Abolish the Police? Survivors of the Chaos in Seattle Aren’t So Sure

Issues have to get pushed to the extreme because politicians drag their heels otherwise.

Corruption is the best business to be in. Police departments have no interest in oversight, beyond the amount necessary for leadership to protect their positions of power. And Police Unions are generally very powerful and dominate local politics.

I think the thing you're missing here is that the distortion (see the use of the word abolish here, the proposal is defunding) is completely deliberate.

This divide didn't happen by accident, it's the product of decades of deliberate political choices.

You need police in hospitals to maintain security for the patients in there. It's not uncommon to have incidents with people from the outside trying to assault/murder someone they know in the hospital. Criminals shot on the street still have to go to the hospital and this leaves an opportunity for their would-be-murderer to come in and finish the job.

Schools, it's sad but I'm in favor of school resource officers. Those people were good to have around and can serve as a role model.

It wasn't like this a few years ago. Outraged responses are a feature of outrage culture, which is pretty recent. Media have been pushing it to drive clicks, and sell ads on cable TV, for years. Grifters push their instagrams, their vlogs, their books.

I think the decline started when University produced generation after generation of supposedly educated people that had no skill other than fanning the flames.

And social media has been the A-bomb against rational, paused discourse.

> I really hate that in typical US manner this issue gets pushed to the extreme so in the end a reasonable discussion can’t be had

That's kind of the intention. It's easy to argue against "Abolish the police! Anarchy for everyone!". Not so much against "maybe we shouldn't send people with guns drawn to respond to unarmed individuals going through a mental health crisis" [1].

None of the real proposals for policing reform that have come out the protests are calling to get rid of the police. Pretending that they want that is a political fearmongering tactic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Charles_Kinsey

But it's an uncomfortable environment happening on the incumbent's watch. That doesn't say much positive about the incumbent's ability to lead, and suggests new leadership is in order.

You should be aware that I've talked to liberals in rural areas who feel physically threatened by far-right rhetoric. I.e. the "the only good democrat is a dead democrat" video, conservatives guarding voting locations with guns, the president encouraging both these examples, etc. A couple of them have taken up gun ownership specifically because of this fear. I absolutely sympathize with both sides, but being "very uncomfortable" is nowhere near one-sided.

That's the point... Nobody is seriously considering getting rid of the police. Calling it that is a fearmongering technique from the political right.

Biden doesn't even support the defund the police movement [1] which is the real goal of most of these protests. If you look beyond the media's reality distortion bubble, the defund the police movement is about diversifying how we respond to crises, not getting rid of the police as some claim.

[1] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/07/trumps-false-recurring-cla...

> the radical changes being proposed have their own problems

I'd like to point out that none of said changes have been implemented anywhere in the US in any meaningful way. Save some minor defunding, I know of no locale who has transferred any responsibility away from the police, which is one of the main roads to abolition. As another poster said, this is a very clear straw man. CHAZ was a result of protesting and an incredibly aggressive Seattle PD, not an ideal people are looking to recreate everywhere.

What experiments? None of the proposals for policing reform have been implemented. The only thing we've seen are the police refusing to respond to calls and do their job in a political move. Nobody asked for that and none of the serious reform proposals consider anything like that.

It's possible to have a world where the police do their job and are accountable when they commit horrible acts as we've seen over the past few months. Talking about the subject as if we can either have the police and look the other way at their abuse, or get rid of them completely is a terrible false dichotomy.

Just FYI, you're likely to get downvoted for posting an AMP link. It's generally best to link directly to the source.

as always, be careful what conclusions you draw from polls. here's an article discussing that poll and some others from previous years: https://www.vox.com/2020/6/17/21292046/black-people-abolish-...

I'm not even sure you're wrong; I just think you can't conclusively say how black people feel about an issue.

Most of the examples that spurred this movement are killings that are disproportionately either negligent or depraved heart at the very least (let's pretend we can't form an argument that any of them were purposeful murders that were not necessary to save the officer). Even given this benefit of the doubt, it is still reasonable for independent citizens of a free nation to fight tooth and nail against such an assault on a tenant of civilization: That the state never kills you in the streets, if they can at all help it. Further, I can't see from any angle how allowing these instances to continue is a necessary price for preventing widespread crime.

