the truck to talk in the first place.
I puzzled and annoyed them by confessing poverty, but offering to volunteer skilled labor. Apparently the firehouse didn't need wiring or network or anything :)
>The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants.
One could say he was giving the owners a chance at recovering some value rather than nothing. Also, it’s probably a more apt analogy for modern US hospitals: when you’re having say a heart attack you can’t exactly “price shop”.
But the slanted history point of view is that he started fires, so he can buy the distressed property. hospitals don't have an incentive to give you a heart attack.
Medical errors happen all the time and often are preventable with better processes. Just don't invest in reducing the error rate and boom, more business.
They do have an incentive to tell you your house is on fire (I.G. prescription drugs, and the like), but they don't actively set houses on fire because they don't have 100% market capture to the patients.
Correct, the head of the VFD had his house burn down. The 2nd fire starting after they'd been out there once already the same night made me suspicious, but i never heard nobody brag about it.
I plan live events these days and the off duty cop shakedown is so real. Good luck getting really any permit. “Oh you’re hiring private security? We don’t think your security plan is sufficient to keep everyone safe.”
I guess I live in a different world. I have run multiple large beer events. (4 or 5,000ppl at the last one) These get approved by our city and state. All I have ever been asked is if we have a security plan, not any details, just that one exists. And it's sort of in passing, usually after the we need a copy of your insurance requirement. There were not any requirements to hire an officer. I still choose to hire 3 off duty officers but that is my choice as the event host. I also call them individually as I have met many of them over time and they are worth every penny. They aren't even expensive compared to other services required.
You choose to hire off-duty police and don't have the same experience as the person who didn't choose to hire off-duty police...
I'm positive that corruption like GP described is able to coexist with scenarios like yours where everything's above board, but given you are hiring the off-duty police voluntarily, you haven't established that there wouldn't be repercussions for not doing so.
There is absolutely zero repercussions, I hire them after all licensing approval. After the point of any city or state interference. I have run some of the smaller 400-600ppl events with zero police.
Yeah, I mean, nobody knows how to skirt the law better than cops, and they of course never exactly phrase it in such a way as to be extortion. It’s bullshit, and I’ve talk to people from all over the country and I think it’s pretty pervasive. But my business relies on permits that they sign, and it just feels like I could probably spend a lot of time and money and ruin myself fighting it, over what is really a relatively small tax.
I suppose that’s how they continue to get away with it. We’re all hoping someone else falls on their sword.
> exactly phrase it in such a way as to be extortion
extortion is unrelated of the exact words used but the intend
that clever phrasing can make you avoid extortion charges or similar is a common misbelive
if a cop gets away with a clear extortionist behavior it's because the prosecutor lets them and uses formulation as a shallow excuse not because clever formulations protect you from the law
I think this kind of defeated attitude enables this behavior. You should expect good behavior by default from public officials, normalizing the idea that this kind of corruption is deviant (even if it is more common than that) and expect punishment. Even as a bystander you can help influence opinion, expectations, and standards.
This is a good tactic in many other situations as well.
Neither party is obligated to the interests of the people living in this country. I'm not saying this is necessarily bad advice but there are some problems that require actual citizens to do something aside from vote.
I don't agree, some jobs are what I would consider protected. Particularly, when they are literally wearing their main job uniform and exercising their same powers!
For example, in the UK the Police are technically servants of the crown, and are prohibited from industrial action / striking - this means there are different from a regular job.
Do you feel members of the military should be allowed to have weekend jobs, particularly roles that benefit from their main job.. such as being a mercenary?
Comparably, I would be shocked in an SEC official would be allowed to have a 'side-gig' working in finance. Same as there are conventions on the business interests that US presidents are allowed to have.
Yes military and SEC are and should be free to moonlight. It is extremely common for military to have two jobs, especially the military reserve. The only provision is that they can't have conflicts of interest.
Im not sure what the rules about uniforms are, and for the record, I dont think cops should wear uniforms when moonlighting either.
Military do retain many privileges in private roles.
For example, having a verified secret security clearance is often a big advantage in a second occupation in private industry.
With respect to police, I assume the "privilege" is being able to act as an off duty cop and make arrests. This is a ability the people have given cops because we want them to do it. It is a good thing if they arrest a dangerous person off duty.
This brings us back to the problem. We shouldn't have laws on the books requiring the employment of off duty cops. If a company really needs someone with police power, they should contract with the police department.
If they dont needed it, they should be free to contract with whom they choose.
A bouncer or traffic director does not need the ability to arrest people.
Using the language of labor movements to describe police isn't adequate for understanding the constraints they work under. What makes a cop a cop isn't the work they do, but the power they have. To what extent they are free to apply this power, or sell it, outside of its normal sanctioned purpose is a critical question. And one completely separate from the issue of workers selling their labor to multiple parties.
Workers aren't slaves, but police are closer to slave drivers than they are to workers in this model. They do not labor, but are part of the system that coordinates who labors, to what ends, and to whose benefit.
Exactly. Police are part of the “special bodies of armed men” that form the state. They only exist to protect the interests of the ruling class, which in most cases is exploiting labour.
I think that argument breaks down if the police are Moonlighting in a job that doesn't require police powers.
It is one thing, and I think reasonable, say that police can't wear their uniforms when working off duty. It's another thing entirely to say that they can't work at all
So if police are allowed to moonlight in other jobs, then they by definition bring those powers to the job - and their legal immunities, and their illegal immunities created by the 'thin blue line' of cops who protect each other.
Cops are different in that they are always on the job. If they see a crime happening, they are obligated to intervene even if they are off duty (probably with some reasonable exceptions, e.g. they aren't going to be writing parking tickets).
The moonlighting cop is still a cop even if off-duty, still has arrest powers and is authorized to use deadly force even while working the second "security" job.
Yep, people are always surprised to learn this in my experience.
The government doesn't offer a guarantee of safety, or even a guarantee to try its best. Responsibility ultimately lies with the individual to protect themselves.
In a number of countries, events that take place in public spaces can hire the police service as security. A key difference is that it's the police department itself that you're paying, not individual officers.
This is a pretty shady looking protection racket -- "nice business you've got here, be a shame if something were to happen to it". With the difference from traditional gang/mafia activity just being that they'll get the government to remove your business license, rather than burning the place down.
Similarly, I once got a speeding ticket while driving through Kansas, and was instructed by the ticketing officer on how to send a "donation" to the "Sheriff's Benevolent Society" to make it go away without any points on my license...
> Similarly, I once got a speeding ticket while driving through Kansas, and was instructed by the ticketing officer on how to send a "donation" to the "Sheriff's Benevolent Society"
This is when you express frustration because you already donated to the Policemen's Ball.
If it works out, the officer will respond with something like "What are you talking about, policemen don't have balls"
We have a bunch of off-duty police here in the southeast US that do traffic control for churches, HOAs, etc. Not the same as security, I guess, but tangentially related.
I always wonder how this is legally allowed. The idea of using taxpayer vehicles, training, equipment, etc. to control traffic while also leveraging the power of the badge to hold authority seems legally questionable, but IANAL.
In the UK, I believe that if you organise a large event that needs police coverage, you pay the Police force to provide on-duty officers. This seems a lot less open to corruption because it would be based on a standard price list that was public, and the officers received the same as they would doing any other duties.
I know that's how it worked at some events my Dad organised in the 90s. I can't find anything about this on any Police force website, so it might be that it doesn't work like that any more.
There was a discussion about this on another HN thread today. [0]
As you've said, the contact is with the police force not with the individual officers, who get paid the same as they would for any other duties.
There was a whole court case [1] about when the police could charge for this sort of coverage, which codified the current arrangement that, at football matches, they can charge for the officers in the stadium but not for the ones outside it.
In the UK, while police are allowed to have outside jobs, any outside employment must be approved by the force, and as a matter of policy security work is banned. Similarly, security guards aren't allowed [2] to be special constables (people who work as part-time unpaid police officers).
Oh, hey, I'm not saying off-duty police officers can't do side gigs. I'm more questioning them using publicly funded resources and authority to do so.
Anyone can try to direct traffic, but cops are paid to do it because they get the car and flashing lights (and I assume the ability to ticket/arrest violations) while still collecting side money.
It'd sort of be like me using my company's laptop/servers for side work, I guess.
You would have to prove that trained non-off-duty citizens were prevented from supporting, otherwise you would implement a policy where you shrink the number of people that can take said position and that increases cost for tax payers.
