'Law & Order' Politics is Back

[Fuzzy Says: "Abolish NPR!"]

We do not need new, tough sentencing laws.  Indeed, we can roll back a certain number of enhancements in sentencing.  We can roll back "overcriminalization" where crimes that were misdemeanors for decades became felonies, felonies became aggravated felonies, aggravated felonies were given minimum-mandatory sentences, etc.  We can reform sentencing processes to reduce bias in sentencing (because, after all, the usually white kid who stole systematically who has a "drug problem" but had been a "good kid" who had "got into college" has more in common, socio-econoically speaking,  with the "stakeholders" in the "system" (Judge, Prosecutors, Defense Attorneys, Probation/Parole Agencies, other Community Agencies, than, say, a poor black female defendant who systematically steal from Walmart.  And we can certainly re-evaluate our enforcement of Drug Laws and the impact of this enforcement on Civil Liberties.  These are all doable tasks that should be done.

But we need to enforce the laws we have.  Laws against stealing should be enforced, regardless of the motive, because property is a fundamental right.  And the victims of petit thefts (Are you listening, Mr. Gascon?) are often poor or struggling people where a Petit Theft might involve losing everything they need for the pay period. 

We need to recognize that the idea of racist police and "police brutality" is a grossly overblown issue that has been grossly overblown for the sake of some of the worst political actors this country has recently seen.  (BLM and various race hustling pols fall in this category as do ANTIFA and the Far Left on Campus; these are some of the most obvious wrongdoers here.)  We should punish brutal police for the crimes they actually commit, and they should not be above the law, but they should not be BELOW the law, either. 

We need to recognize that a decent amount of the "disparate impact" policing, incarceration, and criminal justice policies have on African Americans is, to a significant degree, caused not by bias, but by the fact that African Americans commit crimes (and commit violent crimes) at a higher rate per capita than any other demographic, and that rate is even more disproportionate when we are looking at young black males 25 and under.  Perhaps if we can openly face this uncomfortable fact of our society collectively and nonjudgmentally we can actually develop strategies to reduce and end these disparities and actually make the World better.  In the meantime, we can recognize that in those communities that are most troubled with violent crime, the law-abiding citizens there WANT the police there, and that the Black Lives that are being lost matter more to the police there than to the gangs of armed remorseless criminals and criminal gang members that are the providers of the violence in our most troubled neighborhoods.

We can all, publicly, emphasize that people should not resist a lawful arrest.  With the exception of Breonna Taylor (whose boyfriend shot first), all of the controversial incidents in policing that resulted in death involved in persons either (A) resisting a lawful arrest or (B) stop unlawful activity that threatened the life/lives of others.  There are cases where police acted wrongly.  There are other cases where police acted justifiably, and were found to have done so.  Some cases are up in the air.  But one thing is certain:  George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Daunte Wright, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown (to name five) would all be alive had they not resisted lawful arrest.  Period.  Most of these folks would likely have bonded out after arrest, and not expensively, either.  We need to get real about this issue.  People do NOT have the right to resist a lawful arrest, and people who encourage others to resist arrest are not doing anyone (including the person subject to arrest) a favor.

Lastly, we can resist the positively silly ideas about Law Enforcement that will, in the end, do more harm than good.  The most destructive of all of these ideas is the ending of Qualified Immunity.  Doing this will result in the best psychologically qualified applicants for policing to choose a different occupation.  We would be asking people to take on a hazardous job where people get killed without protection from frivolous lawsuits.  When that happens, Police Departments will have a lesser pool of applicants to choose from, and people who tend toward the antisocial side will replace the type of applicants Law Enforcement Agencies have today.  The fact that we have the best quality of applicants for policing in America at any time in our history should not be taken for granted.  When qualified immunity is gone, we will have more people with power/control complexes occupying officer positions because (A) their records will be officially clean and (B) departments will not be able to be so picky in who they hire.

We really CAN fix all of this, but it will take compromise all around to do so.

[Santander]

Being “tough on crime” doesn’t mean “being tough on black peoples.” If you think it does, or must, maybe you need to examine yourself.

lol

[Kamala's side hoe]

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-duck-sauce-killer-glenn-hirsch-bail-queens-chinese-food-deliveryman-murder-20220627-mgceteyi65d3vn56kixw4s75um-story.html

A judge in Queens granted $500,000 bail Monday for accused “duck sauce” killer Glenn Hirsch as he awaits trial on charges he fatally shot a Chinese food deliveryman over a bizarre months-long beef over insufficient condiment packets.

