A few weeks ago, my sister turned up for a 12-hour shift that began at 4 pm, and was immediately called to an emergency situation: a man had climbed atop a light pole, and was threatening to jump, was threatening suicide. My sister then spent the next 7 hours attempting to talk him down, and at 11 pm (7 hours later!) she finally succeeded. She talked him out of it, she prevented his death by suicide. He was apparently out of his mind on crystal meth when he climbed that light pole.

My sister (a police detective in a working-class city near Toronto that has been ravaged by job losses, and by the scourge of crystal meth) has had a lot of specialized training in community policing and in conflict resolution. I'm not sure what other individuals or groups in that community are prepared to step in, in the inevitable event of such cases, and in the absence of a functioning police service?

Don't "defund" the police, but rather make sure the money is spent on training police officers to do community policing, and then pay them accordingly. The idea of a "defunded" police force just makes me think of wannabe cops, now working as security guards at the local mall, now finally with their hands on guns, and with actual power, as a new force of underpaid police officers, and I'm pretty sure that would not work out very well. You get what you pay for, after all.

1: I think the idea is that someone would still do the job you describe, but they wouldn't be "police" -- we wouldn't combine that kind of work with the job of shooting people.

But seriously, Walt, who else would do that job? It is a very difficult job, demanding loads of specialized training (it is actually not all that easy to go face-to-face with someone on a bridge, or a light pole, threatening to jump).

So who else is prepared to do that job? And if they're actually ready to go, why haven't they stepped up to the plate before now?

I've really enjoyed the repeated references to Camden in these abolish the police comments. I gave it a few days to see if anyone would actually go read about the Camden model and apparently the answer is no.

Here's a few articles. The last one talks to both Vitale and a lieutenant in the Camden County police academy. If you don't want to click through the highlights are yes Camden dissolved their police department. They then contracted with the county for a new force. A force almost twice the size of the old one. They hired a ton of white cops from the suburbs to engage in high visibility community engaged broken windows style policing. And it worked. Also, in the new department it's easier to discipline and fire people for things like use of force issues. There's good practices with use of force and community engagement. Another good tactic was the city knocking down a bunch of abandoned houses.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crime-in-camden/549542/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/how-camden-new-jersey-reformed-its-police-department

https://www.njtvonline.org/news/video/camden-demolishes-derelict-houses-reduce-crime/

https://thecrimereport.org/2018/06/18/police-in-america-warriors-or-peacemakers/

4 is incredibly irritating. I had already read 2 of the 4 articles you linked to.

3: I don't understand what you're saying. There's someone willing to do the job now (your sister, for example). Are you saying that they won't do it unless they have the job title "police officer"?

Are you saying that they won't do it unless they have the job title "police officer"?

Jesus, no. I'm saying they probably won't do that job unless they're members of the police service, because nobody else in our society is called upon to intervene in these incredibly difficult situations, and nobody else wants to do it.

But that is exactly what people want to change. It's nobody else's job because we decided it's nobody else's job. It's not a law of nature.

And while it does seem like a dangerous, stressful job, it's not in the top ten most dangerous jobs in the US, and we do manage to hire people successfully for all the jobs that are more dangerous than being a police officer: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/27/the-10-most-dangerous-jobs-in-america-according-to-bls-data.html

Also, 4 is being amused that people are talking both about Camden and about abolition, which is silly because Camden hasn't abolished the police? I don't believe anyone thought it had.

6: in that particular situation, why is a police officer more competent to perform that role than a mental health clinician.

it's not in the top ten most dangerous jobs in the US

I get that this if offered in good faith, but this measure of "dangerous" really seems to miss the point of what makes policing hard. I don't think logging is a major driver of PTSD, to put it snarkily. The combination of seeing fucked up shit, lots of interpersonal conflict, and low to high levels of physical danger is, wartime deployments aside, pretty unique to policing. I do think this is another argument for breaking the job into different tracks, so that no one person is dealing with all those parts of it.

Gswift, what are your top five reforms for police departments with a toxic environment of protecting abusive police officers?