For a lot of the above-board police charges in the US the prices have gone up a lot. Anecdotally, I remember this thread where cycling race organizers talk about how the biggest cost for road races is always police. That's to be expected, but a lot of them mention that those costs have gone up a lot recently
That's wild. Personally, I see that (cyclists hiring police officers for route clearing) as a _valid_ implementation of this. Churches/neighborhoods hiring off-duty police officers daily just ease congestion? Seems like a stretch to use publicly funded resources, to me.
Yeah when you need to effect road closures for sure you're costing the municipality something and should have to pay something for that. The congestion easing on otherwise-normally-functioning roads certainly feels shady.
Those are likely reserve officers. Reserve officers are generally part time and are used for additional manpower for events or recurring security so that normal patrol officers aren't short staffed.
Generally the private entity pays the city, which then pays the cop. In many states private entities can't stop/redirect the flow of traffic legally so they hire off duty cops to do so.
That's my point - seems like private police with both public authority and resources. These officers are directly benefiting churches, private neighborhoods, etc. by providing public services benefitting private institutions.
It's advantageous for police to be present at large gatherings, from a traffic control point of view it prevents accidents with other members of the public that would cost the municipality even more money to respond to.
Also from a security standpoint as people physically fighting or potentially someone looking to do harm with a weapon would both reflect badly on the community and their events, and also require even more of a response.
So if the event organizer is paying for that security from off duty / reserve officers, the community is getting that extra protection essentially for free, whereas they would have had to pay other officers likely for overtime if it wasn't paid for by the event.
If you find these corruption allegations hard to believe, I lived on the South Side of Chicago in the late 90s, and cops there expected to eat for free wherever they went and blew through stop signs and red lights like they weren't even there. (I have never seen this kind of police behavior anywhere else I've lived, which includes downtown Seattle.)
Oh, and I had a detective tell me once (after they'd found the guy who stole my laptop) not to worry because they had ways of making people talk. Shortly afterward I found out that detectives in that precinct had been sticking unloaded shotgun muzzles into suspects' mouths and pulling the trigger. I declined to press charges after I learned that.
That happens in San Francisco too. Back in the day when someone tried to negotiate with the union, a bomb was found in the city with an implied threat.
Don't be obtuse. You know they meant they declined to cooperate should the DA pursue charges, and that "decline to press charges" is a popular phrase, if not technically correct. (And if not, you should.)
“Press charges” is exactly correct. It literally means a civilian advocating for charges to be filed. (The actual filing of charges is of course something only the state can do).
Fascinating to learn that George Floyd and the cop who murdered him worked at the same nightclub for a while, and that the cop ended up also being charged for not paying taxes on the ~10k he earned under the table at the nightclub.
It's interesting that a lot of pro-cop people will say stuff like "The neighbourhood cafe always gives them free doughnuts. Guess who has a cruiser parked there often and always gets responded to. Be nice to the police."
Like, dude, that's a protection racket. At that point, you might as well open it up to private organizations and I'll pay on the market for the best one that I like.
I lived in Minneapolis in the late 90s/early 2000s. As I look back, I think the MPD is one of the most corrupt of all the places I've lived or worked.
The sheer number of off duty "security" was surprising. As was the fact that cops never waited at stop lights. Instead, they'd roll up, flick on their lights for a second, then just roll through and keep driving.
> Eventually, another officer helped schedule off-duty work: Derek Chauvin. He worked security at her club for 17 years.
> …
> “They were gone half the time,” Santamaria said. “They were on my payroll but they were gone.”
>
> She sold the club in 2019. When Santamaria saw Chauvin pinning George Floyd on the pavement in the video that shocked the world, she recognized both, because Floyd worked as a bouncer inside the club in 2019.
>
> El Nuevo Rodeo burned to the ground during the subsequent riots.
So…
1. Insist on security officer
2. Use security officer to start riot
3. Use riot to cause mayhem
4. Goto 1
Doesn’t sound that different from traffic control details in Massachusetts.
While I don't know the details of their agreements first hand, I believe they are required by law to be off-duty cops, they are expensive, and have something like a 6 hour minimum.
What I can validate is that they are usually seen chatting with people or sitting in their car rather than doing a single thing to help streamline traffic or in the interest of safety.
Their union props up laws by saying it needs to be someone experienced and couldn’t be a cheaper certified citizen (as it is in many other states) but the net effect is that you get someone who is entitled and complacent.
Came here to mention this. It's the biggest shakedown of all time in Massachusetts.
They are required to do all these jobs that most states don't require them to do. They are extremely expensive, like 10x what a construction worker costs to wave flags on the side of the road. And the police don't even really pretend to do the job most of the time. They are off on the side of the road drinking coffee and playing with a smartphone.
What I have seen is lots of contractors will try to do things on the sly to avoid having to hire the police detail. E.x. a tree cutting crew that is technically going to block the road even briefly. The police detail will cost more than the work crew costs, so the contractor will try to sneak it in, otherwise the customer avoids having the work done completely or can't afford it. Even if the tree cutting takes 15 minutes the property owner would have to pay an entire shift's pay for the police detail.
In the case of the original article though.. rowdy night clubs having to have police on board is no different than police being present in a school a large sports gathering.. it makes sense as those situations can be a powder keg waiting to go off.
Anytime I drive through VT or NH it's amazing how well the construction workers direct traffic, and they don't get to charge $100 an hour or whatever the police actually charge.
This happened to a childhood friend in St. Louis, Missouri. He opened a restaurant/bar and was mildly successful for a year or so. Then some dude came into his restaurant, flashing a badge, saying he needed to pay for additional security because of recent complaints, even though my friend had never heard of any complaints. My friend asked what "additional security" meant, and the dude told him that marked police cars would drive by every once in awhile. So, basically nothing "additional" at all. Anyway, my friend refused, and the dude left. Almost immediately, the "additional" police cars showed up outside his restaurant. They were constantly parked across the street, where they waited to pull-over nearly every car that left the restaurant. They issued numerous DUI citations, even to people that didn't have anything to drink. They impounded cars for chickenshit reasons. Business at my friend's restaurant plummeted - no one wanted to be harassed by the cops, and risk getting a DUI. My friend eventually had to close his restaurant.
This was a few years ago, and when my friend told me about it, I just kept thinking he was talking about The Sopranos. But he wasn't; he was talking about the real-life police.
This amounts to the police becoming a mafia with a protection racket. They realized that they have little or no motivation or incentive to actually do their jobs if they can extract more money with side jobs.
This is also true in Orange County, Florida. I was surprised when I found out via a friend that was a deputy there that the uniformed police working at bars were being paid by the bar, and it was required that they had a certain number of them on duty. They too were getting paid $50-60 an hour.
A lot of times, off-duty police are the only people licensed to carry concealed weapons. Santa Clara Sheriff's department decides to approve an application or not so they prevent any competition for armed security. They solicited bribes in exchange for permits for Apple corporate security.
Thankfully, this is not common outside NY and California. Most other states (27 at last count) have constitutional carry, and at least in my area (small city) violent crime is extremely rare, since pretty much everyone has a gun or access to one. Our crime consists of theft and DUIs.
I can't imagine what would happen if cops tried a protection racket here...
Thankfully it won't be common anywhere else due to Bruen supreme court case that made conceal carry permits shall issue if the person applying qualifies against aa rigid set of criteria.
It seems like there are a few different issues at play here:
1. In general, it doesn't sound like the police were the ones forcing the bars to hire police; that was the city. Maybe there was some backroom deal happening where the police were paying off city officials to create that mandate, but if so the article doesn't allege it. As others have pointed out, there are valid (though debatable) reasons for why a city might want to force bars and public events to hire private security, and even some valid (but more questionable) reasons why they might want that security to be cops or former cops.
2. But then there's the racism angle, with the woman in the article claiming that the only reason her business was required by the city to hire private security was because "they’re racist and we’re Mexican". If it's true that's the reason her business was targeted then yes that's a problem that definitely needs to be dealt with; probably through a civil lawsuit and some serious public shaming. Though I'll note that would be the city's fault; not the police.
3. The article also makes a separate claim "some small business owners — particularly those owned by immigrants — have been led to believe they must hire MPD officers, or risk getting ghosted by police", which if true would be an actual protection racket that the feds should bring the hammer down hard on, though there doesn't seem to be any compelling evidence of that as of yet (as least, not as described in the article); just rumors and allegations so far.
4. And then there's the issue of some of the officers hired being really expensive and not good workers. IMO that's only an issue if the claims about a protection racket are true. Otherwise you could just fire the people who are being lazy and hire someone else, same as any other business. It might also be a good argument for why the city shouldn't be requiring officers in particular to be the ones hired (much more limited hiring pool).
5. Then there's the tax evasion issue, with some officers insisting on being paid in cash. That's the least important part of this in my opinion. Let the IRS deal with it if that's actually what's happening.
