"Meaningful police reform"... what does it mean??

[Ratatatat]

Senator Cory Booker was on CNN yesterday, saying big changes are coming down the pike regarding police reform:

Booker: 'Meaningful progress' but no deal yet on police reform (cnn.com)

Like any good politician, he had little to offer regarding specifics, leaving it up to viewers to come up with likely scenarios and outcomes.

Here's where I think things are headed (at least in places with Senator Bookers in charge): under the guise of maximum accountability, the police will essentially be neutered to the point of irrelevance. Yes they will still exist, but only as empty bureaucracies and civil service providers of employment. It will be similar to what happened in South Africa, post apartheid, where the police were intentionally ham-strung after decades of being instruments of political oppression.

I was in South Africa a few years ago, imbedded with SAPS DPCI units (aka "The Hawks") in Durban and Cape Town. The officers all said the same things: we are understaffed and overwhelmed... The level of violence is unreal... The criminal element is highly organized and equipped.... The political powers do not support law enforcement... We are all trying to emigrate to New Zealand or Canada to give our families a better life...

On the streets, every home and business was rimmed with razor wire or electrical fencing. There were few police vehicles and police officers in public but many private armed response vehicles out and about (private security are the first responders to violent situations. If your house were getting robbed, you'd call your armed response company, they'd rush over and shoot it out with the bad guys, then you'd get a bill in the mail. Provided, of course, you weren't killed at some point during the encounter). In Cape Town, the streets emptied as soon as nightfall began and the hordes of zombies emerged to search for flesh to eat. I saw firsthand the violence in the Cape Flats, where gangsterism is the way of life in a city with 2,500 murders a year, where 13 and 14 year olds shoot neighborhood kids in the head, their initiation into a bloody abyss where life has little, if any, value...

The pastoral countryside offers little shelter from the mayhem. Common scenario: farmer and his family get killed during a midnight raid on a remote farm or ranch. Bodies are removed and squatters move in. It's their place now, as the police and government do nothing.

Perhaps some of you saw the recent CIT (cash in transit) robbery attempt video. That driver was lucky... since that happened a few weeks ago, several drivers have been killed.

Heists Of Cash In Transit Vehicles Almost Daily In South Africa (jalopnik.com)

There's little sense of shared values or community justice. It's a country on perpetual edge.

I asked one of the officers what it was like to witness the daily carnage. "We're de-sensitized to it", he said. "We just step over the bodies."

This weekend I was watching my local news, broadcast from my nearby violent city (at least for American standards, with 300+ murders a year). A sixteen year old girl was killed in crossfire during a gas station shootout between the Seven Mile Bloods and the Hustle Boyz. A candlelight vigil was being held, but there was no anger or outrage, only tears of resignation....

South Africa is America, year 2030. The violence of widespread gangsterism will be 100X our current levels but that's only a problem if you're not fully de-sensitized to it. Soon enough, the numbness will begin to take effect...

[Aidokea]

Senator Cory Booker was on CNN yesterday, saying big changes are coming down the pike regarding police reform:

Booker: 'Meaningful progress' but no deal yet on police reform (cnn.com)

Like any good politician, he had little to offer regarding specifics, leaving it up to viewers to come up with likely scenarios and outcomes.

Here's where I think things are headed (at least in places with Senator Bookers in charge): under the guise of maximum accountability, the police will essentially be neutered to the point of irrelevance. Yes they will still exist, but only as empty bureaucracies and civil service providers of employment. It will be similar to what happened in South Africa, post apartheid, where the police were intentionally ham-strung after decades of being instruments of political oppression.

I was in South Africa a few years ago, imbedded with SAPS DPCI units (aka "The Hawks") in Durban and Cape Town. The officers all said the same things: we are understaffed and overwhelmed... The level of violence is unreal... The criminal element is highly organized and equipped.... The political powers do not support law enforcement... We are all trying to emigrate to New Zealand or Canada to give our families a better life...

On the streets, every home and business was rimmed with razor wire or electrical fencing. There were few police vehicles and police officers in public but many private armed response vehicles out and about (private security are the first responders to violent situations. If your house were getting robbed, you'd call your armed response company, they'd rush over and shoot it out with the bad guys, then you'd get a bill in the mail. Provided, of course, you weren't killed at some point during the encounter). In Cape Town, the streets emptied as soon as nightfall began and the hordes of zombies emerged to search for flesh to eat. I saw firsthand the violence in the Cape Flats, where gangsterism is the way of life in a city with 2,500 murders a year, where 13 and 14 year olds shoot neighborhood kids in the head, their initiation into a bloody abyss where life has little, if any, value...

The pastoral countryside offers little shelter from the mayhem. Common scenario: farmer and his family get killed during a midnight raid on a remote farm or ranch. Bodies are removed and squatters move in. It's their place now, as the police and government do nothing.