We would hire people to do what your sister did, as community healers, or social workers, or some other name. You could call them stewards or shepherds or chaplains (except not religious). They could be well trained first responders. But they don't have to be in military-derived uniform, nor authorized to use force. Could your sister not have done what she did if she weren't empowered to restrain, arrest, or use force to hurt the man?

Of course there's a terrific need there, but it doesn't have to be bundled into the same package as policing. People who say 'abolish the police' are saying to address the need itself (decriminalize drugs, offer addiction services so that guy's at a safe injection site, not climbing light poles) and also, create a different body of people who don't have the cop mentality to be the responder (because the cop mentality is too racist and relies too heavily on force).

13: I'm not sure how to make sense of the chaplain idea epistemologically, because in the U.S. at least, guns are easy to come by, and not all situations can be resolved without force of some kind. Social workers now do occasionally have to call in the police.

11:. When shiv worked essentially the roustabout job, there were concerns of injury, but they're well defined. No worries that the drill is going to shoot you in the head while you do paperwork after shutting it down. Which is what happened to a young officer and the social worker here last week - domestic violence call, 12th one at the house, cop talks to the man who apparently peacefully returns to his house, only to grab a gun and shoot the cop and social worker.

because in the U.S. at least, guns are easy to come by, and not all situations can be resolved without force of some kind.

These other threads have convinced me that many of these must go hand-in-hand with gun control measures. We're talking about reassigning things like mental health crises or drunk and disorderly individuals, but there's just a giant gulf between "mental health crisis" and "mental health crisis with a gun", or "drunk and disorderly" vs "drunk and disorderly with a gun".

The combination of seeing fucked up shit, lots of interpersonal conflict, and low to high levels of physical danger is, wartime deployments aside, pretty unique to policing.

This sounds utopian, but don't you think the sorts of unarmed, non-violent emergency response jobs we're talking about would be literally psychologically easier to handle for a lot of people that policing? Not easy, on an absolute scale. And not safe, on an absolute scale. But easier than going out into the world viewing every interaction as a potential deadly threat that can only be avoided by maintaining total interpersonal dominance over everyone you interact with.

16: burnout in social workers and EMTs is pretty high, as is turnover, IIRC. It seems like dealing with other people's worst moments is psychologically shitty. I can't imagine the police culture in some places helps, but some of the stress is going to be unavoidable.

Also, 4 is being amused that people are talking both about Camden and about abolition, which is silly because Camden hasn't abolished the police?

4 is being amused at so called abolition fans invoking an example that involves doubling your force with mostly white cops from the suburbs and executing broken windows policing. Invariably people who invoke Camden in this way don't know a thing about it other than Camden fired all it's cops.

1, 3: But there are people who do your sister's job without a badge and a gun. Social workers, street outreach workers, harm reduction workers, mental health nurses-- they successfully intervene in precisely this kind of situation all the time. And they manage to do it without killing the people they're meant to help, which is more than we can say for Canadian police officers this week.

18: So, exactly what I said. You think the person who brought up Camden as an example of what's meant by police abolition is ignorant. Good luck tracking that person down.

12: Camden really is a good example. Increased headcount coupled with hugely improved training and engagement practices. You have to foster a culture where bully types aren't tolerated. Also the ability to discipline and get rid of people who don't belong on the job. Part of this is the state level people need a lot of leeway and discretion to yank the cert. In some states you basically have to commit a felony to get your cert revoked and that's nuts. Here if you catch a misdemeanor DUI it's not are you getting your cert pulled but a matter of for how many years. This totally removes any possibility of nepotism or corrupt retention of these types. Without the state cert the department can't keep you as a cop.

You have to foster a culture where bully types aren't tolerated.

Do you think SLC has such a culture now? Because I have to say, the fact that you didn't even understand that stopping your car to confront someone who yelled at you made you look like a bully worries me along those lines. By your own account the guy ran away: you can make fun of him as a coward, but if you're not trying to come across as a bully, you should be reacting to people who are afraid of you as evidence of a problem in how SLC officers are presenting themselves.

Does anyone remember Eleanor Bumpurs? I'll bet LB does. She was an old disabled and mentally disturbed African-American woman being evicted from her home. She brandished a knife at the police doing the evicting and they shot her with a shotgun. Twice. Ever since then I've thought the police should deal with similar cases armed with very large pillows, or that hook like device the Chinese police use.