(I don't know why I wasted so much time writing this summary, but now that I have I might as well post it... hopefully some find it helpful.)
As a Brazilian, I'm here to tell you: that's how it starts. If this isn't curbed, you'll have a presidential candidate thoroughly linked with them in ~20 years
This has been happening in the US for more than a century now. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be stopped but our government system is pretty well designed to prevent things like this from rolling up to a national level.
The bigger call out is that people who are trying to vest more power in the federal government should look at stories like this and realize that it's a bad idea.
The Target here in ATX next to downtown hired 2 ex-PMC's in full plate carriers. (APD's call backlog for nonviolent reports runs 36- to 48-hours, so it might as well be never. A private person must then either be equipped to defend themselves, cease venturing in public, or move because the police may be too busy or too unconcerned elsewhere.)
I think I can maybe reverse engineer the meaning of two of those, but really you should use acronyms in full on first use.
xPD is often how Americans refer to the police departments, so possibly that with “A” being a city or state or similar. ATX I can now assume is referring to the same “A” in APD, leaving “TX”, so I assume Austin, Texas and Austin Police Department? It shouldn’t take this much effort and international geographic knowledge to read your comment! (And I’m still don’t really grok it, wtf is a PMC?)
I didn’t know what a full plate carrier was either, but I could at least Google that one ;)
Any group of people, police or not, running protection rackets should face legal consequences that punish individual actors and effectively dissolve the said criminal enterprise. All of the officers, not just Chauvin, that were extorting immigrants for cash-only payments should also be investigated for possible tax evasion.
Man I used to tell family in India that the US is better despite corruption because the corruption was at very high levels. Companies paying to pass bills that benefit them. That as a citizen you didn’t see it daily. I even used examples of how cops in India do this sort of thing. How naive of me…
I'm not here to shill for the police, but in my former city, it was not unusual for certain kinds of businesses which had a history of being the source of rowdy behavior to be required by the community board to take certain measures to prevent that. It didn't mean they had to hire former police, but they had to show preventative measures were taken above and beyond state level licenses requirements if the board, which had a right to refuse their liquor license, was fed up with the amount of police activity there.
It's a valid response to say the board should not have had this much power, but the point is that it isn't necessarily a racket.
I don't think you read the article, they were not force to provided better form of security to keep their licence, they were force to hire MPD during business hours. At high costs, under weird pretence of minimum numbers of hours, and most of the time were gone doing MPD work while being paid by the business... This is mafia behaviour.
Yeah, and that's where the crime angle to this comes into play. Are the businesses really the "source of rowdy behavior", or is it actually the people who frequent those particular establishments? And if the latter, shouldn't that be the city's responsibility to deal with those people to make sure they aren't able to continue to repeatedly act in a disruptive manner requiring a police response? Why are they making the businesses pay for private security?
Though as others have pointed out, bouncers have been a thing forever, so maybe I'm off base here...
There is a Walmart in my metro area that is responsible for like 80% of all police calls within their municipality. This is the same Walmart that leeches off society in other ways like paying sub-living wages so that employees need to rely on social safety nets to survive. I'm not sure if they have to hire private security, but this is a prime example of a business that should be securing itself or changing location.
Not insensitive. It’s a bit of a special case. It avoided being burned in 1938 because it was already planned to be sold to the city, thought it was still damaged. Then it came to fame in 1994 when the first arson attack on a synagogue since 1938 was attempted. A second attack happened in 1995 and those responsible were never found.
It was completely restored in 2020, which was when the small police station was also added, and has been in active use as a Synagogue again since then. I’d love to see it now, as I have only been inside before the restoration started (guided tour), but I need to figure out how as it’s normally closed to the public behind an electronic gate.
> Is violent antisemitism still so prevalent? Did denazification fail so badly?
We’ve certainly had our issues, with several big scandals just in recent times, but it’s now once again getting worse in line with right wing extremist ideologies gaining ground world-wide. Jews are, as it has always been in history, getting fucked in particular with both Nazis and some of the extremist Islamic immigrants hating them, and of course also some of the left.
It doesn't take a lot of extremists to cause a security threat; "lone wolf" scenarios are absolutely something Jewish places of worship have to worry about. Not just in Germany, and doubly so this week.
Germany had a far-right coup attempt brewing late last year:
> German authorities on Wednesday arrested 25 people suspected of plotting to use armed force to storm parliament and violently overthrow the state, marking one of the country’s largest-ever raids targeting right-wing extremists.
> Those arrested included a 71-year-old German aristocrat, a former lawmaker from the right-wing Alternative for Germany party and at least one former armed forces member, according to the public prosecutor and officials.
Seems inevitable when it replaced all the other retail stores with merchandise you can steal. Where else would I go to steal something in a small town with a Walmart?
To me that actually sounds like a clear example of a business that shouldn't have to hire private security. At least with bars you can claim that the bar is indirectly responsible for instigating the distributive behavior by serving people alcohol. I don't know how you make that argument for a Walmart.
I suppose an argument is that if they stop undercutting the prices of smaller businesses, then the rowdy behavior wouldn't gravitate toward them, it would be more evenly distributed. But letting the police focus 80% of such efforts there (instead of forcing some sort of change that blurs their focus) might not be a bad thing.
In my state municipalities are required to spend 25% of their budget on police. So effectively 20% of the tax base of the municipality is being used to police Walmart. Walmart isn’t the only business in town, there are lots of businesses, convenience stores, restaurants, you name it - they share what’s left after Walmart, and it doesn’t seem fair.
They should be mandated to hire private security. If they are utilizing the majority of the resources available but aren't willing to pay the real costs of that, well, they need to suck it up and pay.
I thought the US was like the most advanced nation in the world? And businesses are supposed to pay for their own security instead of relying on police? What next? Families of murder victims should cover the cost of the investigation?
ITT: people defending the actions of a corporation owned by a family worth over 230 billion USD.
Businesses should expect that society protects them, sure. But those same businesses can't then go and bribe the government to cut worker protection laws, labor laws, can't slash wages and expect that the government covers the costs of labor, etc...
If Walmart paid their workers lavishly, gave them huge pensions, didn't engage in far-right lobbying to diminish worker protections, didn't demolish the proverbial Main Street all across America, sure, I'd give them the benefit of the doubt and say that we should cover their security costs. But look at their actions over the last 35 years....they've enriched themselves greatly as a corporation, bribed the government, and told regular Americans to pound sand.
We are criticizing the government, not defending Walmart.
The idea of equal protection under the law is much bigger and more important than a corporation that sucks. Every business should have equal access to law enforcement regardless of how big they are.
If law enforcement sucks, it is simply not any private company’s job to address the problem.
If a corporation donates heavily to anti-government think tanks, funds several union-busting operations, sponsors politicians that write laws that would exempt that corporation from having to pay tax.....then we're not criticizing the government, we're calling the corporation out for antisocial behavior.
If I run a company, make bank, and then use that money to engage in lobbying that would see public services cut significantly, I shouldn't get to whine that those same public services (which includes policing) should be protecting my private interests first and foremost.
Walmart is able to provide cheap goods because it can strong-arm providers into taking a loss or operating at a break-even point just for the chance to sell at Walmart. It can also provide cheap goods because they pay their workers jack shit and instruct employees to use government subsidized healthcare and insurance.
It's totally possible to provide good pay, healthcare, etc... to employees, still have healthy enough margin % to make Wall Street happy, keep the C-Suite well paid, all while providing a great service at competitive prices to consumers. Maybe not enough to enrich the owners to a quarter trillion dollars in net worth, but plenty enough to keep the ship going. Case in point: CostCo. Whole Foods prior to Amazon was another.
Have you ever been to a small town in America? Outside of a few regions, Walmart is all they have...so that sort of nixes points 2 and 3.
Regarding point 4, and your quoting of me - yes, people have. And some have been lucky in that they've made themselves multigenerational wealth in doing so. The guy who founded Costco did it, and made himself over a billion dollars. However, the Waltons have hundreds of times that amount. You can make a billion by doing right by everyone, or hundreds of billions by doing right by everyone not named you. I know what number I'd be content with, not sure about you though. (Hint: if you give me a billion dollars, I'm retiring tomorrow)
Regarding point 5, Walmart IS however responsible for spending vast amounts of money (generational money) over the years to enact some pretty anti consumer and anti worker laws throughout the country. It IS responsible for funding some crazy far-right politicians. It IS responsible for paying its workers so little that they are "encouraged" to go on food stamps and apply for section 8 housing.
> Have you ever been to a small town in America? Outside of a few regions, Walmart is all they have...so that sort of nixes points 2 and 3.
