We should not defund the Terminator program | Hacker News Reader

We should not defund the Terminator program

mcsweeneys.net

37 pointscolinprince15 comments

This is such a stupid article. Cops are not terminators. If you really think society could function without entire police departments, I welcome you to lobby your local municipality to dismantle their police force. Unless, that is, you mean to tell me "Defund the police" doesn't actually mean defund the police, to which I say: say what you actually mean, and don't hide behind a catchy slogan.

At least in my experience with police, ranging from dense inner city metro (DC, Houston) to suburb, and rural, society would function just as well, if not better without it.

I have yet to have an additive, positive interaction with Law Enforcement. I say this as a mixed-race person with LE as family members as well as working alongside Federal LE for most of my career.

Best case scenario I have seen is that LE will take a report of whatever [bad thing] happened and then courts will use LE to execute a specific warrant. Even then, nobody was made better off in that situation - simply that someone that committed an assault was punished.

are you suggesting scrapping all laws? How do you enforce laws without police?

Semantics: if you define any system with the goal of ensuring that the laws are followed no matter the method used “the police” then sure you’re right.

Does that mean such a system has to look anything like our currently very militarized police force? Nope!

We're likely better off starting from scratch with the Constitution. Too much legacy code (literally legal code) is fundamentally flawed to try and keep modifying it.

Actually I’d suggest scrapping all police immunity, and hold officers fully and individually accountable to the law.

IMO law enforcement officials should be expected to understand, obey and be held accountable to the law at a standard several orders of magnitude higher than civilians. Not the opposite.

Societies managed to function (for better or worse) without entire police departments for thousands of years.

The contemporary police department is a relatively novel way of organizing law enforcement, but there are sherrifs, constables, watchmen, guardsmen, etc. in our oldest written histories.

The idea of “defunding the police“ is to re-allocate funds towards services that are better aligned with the problems at hand in a given community.

Take drug addiction as an example — Instead of funding more jails and more officers, “defunding” would allocate that money towards addiction specialists, rehabilitation facilities and programs to help people recover, get jobs, and rebuild their lives.

In other words: A shift towards funding preventative care more, and reactive use of force less.

It doesn't mean the police go away entirely.

So say that. No part of the phrase "defund the police" indicates any part of this re-allocation that you describe. Regardless, you still will need a police force. There has to be some entity of the government which enforces the rule of law. Look at what happened when the police abandoned their posts in during the Rodney King riots. Additionally, what about homicide and detective units; we should probably keep those positions, right?

The problem with this slogan is I have no idea what it is actually proposing except for the literally dismantling of the police force as we know it.

> Cops are not terminators.

Then we should stop training them like they are [1]. When Dave Grossman tells cops that they're warriors, and they need to get over their instinct to not want to kill in order to better protect "sheep" from "wolves", we're telling cops to be Terminators.

> If you really think society could function without entire police departments, I welcome you to lobby your local municipality to dismantle their police force.

Minneapolis is planning to do just that, and replacing it with Public Safety services. And as someone who lives a few miles from Camden, it's been clear that disbanding the police force entirely and reforming it has greatly improved the situation[2].

The point of the satire is that politely asking a group to stop murdering people without further meaningful change is unlikely to be helpful. And given that police are now hunting down protesters using facial recognition and social media, and that police unions have resisted even the most modest of reforms over the years, it doesn't seem like these Not Terminators will stop terminating willingly.

1. https://www.inlander.com/spokane/why-thousands-are-calling-o...

2. https://www.newsweek.com/minneapolis-not-first-disband-polic...

But people literally mean “defund the police” in the sense of “completely eliminate the existing police force in its entirety and build something else from the scorched earth.”

And for black communities it really is true that no police would be an improvement over the current status quo. That’s literally the main tenant of the protests.

Then shouldn't they be saying "Reform the police"?

They don't believe the police can be reformed. They believe the system is irreparably and irredeemably rotten to the core and that the only solution is to burn it all down.

This shouldn't be a controversial concept, as it's what many Americans already seem to believe about their own government.

Don’t sell the concept short! Burning it all down is a pretty controversial opinion in its own right. Doubly because you have a majority of people who aren’t generally harmed by the status quo. I would be surprised if it wasn’t a controversial opinion. The amount of empathy currently being shown at the protests is unheard of.

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