"Defund the police" is about as stupid as "Reform the police" The whole police system needs to be so drastically restructured to the point that "Reform" is essentially a code word for ineffective tinkering. To date virtually all "reforms", training, community policing, criminal charges like in the Floyd case are essentially tinkering when you look at the big picture of public safety. Defund might be really decreasing funding by 90%. "Replace the police force" might be about right. Reduce the number of armed civil servants or "police " if you must by say 90%. Eliminate many or most non-violent crimes and to the extent they are problems have them attended to by social workers types. Key is getting rid of all handguns and only allow long barrel single shot hunting rifles or shotguns. Working examples of how to make our country safer by eliminating the overall amount of crime and particulary killings exist in quite a few countries and we need to quit f'ing around and imitate them. It will require higher minimum wages, pensions, access to health care, and education, family leave, more gun control, lighter prison sentences, higher taxes for corporations and the rich, particularly the 1% tapering down to the 10- to 20% or even 50% more. If not keep having frequent mass shooting and unnecessary cop killings.
I will post this here because it's not worth starting a thread. I had a problem with a few politicians's statements yesterday. I like Keith Ellison but him referring to police shootings as similar to Jim Crow. Police shootings aren't that prevelant. Police kill twice as many whites annually and regardless police shootings are very rare incidents considering how often police encounter people in negative situations as opposed to something like segregation that affected everyone daily. I also think some police unions are going to react negatively to some speeches in regards to feeling they were sold out in terms of criticism of race relations with the community
Numbers wise, this is true, percentage of population wise, far and away, blacks are killed at a much higher rate. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1123070/police-shootings-rate-ethnicity-us/
Percentage wise how many times are police called to respond to a black suspect. Its not about overall population
It seems to me that both stats are misleading. I would expect that if you live in a neighborhood where there are more crimes taking place, there will be a higher police presence, more interactions with officers, and consequentially higher likelihood for police shootings. Trying to tease out and quantify the role racial bias in the police force has in all of this seems tricky. It would be surprising to me if it didn't have some role, but these simple statistics I keep reading don't tell much much about how big a factor it really is.
And in terms of my first post about the politicians's comments I understand that yesterday wasn't the time, but they talk like all these incidents happen with totally innocent people. If you don't want to address black males and crime out of respect for Floyd's family that's totally understandable but don't paint police as hunting down black men Edit: not that yesterday was the time but the way to address it in a political and also practical sense is to address helping black men do better in terms of education