Perhaps some of you saw the recent CIT (cash in transit) robbery attempt video. That driver was lucky... since that happened a few weeks ago, several drivers have been killed.

Heists Of Cash In Transit Vehicles Almost Daily In South Africa (jalopnik.com)

There's little sense of shared values or community justice. It's a country on perpetual edge.

I asked one of the officers what it was like to witness the daily carnage. "We're de-sensitized to it", he said. "We just step over the bodies."

This weekend I was watching my local news, broadcast from my nearby violent city (at least for American standards, with 300+ murders a year). A sixteen year old girl was killed in crossfire during a gas station shootout between the Seven Mile Bloods and the Hustle Boyz. A candlelight vigil was being held, but there was no anger or outrage, only tears of resignation....

South Africa is America, year 2030. The violence of widespread gangsterism will be 100X our current levels but that's only a problem if you're not fully de-sensitized to it. Soon enough, the numbness will begin to take effect...

Preach it...

[Aidokea]

I'll be watching from my brick house, located in the center of my fully fenced and gated ranch in rural central Texas, with my scoped AR and a BIG stack of loaded mags...

[CCCSD]

Two problems with this analysis in my opinion. First, it presupposes that the only factor contributing to or limiting violent crime in policing. And that's simply not true. But the second problem I have is that you're presenting a false choice...status quo or hamstring the police. I don't think that's reasonable and I don't think that federal reforms will hamstring law enforcement. I hope they won't. But I can't look at situations like Laquan McDonald and Ronald Greene, both cases where police officers and supervisors appear to have coordinated to cover up unjustified use of force resulting in a suspect's death, or George Floyd where a trusted training officer committed a gross and sustained abuse of a suspect's rights... I can't look at those situations and not see a need for reform of some kind.

Is there a risk that politicians will overcorrect in response to public sentiment? Yes. Calls to "defund" or abolish the police are not helpful. But I hope that reforms will be more balanced and nuanced than that. Communities need to be able to trust the police and lately that isn't happening. It's better for the communities and for the police if something is done to fix that.

So the reform is to allow a certain segment of society to be able to run wild with minimal ramifications. All in the name of “justice and rights”..?
LOOK who’s RESPONSIBLE for 80% of crime in the US... And LOOK who’s COMMITTING said crimes...

Yep.
Rat is correct.
BTDT in SA also.

[Aidokea]

Two problems with this analysis in my opinion. First, it presupposes that the only factor contributing to or limiting violent crime in policing. And that's simply not true. But the second problem I have is that you're presenting a false choice...status quo or hamstring the police.

Nothing he said, denies other contributing factors, like institutionalized lack of personal responsibility, lack of integrity, lack of honesty, lack of respect, lack of respectability, lack of chivalry, baseless hatred of the police, racism, poor work ethics, entitlement, assumed third-party victimhood, and a myriad of other dysfunctions, passed down from generation to generation of bad parents in broken families...

[not.in.MY.town]

An affirmative duty to intervene and duty to report would be a good start.

[BNWS]

It's already in the regulations. As for using it as leverage to gain leverage against another cop. The laws needed for that are already there.

[BNWS]

Seems like Senator Booker has been on both sides of the issue.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/from-tough-on-crime-to-tough-on-cops-cory-booker-recasts-his-record/2019/08/03/abc398c2-b20b-11e9-951e-de024209545d_story.html

[Boojie]

As times change so will policing. Adapting to communities and the people they serve.

[Krinkiboi2020]

I think the conversation that really needs to happen is "meaningful law reform," and what that means.

[tanksoldier]

Maybe “meaningful public reform” is what we need....

[Aidokea]

Meaningful criminal reform would be good...

[angeredmgmt]

Overall, policing here in the US doesn't need to be touched. What actually needs to be done is to effectively combat the left in this country. They have been in an actual war with us, and like the foreign terrorist fighting a holy war against us while we weren't yet fighting them, we need to get ALL hands on deck and up to speed. This is still our country, for the time being, and we need to fight this BS tooth and nail. For God's sake, guys, if you have children and grandchildren, great grandchildren or whatever, fight the good fight!

The leftist lie that LE is THE problem is so offensive, it makes me want to puke! LE officers are just government agents sent out to enforce their laws THEY wrote, but the lefties and the government, itself, make LE the scapegoat for one of the greatest ills of society when the blame falls squarely on their backs. The home-grown domestic enemies, the foreign enemies, and the domestic enemies working with the foreign enemies will not stop to take down and/or destroy this country. Human nature, being what it is, causes this behavior - the desire to control and conquer.