Yeah, I've lived in them. My dad was in the AF, and (to save money) my parents would shop on the nearest AF base, which was maybe 30 miles away. They'd go once every 2 weeks or so and fill up the car with groceries.
The indisputable point is people prefer to shop at Walmart. Nobody makes them.
> A new report issued Tuesday shows that Walmart and the Walton family that founded and controls the company have dramatically increased their political contributions over the last decade and that the vast majority of those contributions have gone to Republicans and right-wing causes, including anti-gay, anti-environment and pro-gun politicians and causes. The report asserts that Walmart, the world’s largest private employer, and the Walton family have spent over $17 million in federal elections and millions more on state and local initiatives. Since the 2000 election cycle, more than $11.6 million—69% of Walmart and the Waltons’ contributions—has gone to Republican candidates and committees. At the same time, 83% of the Waltons’ contributions, including their contributions to Super PACs, went to Republicans.
> The report further underscores Walmart and the Waltons’ turn to the right and shows that political contributions doesn’t simply stop at supporting Republicans; in 2008, Jim Walton gave $75,000 to the Arkansas Family Council Action Committee, which at the time was supporting a ballot measure to prevent gay families from adopting. Meanwhile, 94% of the Walton family’s contributions to candidates from 2000 to 2012 went to those who were opposed to or silent on the issue of marriage equality.
Uh, yes, they are. They all sit on the board, and collectively own a majority of the company's stock IIRC. You're also not remembering that the company literally bears their family name. Multiple Walton family members are on the board, and the 1st, 2nd and 5th largest shareholders of the company's stock are Waltons. Those 3 shareholders collectively own roughly 42% of all outstanding shares.
They also donate not out of the good of their hearts, but to protect and grow their economic interests, which is primarily the value of Walmart's stock.
In many of the places Wal-Mart has the most problems, both police and private security are sharply limited in what actions they can take against shoplifters. And places like California, Oregon, and Washington won’t prosecute for crimes under about $950.
What do you propose Wal-Mart do in these localities?
A lot of people are under the impression that these stores can just eat the cost with insurance, which is, of course, an absurd notion because then the insurance company is losing too much money and will raise the premiums. Then Walmart, etc. can't afford the insurance unless they close their most problematic locations.
People engage in a lot of magical thinking to justify theft since it seems like a harmless act. Thieves are just trying to feed their families! Insurance will cover it! Etc.! It's really unfortunate, they're going to learn the hard way as not only Walmart but other retail stores in their areas flee.
No, insurance doesn't have to cover it, because even in these cases where large retailers are crying about theft, it's still not the primary cause of shrinkage in their businesses! Grocers still lose more product to employee theft or just breaking stuff during handling.
Even in California where there's some conspiracy theory about how "It's the DAs fault the police aren't doing anything", as if it's the police's responsibility, or even their jurisdiction, to pick and choose who should go to jail.
Cops should be bringing in people violating the law even if nobody ever went to prison!
At least one source gives shoplifting as the plurality of shrinkage at 36%, with employee theft close behind at 30%. But if theft isn't prosecuted, this would seem to affect incentives for both shoplifting and employee theft.
No, this puts "shoplifting" on the same level as "employee theft" and "literally just doing a bad job" in terms of losing $100 billion (this is actually a global number) last year. IE, brick and mortar retail reported losing about $35 billion to shoplifting.
Out of $6 TRILLION (Just in the US!) worth of brick and mortar retail sales in the same year, in an industry that claims 2% profit margins on the low ends.
All the fuss over shoplifting is just noise. Consider that the same survey which produced those numbers also showed that a full 16% of ALL merchandise sold in retail is returned, yet we don't have news channels blaring all over that we are in a crisis of unfit products.
It's a narrative, and a bad one, to blame greedy price increases on a STABLE total rate of shrink, one that has been roughly 1.5% for over a DECADE. The cost of shrink has been factored in to the price of goods forever.
>IE, brick and mortar retail reported losing about $35 billion to shoplifting.
>Out of $6 TRILLION (Just in the US!) worth of brick and mortar retail sales in the same year, in an industry that claims 2% profit margins on the low ends.
So shoplifting is 29% of net profits? I'm sorry, which side of this argument are you on, exactly?
It's still a class A misdemeanor though and they will arrest you for it.
Also it becomes a felony if any theft has been committed more than 3 times: `(D) the value of the property stolen is less than $2,500 and the defendant has been previously convicted two or more times of any grade of theft;`
In those other states its hard to get the police to even respond to shoplifting calls let alone make an arrest. And even if they did, the prosecutors will dismiss the charges or give them a slap on the wrist (which is why the cops don't bother anymore).
It's not unheard of in the US. The missing person case of Jennifer Kesse in Orlando, FL comes to mind. Her parents even had to file a lawsuit against the police because they refused to cooperate with private investigators after failing to make progress on the case.
Well, banks hire private security guards, have stong safes (well, back when they handled cash) etc under practical pressure and pressure from their insurers. They don't rely solely on the police.
On the other hand a lemonade stand will generally rely entirely on the police and on peoples' good nature. I sure hope they aren't armed!
So on the spectrum between the two, don't we want a society where almost all interactions don't rely on private security guards?
I feel like there has been an explosion of private security guards over the past 30 years, but I do see them in old movies so I don't know if my impression is correct.
Walmart hourly salaries start at 14-19 an hour depending on location. They also abide by all the rules. What are you comparing it to? Mom and pop shops that have kids working there in getting paid under the counter at a lower wage?
14-19 an hour is atrocious in 2023, and of course most of these employees are limited to part-time hours so the company can avoid paying for benefits, all while advising employees to use food stamps. Medicaid is rarely available to such employees because they will often make barely too much income to qualify so they try going without insurance. It's despicable and frankly so is anybody defending such arrangements.
Bouncers are there to keep your customers safe, so they don't go elsewhere and never come back. You don't need to mandate bars have bouncers. They want bouncers.
You should look into overpolicing and how it impacts those summary statistics; in brief if you look you will find someone breaking a law but bad behavior in one group gets ignored as an exception whereas in another group each incident is treated as emblematic and needing strong corrective action.
In my experience both groups are full of pretty similar young men, which makes questions like yours pretty obviously loaded; why are you expecting one to be measurably different?
"You should look into over policing and how it impacts those summary statistics"
This may have been the case 10 years ago, but we have started defunding the police in many major cities. Have we seen a change in crime stats?
"if you look you will find someone breaking a law but bad behavior in one group gets ignored as an exception whereas in another group each incident is treated as emblematic and needing strong corrective action"
I think if you look at what's actually happening, you might change your opinion on this.
"In my experience both groups are full of pretty similar young men, which makes questions like yours pretty obviously loaded; why are you expecting one to be measurably different?"
This may be your experience, but probably not reality. I don't really think they care about theory and statistics when there are shootings and violent behavior on certain nights of the week.
"we have started defunding the police in many major cities."
Is a statement so detached from reality I don't even know where to start. Which major US cities have had their police budget removed, or redirected in whole towards social services and rehabilitation?
I mean, you're basically describing hiring a bouncer. I've never heard of a bouncer being required, but that does make sense if otherwise they're calling the police all the time.
It makes sense even if they don't. Places like that have externalities, and they shouldn't be offloading their rowdiness onto people who live next door.
I think the idea that the enforcers of law (the ones that show up in guns and armor) can compel people to hire them for security work is a very, very conflicted interest. Very mafia-like.
Hiring off duty cops used to be a thing in Seattle when I was working at Crackdonalds (3rd and Pine McDonalds) in 94-95 (we had one or two cops working at all times to keep the lobby/dining area sane). But these days they aren't allowed to do that or the cops have become too expensive, I'm not really sure. They can only off duty for sporting events here for some reasons.
Before you hire off-duty police for private security, shop around a little. In the past, some concert promoters have hired the Hells Angels for security at a considerable discount.
You may also consider a less criminal MC, but generally bikers are great security. I ride with a Guardian Riders (https://guardianriders.com/) chapter president, and he's often pulled in for private security at massive local events. They look intimidating and don't cause trouble.
I'm not saying they're angels, but I've never had a problem with The Angels as security: everybody knows 'don't mess', and things are good.
I've seen a few mild beatings, but considerably less that the same fone by 'regular' bouncers down town (though they're getting better....must be all the cameras).
The DOJ has to start actually doing its job and completely dissolving these corrupt police departments and rebuilding them. Thats the only way we're going to get rid of corrupts cops like this.
