The program that I vaguely mentioned before is the Advance Peace project. The murder reduction is especially notable in Stockton, I think.

It isn't clear from your post that the funding for the peace workers comes from the police budget, but that's what I would want.

Oh, I guess you did say, don't take money from police just yet, so this is all politically palatable. That doesn't exactly match my mood right now.

That's not so much my ultimate goal, as what this guy is suggesting. He's reaching out to the constituency who can't get themselves as far as defunding the police yet.

I discovered early on that my role in the Resistance will not be with the 'reach across the aisle' contingent. More power to them (maybe) but my skills lie elsewhere.

Anyway, yes to the larger concept. Lets have non-shooty people doing that work.

Boy, my memory is not good. I just went to buy this guy's book, and Amazon informed me that I bought it in 2018 and it's on my Kindle.

Now that I open it (Uneasy Peace, by Patrick Sharkey) I do remember reading it.

Oh, I guess you did say, don't take money from police just yet, so this is all politically palatable. That doesn't exactly match my mood right now.

Police report that they don't want to do social work anyway, so may be politically a lot better to hire the social workers first, then pay police to do absolutely nothing (or investigate crimes?) instead of social work, then get rid of the ones who are doing nothing. But affordable??

We're heading into a giant recession where having the government hire people to do absolutely anything is going to make economic sense, if we can get the political will together for it. I'm not excited about paying police for not working, but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. And yeah, maybe there could be more criminal investigation with all the manpower saved by not being on call to wake up people sleeping in the wrong place.

2: It looks like Boston is going to take money from the police overtime budget!

On this topic, does it seem plausible that another underreported cause of the ongoing shift of opinion is the transition in many big cities from more technocrat, centrist, or center-left mayors to avowed progressives? E.g., if reformism is to work it should have started to work by now.

Examples, obviously Bloomberg to de Blasio, but also Lee to Breed in SF, Villaraigosa to Garcetti in LA, more recently Emanuel to Lightfoot in Chicago, and in Oakland we've had 14 years of reformists, all leftist by state standards, plus almost four years of one of the most empowered civilian police commissions in the country.

But I don't know anything about Minneapolis mayors so I don't know if this holds there.

8: I think the police are in need of reminding who actually pays their paychecks.

In many suburbs, that would have exactly the wrong effect.

10: I don't think most people feel that Frey is left of Hodges in any meaningful sense. Personally, I don't see him as being to the left of Rybak either, though I would entertain the argument. Hodges, of course, was undone by her inability to keep the cops from shooting a middle class, straight white woman. Although her favorite movie is "Die Hard", so go figure.
I think Hodges was trying to push some very mild, very incremental reforms, along with former chief Harteau, but that all came to naught. Frey basically represents the hip millennials and downtown workers, both of which groups like to think they're very progressive, unless there's an uptick in burglaries or groups of young Black kids hanging out downtown.
Ultimately, in this town you can't be mayor without the tacit consent of the big property developers, and if you go against the police union, you're going to find out very quickly what the limits of your authority are.

Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. "Die Hard" was a pretty great.

(Cue Smearcase, Ajay and Gswift showing up to call me an anti-semite for criticizing Frey)

Alan Rickman's old agent is also coming.

||

If a camel is fully reliant on the desert for food, it uses resources that could support the equivalent to three caracals, 18 sand cats, 56 falcons or 12,500 gerbils.

Australian camels must cause a shit-ton of ecological damage.

Thank you for the article, it it is good.

I think Yglesias' summary is good (and seems like an excellent plan).

"Fund promising community-based alternatives to conventional policing on an experimental basis, then scale the best ones up based on evaluations"

He also notes

Michael Bloomberg has the right combination of deep pockets, relationships with African-American elected officials, and desperate need to do some penance for indulging the NYPD's worst habits.

He should find some people to partner with on something like this.

WE DON'T BURN THE COAL. WE JUST SELL IT.

13: What about Rybak? Similar to the next two in this big picture?