Hirsch, 51, had faced a long stint awaiting trial on Rikers Island — until he posted the hefty bail. Queens Criminal Court Judge Kenneth Holder granted Hirsch’s release into home confinement following a hearing in Queens Supreme Court.

Hirsch’s brother posted the bail with a certified check, but the $500,000 came from Hirsch himself, his lawyer Michael Horn said.

Holder ordered the city Sheriff’s Department fit Hirsch with an electronic bracelet. He has to stay in his home 24 hours day, except for visits to his lawyer, doctor, court and one hour per day of exercise.

[GP270watch]

 Mass incarceration is a failed and unsustainable policy and it is anti-poor, anti-Black, and has proven to be a horrendous policy failure.

[Hammy]

So Dems are picking the time where there's literally an active federal investigation because police decided to let children die because they were cowards to start retreating on fixing this broken institution?

[Mercenary]

We're back to competing on which party is tougher on crime:

Dems retreat on crime and police reform
If 2020 was the year the left reordered the traditional politics of crime and policing, 2022 looks like the year centrists regained their footing and nullified those gains.

It's almost as if the Black Lives Matter movement never happened. 

Maybe because the idiotic defund the police nonsense resulted in ridiculous increase in crime and people got tired of it. Maybe people are sick of the drug camps in the cities. I wish the fools elected to office would do something about the crime but alas criminals have more rights than law abiding citizens, at least in my state anyway.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

I think the issue is both Defund the Police and Blue Lives Matter, like many such movements, have elements of the truth and do speak to sections of the population but neither have a particularly credible solution.

The issue is that the American police system is institutionally incompetent especially at a local level. The failings we see in particular are quite common to all institutions: an interest in using cash for flashy purchases rather than longterm investment in their people, which is why you have so many Chief Wiggums with a minor nation's armoury at their disposal; attempts to deal with anti-discrimination laws etc with meaningless tickbox exercises; a rewards system that prioritises low level targets over high investment, risky investigations (so you end up with hundreds of minor, petty infractions to fill unofficial quotas while home invasion, assault, rape and even murder are increasingly met with inaction) and systematic neglect of certain areas of town (you know which areas).

This reality squares badly with both of these slogans. Blue Lives Matter may be a nice statement if you're talking to some lumpenproletariat buddies on the Facebook, but it does not track with the lived experience many people (especially black people) who view the police as, at best, a bunch of jumped-up bureaucrats from a different part of town. I do have some sympathy for besieged police officers who feel consumed by public hatred and believe they are doing something, in the same way I feel sympathy for child protection and social care workers who simultaneously are often pushed as too neglectful and too heavy handed, and are subject to public ire in the event of catastrophic failure.

The issue is DtP also gets the wrong end of the stick. Firstly, we should say that the democrats embrace of it made them look very weak and was not a particularly convincing guise. Classic example of a politician saying anything in the moment to an angry crowd with the subtext "if i say this will you go away??!". But it also fails to address the issue at hand, a symptom of its origins in academia and adoption by a not hugely representative clique of activists. It relies on utopian politics, almost never a particularly sustainable platform, and fails to realise people do want a version of the police, just not the police they have right now. Public schooling can also be criticized as racist and mismanaged, but democrats would tend to have a dim opinion of a campaign to essentially privatise it on this basis.

[MR DARK BRANDON]

We're back to competing on which party is tougher on crime:

Dems retreat on crime and police reform
If 2020 was the year the left reordered the traditional politics of crime and policing, 2022 looks like the year centrists regained their footing and nullified those gains.

It's almost as if the Black Lives Matter movement never happened. 

I've noted this myself. The George Floyd murder, which seemed as if it would usher in a new reckoning with the inequalities in our criminal justice system, ultimately did not have such an impact. I don't think we will ever see systematic criminal justice reform, and a tough on crime approach will be the generic one taken moving forward.

If anything, it might have hurt the movement in the long run, seeing as BLM probably cost the Democrats several congressional seats.

We where on track to make some real progress, then some ppl had to push it with all this defund the police and ACAB BS and here we are.

[Fuzzy Says: "Abolish NPR!"]

We're back to competing on which party is tougher on crime:

Dems retreat on crime and police reform
If 2020 was the year the left reordered the traditional politics of crime and policing, 2022 looks like the year centrists regained their footing and nullified those gains.

