Clearly it's also a public rebuke of the black community and everyone working against police brutality, even if Biden discreetly tries to soften the slogan.
Is this first part of that statement true? My impression was that the part of the black community that supported Biden in the primaries was not in favor of defunding the police.
Doing a quick search here's what I find for polling on the issue.
In 2020 the number of African-Americans saying that police funding in their area should Increase / Decrease / Stay the same was
22/42/33
In 2021 the answers to the same question were
Increase 38% (+16%)
Decrease 23% (-19%)
Stay the Same 38% (+5%)
The base for "defund the police" has always been *young* (highly educated) people of all races, not Black people. It's always been very unpopular with older Black folks. There's a reason Biden handily won the Black vote as did actual cop (not figurative "Kamala is a cop") Eric Adams. Biden has a lifetime of genuinely listening to Black leaders and there's just no way that this is a rebuke of the Black community. See also the Ketanji Brown Jackson nomination, who's from a Black police family.
Fair point. That wasn't an accurate way to describe the group who will feel rebuked.
At any rate what we need to do is *fire* bad cops and stop them from getting rehired, and hire better cops. That's the whole game. More money probably helps with that, but money alone doesn't do it.
Also like have an actual policy on homelessness instead of whatever the fuck we're doing now. The "cops shouldn't always be the first responder" point is a good one, but the connection to police funding has always been somewhat tenuous. It's that non-police first responders need to be funded, but bundling that with spending less on police isn't a necessary part of it.
And limit civil asset forfeiture.
Overall my feeling is (a) that funding the police is good politics and most likely good policy, (b) I still support efforts to reduce police brutality, I'm not sure that shrinking the size of police forces, in general, is a good way to achieve that, (c) it would be good to see some sanctions for particularly bad departments, and I don't know whether that's in tension with new funding in general.
Also like have an actual policy on homelessness instead of whatever the fuck we're doing now.
Does anyone who has been following this more closely know if Kevin Drum is correct that this is mostly a West Coast problem? https://jabberwocking.com/yet-more-about-housing-in-the-united-states/
I'm not on the west coast and there's a huge problem with homelessness here (both a problem for the homeless people themselves since it's an awful way to live, and a general safety problem because a lot of the homeless people are dangerous). Our housing prices in town have gone up a bunch, but I don't think that's true regionally and most of the homeless people here are from the surrounding region rather than in town.
The heroin epidemic seems to have peaked, which is good because fewer people are dying of accidental fentanyl overdoses, but also bad because people on meth are so much scarier than people on heroin.
9: It's true in pretty much every major metro. The West Coast just has a lot of them and less hinterland relatively. Drum isn't worth reading on this topic, there are not even any scintillas of insight.
Drum isn't worth reading on this topic, there are not even any scintillas of insight.
Thanks. It matched what I'd seen in this article, but that's five years old at this point.
Nationally, homelessness has been trending down, partly because governments and nonprofit groups have gotten better at moving people into housing. That's true in many West Coast cities, too, but the flow the other direction is even faster. And on the West Coast, shelter systems are smaller.
Also, homelessness is definitely an issue in my medium-size West Coast city (definitely not a major metro), and has clearly gotten worse over the last 10-15 years. I admit, I was just _hoping_ that it was better in other parts of the country.
Yeah, the middle-class is better off in the midsize metros, but lack of housing affordability at the low end seems to be an issue there too in a way it didn't used to be.
(In the 70's, one reason street homelessness was virtually unknown was there was an abundance of super-cheap private housing, like crummy residence hotels, for people down on their luck. Bad places to live, your person or property wasn't necessarily safe, but still worlds better than living outdoors. And I have to assume that availability was closely related to all the public and private housing being built, by today's standards, frenetically.)
The book Ghettoside argues that Black communities are simultaneously over- and under- policed. (Over - lots of police harassment. Under - police don't try to solve murders in Black neighborhoods.). So it'd make sense that Black communities simultaneously think that police should be more funded and less funded.
I saw some poster that said that pre-WWII, half of all housing in NYC was rented by the bed/room, not by the complete apartment (SRO's, boarding houses). That fell out of favor with the post war housing boom. But it has so much explanatory power to me. That kind of housing is so hard to replace if zoned out. HALF! We just aren't gonna be able to shelter half the population without that kind of housing.
That fell out of favor with the post war housing boom. But it has so much explanatory power to me. That kind of housing is so hard to replace if zoned out.
I sort of agree in that those uses are illegal almost everywhere now and we need them back to a degree, but tech change is also a factor - before the labor-saving advances of the first half of the 20th century, it was a lot harder for a single person to provide for themselves. Unless you had your own household, you usually had little choice but to club together with other people, via rooming houses, for hot water and meals and sheets and so forth. A lot of people probably appreciated the independence of switching from boarding houses to efficiency apartments.