15: Uh, have I done this before? I can't recall ever calling someone here anti semitic. And you are seriously overestimating my interest in your town or its importance if you think I even knew your mayor's name let alone whether he's Jewish.

Mate, I don't think you're anti-semitic because you don't like the mayor of Minneapolis or wherever it is. I think you're anti-semitic because you reacted to right-wing violence against French Jews by calling them "Israelis with French passports".

||

Biden pulled in $16 million from small donors in April, more than three times the $4.9 million Trump raised in small amounts for the month.

Quite the graphic on the share of a city's budget going to the police.

https://twitter.com/GalvinAlmanza/status/1272254886256742400/photo/1

17 When the blockade began the Saudis sent herds of camels which people keep there back across the border. They've caused a lot of damage to the environment, my ecologist friend rants about it.

If a camel is fully reliant on the desert for food, it uses resources that could support the equivalent to three caracals, 18 sand cats, 56 falcons or 12,500 gerbils.

That would have to be a pretty fucking amazing camel before I value it more than I would value three caracals or 18 sand cats.

The gerbils, I admit, I could take or leave.

(Presumably the way that the desert in practice supports those caracals etc is by actually supporting a load of gerbils, which are then eaten by the caracals.)

In the desert here I once came across the carcass of a sand cat that had been bound, possibly caught in a trap by some asshole.

THAT'S NOT MY ASSHOLE

23: I reacted to a story about a whiny French pig who was hiding behind his religion to justify crimes against Muslim youth.

Here's a law review article with some additional concrete thoughts about moving functions outside the realm of conventional policing: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3564469

It's worth reading (although it is a law review article, which means it's wordy and badly written )-- more friendly than I'd be to maintaining the police as sort of an overarching structure, but still talking about the same sorts of things I'm thinking about.

There's something about institutional culture and psychology that's extremely important to get right, when thinking about reforms. If you don't have buy-in from the top, they won't transmit buy-in to the foot soldiers, and well-intentioned reforms become paperwork, and then fudged paperwork.

So when I hear us debate these details, I think "it all depends on the implementation and hiring, and the predisposition of who controls these things."

Any of these things will work on the trial small scale, because it will be run by someone who believes in it, and selects people accordingly. The trouble is always when you try to scale it up, and don't take the care to hire carefully.

That exactly is what makes me lean toward the abolish/defund rhetoric rather than reform. Police culture in the US seems very very stable and self-defensive -- all the frankly insane sounding tweeting from police unions makes it sound like there's a strong constituency heavily invested in pushing back against reform. Changing things by creating new parallel agencies that can take over for police rather than by changing police seems as if it has more potential for working.

I'm slowly coming to the conclusion that that rhetoric is landing opposite for me. It somehow doesn't capture the toxicity of the current situation.

It doesn't convey to me that the current culture is so poisonous that it will, by design, sabotage any incremental reform. I think the toxicity of the current system should be the heart of the message.

We're not trying to sell alternatives because the platonic ideal of "police" isn't as good as this new plan. We're trying to sell alternatives because this actual culture that is rooted and unalterable in the US is completely rotten to the core. The rottenness is the key.

(I'm not so troubled that I'd ever argue with anyone besides people here, though. Abolish the police! I'll readily carry a sign.)

Right. That's where the commentary about how European police don't kill their citizens nearly as much falls flat for me. I don't believe we can get to European-style police, because US police have a lot of political power and will fight hard to avoid changing. At which point, if we can't change them, we have to get around them somehow.

I agree! I'm just thinking about conveying that succinctly.

(I'm like a week behind on thinking about issues in the threads - this was of course the point of the thread last week.)

It seems like it's three things, which interlock. There's a poisonous culture of abuse and silence among rank and file. That's one. There's an almost complete failure of leadership by the higher ranks who refuse to push for better standards, partly because the culture among higher ranks is that you don't have to obey orders, and you can disobey orders without risking punishment. And there's the apparent impossibility of actually punishing wrongdoing - not just because of 1 and 2, but because the courts seem almost completely unwilling to prosecute and convict police officers. That third one isn't about the police, it's about government policy (inasmuch as governments run the prosecutor's office), and about public opinion (because they make up the juries).