It's almost as if the Black Lives Matter movement never happened. 

I've noted this myself. The George Floyd murder, which seemed as if it would usher in a new reckoning with the inequalities in our criminal justice system, ultimately did not have such an impact. I don't think we will ever see systematic criminal justice reform, and a tough on crime approach will be the generic one taken moving forward.

If anything, it might have hurt the movement in the long run, seeing as BLM probably cost the Democrats several congressional seats.

We where on track to make some real progress, then some ppl had to push it with all this defund the police and ACAB BS and here we are.

This x 10.000.

[Progressive Pessimist]

Democrats will likely never be received positively when it comes to crime as a general issue. But there is an opportunity here in this post-Dobbs hellscape. I've said many times before that reproductive freedom is such an important issue because it overlaps with so many different kinds of policies. One such policy is now crime. It occurred to me that if women are being prosecuted for having abortions in states that criminalize it with little to no leeway, and/or those that assisted them, it takes attention and resources away from what should be considered more important crimes to be investigating and prosecuting.

I know that I can't assume that a Democratic campaign strategist will ever come across this post, but seriously, the abhorrent consequences of Dobbs are much further reaching than the average person may think. And hopefully being exposed to those consequences will make some reconsider the conventional wisdom they may fall for so frequently.

[GoTfan]

We do not need new, tough sentencing laws.  Indeed, we can roll back a certain number of enhancements in sentencing.  We can roll back "overcriminalization" where crimes that were misdemeanors for decades became felonies, felonies became aggravated felonies, aggravated felonies were given minimum-mandatory sentences, etc.  We can reform sentencing processes to reduce bias in sentencing (because, after all, the usually white kid who stole systematically who has a "drug problem" but had been a "good kid" who had "got into college" has more in common, socio-econoically speaking,  with the "stakeholders" in the "system" (Judge, Prosecutors, Defense Attorneys, Probation/Parole Agencies, other Community Agencies, than, say, a poor black female defendant who systematically steal from Walmart.  And we can certainly re-evaluate our enforcement of Drug Laws and the impact of this enforcement on Civil Liberties.  These are all doable tasks that should be done.

But we need to enforce the laws we have.  Laws against stealing should be enforced, regardless of the motive, because property is a fundamental right.  And the victims of petit thefts (Are you listening, Mr. Gascon?) are often poor or struggling people where a Petit Theft might involve losing everything they need for the pay period. 

We need to recognize that the idea of racist police and "police brutality" is a grossly overblown issue that has been grossly overblown for the sake of some of the worst political actors this country has recently seen.  (BLM and various race hustling pols fall in this category as do ANTIFA and the Far Left on Campus; these are some of the most obvious wrongdoers here.)  We should punish brutal police for the crimes they actually commit, and they should not be above the law, but they should not be BELOW the law, either. 

We need to recognize that a decent amount of the "disparate impact" policing, incarceration, and criminal justice policies have on African Americans is, to a significant degree, caused not by bias, but by the fact that African Americans commit crimes (and commit violent crimes) at a higher rate per capita than any other demographic, and that rate is even more disproportionate when we are looking at young black males 25 and under.  Perhaps if we can openly face this uncomfortable fact of our society collectively and nonjudgmentally we can actually develop strategies to reduce and end these disparities and actually make the World better.  In the meantime, we can recognize that in those communities that are most troubled with violent crime, the law-abiding citizens there WANT the police there, and that the Black Lives that are being lost matter more to the police there than to the gangs of armed remorseless criminals and criminal gang members that are the providers of the violence in our most troubled neighborhoods.

We can all, publicly, emphasize that people should not resist a lawful arrest.  With the exception of Breonna Taylor (whose boyfriend shot first), all of the controversial incidents in policing that resulted in death involved in persons either (A) resisting a lawful arrest or (B) stop unlawful activity that threatened the life/lives of others.  There are cases where police acted wrongly.  There are other cases where police acted justifiably, and were found to have done so.  Some cases are up in the air.  But one thing is certain:  George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, Daunte Wright, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown (to name five) would all be alive had they not resisted lawful arrest.  Period.  Most of these folks would likely have bonded out after arrest, and not expensively, either.  We need to get real about this issue.  People do NOT have the right to resist a lawful arrest, and people who encourage others to resist arrest are not doing anyone (including the person subject to arrest) a favor.