>I just get the distinct impression that many people have got no real idea about the threat that crime poses to the prosperity of a community

I can't disagree more strongly.

>... and the effort that is required to keep it in check

This I agree with. But this is a weak argument against people who live with a constant background, and sometimes foreground, fear for their lives from their own government.

Funding a massive police force to curb what essential amounts to socioeconomic issues is highly inefficient. Putting that funding towards building better communities, alleviating the factors associated with crime directly, rather than just trying to patch it by putting public workers in danger.

How much abuse of power is acceptable in your eyes?

> The occasional misbehaviour of police officers is a small price to pay compared to the oppression and privation wrought by widespread crime.

What's the going conversion rate on that? How many thefts should we expect the police to prevent for every person we allow them to rough up?

We can live in a society where police are held accountable for their actions and where they do their job. Pretending otherwise is a false dichotomy.

I think for most people defund sounds like “take away all funding for” which would be tantamount to abolishing.

> Law enforcement is not necessarily the same thing as security

I'm having difficulty finding my source right now, but it appears that in cases of homicide by someone unknown to the victim, a police officer is the perpetrator in between 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 incidents. These statistics don't consider whether the killing is justified; they just observe that if people know of someone who was killed by a stranger, there's a 1-in-3 or 1-in-4 chance that stranger has a uniform.

And as we know, people's perceptions of safety are more important than actual statistics. We rewrote the nature of air travel in response to 9/11.

It needs to be replaced with a credible alternative.

Defund is not actually a bad idea. The police are tasked with handling the fallout of failing or non-existent social systems and have been scaled respectively - in fact police funding is growing every year, and not insubstantially.

If you work in tech you should know what happens if you transfer too many responsibilities to one bloated team.

These funds would be better invested in actual support systems. Homeless shelters. Drug rehabilitation. Fixing subpar education funding in poor school districts.

> Abolish the police

What does this mean to you?

I know you may be unwilling to entertain the opposite point of view, but it doesn't necessarily sound like a "stupid idea" to friends/families/cultures who have lost members to murder by police (at varying points on the scale from negligence to depraved heart to purposeful to premeditated), especially in the case for mere "defunding", which is thoughtless to call a "stupid idea" out of hand, since the argument that some police have too much firepower is one that can be formed reasonably, and not just a "stupid idea" to be dismissed without engaging. Also, most victims don't even go as far as literal and unqualified abolishment, and say they want complete reform. But even the ones desperate enough to call for abolishment, which I find hard to blame them for, are usually talking about specific extremely corrupt and violent jurisdictions, and further, they admit that something must come after - abolish "the current" police in "some" places, before they kill again, and replace them. And of course, I'm sure there are some who have been driven to want only to "abolish police" without further qualification, and you are encouraged to engage them respectfully and explain that it's unrealistic despite their emotional suffering and outrage, and engage them in the context of the more fleshed-out options I've listed above.

Don't just call it a "stupid idea". That doesn't belong on HN.

As an outsider looking in, it seems to me like reducing the scope of responsibility , and increasing accountability, of your police forces would be a boon to public safety.

It's mostly terrible messaging. Defund and Abolish are both absolute terms (i.e., people try to defund planned parenthood, and we abolished slavery) but, for the most part, what's being asked for is just to scale back the police and their funding.

You're falling for a strawman.

Spend some time looking at the nuanced proposals for policing reform that go by the name "defund the police" and I am guessing that you agree with them a lot more than you think you do.

> “Abolish the police” is a scale

Words have meaning though. No one on the political board is against reforms but “abolish”, “defund”, or “shut down” mean what it means.

>>From what I've seen, that isn't what the majority who are calling for abolishment are aiming for.