I mean any cop who couldn't have disarmed her shouldn't be on the force. Why even bring a fucking shotgun?

She made it into a Lou Reed song. New York isn't his best album, maybe, but it certainly covers the headlines of my last few years of high school.

25 That's one of the things that radicalized me as a teenager.

New York is his best album.

I'm not arguing with that; I was preemptively correcting for the fact that it's a huge personal nostalgia hit for me, so I probably overrate it.

21: And the things you're talking about do sound like good things, or at least better than the alternative. I'm picking on you, though, because the way you've been talking about these issues makes you sound as though you're so enmeshed in your professional culture that you can't see what's wrong with how police treat people. Being amused by a protestor's cowardice when he runs away from you because he's afraid you're going to hurt him? Even if you weren't going to hurt him, something bad happened there. Looking at a coworker shoving a frail old man to the street and withholding judgment until someone within the police force determined it was bad, because it was plausible to you that it might be justified? Your thinking it was plausible that it might have been justified is a symptom of a sick culture.

I mean, do what you can to make the SLC police "one of the good ones", and to the extent they're better than the alternatives, do what you can to keep them that way. But try to consider the possibility that not all the criticisms you're hearing are ignorant and unjust.

27 oh Walt, I like it enough but even Metal Machine Music is better. Not to mention Berlin or Transformer which blow it out of the water.

LB, you're not looking to learn anything, you just want a fight. No thanks.

I'm learning from the things you post. I don't think we're getting closer to agreement, but that's not the only goal of learning.

"The combination of seeing fucked up shit, lots of interpersonal conflict, and low to high levels of physical danger is, wartime deployments aside, pretty unique to policing."

Paramedics have all these things. As a result, AIMHMHB, they have more than triple the incidence of PTSD of soldiers who have served in combat, and higher even than police officers.

Nurses too.

No doubt - I don't know the numbers for nurses but sounds likely. Also probably A&E doctors for that matter.

They could be well trained first responders. But they don't have to be in military-derived uniform, nor authorized to use force. Could your sister not have done what she did if she weren't empowered to restrain, arrest, or use force to hurt the man?

In that situation? Sure. And I do like your idea of stewards or shepherds; and I also believe that too many North American police forces have become too militarized.

But who is going to deal with, say, a domestic violence situation, or an active shooter scenario, if we don't have law enforcement officers who have been authorized to restrain, arrest, or use force, when necessary,* in order to uphold the law and protect the victims of that violence, of that shooting?

I guess I'm just not seeing how an unarmed social worker can be expected to effectively restrain an actively violent offender in a scary and volatile situation. Which is why I'm saying police reform, and community policing standards upheld and strengthened, but not an end of policing.

*And I do understand that "when necessary" can be a loosey-goosey standard, and a bit of a moving target, especially when the officers involved in a controversial action submit to some kind of 'fraternal order' loyalty test, as they so often do.

But who is going to deal with, say, a domestic violence situation, or an active shooter scenario, if we don't have law enforcement officers who have been authorized to restrain, arrest, or use force, when necessary,* in order to uphold the law and protect the victims of that violence, of that shooting?

You might want to read the interview ogged linked before. You must realize that these are questions that advocates have thought about, right?

38: Yeah, I read the interview, but was not convinced by Vitale's responses, when I got to thinking about domestic violence situations, and how they typically play out.

And you might want to adjust your tone, so that you don't come off as some kind of smug, sanctimonious prig, with a bit of a mansplaining vibe.

Well, actually, he didn't explain anything.

That's uncorrelated to mansplaining.

You don't explain on the mansplain and you don't man on the plainmans.

"but wait, has anyone proposing this idea that actually has a scholarly intellectual history behind thought of this obvious question?" isn't exactly not smug or sanctimonious! It's actually, I would humbly submit, rather similar to the kind of attitude that lies behind a lot of mansplaining, or whataboutism--the assumption that the objection that has just occurred to you hasn't occurred to your interlocutors and can't be answered by them, even though they author entire books about the subject.

