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sundin13 on 23 July 2021
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Mr Puggsly said:
sundin13 said:

For someone clearly not looking for a big debate, you sure do a lot of debating. I'm not sure what part of your lengthy history is supposed to convince me of that point haha

But anyways, do you not see that the paradigm you are establishing is fucked? What you are saying is that if the police abuse trust, you need to trust them more or else crime will increase. That is fucked. It isn't the responsibility of the citizenry to trust the government, it is the responsibility of the government to earn the trust of the citizenry. A drop in trust of public institutions is something that the institutions must respond to by enacting reform. We don't solve this problem by just trusting harder. That is dumb. 

Further, you keep blaming this type of thing on "cities" or "policies", but the 478

Police certainly wouldn't be unique at abusing power. If cities or a certain party has lost faith in them, that's fine I guess. I would simply suggest having another solution to deal with crime before essentially neutering your police. Take from that what you will.

You're preaching to the choir about government trust. That's why I don't vote democrat.

"lack of trust largely comes from Police Misconduct, and individuals reacting to police misconduct." You know a vast majority of police interactions don't end in some sort of misconduct. If some bad interactions is all it takes for a city to want less policing, well I guess we know the results. It often leads to higher crime. Hence, people losing faith in police seems to benefit criminal behavior more.

You say that I'm "preaching to the choir", yet you seem to be advocating blind trust in state sanctioned violence...

Anyways, the issue isn't just some police officers committing misconduct. The way that the police system is set up through the current police union system creates a power imbalance between the police and the communities they serve. Communities have virtually no recourse to respond to police misconduct, both because the police typically investigate and protect their own, and because unions shield officers from consequences in all but the most severe instances of misconduct. 

The primary way to maintain trust in a system is through accountability. Most people understand that in every system there will be some degree of abuse, they simply expect the abuse to be met with accountability. Instead, what we repeatedly see is that the police are more interested in protecting other police than they are in accountability. We need to even this power imbalance between the police and the communities they serve in order to restore trust in these institutions, and in large part, what we are seeing from police is a backlash to any hint of accountability. 

The police have tremendous power to both fix their policing system, to repair trust in policing and to respond to community concerns, but they don't want to. This isn't evidence that the communities have gone mad, it is evidence that the police don't want to fix their system because they see it as beneficial to themselves. The police are more interested in protecting themselves from accountability than they are in serving their communities, and if that is the case, then it is hard to justify further expenditures for policing until they recognize their role in fixing it.