Canadian Politics Today

You mean like "defund the police"?  BAHAHAAHA.

My slogan means we demand police accountability...NOW!

What do you mean by "accountability"?

Cops held accountable for abusing power & breaking the law, ie: getting fired, suspended w/o pay, and/or sued.

Punishing individual police doesn't change anything about policing's role in society tho

Police chiefs should be accountable too.  If they allow unlawful behaviour they get fired.

Also, a lot of police departments in Canada don't even use bodycams.  Lack of accountability and transparency.

In terms of their role in society, it should be to enforce the law, warn/fine/arrest lawbreakers, and investigate crimes in order to do such.

But that i snot what it actually is.

For those with mental health issues, disabilities, or having domestic issues there's a role for other professions to help who aren't carrying guns.

And the point of "defund" is that those types of resources are grossly underfunded in no small part due to the tremendous amount of resources that get funnelled into police. Underfunded mental health (for example) services means police are the go-to for handling people having public mental health crises which means more demand for police, which means more money to police and less money for mental health services. At some point the cycle needs to break.

Sometimes you need police or someone else who can use force to respond to mental health crisis because people can be out of control, hurting other people, destroying property etc.  You don't send a cop to someone's house if they are depressed.  You might send them if they're feeling suicidal because you might have to break down a door.

Now I agree they aren't quite trained for mental health crisis most likely.  So you'd need to either train cops for it, or train mental health counselor to be able to break down doors or stop a person from hurting other people, destroying property etc.

The "defund the police" slogan is stupid.

It's only stupid if you don't understand it, which this scenario you lay out seems to suggest. One of the interesting things about a lot of the "oh yeah who are you gonna call when X happens?" arguments against defunding the police like this one is they they betray the fact that policing is fundamentally reactive and they treat things like mental health crises or poverty as inevitable. The fact that it may be possible to deal with the root causes of these things doesn't seem to enter into it, whereas that is a fundamental component of the defund argument ie if you give money that is going to buy cops tanks to social services, to mental health services, to communities, then the problems you say we need police to deal with will be significantly reduced.

That's not to say there aren't instances (such as someone threatening harm to themselves or others) where you would need police intervention, but in those cases, there should be also be professionals on the scene who are equipped to handle the mental health angle so you don't end up with something like this happening.

It's a dumb slogan if every time someone says it someone else misinterprets it and then someone needs to explain "what it really mean".

If you’re expecting a three word slogan to be a detailed policy proposal and not a provocative conversation starter, that’s a you problem.

I'm expecting it to make some sense.  "Black Lives Matter" makes sense.  Some stupid white people misinterepreted this as "black lives matter more", but it actually meant "black lives matter too".  So maybe a better slogan would be "Black Lives Matter Too".

So that's another example of a slogan that requires additional explanation, then.

And then there was the whole "Check your privilege" debacle.  So I think the left needs to get better at slogans.

The right has "Lock Her Up" and "Facts don't care about your feelings", which at least make sense.

Those aren't political slogans in the sense of connecting to policy or anything. like, no one is chanting "check your privilege" at a march, c'mon.

We used to live in a world when the mainstream left wasn't completely stupid, the only stupid left were the radical loopy ones like the ultra-vegans or nouveau hippies who lived in vans that used used restaurant kitchen grease as fuel.

Again, you're expecting a three word slogan to explain a detailed policy when it's actually meant as a conversation starter. But I also don't think "defund the police" is all that challenging a concept, since everything else that people who espouse it want flows from that starting point. Again, this is a you problem.

If stuff like this can happen with bodycams, imagine what goes on without them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/ynzkig/policing_in_america_a_legally_blind_man_was/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Exactly right. Lots of cities in Canada have cops without body cams.  How lovely.

I hope these cops aka tyrants enjoy being sued and fired.   The blind guy is a champ, he knew all his rights and did and said all the right things and didn't resist arrest.  He's alive and will make a lot of money.