Bernie Sanders Does Not Want To Abolishing Police Departments

[Pressure]

Maybe you pay officers more but you have less of them. He’s on the record saying he’s not calling for more money to police

I suppose. Police gotta trim the fat somewhere. What's the average pay for social workers right now?

 

[FAH1223]

I suppose. Police gotta trim the fat somewhere. What's the average pay for social workers right now?

Here in Maryland its in the $65k to $85k range

 

[2Quik4UHoes]

It’s a start, doesn’t fully address or bring justice to the Black people that have needlessly died but that’s a deeper issue with the country itself. Pigs are idiot goons doing the bidding of wealthy whites aiming to maintain law and order so the money keeps coming in.

Plus being a cop should be a full blown Criminology degree. Let them do the actual 6 months training after actually going to school as a way of changing the culture.

Of course absolutely none of this is gonna happen. But it’s fun to fantasize I guess

 

[Professor Emeritus]

you seeing hella black cops? cause some of the hispanics i see, no different than white

In my experience it's damn near always a mixed team, like they're doing it on purpose. A Black cop and a White cop, or a White cop and a Hispanic cop, etc. My biggest "incident" in South LA was with a Black cop (he was chill in the end tho).

 

[jj23]

why is there still this obsession with sanders? havent sanders supporters shown since after his drop out we arent some cult that cant criticize him? he dropped out, centrist dems are bitter ass winners

He isn't running, but to say the comments he made aren't fair game is disingenuous.

He is still a consequential politician. He made debatable comments on a hot button issue. The OP raised a new thread to discuss those comments. It isn't a derailment on an election thread.

We have the debate in the thread and move on.

So even if, as you say, the OP or the folks in this thread have an obsession with Sanders, they followed the rules to raise the point.

And you get a chance to put them in their place. Or ignore them.

 

[jj23]

My

In my experience it's damn near always a mixed team, like they're doing it on purpose. A Black cop and a White cop, or a White cop and a Hispanic cop, etc. My biggest "incident" in South LA was with a Black cop (he was chill in the end tho).

Hi @Rhakim,

You or @FAH1223 or @Pressure may be best placed to answer this.

Are police departments well trained?
Are police officers well paid?

What's the truth? As everytime these a$$holes kill black men they still seem to be able to keep their pensions and other benefits.

The other question is, would that necessarily stop police from killing innocent black men and women? As silly as that may sound, we have already seen that economic empowerment doesn't translate to less racism.

Final question (and this is the question to ask if training and a good salary can't fix the issue.) How do you fix it?

 

[Professor Emeritus]

My

Hi @Rhakim,

You or @FAH1223 or @Pressure may be best placed to answer this.

Are police departments well trained?
Are police officers well paid?

Worth noting that training, pay, etc. varies from place to place.

Generally though, I believe most police officers are poorly or insufficiently trained, many to a LARGE degree.

I think police officers are well-paid in comparison to their current qualifications and current job duties. I would prefer a meaningful shift towards professionalization of both qualifications and job duties, and in some areas that would correspond to higher pay. In fact, I would prefer we shift to a tiered system, where a lot of their duties are passed off to a new category of unarmed community cops (like the UK, Germany, NZ, etc. have) and/or social workers and actual trained mental health professionals. Thus the number of armed, professional cops we have could be reduced dramatically.

As everytime these a$$holes kill black men they still seem to be able to keep their pensions and other benefits.

Which is insane bullshyt.

The other question is, would that necessarily stop police from killing innocent black men and women? As silly as that may sound, we have already seen that economic empowerment doesn't translate to less racism.

Final question (and this is the question to ask if training and a good salary can't fix the issue.) How do you fix it?

As I alluded above, I think we need to get guns out of the hands of the police a lot of the time. This country has a mentality that every problem is solved with a weapon. It's past time we deaded that shyt. The number of times someone is shot when they are unarmed or weren't committing a crime is ridiculous. How do you stop the police from defaulting to lethal force at the drop of a hat? Perhaps you just need to remove the option altogether except when it's necessary. If they don't have a gun when dealing with regular community shyt that doesn't require a gun, then they won't have the option to kill and will have to deal with situations in other ways like damn near everyone else does.

Second, as in most of the points that Bernie listed in his demands on the front page, there needs to be far more accountability. We need to hold police to higher standards, make it more viable to prosecute not just when they kill but when they overstep their bounds in other ways. The way current laws and accountability structures are set up it's just far too easy for cops to duck convictions that no other citizen would be able to avoid.

Third, we need to hire better quality material and train them better. As has already been covered in this thread, exactly how to do that effectively might be controversial. But it seems that the vast majority of the world does it just fine. Police rarely ever unarmed Black men in the UK. Police rarely ever kill unarmed Black men in Germany. No one in their right mind is gonna claim that White Brits and White Germans have let go of all their racism. So how are they hiring differently? How are they training differently? What could we do different?

Finally, I think we need to full-stop destroy the toxic culture that has overcome a lot of departments. There needs to be far more proactive forces that are willing to just completely close down a corrupt police department and rebuild from scratch. The federal government can be a force that does this in some cases, but we have to carry in the power of our communities to shut down departments too. That's something I've been talking about for years on this board - how to defund an out-of-control police force until they're forced to capitulate. Because we can't just wait for the feds to do it.