Obviously that doesn't mean they have perfectly satisfactory answers to every question (and I haven't read the book--honestly I'm not sure I have the mental wherewithal to read a book at the moment--so neither I, nor, I expect, anyone else here, could answer your question), but "what about $x, therefore I oppose this" doesn't strike me as the most intellectually virtuous position from which to lecture others.

To the best of my knowledge, cops, even the estimated 60% who aren't perpetrators of domestic violence themselves, aren't super helpful as presently constituted in such situations anyway.

In my generation, I know two women who married cops. Both of the cops were abusive to the women I know; at least one of them was abusive to his children.

After the divorce, one of the cops would drive by his ex-wife's house and call in the license tag number of any car he saw parked in the driveway. I made sure to drive my mom's car when I went to visit.

As far as I know, neither suffered any professional consequences as a result of their domestic violence.

I don't understand why all these discussions always circle around beat cops. It's not the most crucial function of law enforcement and abolitionist activists aren't proposing to get rid of beat cops and keep the rest.

If you get rid of law enforcement, organized crime will gradually take over more and more aspects of society. You can perhaps argue usury or sports betting should be made legal, but you can't very well legalize shakedowns or murder.

The other thing is if you don't somewhat reliably catch and punish murderers, you will have constant retaliatory killings and blood feuds. The legal system came about as a means to end blood feuds to a great extent.

If you do want mob bosses to be sometimes apprehended against their will by salaried public sector employees, it seems both cute and extremely counterproductive to call yourself a police abolitionist.

If you think vigilante militias should deal with organized crime, as I've seen at least one writer advocate, you're a less idealistic kind of abolitionist, but no more sensible.

If you get rid of law enforcement

And who, exactly, is saying to do this?

David must be one of the vast majority of people who don't realize slogans like "defund the police" and "disband the police" contain an implied "and replace them with... police, but with more accountability".

I've had many conversations at the Other Place today explaining the implied "other police" clause. It's a dumb thing to have to explain, but the horse has left the building.

I honestly haven't been 100% sure what various people bring along as implied, when they say that.

49: The only agreement is on the slogan. No one agrees on what it means.

Some people are trying to expand the Overton Window by saying something that sounds extreme and irrational, so the universe of things that CAN happen is greater. But you're supposed to be doing that as part of some sort of pressure campaign, not just talking to other schmoes on the internet. And you're not supposed to follow up your extreme and irrational statement by then explaining how it actually means something reasonable but saying reasonable things doesn't get attention. You have to own your status as the extreme and irrational person, so the moderates can say "Well we will never appease this person, but we WILL move toward their position by doing the following things we never had enough support to do before".

And some people like Alex Vitale are putting forward a very convincing argument that there are way too many things that are now the responsibility of the police, that should be the responsibility of other agencies, thus inevitably making the police smaller. These people should be upset that their argument is being phrased as something that is very hard to agree with at first and then sounds OK if it is explained extensively.

46: Probably most longtime police abolitionist activist, and, as of this week, half of left twitter apparently, but even if there were zero "proper" abolitionists, it would be true that "If you do want mob bosses to be sometimes apprehended against their will by salaried public sector employees, it seems both cute and extremely counterproductive to call yourself a police abolitionist."

Ok, but this is the first time in 15 years I've ever heard a policy make the news, and upon being discussed here, being deemed too radical and unrealistic.

49: I think that's likely because there are at least two schools of thought that overlap in places, but aren't really a coherent thing. One question is, could a significant (majority?) of the functions of current police forces be done more effectively (safer, etc.) by someone else? The other being, are some (most? all?) US police forces so broken that it is implausible to believe they are capable of being reformed, and you are better off starting again.

It's not impossible to believe the answer to both of these things is "yes", but it's not needed either.

Alex Vitale talks about "The End of Policing." A supermajority of the Minneapolis City Council advocates "dismantling" the police department. I don't actually know anything about Vitale or the city council, but it seems to me that he is given to some rather extreme rhetoric, and that this type of talk has advanced to the point where practical politicians are adopting it.

From what I've seen, few police abolitionists distill it to "there should be no means of enforcing laws or keeping order", directly or indirectly - or even any coercive means. They aren't anarchists, by and large, fwict. Certainly they probably believe too many things (especially crimes of poverty and homelessness) are criminalized, but violence? exploitation? No real argument there about a public role; it's pretty unproductive to pretend that's the issue being debated.