The problem is a large number of people calling for for abolishing the police do not have an actual plan on what to replace them with, saying things like "Something will rise up to replace it"

There is also a over riding belief that criminality is 100% related to systemic racism and poverty which is not really the case, Some of it is sure and we should address that with reform but a large part of criminality is not and abolishing the police is not a solution to that crime

We need massive reform and demilitarization of the police, and abolish police unions, but abolish police is crazy town

Why should an ambulance driver have to respond to a call in a dangerous neighborhood without a police escort? I wouldn’t. Fuck that, you don’t want police, good luck.

Not sure if this could have been more perfectly executed to discredit the idea of abolishing/defunding the police, which in my understanding has always been proposed as a structured, intentional shift away from heavily militarized policing toward a system of robust social services. I've seen others use the language of divest/invest to make clear that it's a shift in resources. Reading a little bit of abolitionist literature (because this stems out of a much larger, ongoing conversation about the prison industrial complex), it seems even full abolitionists see it as a process that involves building new systems and drastically shifting the American mindset around punitive retribution.

Instead, you have a situation where the police to abandon a precinct all at once and not long after, far-right groups start showing up at night to stoke violence. Hard not to read that as intentional.

> "Abolish the police" is a scale where there is an extreme end where they may call for completely removing police from across the USA. From what I've seen, that isn't what the majority who are calling for abolishment are aiming for. Maybe "abolish" was a poor choice of a word.

It's not "Abolish the police" by itself. The same people also say "All Cops Are Bastards" and "Policing is a racist institution". It would be unreasonable to take these words as supporting anything other than doing away with police entirely.

For those of you who were not here when this happened: The police decided not to respond the actual 911 calls in or _near_ the CHOP (the auto shop was a block _away_, not within) was a retaliatory tactic they employed out of spite. Knowing full and well that it would look bad on the protesters and those who created the CHOP. Denying health services and aide is NOT what people who are advocating for defunding the police are advocating for.

I agree, this is absolutely a straw-man argument.

> I'd call this article a straw-man argument, but there are those on the extreme end of the scale, apparently.

I too found it hard to believe that such people exist, but my own wife said she agrees with the statement "I believe police cause overall more harm than good in the USA, and it would be better to have no police at all than policing in its current form."

And yes, she believes that all police, except for investigating detectives, could be replaced by social workers and the like. Many of her friends believe similarly. So it isn't a straw man, these people really exist.

As you suggest, "defunding the police" is a motte and bailey argument, in that "defund" CAN equal abolish, if the defunding is 100%. On the other hand, a 5% shifting of funds would be a minor reform. So advocates, if they are unscrupulous -- and not all of them are -- can simultaneously advocate for a radical change in policing and assert it will have modest impact, by equivocating on the meaning of the word "defund".

>>>This is a classic white liberal issue of "I support the ideas but not the way to them" that has been around for centuries.

"The white liberal is the worst enemy to America, and the worst enemy to the black man....The white liberal aren’t white people who are for independence, who are moral and ethical in their thinking. They are just a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. The same as the white conservative is a faction of white people that are jockeying for power. They are fighting each other for power and prestige, and the one that is the football in the game is the Negro..." - Malcom X

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8869214-the-white-liberal-i...

Portland cut 3%.[1] Seattle is going to vote on 2%.[2]

[1] https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/2020/06/17/28550006...

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-c...

All right, but then comes the question: Replace it with what?

Then the businesses will leave and the local economy will suffer. Those with little will have less. Those with enough to start over elsewhere will leave. This phenomenon is called "blight".

Good luck Seattle.

I don't think the owner of an independent coffee shop qualifies as "rich and powerful".

I would argue that small business owners with few employees would hardly meet the generalized popular definition of "rich," and that their inability to operate would directly harm those employees who are also not "rich." This country runs on small business owners, and it's baffling that there are those who exclude that fact from their worldview.

If you're looking at what happened to the business owners in the article and thinking that that's a step in the right direction, I think there are a lot of criminal-justice/police reform folks who would prefer that you did not try to associate yourself with what they're fighting for.

Telling America that the coffee-shop guy deserved to get harassed by a violent mob because he's a wealthy fatcat is the surest way to discredit any cause you're advocating for. And I'm saying this as someone who thought the ideas underlying DTP made a fair amount of sense.