Lastly, we can resist the positively silly ideas about Law Enforcement that will, in the end, do more harm than good.  The most destructive of all of these ideas is the ending of Qualified Immunity.  Doing this will result in the best psychologically qualified applicants for policing to choose a different occupation.  We would be asking people to take on a hazardous job where people get killed without protection from frivolous lawsuits.  When that happens, Police Departments will have a lesser pool of applicants to choose from, and people who tend toward the antisocial side will replace the type of applicants Law Enforcement Agencies have today.  The fact that we have the best quality of applicants for policing in America at any time in our history should not be taken for granted.  When qualified immunity is gone, we will have more people with power/control complexes occupying officer positions because (A) their records will be officially clean and (B) departments will not be able to be so picky in who they hire.

We really CAN fix all of this, but it will take compromise all around to do so.

This is little more than a screed from a man angry that the world has moved past the 1980s.

[LabourJersey]

I think the issue is both Defund the Police and Blue Lives Matter, like many such movements, have elements of the truth and do speak to sections of the population but neither have a particularly credible solution.

The issue is that the American police system is institutionally incompetent especially at a local level. The failings we see in particular are quite common to all institutions: an interest in using cash for flashy purchases rather than longterm investment in their people, which is why you have so many Chief Wiggums with a minor nation's armoury at their disposal; attempts to deal with anti-discrimination laws etc with meaningless tickbox exercises; a rewards system that prioritises low level targets over high investment, risky investigations (so you end up with hundreds of minor, petty infractions to fill unofficial quotas while home invasion, assault, rape and even murder are increasingly met with inaction) and systematic neglect of certain areas of town (you know which areas).

This reality squares badly with both of these slogans. Blue Lives Matter may be a nice statement if you're talking to some lumpenproletariat buddies on the Facebook, but it does not track with the lived experience many people (especially black people) who view the police as, at best, a bunch of jumped-up bureaucrats from a different part of town. I do have some sympathy for besieged police officers who feel consumed by public hatred and believe they are doing something, in the same way I feel sympathy for child protection and social care workers who simultaneously are often pushed as too neglectful and too heavy handed, and are subject to public ire in the event of catastrophic failure.

The issue is DtP also gets the wrong end of the stick. Firstly, we should say that the democrats embrace of it made them look very weak and was not a particularly convincing guise. Classic example of a politician saying anything in the moment to an angry crowd with the subtext "if i say this will you go away??!". But it also fails to address the issue at hand, a symptom of its origins in academia and adoption by a not hugely representative clique of activists. It relies on utopian politics, almost never a particularly sustainable platform, and fails to realise people do want a version of the police, just not the police they have right now. Public schooling can also be criticized as racist and mismanaged, but democrats would tend to have a dim opinion of a campaign to essentially privatise it on this basis.

This is a great post, and the bolded gets to the heart of the matter.

People want police, but that they want is a system that's very different than what we have right now. The focus needs to be on getting there.

[Pres Mike]

Good

I have no sympathy for looters, rioters, murders, rapists and thieves.

Crime has risen in this country because laws have become too laxed.

Look at San Francisco. Even "The Atlantic" magazine has called it a failed state. Their new DA said he would prosecute shop lifters. Guess what? Shop lifting has exploded in  the last year. In broad daylight!

Now businesses are closing up and leaving. Everything from mom and pop stores to nationwide chains. The number one job opening in SF is private security. I wonder why?

I am a firm believer in law and order. When I was younger I worked retail. I was pepper sprayed in the face by a shoplifter! She was later arrested for shoplifting at another store. She had a record of getting arrested and being let go. Should have been thrown in jail for a long time for the first time.

[OSR stands with Israel]

Good

I have no sympathy for looters, rioters, murders, rapists and thieves.

Crime has risen in this country because laws have become too laxed.

Look at San Francisco. Even "The Atlantic" magazine has called it a failed state. Their new DA said he would prosecute shop lifters. Guess what? Shop lifting has exploded in  the last year. In broad daylight!

Now businesses are closing up and leaving. Everything from mom and pop stores to nationwide chains. The number one job opening in SF is private security. I wonder why?

I am a firm believer in law and order. When I was younger I worked retail. I was pepper sprayed in the face by a shoplifter! She was later arrested for shoplifting at another store. She had a record of getting arrested and being let go. Should have been thrown in jail for a long time for the first time.

Yup basic law and order is essential in any society