I can see why people might reasonably think whatever would be made to accomplish these tasks would boil down to "police, but better/reformed," but I think it's plausible new institutions could look so fundamentally different that "police" would be a bad descriptor.

How are the social workers in Minneapolis going to do at slashing the tires of protesters cars? They don't have the training.

About prison not police, but helpful on how abolition is better seen as a process of creating new structures. Note it says explicitly "You need to create structures to minimize harm and hold people accountable."

Right. Hence unfenced prisons in the north. No one gets hurt trying to climb things, the wolves keep the accounts.

How about instead of "Defund the Police" we go with "Shave the Fuzz"?

I have no objection to saying "defund the police".

Let's stay away from "Starve the Pigs."

What if the police could fund themselves with a really big bake sale, the way the Air Force paid for the B-2 bomber?

15-20 years ago I was in a prison abolition group on campus and I remember making the same arguments and it never became intuitive. And I don't see any progress on that since then either. The word "abolition" to people means getting rid of something. Examples of abolition in history that come to mind are the abolition of the slave trade, the abolition of slavery, and the abolition of child labor. "Abolitionism" in history class means the movement to make slavery no longer exist. Not the movement to reform slavery (although it ended up more like reforming slavery, into sharecropping).

From 58:
"A lot of people think abolitionists want to close prisons tomorrow when we didn't get there yesterday. Ruthie Gilmore says, "Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions."

The word "abolition" means building something good? No, the word abolition means getting rid of something bad. The thing you want to abolish is something you want to not exist anymore after it gets abolished. Why hamstring yourself with this rhetoric? Is it that getting a public official to finally commit to "abolition" means they are guaranteed to actually do something, unlike committing to "reform"? They still aren't guaranteed to actually do something.

The devil is in the details.

I have no objection to saying "defund the police".

FWIW, this is the demand in NYC, this is the rhetoric at rallies and marches, and this is what people are passing out flyers about. There are both "defund nypd" and "abolish nypd" signs but the latter outnumber the former.

Certainly they probably believe too many things (especially crimes of poverty and homelessness) are criminalized

This is hard to dispute!

Somewhat related, but this is a good thread about wage theft, which (apparently!) is not a crime, but a civil infraction.

Moving the overton window is good as long as our demands are a more radical version of something that could happen and doesn't sound too alarming to too many people, but a lot of abolitionists steer people away from clear, actionable demands other than cutting police budgets since a lot of them become infuriated by anything that could be construed as reformism. Every city should do what Minneapolis is doing, the question is what happens next.

I'm obviously reacting to things I see on twitter, but twitter isn't unimportant in this context, when ideas to the left of the New Republic reach regular people, I do think twitter generally plays a huge part in that.

I don't know. There's a tremendous amount of positive change and momentum right now, I don't want to sound too negative.

I too get a little disapproving when I see people slam others for opportunism/hypocrisy in suddenly coming around to something like abolition. When people cravenly come around to your position, use it! It means you're winning! But on the other hand, the emotion and frustration is real and part of what is creating street presence and victories.

"Abolish the police" is the moderate, sober, carefully considered policy position of people who have thought through the persuasive impact of that slogan. Here is a less measured but still legitimate viewpoint -- the sort of thing you'd see on signs if the protesters were less concerned with the opinions of decent, centrist types.

Minivet, you might be amused to know that I saw someone at a protest today with a sign saying "abolish suburbs". See, in comparison, abolishing the police seems doable.

the sort of thing you'd see on signs if the protesters were less concerned with the opinions of decent, centrist types.

Protesters have also been chanting "NYPD suck my dick", fwiw.

When we get past it being a horrible slogan, "abolish the police" is in most senses a right-wing approach to municipal organization. The single example everyone is using-- including the Minneapolis City Council -- is Camden, New Jersey. I know the place well, as I live nearby and drove to Camden every work day to catch a subway to Philadelphia for 25 years, and also appeared regularly in the local court.