"The DOJ has to start actually doing its job and completely dissolving these corrupt police departments and rebuilding them"
Not trivial, considering a substantial percentage of elected officials are dead-set against allowing the DOJ to actually fight this kind of thing. They only approve of law and order when the law and/or order is pointed at very specific types of criminals or protests.
People forget that corrupt police departments are tolerated because they help exert racist and class-based preferential enforcement/harassment/suppression.
Porbably why the police unions are so staunchly supported by conservatives, because in the city the police's primary job is to protect affluents and their property values from the "ghetto".
So the likelihood of some DOJ reformation is slim. The dems in power won't rock that boat (the local governments are usually democratic) and the reps won't because of the real purpose of city police as described.
LOL. Yes, the corrupt DOJ is going to suddenly have a moral compass. State issues are state issues. There's zero reason to involve the federal government. Clean up your own state and stay out of others who have voted the right people in.
I do not have magical powers that would cause the FBI (or any other component of the DOJ, come to that) which would cause them to act in morally positive ways by simply imagining "how it should be".
If there is a "how it should be" when it comes to the DOJ, which seems very doubtful, there exist no humans on planet Earth who could implement it. Even more so, it would be impossible to know how to implement it without thoroughly and profoundly understanding the various failure modes. In other words, you're even doing the "examining the way the world should be" wrong.
Given the shortage of cops, I am not sure there is the appetite for this. Politically, cops shaking down businesses people associate with trouble seems more palatable than exacerbating the police shortage.
What shortage of cops? Come to NYC, you'll see a seemingly infinite number of them parked on sidewalks/in bus lanes/bike lanes, hanging out in the subway on their phones, directing traffic where perfectly good traffic lights exist, harassing street vendors, etc. All while funding is being cut for actual public goods.
There's no shortage of cops. There's a severe problem of misallocated resources. Their overtime budget alone could take every homeless new yorker off the streets, harden the city to climate change and create humane conditions for the influx of migrants from increasingly destabilized parts of the globe.
A shortage means not enough to achieve the desired outcome. In the example of New York, the very wealthy and heavily policed city, even a very cursory google search will show you the NYPD's own clearance statistics reporting, and the many articles written about the same, that show while police spending has increased, violent crime clearance rates have decreased.
Police do not function to keep us safe (nor are they legally obligated to protect us), their sole purpose is protecting capital.
Perhaps if we asked police to do less, paid them less, and eliminated their impunity to function as an occupying gang, they would be less violent and people would hate them less, and they'd be able to hire more easily.
I always think of The Big Lebowski (I know, I know, I'm hardly original), when LAPD tells him to come pick up his stolen car from the police impound and he asks if they have any leads on who might have stolen it:
"Leads, yeah, sure. I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab, they've got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts! Leads! [laughing] Leads!"
I'm not sure what is the role of police here. If their role is to extort citizens I see no reason to keep them around. Or you think corrupt cops also protect some neighborhoods? Maybe for a nice price? I can rent my own thugs instead and I bet they'd be cheaper.
I cannot imagine any real-life situation where police or thugs would need to kill "on my behalf". Armed terrorists shooting at people can be shot down already without much complications, and all the rest can and should be arrested.
Here one solution that could fix shortage and quality in police departments. I see a lot of college educated people that can't find jobs. Raise the requirement for being a cop to need 2 to 4 years of college and hire all the college people looking for work. That will also fix most of the corruption problems. I bet a lot of college graduates would kill for a pension right about now.
What makes you think this would solve the corruption problem? Cops aren't corrupt because they're dumb, they're corrupt because the institutions they are part of allow and reward corruption. Without some mechanism to change that culture, simply adding more members to it will only bolster it. College degrees don't have anything to do with it.
> I bet a lot of college graduates would kill for a pension right about now.
Literally! They might but that doesn't make it a good idea. We don't need more police we need to change the role of police in our society.
Do you know any cops? I know quite a few. Most of them are dumb as bricks and very easily succumb to their base instincts. They also have very over inflated egos. Thinking they know more than their citizens they're supposed to be protecting. Do you know who runs these departments? The ones with the most over inflated egos who literally think that they are in a war with their own citizens. They are also the ones that easily fall for conspiracy theories. I know we want to think its elitiest to require a college degree to do a job. But I don't think it is. Its a filter to get less of these type of people.
Surprisingly I actually do know a lot of cops. They do use the language you're talking about, they view non-cops as too weak and cowardly to do what is "necessary," the violence that they do. They also tend to be fairly unsophisticated sure but they understand what they're part of. And plenty of them are smart, and those tend to be officers in my experience.
But I simply reject the premise that any of this is caused by lack of education and can be corrected by shifting the selection criteria. You need a certain amount of moral flexibility and malice to stay a cop for long, and that will be just as true of college graduates. Policing attracts all kinds of people as it is, but it only retains the ones it can mold into a particular nasty usefulness.
Every place where they do road work in Hawaii they require one or more patrol officers just sitting there in a car with lights on doing nothing. Also, I’m not sure of the details, but most cops in Hawaii seem to drive personal vehicles with lights attached. Literally what you see in “Hawaii five o”, with cops driving around in a 4Runner or a Charger or something.
Vultures picking what away at parts of a corpse they can.
You see so many examples of this, just straight parasitical behavior, in at least American society. I don’t think the U.S. is economically where the Soviet Union was when it fell, but it’s rapidly approaching the civic dysfunction and deep corruption. You have to wonder, is this the fall of an empire or something like the corruption of the late 1800s and early 1900s, that created a backlash that corrected it and led to more prosperity? Dunno. We’ll see, if the vultures leave anything behind.
I don't think cops extorting marginalized people is new, sadly. I actually think cops making life hard for people of color is the tradition of cops in america, all the way back to the slave-catching days.
Yes there are so many signs that what we have is a house of cards but like stock markets, even in real life, things can remain crazier way longer than they should.
One one hand the law and order is missing and on the other hand the people that make the laws are so divided. The people who should protect lack credibility on one hand and are demonized on the other hand. On one hand we do want to encourage rehabilitation of people who made mistakes and on the other hand some of those make businesses so hard to run. And when we make mistakes, let's say with liberal policies or the conservative side, there is no course correction since it takes elections and then maybe multiple cycles ... we have completely forgotten thr "apologize, fix the mistake and move on" method of working. We say we don't have monopolies but big business has all but killed individual initiative.
I think our fall, if it ever happens, will be magnificent. If it does not, that will be quite crazy too, at least for the bottom of the pyramid.
> The people who should protect lack credibility on one hand and are demonized on the other hand.
The former leads to the latter. Despite media (both fictional and non-fictional) largely carrying water for law enforcement, they just can't help but paint themselves in an incredibly unsympathetic, uncharitable light. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1199352063/seattle-officer-re... - a bodycam recording[2] of the SPD union VP speaking to the president shortly after an SPD officer ran down a woman using a crosswalk, by doing 74 in a 25 zone, at night, with no sirens. He didn't brake until after he hit her.
[2] Since she was 26, according to our fine boys in blue, her life had 'limited value'. This is what the guild's leadership think of the people they are supposed to 'protect and serve'... When the cameras are rolling.
When you're actually behaving like a demon, is it any surprise that you're demonized[3] for it?
[3] Demonized isn't even the right word. They'll face no consequences, as the SCC is both incapable, and entirely unwilling to reign in these animals.
I hope the latter. Many people are sick of corruption, but often they react to imaginary conpiratorial instances and ignore the corruption that is in plain sight.
It's dangerous to extrapolate too much from the early 1900s because the US not being ground zero for two World Wars, therefore able to serve as an industrial core to help rebuild the destruction, created economic opportunity the likes of which one hopes we never see again.
Lacking that destruction creating a huge market for American business, it's hard to predict what happens if America lets its domestic capitalism go off the rails in terms of service to its people again.
Federal and State governments are the biggest parasites with their armies of useless Admin workers. Incidentally, big Govt is also the main driver of malaise-causing inflation.
Start to starve them, redirect that labor/capital to useful endeavors and watch productivity and consumer confidence skyrocket.
The Minneapolis Police Department aspires to be the Chicago Police Department. Kind of always been a theme for people that follow a police department of an otherwise pretty modestly sized city that should have a lot more integrity.
That open corruption is surprising but not surprising, why hasn’t it gotten federal attention?
The problem in Minneapolis presently is that there are not enough police. There are statutory requirements for numbers that are nowhere being met. For that and perhaps other reasons they are not doing their jobs very effectively to the extent that I feel considerably less safe than I did ten years ago. With numbers and personal experiences to back it up.
"a gang" implies youth staking out territory, going up against other gangs, etc. Mafia implies it's a lot more subtle, someone coming up to a business going "Nice place you got here, would be a shame if something were to happen to it". Protection racket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket).