If this was a military unit committing abuses, things would be different: you probably wouldn't have the situation where senior officers refuse to obey orders to enforce discipline, and you definitely wouldn't have entire units mutinying when one member was punished.

That exactly is what makes me lean toward the abolish/defund rhetoric rather than reform. Police culture in the US seems very very stable and self-defensive -- all the frankly insane sounding tweeting from police unions makes it sound like there's a strong constituency heavily invested in pushing back against reform. Changing things by creating new parallel agencies that can take over for police rather than by changing police seems as if it has more potential for working.

This is directly arriving at the post I had sent Heebie before these last posts (in which I said that, as an incrementalist, I would like to think that better regulations would solve the problem but, if the ultimate problem that needs to be solved is a matter of culture, it's harder to see how to address that).

On the other hand, cultures can change, and it is generally an incremental process of things which had been acceptable becoming unacceptable. In the previous thread gswift said, "Change and improvement have been happening. Police shootings are down 90 percent from the 70's." That clearly hasn't been enough to resolve the problem, but is that a sign that gradual change can work?

Personally, I'd much prefer a scenario in which the police (or at least large numbers of them) were interested in making some meaningful changes -- even if those didn't go as far as we might wish -- than one in which any police reform is being imposed involuntarily on police departments. In the latter case, the idea of creating parallel agencies makes a lot of sense.

Pretty much. A couple of slight subtleties -- I'd draw a distinction between "higher ranks", which are the way you describe, and the very top ranks, who often are or say they are on board with reform, but don't successfully change the culture. And the unwillingness to convict police officers has something to do with needing their testimony for prosecutions generally -- DAs form the habit, or have the policy, of finding police officers more credible than members of the public even when their stories are implausible, and that carries over to making it impossible to convict a police officer without either a confession, police testimony against him, or video evidence.

Eliminating the police overtime budget - which is absolutely massive - and using it to fund non-violent social workers seems like a strategy that satisfies the goals of several different constituencies and has some compelling sales pitches that could sound reasonable even to the pro-police crowd.

The cops will raise holy hell, of course, but they'll do that about literally any reform whatsoever, so fuck those bastards.

The thing about eliminating the police overtime budget is that it's a management problem -- to take away the money, you also need supervisors affirmatively sending cops home at the end of their shifts, and defining the job such that overtime isn't necessary. I don't think this is impossible, but it needs cooperation.

My sense is that police overtime is less of a direct time management shift scheduling problem and more of an incentives problem, see e.g.:

https://twitter.com/GalvinAlmanza/status/1272254879956951040

Cops seem to have a whole bunch of institutionally blessed tricks they can pull to guarantee themselves overtime that would rightly infuriate folk were they more widely known.

That is, I'm all for it, but I'd expect the reaction from a police force that didn't buy into it to be "this makes it literally impossible to do our jobs, we're going to stop working on murder cases now."

I'm willing to promise not to kill anybody for the adjustment period, up to a year.

42: Police overtime is complicated - that viral tweet (which I have shared) is illuminating but not even a third of the problem. It is mostly management and culture problems of one kind or another, but also I have outright heard from the mayor in public that part of it is it's cheaper to pay existing police overtime wages than pay regular salary _and benefits_ for more police.

Because overtime is so perennially over budget in Oakland, the council gets quarterly reports. In the fiscal year ending June 2019, it was:

* 28% backfilling absences (e.g. keeping up patrol strength which is a big deal)
* 22% reimbursable events
* 15% extension of shift (the tweet)

The rest were a whole host of special circumstances, each smaller, more or less "everything else the department ever does" (violence suppression efforts, crowd management, training, FLSA, internal investigations, community meetings, even the canine unit) that make me think it's a generalized lack of internal controls, inefficiency blamed on understaffing.