(1) Due to long-term incompetence and corruption -- three different mayors went to jail over two decades-- the city ran out of money and had to lay off about half the police force.
(2) The city needed a state bailout. The Republican Governor Christie took the fiscal crisis as an opportunity to break up the police union and cut police wages. At the time, no one was concerned about abusive police officers, although I'm sure there were some incidents. There was concern about a very high crime rate due to a feud among drug distribution gangs. Truthfully, no one really cared much about that anyway, since it just involved drug dealers and the people who are found within gunshot range of them.
(3)) It was about money, and taking away some patronage from Black and Hispanic politicians of Camden City,and giving it to the white politicians of Camden County. The state threw in funding, so the county force could be larger than the city force had been at the end.
(3) The county rather than the city became the source of the police force. This meant that instead of being politically accountable to the 75,000, majority African-American or Hispanic, citizens of Camden City, they were accountable to the 500,000 citizens of Camden County, vast majority white-- most of whom actually lived in towns or townships with their own police forces. Camden County is majority white. Minneapolis is considering the same thing with Hennepin County.
(4) They didn't really fire the police officers. They just rehired those who were willing as county police officers rather than city police officers, without a union and at lower salaries.
(5) The Camden city police force was overwhelmingly Hispanic and African-American. Their skills were in high demand by other towns in the region, especially the many who spoke Spanish, so most didn't stay.
(6) Camden County politicians being who they are, new hires, on average, Whiter than those who left, and were not as proficient in Spanish. Which leaves me wondering if the future non-Minneapolis police force will replace the recently indicted Laotian officer?
(7) The crime rate did go down over time, mainly because the gang war fizzled out. Not clear how much the police had to do with it.

So, a reorganization that cuts working stiffs' salaries regardless of personal merit on the job, takes management and accountability outside of city limits, and leaves a larger police force less likely to speak the language of many residents. Sounds like a Heritage Foundation project.

Several people are also talking about the Republic of Georgia!

73 is great.

When we get past it being a horrible slogan, "abolish the police" is in most senses a right-wing approach to municipal organization.

Yeah, it does sound a little like "abolish public schools".

(3) The county rather than the city became the source of the police force. This meant that instead of being politically accountable to the 75,000, majority African-American or Hispanic, citizens of Camden City, they were accountable to the 500,000 citizens of Camden County, vast majority white-- most of whom actually lived in towns or townships with their own police forces. Camden County is majority white. Minneapolis is considering the same thing with Hennepin County.

This is the one part I disagree with. If we've learned one thing this month it's that the police force can easily be not accountable to any civilian oversight, especially if the police are all Republicans who commute from 25 miles out of town and see themselves as an occupying force (sounds like that was not the case in Camden). If the city police force is part of the county budget it at least isn't "out of sight out of mind, of course everything's corrupt and broken in the city" from the point of view of suburbanites.

71: My kind of people.

Here is an article specifically about police defunding and domestic violence.

Also the city of Minneapolis is already majority white anyway, so that isn't helping.

2010 census:
Minneapolis 63.8% white
18.6% black
5.6% Asian
10.5% Hispanic

Hennepin County 74.4% white
11.8% black
6.2% Asian
6.7% Hispanic

Maybe the slogan should be "Cancel the Police."

Free the police!

Free the police of all social work. Free the police of all medical work. Free the police of lack of oversight. &c.

Sounds like a Heritage Foundation project.

73 is excellent; and articulates, much more cogently and coherently than I did in 1 (where I said, "you get what you pay for, after all," which may have come across as too flip), what I think is a genuine concern about "defunding."

When I see/hear the term "defunding," I think: austerity budgets; de-investment in the public sector; cost-cutting measures that are almost certain to hit the most vulnerable members/segments of society; and a major concession/capitulation to the de-legitimization of the role of government in its provision of essential services that has been the goal of the conservative movement, and of movement conservatives, for the past few decades.

And of course I realize that this is not at all what "defund the police" activists have in mind: they want the money to be redirected toward education, health care, housing, mental health services, transportation, and etc. All of which I support! But in the absence of actual plans, and of robust support for those plans, the defunding of any arm/branch/office of government is likely to result in an even worse version of whatever agency just got its funds cut.