(I don't know if there's any difference between boarding-house and rooming-house.)
17 is a good point. Also, plus sexism. My dad boarded with various older ladies before he got married. Because what was he supposed do, wash his own laundry? And what was a widow supposed to do before social security kicked in if she didn't want to marry again right away?
That's also how my first babysitters were hired.
And once you subtract out the population that can afford the independence of an efficiency or one-bedroom, you're left with a much more unstable clientele to invite in your house.
Most of the time I lived in a one bedroom apartment, it was in Ohio. So I can't really judge how bad they are in regular places.
18: Board is your meals. A boardinghouse cooked for you at least some of the time.
Lots of Seattle -- including parts that are now terribly swanky -- were built as rooming/boarding houses, and even more was designed to make that possible. Lots of shared houses were making use of that into the 1990s. I don't think boarding specifically lasted as long.
My favorite bit is that many places had a tiny sink in each bedroom, which was officially for washing the face and making your own tea on the room's gas heat, but I figure *have* to have also been pissed in many a night. Some of the little sinks are very low.
Toilets and tubs and showers seem to have been in separate little rooms for maximum shareability. Most of this has been renovated away, I spent some time entranced by old microfiche records of building plans.
I lived in a boarding house turned co-op in San Luis Obispo for a while. My room (10' in all dimensions) had a tiny corner sink. I absolutely loved it. I would never have thought to want one but once I lived with one, it was really great. I never pissed in it.
I'm trying to reintroduce boarding at my current place. Well, first I have to build the kitchen in the back yard. But then I'm going to try to get a cook to run a boarding situation. Maybe sell about 12 dinners/night, four of them to us.
In England, the dorm rooms all had sinks and pissing in the sink was indeed the tradition. Or that's what someone told me and I found it more convenient than going do the hall at 3:00 a.m.
They also used to hang grocery bags with food outside the window instead of putting it in the communal fridge.
To get back to the serious post, I was going to say a similar thing as Megan about overpolicing/underpolicing/Ghettoside. Plus the example that in Seattle right now it's the less rich and less Anglo neighborhoods that seem to be getting absolutely the worst of our homelessness-plus-violent-crime, extra for the downtown bus boulevard, less in the University district. At least, our remaining local reporters say so, and it looks that way traveling about town. It feels worse than it was in the grunge/heroin 1980s, though some of that is because I'm not a teenager any more and a lot of it is that there at least was really cheap housing in the 1980s.
It feels worse than it was in the grunge/heroin 1980s
It really does in downtown Sacramento as well. I don't think I'm an urban naif, but oh man.
Sam Quinones wrote Dreamland, which I thought was a great explanation of the rise of heroin/opiate addiction in the US. He says there's a new formula for meth (since 2016) and it makes people crazier. I don't know whether to believe that, but it sure feels like the down-and-out are substantially differently sick.
The other regional/statewide thing is that AFAICT everywhere wants to believe that the worst of the problem comes, is even maybe sent, from Elsewhere. Elsewhere within the state, we're not as focused on California/Boston incomers as we used to be. I've seen the same survey used as evidence on *both sides*, I thought maybe it showed that lots of people in the region have ties in several places in the region.
"Fund the Police" is a clear loss for the left. Cops can't be reformed.
This is only tangentially related, but I am worried about a friend in King County WA and since I have exhausted what I can do for him from afar for now, I am meditating on how his condition and my inability to help him reflects various systemic issues, at least as I understand them.
He's a 35 year old white guy who has had debilitating depression, anxiety, and sporadic but rapidly increasing chronic pain and headaches, and combined with his general disillusionment with society ( I know him religiously and he tried pretty seriously to be a monk for a few years and has never really held down a traditional job for very long) he's quite poor and chronically underhoused. For many years he lived with a fond elderly aunt and she left him an RV, but he doesn't get along with the rest of his family at all and he stopped feeling able to park his RV at his brother's house last year. Last year, not long after he started parking his RV in various random places, his headaches became truly debilitating, and he was diagnosed with what they're calling post-concussive syndrome. He was a pretty serious school and club hockey player in his youth and early 20s and I don't understand Hockey at all, but he apparently got a very high # of frequent, seriously concussions, even for a hockey player. From what he's described to me of his symptoms and their onset, it sounds like he probably actually has CTE, though of course that can't be truly diagnosed in the living. He's in bad shape.
