Generally agree with the tenure of this article but you show your sloppiness on this Matt by not investigating further the George Floyd case. The officers are likely going to get off, and if ones looks at the full circumstances, including the audio recordings from BEFORE the video, the toxicology report etc you can see that the cops are not the racist villains the media paints them to be. I expect this sloppiness from mainstream media, but not by you. I recommend for the few who still have an open mind on this to listen to this interview of George Parry (Here: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/09/what-killed-george-floyd.php), who at one time headed the Police Brutality and Misconduct Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, giving all the details surrounding the case. It made me do an almost full 180 on this individual case, and I dont have people paying me $80 to actually investigate what I write about.
Isn't this post, and Obamas point, exactly the same point that University Of Chicago Harald Uhlig made and yet Paul Krugman and Justin Wolfers tried to get cancelled? The left is going fen crazy with this cancel BS. Glad to see you are on the reasonable and courage side Matty!
"The St. Louis Police Department (the dot at the top) is dishing out a ton more deadly violence than any other city, without St. Louis being a particularly heavily policed city."
St. Louis is an outlier, but if I'm reading your graph right, it's the seventh most heavily policed city in the sample, out of more than 90, and it has more than twice as many police officers per capita as the median city.
Loved this article though from what I recall from the video, Floyd did seem highly distressed. The video left me wondering how a man that was cuffed be treated so brutally. He said he couldn't breathe; he was highly erratic and at times unintelligible; the one and only time I saw the video I couldn't help but utter "get this man a doctor". He needed to be calmed down and assured his safety (in the video, he predicted, while cuffed in the car, that he was gonna die), not crushed on the pavement for not respecting police authority. In this one case I do think a social worker or mental health professional would have de-escalated the situation before devolving into an unnecessary death.
I agree with Matt that it is "reform the police" that ought to be the policy. Its hard to boil complex issues down to slogans!
Obama had a good point though; "defund the police" works better as a Fox News talking point than it does a rallying cry for the leftist cause and it is genuinely worrying how few leftists get that.
The number of leftists who talk about revolution and Civil War is scary too. There are guys on the left that are every bit as frighteningly disconnected from reality as the Alt Right guys. However the Right wing crazies have guns so if it comes to a civil war I know who my money is on.
I appreciate the clarity of this argument. It's not engaged in rhetorical speculation about what would and wouldn't be politically palatable -- Matt emphasizes over and over that the idea itself is a bad one.
I'd add that the police reform work we need involves building a record of partial reforms that work well for both the police and the community. "Defund the police", for all its flaws, could apply pressure for concessions from police unions.
Did "Defund" beat out "8 Can't Wait" because the defund activists were more effective or because Republicans chose to highlight that (and the media found the resulting controversy more compelling to cover)?
"Defund police" has an appeal because officers treat residents with such contempt. Look at the statements from police unions, the violence towards protestors, the covering of badge numbers. Why should residents of a blue city generously fund an institution that behaves this way?
Matt, you need a slow boring Facebook page with more of your articles as shareable FB posts.
I just copied the whole damn thing into a FB post to share. And maybe not the whole post as a share. But the first two or three sections so readers can see the beginning content without having to click the link and then once they are engaged with the content, they would be more willing to to pay to get through the paywall.
I mean, the simple answer is just that people are more keen to see murders solved than attempted murders (or whatever other lesser offense).
You may also find that there are people who are willing to "snitch" or otherwise break codes of silence over a death when they weren't over a survivable wound, given that a large portion of victims of violent crimes are criminals or people with close ties with criminals.
I think people should talk to police more. There are some duties they would love to pass on to someone else. Death notifications for example. They really don't like doing those.
LIFYA, that's learned it forty years ago, the vast majority of police officers never shoot anyone. And also never have occasion to shoot at anyone. And often are never called upon to draw their service revolver and point it at anyone during their entire careers.
I think there are different iterations of "defund the police" in practice. You lay out the case against one of the more extreme versions, which I think makes sense. But there are plenty of folks who aren't pushing for abolition, or see abolition as a really long term utopian goal.