We can definitely go after police pensions as well.

Which isn't to say that pensions are bad as a rule, but the police are no more deserving of generous pension benefits than any other civil servants or, indeed, workers, nay, humans of any kind.

"Going after" police pensions is weird to me as a matter of contract law. That's delayed, negotiated for, compensation for work that's already been done. Taking that money away seems like straightforward theft.

Negotiating lower pensions in future, and doing more management to avoid pensions inflated by overtime, sure. But beyond that I'm not on board with.

(I feel that I should note that my grandmother, who was kind of a crook generally, retired on an inflated pension from the MTA by working crazy overtime her last couple of years to inflate her final salary. It's a scam, but one my family has benefited from.)

I think they call that "spiking".

Ethically, I think (48) is correct, though one could argue that the police have acted in such a way as to have collectively abrogated their contract with the citizenry. No court in this country would ever see it that way, of course, but as a purely ethical question, it doesn't seem indefensible.

It also raises the question of to what extent current governments, particularly at the city and country level, are or should be allowed to impose financial obligations on their successors. As I recall, there were some cities in California maybe a decade ago that were found to have engaged in widespread pension padding to the point of rendering their operating budgets unworkable.

That's delayed, negotiated for, compensation for work that's already been done.

That's the argument I use when I'm talking about my own pension, but the counter-argument for police is that they are not doing the work we paid them for (public safety, solving crimes), but they are doing some other project (maintaining the racial hierarchy) at our expense.

Anyway, I do like the 'civil settlements out of police pensions/budgets, no backfilling' reform, because it seems like the only incentive strong enough to rival police solidarity.

The "Kids for Cash" judges were fighting to get their pensions. I don't remember if they won, but I hope not.

They've been showing up for work and doing it in a way that was accepted by their supervisors. I'd hate to lose my own pension because someone retroactively disagreed with what they thought of the quality of my output over my career.

I'm happy to defund the police going forward. Retroactively confiscating their pensions is way too far for me (and would be legally extremely hard).

All in favor of cutting back on police overtime, and also ending the common practice of moonlighting as private security. As ide from cost, policing requires constant situational awareness during long stretches of boredom, which becomes more difficult without sleep. It also requires driving for hours and hours. I have long wondered whether some of the well-known incidents of police making fatal split-second decisions were the consequence of sleep deprivation (not Chauvin, although he apparently moonlighted regularly at a bar. He had time to think about what he was doing).

Of course anything that reduces the compensation of police, including reducing overtime, is inconsistent with the goal of improving the quality of the force.

Well, the civil settlements part is a strong signal that they aren't doing the work the public wants. They've gotten those for a long time.

All in favor of cutting back on police overtime, and also ending the common practice of moonlighting as private security

If you're calling for a vote, then I'm an Aye.

As ide from cost, policing requires constant situational awareness during long stretches of boredom, which becomes more difficult without sleep.

Evidence supporting that statement.

For instance, if an officerworks four additional hours of overtime in a week, the odds they will have a negative incident in the following week increase by 12 percent (negative incidents include accidents, uses of force,ethics violations, professionalism complaints, and other incidents tracked internally by KCSO). More specifically, the odds that they will file a workers' compensation claim in the following week increase by 8 percent, the odds that they will be involved in a work-related car accident increase by 13 percent, and the odds that they will be involved in a use of force incident increase by 11 percent.In addition, the odds they will commit an ethics violation increase by 13 percent and the odds they will receive a complaint increase by 10 percent. Finally, the odds they will discharge a firearm increase by 15.2percent.

55.2: I wonder if that's true for new recruits. When you're hired for a salary or an hourly rate, it's the rate that persuades you to take the job -- rarely the expected overtime. (Once you're on the job and used to getting overtime, your expenses rise to match, then it'd be trickier because you'd have internalized that as your expected pay.)

