George Floyd murder / Derek Chauvin guilty of murder

I'm With Stupid said:
As I understand it, 'defund the police' is badly worded. Sure there are people who support abolishing the police outright, but most of the people who I've seen argue in favour of defunding the police really mean diverting some of their budget to people who are better able to deal with particular issues. So when there's a person clearly having a mental health episode, you send a mental health expert, rather than cops who have maybe a few days training on the subject. And that isn't to say you don't send them with a couple of cops too, but just that a couple of cops with guns isn't the only thing you send to a volatile situation, and they follow the lead of someone who better knows what they're doing. The problem is, of course, that a lot of the things that could be funded instead take a lot longer to implement and see the results of. There needs to be some overlap where you fund the police properly (properly, not to the extent that they can buy military equipment they don't need) and fund other services properly to the point that the police become less necessary. But the reality is that the US police are some of the best-funded public organisations in the world and their crime rate is still ridiculously high by the standards of most developed countries. So there clearly comes a point where you have to accept that you're throwing good money after bad.
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I think that is a very good summation.
It has supposedly worked in areas like Camden NJ https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-jersey-trnd/index.html
Although there were law suits involved at the change where community activists said the community hadn’t been involved.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...t-is-being-misused-debate-over-police-reform/
So you would hope any area going the same route would learn from other’s mistakes.

There are very good reasons for and against defunding (terrible description of what is required) being offered in here by prominent posters in the American debate.
But I think the American public in general like things black and white, to use a terrible turn of phrase in these circumstances.
They like it simple and community policing is not a simple issue. To think further fueling a law enforcement body will tackle the core causes of society’s illness, is a false economy and it is a dereliction of proper analysis of a society’s desease.

Funding law enforcement to further arm and suppress a problem is not going to tackle the issue, particularly when the issue is inequality in society.

I’m Irish not British, and although it is not the same thing and probably does simplify a very complex area of history, look where Northern Ireland went when tackling social inequality with force.
If you don’t listen to the moderate voices in a community’s leadership you run the risk of the voice being taken off them and less moderates filling the void.
 
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BJL_City said:
So the noose was actually a door handle all along, now there's a thing...
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The sad thing is that we live in a world where a bloke could plausibly think that a particular knot tying, that looked like a noose, was aimed at him.
 
BJL_City said:
or sad that people are looking for things like that to run to the media about before the facts are established.
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I think that's a wilful misrepresentation. If a black man walks into a southern racetrack, after agitation about removing confederate flags, and sees a rope loop, then there's no 'running to the media' about it. It was convincing enough a theory that the entirety of the race driver corps backed him.
 
MillionMilesAway said:
I think that's a wilful misrepresentation. If a black man walks into a southern racetrack, after agitation about removing confederate flags, and sees a rope loop, then there's no 'running to the media' about it. It was convincing enough a theory that the entirety of the race driver corps backed him.
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but no one had seen this before the Media and FBI got involved? It made a great headline but the actual truth was actually dis appointing for the media.
 
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