73.6 Just a small point of ethnicity -- Hmong immigrant people here in MN are pretty specific about wanting to identify as Hmong, rather than the country of their birth. I believe I've mentioned here before that my sister went to school with a brother and sister named "Nixon" and "Julie" -- many Hmong folx of their parents' generation are still very conservative in terms of their analysis of the American war in Vietnam, and also in terms of resistance to assimilation pressures. My view of the politics of Thao's generation is skewed somewhat from knowing some Hmong people from the arts scene who obviously lean pretty far left. I am sure there are quite a few Hmong people, men especially, who have uncritically bought in to their parents' world view.

75: Yeah, it does sound a little like "abolish public schools".

When teachers went on strike in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and some other red states in 2018, some Republicans tried to campaign against the teachers. They did not get much support outside of the RWNJ world, and not even unanimous support there. So many people in all parts of the political spectrun had positive personal associations with teachers that they couldn't be demonized. The teachers won most of the strikes.

Teachers and police have some things in common. There are enough of them, and in enough places, that almost everyone has had some personal contact with a police officer. A lot of people have a relative or social acquaintance in the field. And despite the number of violent criminals in the police forces, most of the associations are positive. Help after a traffic accident, returning a lost puppy or wallet, help with directions, just seeing a policeman nearby when you're leaving a concert in a city you don't know and you're having trouble finding your car in the dark. Most of it is trivial and didn't need police presence, but it makes abolition a tough sell.

Also, "abolish police" sounds like you're abolishing people, which is just gross. The slogan was "abolish slavery," not "abolish slaves."

This just reminded me that after the abolition, or better, refoundation of the RUC in Northern Ireland, they ended up recruiting a surprising number of their quota of Catholics by hiring Polish immigrants.

It was ironic but it...wasn't wrong? The point was to dilute the sectarian bias, and the Poles didn't give a shit which side your dad had been on.

Also, the Overton window isn't like the law of gravity. It wasn't, AFAIK, based on any empirical research and the corollary Overton handle - the belief that by going really extreme in some degree of bad faith your real aims become more achievable - even less so. Fully Automated Luxury Communism did not, in fact, get us very far at the 2019 general election.

Also IDDK Joseph Overton was a libertarian who laid down his life for his principled opposition to FAA regulations: https://www.mackinac.org/5535

I started the book this afternoon; it's extremely readable.

83, on the other hand, reads to me like a dispatch from bizarro world.

Returning a lost puppy or wallet? Is this a sitcom?

Returning a lost puppy...

Nobody's puppy is ever really lost anymore, thanks to electronic fencing and microchip technology.

My suspicion that 73 is FUD was furthered somewhat when a search for the word "Camden" in Vitale's book turned up nothing. JPJ's 81 seems to have no content aside from FUD other than "you need a plan", which, yes. You need a plan.

C'mon, who doesn't want to live in Mayberry? To be clear: we're not offering, like, a return to the Fordist social contract that's also, like, more inclusive. Just doing vibes, you know. Damn, turns out some of you have THOUGHTS about Mayberry. Divisions in this country run DEEP.

JPJ's 81 seems to have no content...

And yet, you chose to comment upon it! Funny, that...

Look, you could just choose to never, ever directly address me again, and I would agree to return the favour, and we could achieve some sort of comity by promising to never even refer to other's comments ever again. After all, why waste your time commenting upon content-free material? Deal?

81 raises the question of whether, well, a better world is possible. Having hope for the future is definitely the hardest part of socialism for me and honestly being in spaces like this makes it tough too at times. But meh?

92: Well said.

92: Thorn, I truly believe that a better world IS possible, and that we should never, ever stop fighting for it.

94 was me.

87: No, they are both personal experiences. Bizarrely, neither the subway rider who found the wallet nor the policeman he handed it to took any of the cash.
88: My puppy had a microchip! It doesn't prevent escape, but does make it easier to find the correct owner it the collar gets lost.
89: Camden comes up in several threads here on Unfogged. It was also discussed on the John Oliver Show this weekend, and by Rachel Maddow this evening, talking to someone on the Minneapolis City Council (who had pledged support of defunding the police but didn't seem to have any more idea of what that meant than the folks here)..