You might be able to combine a pay bump (like 10%) with a net decrease in pay by banning significant overtime -- which, per your point 1, will also keep people from working long shifts and being too tired to control their impulses. If you were also cutting the overall number of officers, you could theoretically bump the pay for the remainder even more -- particularly if you were making the remnant a more elite force.

Of course anything that reduces the compensation of police, including reducing overtime, is inconsistent with the goal of improving the quality of the force.

That's not necessarily true, tbh. It seems clear that the current crop of bastards are attracted to the job both because of the opportunity to commit violence with impunity and because it's a very lucrative career, relative to other civil service careers that have significantly higher credential requirements. If we cut down on the opportunities for financial grift, we may encourage some of the bastards to leave, increasing the attractiveness of the job to people whose interests are better aligned with good outcomes for the public.

Right. Even though current cops seem very attached to current cop culture, it's offputting enough to lots of people that a real change in the culture would make hiring easier. I don't think that's going to happen, but it's not literally impossible.

There are certainly fields I know where the expectation of overtime, at some point, is definitely part of the job even as a new hire. So much so that the union resists rule changes that would cut back on overtime and hire more people. Including some stuff like LB's 49 - it's not something people suddenly discover after years on the job, it's part of how they get convinced to start, at least informally.

51: but they are doing some other project (maintaining the racial hierarchy) at our expense.

52: one could argue that the police have acted in such a way as to have collectively abrogated their contract with the citizenry

The contract with the citizenry is, in part, enforcing the racial hierarchy. This has been entirely clear for some time -- and of course, it's clear to you, too. I don't think either of you would entertain the idea of collective punishment if you did not perceive collective guilt, but that guilt goes all the way to the top of the hierarchy -- indeed, all the way to the president of the United States, among others.

It must be disorienting for police officers to see the rules change all of a sudden, and for human decency to suddenly be the order of the day. Poor ol' James Bennet got caught in the same kind of trap. One wonders where it will all lead. If people aren't careful, fascism might become disreputable.

Sigh. If you offer higher compensation, more people will apply for a job, and the hirer can choose from a larger number of people. Compensation includes overtime and moonlighting opportunities, and a generous pension, and this is widely known among potential hires. Take those away and the job will appeal to fewer people, and especially fewer people who have other professional opportunities--and the most qualified people tend to have the most other options.

If the force is shrinking the problem remains. You still want the most qualified people, not the people who can't find an alternative job.

True that a pay cut might not discourage those who find carrying a gun around all day to be so much fun that they would do it for free, and also true those are the last people you want to have on your police force, or after abolition, your "violence worker" force.* Unlikely that the entire current force is n this category.

*"Schmolice force"?

38 is roughly where the Republic of Georgia was with their highway patrol in 2004 or so. As I may have mentioned here before, they fired the entire force and started over, with significant assistance from American advisers.

A few high-profile eliminations of entire forces, as Minneapolis seems to be about to try, might be just the ticket to changing the culture in other organizations. Dans ce pays-ci, il est bon de dissoudre de temps en temps une force de police pour encourager les autres.

Which are the famously bad ones? NYPD, Minneapolis, Chicago. Seattle and Portland don't seem to like their cops. There must be a ranking somewhere.

I actually think the NYPD doesn't look bad comparatively if you look at stats -- we're a big politically active city, so we generate noise, but as US police forces look, we're not the worst. It's just that not the worst includes being not absolutely good.

"Fund promising community-based alternatives to conventional policing on an experimental basis, then scale the best ones up based on evaluations"

Vox has summary of a couple of example programs.

In 2015, Stockholm started test-driving an ambulance devoted entirely to mental health care. It looks like a regular ambulance on the outside, but instead of stretchers, it's got cozy seats -- perfect for a therapy session on wheels. Two mental health nurses and one paramedic travel on board. Most of the emergency cases they handle involve people at risk of suicide; sometimes, they involve people having a psychotic episode.

...

"It used to be the police who handled these kinds of calls," Anki Björnsdotter, who works as a mental health nurse aboard the ambulance, told Vice. "But just the presence of the police can easily cause a patient to feel like they've done something wrong. Mental illness is nothing criminal so it doesn't make sense to be picked up by the police."