Concretely, most of the defund movement in Texas is pushing some combination of the following policies:
*prevent the growth of or reduce the number of uniformed officers
*police contract reform and civilian oversight
*non-police emergency response for mental health and substance abuse
*moving non-police duties out of the police department (crime labs, some internal affairs, ending mounted patrol, maybe traffic duties).
*ceasing arrests for certain low-level nonviolent misdemeanor crimes
I see Matt's case against an abolitionist focused defund the police movement and I get his disagreement with the first item on the list above, but I'd be curious about what he thinks about some of the others.
Fascinating opinions on the militarization of the police and armored vehicles. All it lacks is a factual basis. Most of those stories of municipalities buying surplus armored vehicles could be cured by maybe asking them why? Which I did. What possible use could a small town in Maine have for a reconditioned surplus MRAP? Turned out that they have this stuff called weather. And buying a virtually unstoppable vehicle with internal carrying capacity, has winches, and can be equipped with a plow makes for a wonderful all weather emergency vehicle and ambulance. At a fraction of the cost of anything on the market. They aren't buying them for the armor.
What would that scatter-plot look like if instead of counting police-related deaths per million citizens, you made the Y axis "deaths per police officer" or "deaths per 2000 police hours worked"? If the relationship is flat on total population, it almost seems like it must be _negatively_ correlated, if you plot it against the "amount of policing". Which could be because having more police active reduces crime and increases the sense of public safety, and so _the officers themselves_ are operating from a place of more psychological security, and are less likely to get into inappropriate escalations.
I agree defund the police is a bad idea. I don't think there's a world where we don't need police, however perfect we make our social services, so the end state just doesn't make sense.
But I think you're underrating how difficult it is to sell people that the best way to "fix" policing is to give them more money. I think police departments is already one of the biggest line items in local budgets, and the strategy that they've taken to deny there's any problem at all is really alienating. Even with the studies you cite, it's hard for me to accept that they would take any type of reform seriously.
Publius also makes some pretty good points below. I think being a policemen in the US is an incredibly hard job. There are so many guns, and anyone could have one.
Generally agree with the tenure of this article but you show your sloppiness on this Matt by not investigating further the George Floyd case. The officers are likely going to get off, and if ones looks at the full circumstances, including the audio recordings from BEFORE the video, the toxicology report etc you can see that the cops are not the racist villains the media paints them to be. I expect this sloppiness from mainstream media, but not by you. I recommend for the few who still have an open mind on this to listen to this interview of George Parry (Here: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/09/what-killed-george-floyd.php), who at one time headed the Police Brutality and Misconduct Unit of the Philadelphia Police Department, giving all the details surrounding the case. It made me do an almost full 180 on this individual case, and I dont have people paying me $80 to actually investigate what I write about.
Isn't this post, and Obamas point, exactly the same point that University Of Chicago Harald Uhlig made and yet Paul Krugman and Justin Wolfers tried to get cancelled? The left is going fen crazy with this cancel BS. Glad to see you are on the reasonable and courage side Matty!
"The St. Louis Police Department (the dot at the top) is dishing out a ton more deadly violence than any other city, without St. Louis being a particularly heavily policed city."
St. Louis is an outlier, but if I'm reading your graph right, it's the seventh most heavily policed city in the sample, out of more than 90, and it has more than twice as many police officers per capita as the median city.
Loved this article though from what I recall from the video, Floyd did seem highly distressed. The video left me wondering how a man that was cuffed be treated so brutally. He said he couldn't breathe; he was highly erratic and at times unintelligible; the one and only time I saw the video I couldn't help but utter "get this man a doctor". He needed to be calmed down and assured his safety (in the video, he predicted, while cuffed in the car, that he was gonna die), not crushed on the pavement for not respecting police authority. In this one case I do think a social worker or mental health professional would have de-escalated the situation before devolving into an unnecessary death.
I agree with Matt that it is "reform the police" that ought to be the policy. Its hard to boil complex issues down to slogans!
Obama had a good point though; "defund the police" works better as a Fox News talking point than it does a rallying cry for the leftist cause and it is genuinely worrying how few leftists get that.
The number of leftists who talk about revolution and Civil War is scary too. There are guys on the left that are every bit as frighteningly disconnected from reality as the Alt Right guys. However the Right wing crazies have guns so if it comes to a civil war I know who my money is on.