Sadly, like a frog in that boiling pot of water, the enemies have neutered us to where we don't even know how to fight for what is rightly ours. They have effectively filled the heads of several generations now with the idea we should hate ourselves and our history. White guilt, cultural appropriation, anti-gentrification, critical race theory, all whites are racists, etc, etc, etc has caught on far more than at the kook level where it should have remained, and a lot of that has become government and/or corporate policy now.

This is one of the biggest thefts in history, and we're just sitting here eating popcorn as it all plays out. Don't even get me started about a government failing to control the border where their only desire is for votes and support of a certain demographic. It is disgusting that a government which supposedly is voted in my an electorate now gets to choose its own electorate. I shake my head how we as a people can just sit here and allow for this soft invasion to happen before our very eyes.

So back to meaningful police reform. IF a free people want a society where the criminal laws of society are enforced by a police force of officers derived from the community they police, they will have to allow that force to blindly enforce those laws to the best of their abilities. Also, this free people will have to deal with the minority of the police force, otherwise known as 'bad apples' to be dealt with according to department policy as well as state and federal law.

We all know the mainstream media has narratives they push and don't stray away from, so these relatively few bad apples out of almost 700,000 active LEOs are causing these lefties to go ape-poop when we all know it is a leftist tactic. One way or another, they want to control LE so they can control the populace and to push their leftism or they want it neutered so it can't be directed at them.

I don't curse, but I used to have THE worst mouth while growing up until right after I got out of the USMC. This theft of our government, society and homeland makes me want to begin uttering those foul words again, and not to just utter them while sitting here at my desk, but from the highest peak around. Sadly, if I did, my fellow sheople would just tell me to shut up and to continue to eat the hay with the rest of the sheople.

To sum all of that rant up, leftists are bad and need to be dealt with while LE, in general, doesn't need to be touched. I always fall back on this quote by a former slave who rose to the level of counseling presidents: “There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
― Booker T. Washington

[BNWS]

There are constant improvements in law enforcement as evidenced in the legal and procedural bulletin changes I received almost daily while a police officer. Monumental change does not happen over night because almost everything police do is dictated by court rulings, legal precedents and liability concerns.

[OfficerDotCom]

If you can’t hold the conversation without insults, threats, etc. the thread will be closed.

[vc859]

Here’s a radical idea:

Make criminal law enforcement a fourth branch of government. All chiefs and sheriffs are elected and funding is from a separate police tax. Just like there is a fire tax, library tax etc. Done right I think this could work from both sides

LEOs will be answering to other LEOs without the interference by mayors, governors, board of supervisors etc. (Let them hire their own code enforcement if they want an enforcement arm)

Communities will be in direct control of their policing. Don’t like it. Vote in a new leader or adjust budgets via votes and referendum.

Of course there would be some details to iron out but as a general idea I think it can work

[tanksoldier]

Maybe the change we need is people to take responsibility for themselves...

The fundamental flaw in DM’s reasoning is his assumption that police officers decide who to contact and how to address a situation. The reality is that we almost always are reacting to someone else’s decisions or behavior.

95% of the time I have no idea who I am pulling over when I make a traffic stop. I’m reacting to an anonymous person’s driving behavior. I don’t know if they’re a black bisexual platypus until I get up to the window, if then.

100% of the time I have no idea who I’m contacting on a call.... they called me about somebody else. It wasn’t my idea to go there.

[Aidokea]

Yup.

Where did this wacky idea come from, that offenders should have the right to choose the race of the officer that apprehends them?

[Bing_Oh]

Here’s a radical idea:

Make criminal law enforcement a fourth branch of government. All chiefs and sheriffs are elected and funding is from a separate police tax. Just like there is a fire tax, library tax etc. Done right I think this could work from both sides

LEOs will be answering to other LEOs without the interference by mayors, governors, board of supervisors etc. (Let them hire their own code enforcement if they want an enforcement arm)

Communities will be in direct control of their policing. Don’t like it. Vote in a new leader or adjust budgets via votes and referendum.

Of course there would be some details to iron out but as a general idea I think it can work

The underlying idea is good, but I'm not sure that making police leadership political positions would fix the problem. In Ohio, all Sheriff's are elected and, unfortunately, you can see the influence of the political aspect have an effect on some counties and how they enforce (or don't enforce) the law. Law enforcement and politics make strange bedfellows...and usually not for the better.

What we need is a way to separate LE from political influence all together. As LEO's, we should be loyal to the law, not politics and not public influence. The People elect the legislature to pass the laws and the judiciary to interpret the laws. Those laws should be enforced fairly and evenly, without bias. If the public doesn't like the laws, then they have the power to change the legislature. If they don't like the interpretation of the laws, they have the power to change the judiciary. As LEO's, if we're within the boundaries of the law, then politics and public influence should not hamper our enforcement.