During its first year, the ambulance was requested 1,580 times and attended to 1,254 cases. That means the single vehicle was tasked with zipping all around Stockholm to handle 3.4 cases per day.

"It has been considered a huge success by police, nurses, healthcare officials, as well as by the patients," said Fredrik Bengtsson, who's in charge of mental health emergencies at Stockholm's Sabbatsberg Hospital.

In Eugene, Oregon, the group handling such calls is called Cahoots (Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Street). This nonprofit was founded by social activists way back in 1989, but it's been garnering more attention in recent years as the police's sometimes violent and even lethal treatment of people with mental illness has sparked a public outcry.

Cahoots handles non-criminal crises involving people who are homeless, disoriented, or intoxicated, have a mental illness, or are enmeshed in an escalating dispute. Here's how the Wall Street Journal explained their work:

The program in Eugene is unique because Cahoots is wired into the 911 system and responds to most calls without police. The name Cahoots was intended to be a humorous nod to the fact that they are working closely with police. Cahoots now has 39 employees and costs the city around $800,000 a year plus its vehicles, a fraction of the police department's $58 million annual budget. They are also paid to handle calls for neighboring Springfield.

"It allows police officers to ... deal with crime, but it also allows us to offer a different service that is really needed," said Lt. Ron Tinseth of the Eugene Police Department.

In contrast to police officers who typically seek to project authority at all times, Cahoots employees dress in black sweatshirts, listen to their police radios via earbuds, and speak in calm tones with inviting body language.

In 2017, Cahoots handled 17 percent of the police calls in Eugene, according to the Journal. "When I'm talking to a more liberal group of people, I'll make the argument it's the compassionate thing to do, it's the humane thing to do," said Manning Walker, a Cahoots medic. "When I'm talking to a conservative group, I'll make the argument that it's the fiscally conservative thing to do because it's cheaper for us to do this than for the police and firefighters."

Oakland just got a feasibility report on bringing over the CAHOOTS model.

The Mayor announced an initiative to convert to having non-cop health and mental health first responders within two years.

I mean, the mayor here in Sac.

I mean, the mayor here in Sac.

They've been showing up for work and doing it in a way that was accepted by their supervisors. I'd hate to lose my own pension because someone retroactively disagreed with what they thought of the quality of my output over my career.

I agree with that as a matter of general principle. I also thought of this discussion seeing the many mentions of police pension in this harrowing story about a legendarily violent Chicago police officer, concluding with this quotation.

"One of the things that continuously troubles me is thinking about Jon Burge. Jon Burge caused immeasurable harm to so many people, even if you calculated the dollars, this city has probably spent $200 million related to conduct by Jon Burge and his midnight crew," Lightfoot said at the end of the news conference last week. "And every minute he enjoyed his police pension. There's nothing right about that. That's offensive."

Would it have been less offensive if Jon Burge was living off a well funded 401(k)?

Would it have been less offensive if Jon Burge was living off a well funded 401(k)?

No, but it's clearly something people invoke as a symbol.

I'm not in a good position to opine, I've never worked a job that had a retirement plan*, and I have no idea how to recon with the offenses of somebody like Burge. But it seems clear that, symbolically, a pension does represent a continues connection, a sense that even though the employment has ended the relationship extends.

* Which reminds me, I need to buy my current employers about creating a 401K again.

"Defunding" an essential public service, and then "going after the pensions" of those who perform this service...

How is this not a total capitulation to the past three decades or so of right-wing, anti-govt ideology? We don't believe in 'civil society,' we don't even believe in 'society,' we just want to tear it all down. 'Reform' is for liberal wussies, and we just don't believe in it, and anyway, if we don't get our own way, we're more than happy to just tear it all down...

The dispute of the moment is whether the police are net beneficial, and tens of thousands of people are taking to the streets to say that for Black people, they are net negative. The next step is for us all to decide whether we are a society that tolerates a system that is net negative for Black people. That's still up in the air.