The cops in concert with some city employees are running a protection racket.
But I think it's a bit more like a crime family or maybe a corrupt political machine than it is like a gang.
If businesses want to hire security, they should. But it shouldn't be a requirement of having a business. It comes off like the boss of the crime family telling you "I just want to get my beak wet". Like they're shaking down the small businesses.
Already we've got two top-level comments who think this article is about crime. It isn't. It's about corrupt police shaking down small business owners under threat of losing their business license.
ETA: Please give the pedantry a rest. Of course I know police corruption is criminal. That's not what the people talking about "crime" are talking about.
Can you please make your substantive points without swipes or snark, as the site guidelines ask? When other people are mistaken, it's enough to provide correct information. Getting frustrated and lashing out spoils this.
Are you kidding? The first sentences of this article sound like a textbook protection racket, which is one of the most seriously handled federal crimes in the US. Then it turns out this is city mandated, and of course since they're cops they operate outside of the law.
The "you're going to work with this guy" is obviously illegal, and part of the racket. I wouldn't be surprised if there was value exchanged there along with it.
You understand that protection rackets will 'work' with government officials, right? That this is part of it? And they'll try to codify their existence as much as possible.
And even if it was completely legal, its very obviously bad, and that's why its illegal in the first place and we try to combat such outcomes, which is part of the point of the article.
> It's about corrupt police shaking down small business owners
I don't believe that there's ever been any other kind of cop. Certainly not outside of fiction. By prefixing the adjective "corrupt" though, you're certainly buying into it.
Have you never read the headlines where the entire police union tries to extort the entire city? "If we don't get enough cops on the street, bad things will happen". Hell, even more explicitly in Minneapolis after Floyd. Sometimes in the comments here there are hints of people extorting themselves with stuff like "if we didn't have cops, it'd be chaos!".
The linked shakedown is relatively mild by comparison. That feeling you feel is the same as when the tapeworm hooks its jaw pincers into the inside of your gut. But sure, let's just hope for a more gentle tapeworm.
I am not envisioning any society in particular. Instead, I would ask you a question. It's a little contrived, so bear with me.
Imagine a situation that you could plausibly find yourself in where you would feel the need to contact the police. It need not be a 911 call, though those are fine too. Imagine how that would go down... the time of day you contact them. Where you would be when it happened. How you would describe the situation to them.
In this scenario, what is it that they do to help?
Whatever you think happens in that situation, everything I've read over the decades I've been reading about this lead me to believe that there is nothing they would ever do to help anyone reliably/consistently.
If your bike was stolen, well fuck you. Why do you even bother to report that. They will neither recover it, nor ever punish the person who stole it.
If your home was burglarized, the same. With your car, they'll take the report at least so you can claim insurance, but they will be surly and do so only begrudgingly because if they fail to take those reports to any great degree, there will be a political shitstorm that eventually catches up with them.
Are you in fear of your life? They might show up and shoot you. Your dog's in even more danger.
Did you see one on the street and ask for directions because you were lost? In Baltimore, that can cause them to point guns at you, scream obscenities, and run you off (and this is considered by some to be a particularly fortunate outcome).
The least risky encounter for most of us, is when we're being ticketed, when they're just doing revenue collection.
From what I can tell, the outcomes I describe aren't atypical. They've always got more important things to investigate (big drug busts), so the crimes that you and I care about are ignored, and they don't seem to act as a deterrent in any meaningful way. You just have several social filters on your brain that allow you to maintain the illusion otherwise.
May I assume you don't live in the US midwest Bible belt?
A friendly officer drove 10 minutes to pull out a slim jim and unlock my car for me. I thanked him. Normal stuff.
A lady's car broke down in an intersection. A police car put their lights on to keep us safe while 3 or 4 random people pushed the car to safety.
I often call dispatch to report accidents, debris on the road, or anything else that would warrant police help.
I have friends who have been tied up in the legal system with drugs and similar crimes around here. When they sober up, they admit that the cops have a hard job and treated them respectfully.
They protect. They serve.. it's honestly very simple. Not all police are lazy/corrupt/ego-driven maniacs. Not around here anyway.
I grew up white trash in Indiana. I never really drank, didn't do drugs, but the sort of shit that I'd get pulled over for is hilarious now that I have 30 years distance.
The other guy's comment where he's telling his feel good stories, they serve more as a sort of mythology about heroic cops that people tell themselves, they're not even proper anecdotes. He wants to believe, so he tells us some stories, and it doesn't much matter if they're true. They're what you want to hear.
But if you care to check out the reality, go see what they're doing about burglaries in some hotspot. Go ask someone with a stolen bike or car what treatment they do get. Go check on where the resources, time, and manpower are spent. It's not on any of the crimes you care about. But I suppose a cop doing the AAA thing for free somehow makes up for that.
Minneapolis Police Department is like 75% suburbs resident (that is, they don't live in the city). They also are "dropouts" or didn't make the bar of getting in the suburban police departments (cushier jobs, more integrity needed), so they are shit cops that go into Minneapolis, fuck up their jobs in the best case, and drive home to the suburbs.
Minneapolis is a very "young" city. It's only now getting actual generations of people that lived and grew up in the city, it used to be a city where all the suburbs people moved into the city. The first run "suburbs" are still actually suburbs, so you drive about five miles and you are in a suburb, while if you're in downtown Chicago, you have to go like 30 miles before you run into suburbs-like existence.
The police have shown up to mediate between my sister's abusive boyfriend and my parents, arrested him for beating her and put him in jail, investigated and caught murderers that killed in my parents' neighborhood, etc.
If I had been the one to call the police in any of those situations, I would expect that they did what they did, which was show up and provide a threatening presence to decrease the risk of further uncontrolled violence.
I don't mean to phrase this as an emotionally hostile reaction to your idea. Sometimes people hide their reasons for thinking something and then bring them out after drawing the person they're arguing with out into the open. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm merely pointing out that sometimes I need a situation to be dealt with by violent people with resources, and that's what they do.
I agree with you that they won't help with break-ins or with bicycle theft. But I would like them to be able to, because I don't like break-ins or bicycle theft and I'd like the people who to that to be put in "societal time out". This would require an agent permitted to detain someone with violence to investigate and catch people committing bicycle theft and break-ins.
And, for the record, this embodies what most people meant when they said, "Defund the police." Not, "Get rid of the institution of law enforcement." Instead, "Lower funding so that the remainder is forced to be put towards necessary tasks which the police are actually effective at," reducing their ability to engage in the kind of paid apathy or harassment the GGP describes, and freeing up funding for preventative social programs. If you believed it was the former, well, you are not immune to propaganda. And no one in their right mind, even on the ACAB side, wants police to go away entirely. You don't delete a containment board.
1. They self-fund. All confiscated cash is for keeps. If they're not allowed to keep it by state law, they're welcome to call in feds who will do the bust and give them 80% as a finders fee.
2. They extort cities into not "defunding". They don't want it, and they play hardball.
> nd no one in their right mind, even on the ACAB side, wants police to go away entirely.
No one's ever accused me of being in my right mind, but I am asking quite seriously... what would happen if they did? I have reason to believe "not much, good or bad".
In the places where things are horrible, they'd remain horrible. When SF has no retail stores because they can't handle the shoplifting, that'd remain true. And in the suburbs where things are boring, things would stay boring. If your car is stolen, you'd still never get it back. If your bike was stolen, same. If your home was broken into, no one would be caught. And if you were murdered, your murder would go unsolved just like before.
I don't disagree with most of this. The answer is definitely not simply, "Lower the budget," least of all because, as you say, they have other sources of funding. The loss of LEOs on corners probably wouldn't do much for crime rates, either, true.
But I will also answer the question you posed (in the form of an unfinished short story from a few years ago that I dropped because I realized I was doing more telling than showing (also because it's kind of terrible):
Dude, nobody expects a random cop to spend a month trying to track down a $200 bicycle. That's not their job.
Your views are extremely myopic. Low-income neighborhoods around me are asking for MORE police because of how things have gotten. It's literally only suburban people who are insulated from crime that are saying dumb things like "defund the police"
I just told you about a case of a murder in a suburb that was solved. Murderers are caught all the time in the US. Are you claiming that because police don't solve 100% of murders in the US, we should consider police fundamentally useless?
Some people are so privileged they think the police do nothing, the prisons are only filled with the wrongfully convicted, and crime isn’t really a problem.
That being said, I’m all for attempting the experiment, preferably far from me.
> Some people are so privileged they think the police do nothing
They do plenty of things. And I'm glad I'm privileged enough that I never suffer them doing things.
