I remain extremely bitter about the fact that our police department is so awful they started a global uprising, and for all that, there have been essentially zero deep structural or policy changes in the Minneapolis police department. And I don’t see any sign from anyone in the chain of command — police chief, safety commissioner, or mayor — to suggest that any are coming.
A particular irony of the George Floyd uprising’s aftermath is that the relatively whiter lower-crime-but-afraid-of-crime parts of Minneapolis mobilized in the 2021 election to defeat what they perceived as “defund the police” ballot measure and candidates…
…but the police department shrunk rapidly on its own through attrition and 6-figure early retirements for more or less any officers who raised their hands.
That means Minneapolis has a much smaller police department now (exactly the outcome the fearful “reform don’t defund” folks didn’t want) but without any sort of new, robust structure to replace it (exactly the outcome the “defund / abolish” folks didn’t want).
Despite that, crime is •way• down in Minneapolis, because crime generally depends on larger societal factors, not the size of the police department. Well, crime not committed by police, anyway.
@inthehands You could move to Atlanta, where our APD responded to BLM protests awfully aggressively for the "City too busy to hate", and to the firing and arrest of APD officers who killed Rayshard Brooks with a massive blue flu. In reward the privately funded Atlanta Police Foundation (the largest in the country) has secured commitments from the city for $60M in construction costs and rent to build Cop City. And the city will need to add another $30 or so million to fully fund.
@inthehands The City too Busy to Hate, has always been the city that lets big corporations sway it's policies. In 1964, Coca-Cola, pushed conservative, white political leaders into honoring Martin Luther King when he won the Nobel Prize. These days, however, the monied power types are doing exactly what MLK warned about in favoring stability over justice and allowing a giant, corporate-funded non-profit, with conservative ties and donations to twist the arms of our black politicians.
@be It is indeed, though part of the idea of abolishing policing is •replacing• it with better systems of public safety that are rooted in caring, and I do wish we would get to that part already.
@inthehands i just want to say that the lady next to him in that picture (sign language interpreter?) is making the same face i made when i read the headline
@be I struggle to imagine •anyone• creating systems of care that are not entangled with carcerality, racism, mysogyny, etc — all the problems we are battling — if they are a part of society in any way. That’s why it’s crucial to have many people trying many approaches via many different kinds of entities, and to constantly reassess and readjust.
@inthehands In our current practical reality, I struggle to imagine the state creating institutions of care that aren't entangled with carceral institutions such as psychiatry.
@be For many things, we don’t — and folks here in MSP are doing some amazing community-driven work of that kind.
But reality is that in a society where both resources and consensus flow through democratic process, gov participation is necessary for something like e.g. mental health first responders to work at city scale. Envision radically different hypothetical alternative worlds if you like, yes, but we also need solutions for our current practical reality. That’s why.