While I can see where 76 comes from, what do you say to the people who say 50 years of reform hasn't got nearly far enough and they think it's high time to try something else? They have some pretty good points, too.

78: you say "punishing a bunch of retired people who haven't been in the job for decades is not going to do a thing to change the behaviour of people who are in the job now".

Yeah, the pension thing is a silly thing to argue about. It would be really difficult to do legally, and it's got no important connection to changing police services going forward.

Plus, I think 76 is a good point. I mean, if the teachers' unions have wrecked this city's schools for decades, to the point where we have no option but to privatise them and bring in a voucher scheme, is it right - is it moral - that those same union teachers should still be drawing fat pensions from the city? They took the pensions away from the MPD when they abolished it, after all. We should do the same here.

The problem with Jon Burge wasn't that he had a police pension, it was that the CPD and the Chicago city government granted him immunity from his crimes for roughly two decades! And in context that's what Lori Lightfoot was saying: he was "enjoying his police pension" not in the sense of just receiving it, but in the sense of living a good life not in prison. If he'd been fired, prosecuted and imprisoned back in 1981 or so, he'd have had a much smaller pension, or none at all.

Won't somebody think of the inability to buy a milkshake without wetting their own pants from fear of the soda jerks not wearing "Blue Lives Matter" hats? They've been punished enough.

I really don't want to go down the hole that says pensions belong to the employer and can be withdrawn at their discretion.

Particularly because it really isn't true as a matter of law now. People have talked as if it were true for ages, but the context in which it's come up is "We, the local or state government, mismanaged your money so badly that we don't have it any more to pay your pensions, and we can't make restitution without hardship." That's also generally bullshit, but it's very different from "We're taking your money because we think you suck."

83: Good lord, that story. That Shake Shack is in my subway station for work -- I should get lunch there where the office reopens.

83, 86: ?

Exactly.

(googles) Ah, the poisoning thing.

This is an interesting Overton window like thing, isn't it. We're so relieved to find that the employees didn't intentionally poison the officers -- and glad that the police union's public accusations turn out to be false -- that we'd make a point to patronize an outfit where the employees recklessly left poison chemicals on the machinery.

Some of us like to live dangerously.

79 I wasn't really focused on the pension aspect, Jane had been consistently against defunding of any sort too. And fair enough for the many people currently retired. I can see people being salty about those currently employed though , particularly those with a history of bad behaviour. I suppose one way to reduce pension liability is to get as many of them as you can out of the job ASAP.

90: I don't believe that bit either, I think it's the cops bullshitting to cover for just having made shit up. We have a health department that inspects places, and that's a location that's always packed, if they were accidentally serving people bleach it'd be a known problem. I am agnostic between the possibility that the cops literally lied with no basis, or alternatively that they smelled bleach because they were in a space where someone had used it for cleaning and became hysterical with fear.

Anyway, years ago when I worked at McDonald's, cleaning the shake machine was the only hands-on job reserved for managers (along with the soft serve machine). Apparently, the managers were worried the staff would fuck up and then the New York Post would sweep in.

The NYP does exposes on McDonaldses in Nebraska?

84 This. Also as much as police unions are truly loathsome I don't want to go down the hole setting a precedent by busting them.

95: I'm inferring.

90 Cops are making a habit out of these stunts and they never check out.

I mean, Bayes Rule. A very small percentage of the customers at that location are cops. A set of cops claim to have been intentionally poisoned, and then backtrack to saying it wasn't intentional, their shakes were just negligently contaminated badly enough that they believed the shakes were intentionally poisoned. There's no record I'm aware of where non-cops have complained about contaminated food there. Possibilities: giant coincidence, or the police are sometimes less than perfectly veracious. I knew which way I'm betting.

84 as much as that ship may have sailed, I think I agree. On a related note though, existing police unions have very little if any positive role in shaping reform, and could easily be net negative most places. Which I suppose is another point if favour of fairly radical reimagining of policing.