No, I started the conversation out talking specifically about "the things they do what we would actually want them to do".
This is because, were they gone, we wouldn't have to worry about them doing "the things they do that we never want done to ourselves, or to anyone else".
You're just confused. It's a confusing subject. You're not used to thinking about these things, no one wants you to contemplate them too carefully.
You must live a sheltered life to think this. Viewing an entire group of people as evil or inherently bad. People like you are the reason why progress in the area is so hard. You don't understand the reality of the job.
You actually need the sheltered life to not think this. You've only had the smallest interactions with them, in the circumstances where you had the slightest little misfortune to get a traffic ticket or where they were feeling generous that day.
It's bizarre. "Why can't that internet weirdo see that the police are awesome and society would fall apart if they were gone?" only works if you've not paid attention to what the police are doing because you get to be 50 miles away when they're doing it.
Are you a troll account? I can't imagine someone being so obtuse, this must be a joke. You continue to paint any pushback as some bad faith, exaggerated caricature in order to support your silly ideas. The fact of the matter is most people trust most police, that is evidenced in polls after polls, in every community.
I've made sarcastic posts before, go through my comment history.
But this is one of my most sincere postings, I'm being serious, and I'm trying to point out something that others have trouble discerning and recognizing.
I can see how it would be more comfortable for you if you could think me a troll.
> You continue to paint any pushback as some bad faith,
You should ask yourself why your good faith is so bad for everyone. "I'm just doing what I've always done" is lame.
I've taught my children from a young age that we must never come to the attention of the police. That they are not friends or heroes. That, should they show up and we can't just disappear back into the background... whatever bad things might have been happening are likely to get worse.
That if, for instance, someone is trying to murder them, they must handle it themselves. That if we are stolen from, our belongings are gone for good.
You though, you're welcome to continue to live in your illusions, and god help you if those ever melt away like fog on a sunny day.
> The fact of the matter is most people trust most police,
Most birds think the spider-tailed viper is a convenient meal. Their consensus in the matter isn't very inspiring though.
The people who are most affected by reduced policing are the marginalized communities where crime is rampant.
He's correct that if you remove police from a well-off suburb not much will happen, because they mainly do tickets and domestics, and who really cares if a couple is fighting?
But when police are removed from neighborhoods where crime is an issue, it immediately and directly affects those who live there, and not in a good way.
Like in San Francisco, where the chief of police states publicly that having your window broken and your parked car trashed is just the price of living there?
Like when those big inner cities become food deserts because the retail stores start locking up the toothpaste and cans of soup behind glass cabinets a few months before they close down entirely and move out?
You think that those places could get worse than they are, and that the cops (who don't do anything to stop any of these crimes as they happen, or to deter them in any way because they're too busy concentrating on the drug war that brings in confiscated cash they get to keep) somehow prevent things from becoming even worse?
It's difficult to reconcile the idea that you live on the same planet that I do, and that (presumably) you have done so for many years.
Do you actually think most police aren't chasing thieves because they have to go bust some drug dealers in order to steal their cash?
Like, you really believe that? Please tell me you don't. This must be a joke.
SF basically told their police to stop going after small time thieves after 2020. The result has been mass mobs of stores and a huge increase in theft. They voted for these polices to raise the bar at which someone can be prosecuted, so police do nothing.
Jesus, do your research (and not on left wing Twitter lol)
If "defund the police" actually means "reform the police" then why not just say reform the police? And also why burn down police stations?
I think most people who want to "defund the police" plan to live in a place where the police haven't actually been defunded. "Defund the police" is a luxury belief.
Because people have been saying, "Reform the police," for decades, and what generally happens when a "reform the police" candidate gets in office is that the police get more money for "training." So, it's not an unconsidered slogan: the problem with "reform" was that it was resulting in wealthier law enforcement that was still corrupt. Time to be more explicit about what needs to happen: do not "reform." Defund.
Modern policing in the US is pretty terrible in terms of systemic corruption. If you add up the costs of, for example, overtime and detail fraud, it puts normal property crime in the shade.
This is precisely why DAs are elected officials. It's supposed to work this way, in theory. The people vote in the officials who enforce the laws in the manner they wish. In practice, DA elections seem totally ignored.
The problem is lack of voting and civic engagement.
Usually that's because the local PDs exercise their union coffers to ensure that candidates are a minimum level of friendly. If not, there are multiple cases where the police have either directly threatened a candidate or simply did a work stoppage in order to craft a narrative.
There is a way - file a civil suit. That won't have the possibility of sending people to jail, but does have the possibility of financial damages being awarded that are higher than you'd see in a criminal case.
Sort of, but not in a way you'd expect. It presupposes that they don't know what's good faith or not without explicit cases on the subject in that jurisdiction. So qualified immunity squashes new cases that haven't been exactly covered, but also typically doesn't create new case law on that subject meaning that police can continue doing that 'possibly' bad behavior.
Oh, man... That is a disappointing way for things to work. So how would one go about pursuing a complaint in a way that would get case law to exist for a specific scenario?
That has not just qualified immunity, but also straight up standard sovereign immunity. On top of that, the courts are very much against messing with prosecutorial discretion. They view it as a separation of powers issue.
They want you to think like that because it’s good for business…and since our prison population exceeds that of Russia or any other country (per capita), it appears that business is good…
Business is definitely good as the private prisons market makes a killing anywhere they’re allowed to operate. It’s as if there was a vested interest in having a huge carceral population for some reason.
We have a way. In most states the Attorney General can assign a prosecutor to pursue local corruption cases. The AG is an elected office accountable to voters.
However, the prosecutor often is beholden to local police departments to prosecute other unrelated crime. Most DAs don't have the ability to bite the hand that feeds them.
If a DA comes out and says "hey, I'm investigating a racket that is put on by local cops" those local cops (and their union) will fight tooth and nail to remove that DA, no matter how effective their other investigations are. If that AG or DA is out of a job, and try to spill the beans, they can be threatened, or ignored outright by local media or other prosecutors who have legitimate reasons to not rock the boat.
Organized corruption begets more organized corruption.
What's your argument here? That corrupt police who run protection rackets are worth it because they will, in the end, actually protect your family from gangs of 100+ people?
I don't agree with ACAB, but I do agree that there is a lot of dirty behavior out there that shouldn't be swept away with a weak, reductionist call to "childish reductionism."
If you read The Fine Article, you will see it's not actually about security, but about police corruption - pressuring business owners of a certain skin color to hire off-duty cops as security under threat of losing their business license, when white business owners didn't appear to have the same requirements to operate.
The business owner quoted in the article goes on to say that a lot of the time the cops they had to hire weren't even there - they had minimum pay requirements for every shift they "worked" even if they left early or just sat in their car doing nothing.
Yeah, I just bet if I go down to Sparrows Point and try to breeze in the front door of the Amazon DH there I'll get in no problem. And what's that have to do with a Minneapolis protection racket, anyway?
This has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with enforcing law and order. People aren't stealing bread and milk to survive. Notice what products are behind plexiglass in large cities, its not food/essentials. District attorneys across the country are refusing to prosecute crimes like retail theft.
The article is about the MPD forcing businesses to hire off-duty cops or risk losing their business license, rather than an actual security problem requiring security guards.
Even with guns, minimum wage people aren't gonna want to be heroes and risk their lives protecting the money of their boss, when threatened at gunpoint.
Even if they're willing to pull the trigger, your average 7-Eleven employee is no Navy Seal and won't react well under gunpoint pressure and might end up shooting some innocent bystander or himself.
Just giving guns to everyone is bad idea on so many levels.
I don't think this point gets plastered everywhere in the entirety of the world enough.
Most humans don't want to shoot other humans. The few who have murder fantasies do, but other than that nobody wants to take a life. The concept of just arming everyone isn't a positive nor even a remote solution.
Most humans with a gun pointed at them would take the option. Meeting deadly force with deadly force is far from a murder fantasy, in fact, self defense is an exemption to murder statutes, and for good reason.
The Second Amendment is centuries old. The current interpretation of it is only a decade or two old. For centuries before that, other interpretations prevailed - the oddball is the current radical one.
If one more person tells me 'the ship has sailed' or some other hopeless cliche of the moment - yes, the smart trend of the moment is despair! - about anything .... The radical gun people sure don't think that way, and their positions are obvious, absurd horsecrap. The only problem is you (and many like you) quitting.
You could mail order a machine gun until the 1930s and nonviolent felons could buy guns up until the 60s ( violent ones too a few decades before that ). Not much to challenge federally on some of these points until recent history.