His RV is currently parked/stuck in the mid at the land of the parents of another, much younger, co religionist. As far as I can tell she's the only local co religionist of ours who has been a committed friend to him. She has left for India for the big annual pilgrimage and to get some yoga and massage training and will be gone for months. He was actually supposed to go with her -- she very generousy bought him a ticket --- and went as far as a stopover at a retreat in Brazil, but he was so sick there, a senior monk asked him to go back to Seattle, as the big annual pilgrimage would be too difficult for him. Without her in town, he is uncomfortable asking anyone, including her parents, for help, and is basically lying miserably in his RV, barely able to feed himself.
So first of all I have come to loathe Hockey and Football, and think of them as Concussion Industries Inc and find myself deeply resentful of all my friends who still watch and support these games and especially encourage young men to play them. I have only just started tentatively talking to my little male presenting fetus and one of the speeches he's gotten is how these games suck and he won't be playing them.
Secondly I think it's insane that the only kind of wellness check I can call for from a distance is from a fucking police officer. He doesn't need a police officer he needs a nurse with some soup and easy to prepare groceries and electrolytes. ( Sorta on topic?)
Thirdly, having spent some time on the King County 211 site, it strikes me how he just doesn't fit into any of the demographics of people who can get help. To me he's clearly disabled and in crisis, but he's too young, his disability is too physical and too newly diagnosed and not war-based for him to "fit"in any group.
Fourthly it strikes me as a pity that small subsidized metropolitan RV parks aren't more of a thing. West Contra Costa seems to be full of empty lots that would be perfect for that but of course the zoning and permits would be a nightmare. ( Sorta on topic?)
I kicked myself out of the other place so sorry for being voluble and off topic.
West Contra Costa seems to be full of empty lots
Oh indeed, indeed indeed, but they all somehow have neighbors, and those neighbors are very very adamant that there will not be RVs parked in the lots until some impossible standard of research, consent, cross-checking, etc. is completed. (I was just excruciatingly polite to some of my neighbors about this when they cutely shut down the safe parking pilot lot at a church on Christmas Eve.) We have a couple of Seattle-area commenters here (area broadly construed) who might have advice for you, but I hope your friend can get help. That all sounds really terrible.
Oakland just passed an ordinance that anyone can park one RV or mobile home on any residential lot, if the right hookups are provided.
I recently lived for a semester in Berkeley exactly at the border of residential and industrial zoning and in the latter there were so many RVs parked all the time. It was weird and striking, and presumably completely driven by housing costs. It seemed to be a much more functional population than the tent city we would walk past to get to the Marina park.
33: hey that sounds like a positive development! Hmm.... might be promising as a long term way of bringing him down here where we have a marginally more tight knit and caring community.
33: hey that sounds like a positive development! Hmm.... might be promising as a long term way of bringing him down here where we have a marginally more tight knit and caring community.
33: hey that sounds like a positive development! Hmm.... might be promising as a long term way of bringing him down here where we have a marginally more tight knit and caring community.
He just said he's feeding himself today so that's a relief.
Hey, Ile, I'm in Seattle, I can take a pot of stew and a bag of groceries somewhere in King County if you need me to.
Hi Clew! Is your email in the link functional?
rearrange it with my username clew. The link is meant to slow down scrapers.
Here in Minneapolis, the police department is getting an across the board raise, and $7,000 per officer bonuses. Meanwhile, the teachers are on strike for, among other things, fairer wages.
What's scary to me is how the last clearance of an encampment of mostly-Native homeless folx seems to have been a complete success. I know what happened to a few of them -- the post-riot hoarding on the Somali convenience store at the end of my street has a list of the people from that community who've died this year, written in several hands in Sharpie. There's 9 or 10 names on it.
This really is the end times though, fundies were right (or made themselves right) about that. Between the security forces' death squads [watch the normal speed video of Amir Locke's execution and tell me what better describes the SWAT team that killed him] and the rapacious profiteering of the bosses and the rabid race to Gilead that all the Nazi legislatures are running right now, it's a wonder we're not all out stabbing each other.
Alas, Babylon
All the cop-lover propaganda is so sickening. Sometimes it seems like 98% of the city has decided they would prefer to forget that those thuggish suburbanites *actually crushed a man to death*. "Oooohh, boo-hoo, all the poor cops have PTSD from the riots." Fucking where's their PTSD when they're attacking some senior citizen or shooting someone's chained-up dog for the sheer sport of it? Doesn't seem to affect their ability to terrorize my community then, does it? Malingering fucking hypocrites. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. Has committed multiple felonies in aid of their fellow officers, or for their own benefit. Yet they sit up there with their $150,000/year shit-eating grins and talk about "criminals" which is virtually always just a dog-whistle for "young men of color," as everyone well knows.
Well, as Kropotkin points out, empires always fall. This will be a vintage season, alright.
Ile, I've been checking my spam folders and haven't seen anything that could be from you, if I could still be useful maybe heebie could forward email? Pretty sure she has at least one of my addresses.