Is the place packed now? Has the pandemic changed cleaning procedures? Are the inspectors making their rounds as before? I'm not suggesting believing the police here -- and should not have jumped to the conclusion that there was anything wrong with the shakes, or that the officers actually sought medical care -- but I don't think arguing the pre-pandemic status quo is particularly persuasive.

Don't know the answers to any of your questions, but I am certain that cops can't be a large portion of the customers even under current conditions. Something bad happened that only cops complain about, but they're no longer claiming it was intentional? Didn't happen at all seems like the parsimonious explanation.

As Barry says, they wouldn't be the first cops to be found lying about fast food employees doing stuff to their food. If you're going to be believed pretty much no matter what you say, or at least you won't suffer any consequences for lying, why wouldn't you just make stuff up at random? You know, like little kids do when they tell you they saw a dragon in the park or whatever.

Fuck. Then I don't need this sword?

The NYPD is now saying there was "no criminality." Does that mean there was nothing dangerous in the cups? I'm pretty sure that "oops" doesn't actually remove all criminality in a poisoning case.

I'm gonna go with they forgot that they used hand sanitizer before putting straws in and got sanitizer on the straws.

102 sounds about right.

Police unions are not, functionally, labor unions, but rather protection rackets. I'm being completely serious here. They don't play in a role in negotiation between police management and labor, but in a "negotiation" between the police department and the city government in which one side holds some really nasty trump cards.

Burn police unions to the fuckin' ground.

Yes. That's how they function.

When you drink a little bleach and the toilet's out of reach.

When you finish up your shake and you realize your mistake.

They don't play a role in negotiation between police management and labor, but in a "negotiation" between the police department and the city government

But to continue with the egregious violation of the analogy ban in 81 (thanks, ajay!), don't teachers' unions do more or less the same thing (minus the violence, and the potentially murderous bits, of course)? In any given contract dispute, it's not teacher management versus teacher labour; rather, it's the teachers versus the town/municipality/state/province.

When I lived in NJ (which was up until about a year ago), complaints against 1). teachers and 2). the police were pretty much everyday fare, and almost took the place of the weather as a conversation starter: instead of, e.g., "A little bit nippy out today, eh?" [an actual opening bid to a conversation in Canada, when it's minus 20 degrees Celscius], it was "can you believe those police officers [teachers]? I only wish I had their pension..."

Don't they have a pension, like, instead of Social Security, for some fucked up reason?

With the coming wave of state and local bankruptcies, it seems like all those pensions are about get the cram-down anyway. Cushy public pensions are not a thing that is going to survive covid-19.

113: Depends on the jurisdiction, whether they opted out of SS or not. Same with teachers. CA teachers opted out, UT teachers did not. Pretty much all UT police agencies opted out. I've got 11 or 12 years of full time contributing credit in SS but it'll get pro rated. My pension though will likely be fine. We're a solidly growing state and like one of three with a AAA bond rating.

112: I think the point is that the police unions take the side of the police force as a whole rather than just representing junior police against senior police. While if I'm in a union in my job, and the MD announces we're all going to be working longer hours for less pay, the union pushes back against him on my behalf.

If true, unimportant, I would say; it's a structural weirdness to do with the nature of public sector employment that teacher working conditions are not decided by "teacher management", in the sense of the head teachers who are the teachers' direct superiors, but are decided by government officials.

But the union is still taking the side of the workers against the imposition of pay and conditions by the management; it's just that "the management" is the city government, not the chief of police.

the egregious violation of the analogy ban in 81 (thanks, ajay!)

It's really more of a slippery-slope fallacy tbh.

(Cue Smearcase, Ajay and Gswift showing up to call me an anti-semite for criticizing Frey)

I didn't know the guy's name until this comment but obviously you're just snipping at me because I snipped at you three threads ago. Honestly I do remember you getting revved up about violence against Jews in Israel ages ago but I chalked it up more to radical posturing than antisemitism.