Also the bill of rights werent fully incorporated upon the states until well past the signing of the Constitution. In this context it's kind of silly to compare backwards vs many regulations that simply didn't exist or had no incorporated protection.
Is there somewhere that documents this history? My understanding is that the current interpretation is a new(ish) idea promulgated by the NRA, etc. starting around 1980.
The Bill of Rights point seems like a long stretch.
The most significant acts restricting arms federally are the NFA (1934) which was a (at the time onerous) tax because they weren't sure they had constitutional power for many other methods of regulation.
The other was the GCA passed in 1968.
After the passing of the NFA was the beginning of many modern era challenges such as US v.no legal counsel of dead guy (Miller). Unsurprisingly the undefended dead guy with no counsel lost setting a long precedent and the rest of NFA is history.
It's obscene how angry "constitutionalists" get about doing something that was so important to the very fabric of the constitution that they did it ten times by the end of the convention, including the literal "Bill of rights" which was considered essential.
Almost like they don't actually care about the constitution.
It won't be anytime soon because this desire is more concentrated in a few highly populated states and the less populated rural states can stonewall it. Hence the desire to fight over the meaning of the second rather than amend and clarify it.
"The right to an abortion is not explicitly and specifically in the Constitution, therefore it doesn't exist".
(I recognize some of the "issues" with Roe v Wade, tangential/orthogonal to that of access to medical services...)
"The right to purchase arms is not explicitly and specifically in the Constitution, but must exist despite that, because how else could you bear arms?"
Just like how, for Justice(hah) Thomas, same-sex marriage is a state's right/decision, but interracial marriage... isn't.
Why do several Supreme Court Justices state that they are originalists, and the Constitution is sacrosanct, when the very people who wrote it said that it wasn't, and was to be "reviewed and updated to the needs of the times as a living document"?
"This document is correct and perfect in every way. Except the bit where the authors say it isn't."
>Just like how, for Justice(hah) Thomas, same-sex marriage is a state's right/decision, but interracial marriage... isn't.
Banning interracial marriage was deemed unconstitutional based on the 14th amendment. The 14th amendment doesn't have any text about same-sex marriage. That's why it's left up to the states. (10th amendment)
>Why do several Supreme Court Justices state that they are originalists, and the Constitution is sacrosanct, when the very people who wrote it said that it wasn't, and was to be "reviewed and updated to the needs of the times as a living document"?
The constitution has methods to amend it, that's what a living document means, not that some political party gets to decide what it means on a whim.
Roe v Wade was legislation from the bench. The current court undid that, and are basically shredding any Sua Sponte legislation that comes before them.
I don't want to shoot other humans. I've been in a situation where I nearly needed to, and I'll never fail to be equipped to do so. I had to shoot a cat about a year ago, and I'm still a bit fucked up about it. A human would be so much worse, and that's not something I want to experience.
I have no guilt, because it needed to be done. It's just emotionally traumatic. With a human, it's far more hurtful to the soul; no matter how much they needed shooting, they are fundamentally the same as you.
Having a gun pointed at you is a threat to your life, not “the money of your boss”. Minimum wage or not, their life has value, and they should be to defend it by meeting deadly force with deadly force.
Your scenario starts with a gun pointed at the person. How much training do you believe is required such that an otherwise ordinary person "win" a gunfight when their gun is holstered and the opponent already has them in their aim?
I'm a 2A fan but if i were a worker and asked by my boss to do this i'd say no thanks. Going toe to toe with an armed criminal isn't in the job description, if it were i wouldn't be interested in the position.
This isn't a story of racism but a story of power. It's not that white racists in power want to coerce non-white business owners but that people in power want to exercise that power to advance their own agendas. This same stuff happens to white business owners who aren't part of the inner circle.
I live in a country where this is fully integrated into the police system at a national level. There are two sorts of beat cops: traditional "patrol" police and "security" police, which you pay for.
I only discovered the distinction recently, when a couple came knocking on my door, asking about my neighbour who'd missed a payment.
Yet every HNer is begging for tax expansion. Where m you think this money is going to go? Don’t be naive, read history. Everyone else thought they could do it better too.
It's shocking, but it is probably happening all over the country. In USA there is a shortage of workers, including security workers, and police benefit from that.
Some of the allegations amount to corruption, some just business realities. This is a job for FBI to figure out.
You have to scroll far past the accusations of racism and outrage to reach the story here:
> Here’s how the off-duty work program works: Some businesses — like large nightclubs — are required by the city to have security, which until 2020, sometimes had to be off-duty Minneapolis police officers.
Nightclubs often are required to have security beacuse they are a nuisance to the surrounding area and the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers. The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here in my view and that appears to be gone now.
Why do you summarily dismiss (and recommend that other people dismiss) the multiple viewpoints in the article suggesting that the law you’re mentioning was unfairly targeted at immigrant owned establishments? It’s absolutely part of the story. Is it really that hard to believe that a corrupt way of enforcing a law might intentionally be targeted at people who are less likely to feel empowered to fight it?
> Nightclubs often are required to have security beacuse they are a nuisance to the surrounding area
How many night clubs are located in non-urban residential areas? The commercial properties near them would be closed because, you know, they operate during the day and night clubs don't.
> the taxpayer shouldn't be picking up the tab because you decided to overserve your customers
The solution to overserved customers is to not overserve them, not to have off-duty cops or security there to manage them after the fact. This is quite easily remedied by having the cops come by and fine them until they stop doing it. The fines will pay for the enforcement, so the taxpayers will be fine. By paying off-duty cops to manage overserved customers you are making real law enforcement improbable and making the problem worse.
> The off duty cop requirement is the only odd part here
Strange to qualify with 'only' when it is a major point of the piece.
I've been to community meeting with neighbors complaining about drunk bar customers urinating, sleeping, barfing on their lawns; making noise late into the night; fighting; etc.
About security specifically, bar fights are a cliche and alchohol makes people violent. Are we going to pretend that isn't an issue?
> You understand that any visible intoxication is overserving a customer right?
No, it's not. Continued service of someone who is visibly intoxicated, however, is.
I understand the tenets of responsible service of alcohol, and that as a server, you are meant to stop service immediately at that point.
Realities, however, are more nuanced.
I teach new EMTs and paramedics, and one of the discussion points is around informed consent and implied consent. Every class has a scenario or two where a student inevitably says to or about a mock patient, "Well, you have been drinking alcohol so I have implied consent to treat you" or similar. "So, because he's had a drink, he can't refuse medical advice/treatment?" "Right."
"So I can go to a restaurant, have two glasses of red wine with dinner, and be legally allowed to drive a motor vehicle home, but not legally make decisions about my own health?"
RSA education is generally more black and white, but even with your comment above you show that it is easy to misinterpret. It is not a case of "if your customer is visibly intoxicated, then you overserved them", because they weren't intoxicated until that point (all else being equal, if someone sits on a bar stool and orders 4 shots of tequila to start and downs them all in front of you, then reasonability applies, of course).
I'd be OK if they closed entirely, but barring that I demand they pay the costs of externalities they create. One method of doing so would be hiring private security. They should also have to carry a bond to pay out for any DUIs, violence, vandalism, domestic violence or sexual assault that they are a co-conspirator of.
Let's extend your logic - should a gas station convenience store also carry that bond? I mean, you can buy a box of beer at the gas station and go home and be violent.
Unfortunately corrupt cops aren't limited to just one legal fig leaf for collecting payments, or even to operating inside the bounds of the law at all. Even this specific article discusses four or five different towns with varying flavors of this corruption problem; it focuses on Minneapolis probably just because that's where the newspaper is based out of, not because that's the only place where cops do a protection racket.
> That smells just a little bit like racism to me.
No, it smells like a claim of racism. But claims of various 'isms is so common now it's lost all meaning.
I'm more interested in why the focus is seen to be on corrupt cops, and not on the fact that the damn city required it!
If you've got a corrupt city, is it any wonder that the cops are going to be corrupt too? You can't fix the cops without first fixing their paymasters.
it may well be suspicious, but this is just how news articles are written [these days?]. exciting controversial claim at the front, explanation for why you should feel a certain way about said claim, some dross, maybe a tweet, then—if you're lucky—maybe, languishing at the back of the article will be some facts and a source.
Before you add 'Why don't [you|they] do...' responses, recognize for a moment that the police in the U.S. are largely out of control, have undue control of local government and politics, and have an ideology that enforces self-righteousness and an 'enemy at the gates' siege mentality, and oh yeah, are able to apply violence at a level unmatched in society. These are not polite people, and the way one 'deals' with them has far more in common with radical militias rather than state bureaucrats. If you haven't encountered that, you're just lucky enough to have never threatened their interests.