I’m going to shovel out some opinions, here, and I will not be bothering (entirely) to support them with references and argumentation. Let me put that out front, since I am going to make some very negative assumptions about some people, and may even vent my spleen. Or, air it out, anyway.
How’s the defunding going?
Boingboing published a piece [boing] looking at US police budgets.
The reports are in on the shooting of Michael Forest Reinoehl, the ‘antifa-adjacent’ who shot a “patriot prayer” streetfighter and was gunned down in return several days later.
[Warning: Police Violence]
Simply put: it’s a maneuver to delay until another news cycle has passed. You can charge anyone for anything – even a president for attempting to steal the government – but it doesn’t matter if it’s just an attempt to deflect the whole incident.
The cries of “‘defund the police’ is harsh and may alienate potential allies!” are full-throated, and I am thoroughly sick of them. Police and police unions are manipulating politics shamelessly, and have demonstrated again and again and again that consent decrees and legislation are just something they will work around.
This is an oft-repeated story in America: a suspect is sitting in a car, and several police appear with guns drawn, then pepper the car and suspect with bullets. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done.
This is very different from the field in which I used to work. Back in the infosec startup world, if you screwed up, you were usually escorted to the parking lot with all of your stuff in a box, immediately. I’ve heard of people quitting on such good terms that they were later able to come back to an employer later, but I’ve never heard of someone being fired and brought back.*
Yesterday I published a posting that was substantially wrong. Ow! [stderr] But, it got me looking into the question of how cop departments pay off awards against them. It’s unsurprisingly murky, but there are stories that indicate how the delicate maneuvers are made.
It was a historic moment, when the city council of Minneapolis agreed that they would defund the police. [npr] But – and there’s always a “but” – guess what didn’t happen?