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Comment by giantg2 | Hacker News Reader

Funny enough, training is expensive and most of the issues are from a lack of training. I think removing funding will only make things worse.

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Evidence doesn't seem to indicate that, given funding, the police will turn it into meaningful training: it seems to go elsewhere. From [1], a sample:

> We found that, in a two week period at the beginning of June, when the anti-racism protests began, New York City spent $115 million on police overtime, which was over four times what the city spent in the same period last year.

> $14 million went to new locker rooms. $64 million went to motor vehicles and $104 million was planned for police training. During that training, 60 hours are spent on firearm skills while just eight hours are spent on conflict management.

So the training given to police is a fraction of money spent on annual overtime, and the training that is received goes towards increasing violence.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/the-real-cost-of-police-nypd...

Yeah, the biggest cost by far in any department is personnel, especially unionized personnel.

In 2019, the NYPD spent $230 million on lawsuit settlements, including $95 million on police misconduct alone.

https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/annual-claims-report/.

Remove funding for military equipment, restrict gun carrying by police to special teams, stop using militarized police as a response to nonviolent crime. These are all necessary changes that are part of defunding the police.

The military equipment is free under the federal grants.

Military equipment is provided under the federal grants. It is only "free" in the sense that it isn't being paid for by local taxes. That means that local police need to be defunded of federal funds as well as local funds.

It's not really federal funds either. It's surplus equiptment. Perhaps there's a more accurate term rather than defund.

Sounds like it would be more socially responsible to decommission it properly, rather than using untrained, irresponsible, and reckless police as a dumping ground for surplus equipment.

What peices of this surplus equiptment are socially irresponsible? This equipment is defensive, administrative, or less lethal. If anything, it should provide more options before things turn lethal.

Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as there is less worry of harm. Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as it is a social signal that you come prepared to enact violence. Less lethal equipment promotes escalation, as it has a perception of being harmless and more acceptable to use in non-violent situations. The solution is to stop escalating, not to provide more methods by which to escalate while decreasing the risks involved in escalating.

Also, you know, tanks. https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/towns-dont-need-...

"Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as there is less worry of harm."

Yeah, and safer cars increase reckless driving for the same reason...

"Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as it is a social signal that you come prepared to enact violence."

It's being used in response to a suspect's social cue that they are there to commit violence. What should we do, just lay down?

"Less lethal equipment promotes escalation, as it has a perception of being harmless and more acceptable to use in non-violent situations."

This is false. The use of less lethal force is not viewed as harmless and any training will show that. That training will also contain use of force education.

> Defensive equipment promotes escalation, as there is less worry of harm.

I think there's a conversation about law enforcement and civil rights that people in the US need to have. But its awfully hard to have a real conversation when people don't want police to use lethal force and also don't want cops to have access to things that allow them to do their job with less reliance on lethal force.

> Also, you know, tanks. https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/towns-dont-need-...

Actually those are not tanks. And the US military has no problem using .50 cal on personnel. Which are just nitpicks but they illustrate how hard it is to talk about these subjects when the people making the criticisms are so profoundly ignorant about the facts of the matter.

Community trust and support is what lets police be able to police without lethal force. Treating it as a war between police and other citizens destroys that trust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

I can agree with that. How do you propose to deal with the criminal element?

Its not free, it's expensive to maintain and deploy.

The vehicles, sure. But they get orher, simple equipment too.

But what is the purpose of an MRAP (for one example)?

In the incredibly rare event you have an active terrorist attack and can move the MRAP to it before it's over, it may provide the benefit of movable cover.

The rest of the time you have to park it (in two parking spaces likely), train people with it, fuel it, clean it, maintain it. It's just a huge distraction that sends a terrible message to the people you are supposedly serving.

I'm a person that it serves and don't see it sending a bad message. They can use it in inclement weather to deliver supplies, such as after hurricanes. They also tend to deploy the armor at events that are high risk prior to an attack.

An MRAP is not going to be any better at delivering supplies than a few 4x4 trucks. They're not built for cargo and they're very heavy.

And what events in the US are at high risk of attack by IEDs and mines?

They have better ground clearance and should still be operational after say a tornado or hurricane.

A truck with high ground clearance costs more than an order of magnitude less than an MRAP to maintain.

Do you have the numbers for that?

Also, a regular truck will not stand up to storm debris in strong winds.

it allows LEOs and medical personnel to approach an area that is in danger of lethal force by criminals.

I'm not aware of any of it being free. (at least not in TX)

They pay for it and in fact if they dont USE it, it will be confiscated and not refunded.

so not only do they get very big brutal hammers, but for contractual reasons they are FORCED to use them or lose they money they paid for them.

Training and equipping peace officers to de-escalate situations is far cheaper and better for the general population than the hundreds of millions in excessive force and wrongful death lawsuits that are paid out of our taxes.

NYC alone has dropped over $300M on settling lawsuits due to their poor training over the last 5 years[0]

I know a couple current and former NYPD officers and the amount of times I’ve been told of how a routine mental health check up turned into 4+ cops beating the crap out of an unarmed person in their own home would likely surprise most people who aren’t familiar with how brutal the police in the USA are.

[0] https://nypost.com/2020/01/31/city-payouts-in-nypd-misconduc...

It's not necessarily a 'lack of training' so much as 'money spent on irrelevant training instead of what they need'. Either police departments can agree that not all members of the police need to carry guns and be trained to shoot, and redirect training funds from weapons to de-escalation and assistance - or we must move the funding away from the police department to a different department that will do so.

"...or we must move the funding away from the police department to a different department that will do so."

And then you still have armed police without training.

There seems to be a weird attitude in the US that the police are some sort of independent entity, and the most the state can do is reduce its tribute to them. This is a really odd approach, and doesn’t really have a parallel elsewhere; successful police reform had generally involved changes of leadership, independent misconduct commissions, and increased consequences.

They are usually unionized. This mandates that many changes opposed by the union (misconduct commissions and increased consequences) would have to be approved/negotiated by them or else risk a strike. Those negotiations tend to cut out any meaningful changes that threaten their autonomy/privileges.

I think it’s more misallocation of training than lack of training per se. Not enough emphasis on deescalation training.

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