I appreciate the clarity of this argument. It's not engaged in rhetorical speculation about what would and wouldn't be politically palatable -- Matt emphasizes over and over that the idea itself is a bad one.
I'd add that the police reform work we need involves building a record of partial reforms that work well for both the police and the community. "Defund the police", for all its flaws, could apply pressure for concessions from police unions.
Did "Defund" beat out "8 Can't Wait" because the defund activists were more effective or because Republicans chose to highlight that (and the media found the resulting controversy more compelling to cover)?
"Defund police" has an appeal because officers treat residents with such contempt. Look at the statements from police unions, the violence towards protestors, the covering of badge numbers. Why should residents of a blue city generously fund an institution that behaves this way?
Who works for who?
Matt, you need a slow boring Facebook page with more of your articles as shareable FB posts.
I just copied the whole damn thing into a FB post to share. And maybe not the whole post as a share. But the first two or three sections so readers can see the beginning content without having to click the link and then once they are engaged with the content, they would be more willing to to pay to get through the paywall.
Still waiting for some rational reason why shootings with surviving victims are harder to solve than murders. Ideas anyone?
I mean, the simple answer is just that people are more keen to see murders solved than attempted murders (or whatever other lesser offense).
You may also find that there are people who are willing to "snitch" or otherwise break codes of silence over a death when they weren't over a survivable wound, given that a large portion of victims of violent crimes are criminals or people with close ties with criminals.
Exactly this. Shooting victims are often *extremely* uncooperative. Families of murder victims, less so.
I think people should talk to police more. There are some duties they would love to pass on to someone else. Death notifications for example. They really don't like doing those.
LIFYA, that's learned it forty years ago, the vast majority of police officers never shoot anyone. And also never have occasion to shoot at anyone. And often are never called upon to draw their service revolver and point it at anyone during their entire careers.
I think there are different iterations of "defund the police" in practice. You lay out the case against one of the more extreme versions, which I think makes sense. But there are plenty of folks who aren't pushing for abolition, or see abolition as a really long term utopian goal.
Concretely, most of the defund movement in Texas is pushing some combination of the following policies:
*prevent the growth of or reduce the number of uniformed officers
*police contract reform and civilian oversight
*non-police emergency response for mental health and substance abuse
*moving non-police duties out of the police department (crime labs, some internal affairs, ending mounted patrol, maybe traffic duties).
*ceasing arrests for certain low-level nonviolent misdemeanor crimes
I see Matt's case against an abolitionist focused defund the police movement and I get his disagreement with the first item on the list above, but I'd be curious about what he thinks about some of the others.
Fascinating opinions on the militarization of the police and armored vehicles. All it lacks is a factual basis. Most of those stories of municipalities buying surplus armored vehicles could be cured by maybe asking them why? Which I did. What possible use could a small town in Maine have for a reconditioned surplus MRAP? Turned out that they have this stuff called weather. And buying a virtually unstoppable vehicle with internal carrying capacity, has winches, and can be equipped with a plow makes for a wonderful all weather emergency vehicle and ambulance. At a fraction of the cost of anything on the market. They aren't buying them for the armor.
What would that scatter-plot look like if instead of counting police-related deaths per million citizens, you made the Y axis "deaths per police officer" or "deaths per 2000 police hours worked"? If the relationship is flat on total population, it almost seems like it must be _negatively_ correlated, if you plot it against the "amount of policing". Which could be because having more police active reduces crime and increases the sense of public safety, and so _the officers themselves_ are operating from a place of more psychological security, and are less likely to get into inappropriate escalations.
I agree defund the police is a bad idea. I don't think there's a world where we don't need police, however perfect we make our social services, so the end state just doesn't make sense.
But I think you're underrating how difficult it is to sell people that the best way to "fix" policing is to give them more money. I think police departments is already one of the biggest line items in local budgets, and the strategy that they've taken to deny there's any problem at all is really alienating. Even with the studies you cite, it's hard for me to accept that they would take any type of reform seriously.
Publius also makes some pretty good points below. I think being a policemen in the US is an incredibly hard job. There are so many guns, and anyone could have one.