Author Topic: Defund the Police  (Read 17942 times)

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Offline segnosaur

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Re: Defund the Police
« Reply #30 on: January 12, 2021, 02:42:36 pm »
First off, defunding police goes hand in hand with a lot of other social reforms such as decriminalizing sex work, drugs, homelessness, and mental illness and putting resources into communities to address these problems. So right away the idea is to eliminate the conditions that create crime in the first place.
I have no problem decriminalization ****, liberalizing drug laws, etc. And yes, that would greatly reduce the number of arrests.

But, even if you make those things completely legal, even if you eliminate all laws dealing with "victimless" crimes (****, homelessness, drugs/alcohol), you have still only eliminated ~40% of all arrests. (That's a big chunk, and its certainly worth exploring, but its certainly not the majority. And that's being generous, because the statistics contain a large number of "other" crimes that i am lumping in here.) On the other hand, ~60% of all arrests were not victimless (this includes assault/murder, fraud in various forms, theft/robbery, etc.). 

See: https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=1
(These are American figures... tried to find the Canadian equivalent, but could not. But given the similarity in our laws, we probably would have similar numbers, although probably fewer drug arrests due to our legalization efforts.)
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Now, certainly people will still get murdered or assaulted even in this world, which is why I think having a small and highly professional type of body that is tasked with investigating serious crimes would still be necessary
Which sounds a lot like having a police force, you're just giving it a different name.
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but the cop on the street who drives around hassling the poors would be hopefully rendered obsolete.
What about a 'cop on the street' which doesn't drive around hassling poor people, but still responds to things like "robberies in progress"? Or are you going to only go after crimes that have already occurred, without dealing with crimes that are in progress?

"Sorry you had all your stuff stolen. Our investigation showed that the burglars were in your house for 2 hours. We could have stopped them, but we don't do that sort of thing".