71: In my protest-going youth in the Reagan years, "U.S. out of Nicaragua" was a popular sign, sort of a dim echo of "U.S. out of Vietnam." After the U.S. operations in El Salvador and Guatemela became known, the signs changed to "U.S. out of Central America." Inevitably, someone made a sign for "U.S. out of North America."

I stand corrected on the ethnic nomenclature and demographics of Hennepin County.

Inevitably, someone made a sign for "U.S. out of North America.

I thought of it as a sign carried by Lisa Simpson, but google says I made it up, like the movie where Sinbad played a genie.

My puppy had a microchip! It doesn't prevent escape, but does make it easier to find the correct owner it the collar gets lost.

It's a bit of a racket, though, when it comes to veterinary services. What?! your dog has not (yet) been micro-chipped?! Please enjoy a copy of our informative pamphlet, with price schedule attached. We accept all major credit cards, along with Interac payments...

96: Oh, the signs I was familiar with growing up in Arizona said "U.S. out of U.N." I would have interpreted "U.S. out of North America" along those lines.

Those puppy chips will be super useful when the next zoonotic plague jumps to dogs.

The general idea of a window of discourse was in no way novel when the the term Overton window was coined, and this guy Lehman's version of it is ridiculously simplistic.

'According to Lehman, who coined the term, "The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it."[7]'

I also think it works a lot better as a political strategy if your radical ideals happen to be congenial to the kind of people who own media companies or employ armies of lobbyists.

81 raises the question of whether, well, a better world is possible.

Well, look at the other worlds there are that we know are possible, because they're what the world has been like in the past. They're worse. Lots of them are much worse.

So either

we're living right now in the best of all possible worlds, and it's going to get worse and worse again starting tomorrow - we are, in fact, standing right now on the very summit of human civilisation
or
better worlds are possible in theory, but will never happen, nothing will ever change again, the world right now is how it will always be for the rest of human history; we are in fact in the end state of history
or
a better world is possible and will in fact come into existence at some point in the future.

Putting hope aside for the moment, the simple principle of mediocrity implies that the third one is far more likely to be true. The mere fact that there's nothing particularly special about any of us more or less demands that the world will improve.

I think 103.last is the most depressing way possible to be told to cheer up.

But I suppose that 104 must be wrong because the principle of mediocrity suggests that there must be many more ways that are far more depressing.

105: I imagine some of them were heard in places like, say, Masada.
103 isn't wrong, but glosses over the possibility that we're standing, not at the summit of all human civilization for all time, but at a local summit (like, say, Antonine Rome) and that between this and the next, higher, summit is another abyss, possibly centuries in duration. All of which is a very long way of seconding 104 (which, appropriately, is wrong, see 105).

The mere fact that there's nothing particularly special about any of us more or less demands that the world will improve.

Current humans are, in fact, pretty special in obvious ways. We have the capacity now to destroy the planet. "The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking." Einstein might have said the same thing about the release of carbon into the air.

Beyond that, technology is presenting novel challenges all the time. Modern media have proved tremendously useful in distributing valuable information. Will that benefit be negated by the increasing efficiency with which humans are able to propagate stupidity? Stay tuned ...

We have the capacity now to destroy the planet.

Beg to differ: https://qntm.org/destroy

Good point. The survival of humanity isn't material to the improvement of the universe, so things are bound to get better overall.

"And of course I realize that this is not at all what "defund the police" activists have in mind: they want the money to be redirected toward education, health care, housing, mental health services, transportation, and etc."

I'd like activists that aren't Deray to have more specific actionable demands, but this is an actionable demand. If some city council a year from now will cut police spending and cut taxes, it won't be because people picked the wrong slogan, that's surely not how it works.

(Which is maybe not what you personally are saying.)

Any kind of tactic or demand has some potential to backfire, which very much includes unambitious or moderate demands. You have to accept risks in politics, and leftwingers have genreally been too timid the last decades. I don't think defund the police is an unusually risky demand if the underlying idea is right.

This rather good piece in Novara turns out to be by....Alex Vitale: https://novaramedia.com/2020/06/08/defund-disband-and-start-again-what-exactly-is-minneapolis-planning-to-do-with-its-police-force/

We have the capacity to destroy the world, in the original Old English sense (weoruld, age of man).

The peak of human history was 1999. Prince got it wrong.