In all this shyt, I really think we need to take ownership of our police. They are OUR police. They're supposed to fukking work for us. Individual officers are often the enemy, corrupted departments are the enemy, but if we keep treating the very idea of police as the enemy then we'll be fukked. Police or something like police will always have a ton of power in our society. We need to publicly capture that power and force it to work on our behalf. That doesn't mean making friends with bad cops, it means purging bad cops and bad departments and replacing them with something that is explicitly on our side.

 

[jj23]

Worth noting that training, pay, etc. varies from place to place.

Generally though, I believe most police officers are poorly or insufficiently trained, many to a LARGE degree.

I think police officers are well-paid in comparison to their current qualifications and current job duties. I would prefer a meaningful shift towards professionalization of both qualifications and job duties, and in some areas that would correspond to higher pay. In fact, I would prefer we shift to a tiered system, where a lot of their duties are passed off to a new category of unarmed community cops (like the UK, Germany, NZ, etc. have) and/or social workers and actual trained mental health professionals. Thus the number of armed, professional cops we have could be reduced dramatically.




Which is insane bullshyt.




As I alluded above, I think we need to get guns out of the hands of the police a lot of the time. This country has a mentality that every problem is solved with a weapon. It's past time we deaded that shyt. The number of times someone is shot when they are unarmed or weren't committing a crime is ridiculous. How do you stop the police from defaulting to lethal force at the drop of a hat? Perhaps you just need to remove the option altogether except when it's necessary. If they don't have a gun when dealing with regular community shyt that doesn't require a gun, then they won't have the option to kill and will have to deal with situations in other ways like damn near everyone else does.

Second, as in most of the points that Bernie listed in his demands on the front page, there needs to be far more accountability. We need to hold police to higher standards, make it more viable to prosecute not just when they kill but when they overstep their bounds in other ways. The way current laws and accountability structures are set up it's just far too easy for cops to duck convictions that no other citizen would be able to avoid.

Third, we need to hire better quality material and train them better. As has already been covered in this thread, exactly how to do that effectively might be controversial. But it seems that the vast majority of the world does it just fine. Police rarely ever unarmed Black men in the UK. Police rarely ever kill unarmed Black men in Germany. No one in their right mind is gonna claim that White Brits and White Germans have let go of all their racism. So how are they hiring differently? How are they training differently? What could we do different?

Finally, I think we need to full-stop destroy the toxic culture that has overcome a lot of departments. There needs to be far more proactive forces that are willing to just completely close down a corrupt police department and rebuild from scratch. The federal government can be a force that does this in some cases, but we have to carry in the power of our communities to shut down departments too. That's something I've been talking about for years on this board - how to defund an out-of-control police force until they're forced to capitulate. Because we can't just wait for the feds to do it.



In all this shyt, I really think we need to take ownership of our police. They are OUR police. They're supposed to fukking work for us. Individual officers are the energy, corrupted departments are the enemy, but if we keep treating the very idea of police as the enemy then we'll be fukked. Police or something like police will always have a ton of power in our society. We need to publicly capture that power and force it to work on our behalf. That doesn't mean making friends with bad cops, it means purging bad cops and bad departments and replacing them with something that is explicitly on our side.

Great points. The guns one is interesting as the US is a gun country, so the obvious pushback would be how do you protect police in situations where someone has a gun if they are unarmed.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Great points. The guns one is interesting as the US is a gun country, so the obvious pushback would be how do you protect police in situations where someone has a gun if they are unarmed.

The main scenarios where you know you need armed officers - warrants for felons, 911 calls reporting violent crime, SWAT situation, etc. - you would send your fully professional, armed officers. Those same officers would still be sent as part of the security at high-risk events and would be mixed in out on patrol, but they might only be 10-20% of the force rather than 100% of the force.

So what about the community officers? The ones who are just doing welfare checks, investigating crimes, writing citations, regulating traffic, communicating with residents about what is going on in the neighborhood, taking interviews, etc. - the vast majority of police work. They don't need a fukking gun for that shyt. For self-defense they can have their mace and their taser. But they don't need to go killing people. If they get into a hairy situation they can simply retreat and call backup.

Cops who don't have guns learn to handle situations without using their gun. Yeah there are a lot more guns in the USA, but there are still a million guns available in London and in Germany. There are still knives all over the place. In America the cops kill 100 people a year or so who have a knife. In the UK there are MORE knives around, yet cops almost never kill someone with a knife, 1-2 a year at most. It's a crazy difference in how they engage. In the USA the cops might shoot you if you have a hammer, a cane, damn near anything they can call a weapon. Or they will report that they "thought" they saw a weapon. In the UK and other spots 99% of the time they figure out how to disengage and call for backup without just straight killing someone on the spot, because they've learned to operate without lethal force.

Some people claim that would make the job too dangerous for cops. Well, I want the job to be less dangerous for civilians. But I think it would be safer for cops as well. If cops aren't militarized, if they aren't carrying guns, then they aren't seen as a lethal threat and they're far less likely to be targeted. Cops are rarely ever killed in those other countries. And when cops are ambushed by surprise, in the USA or elsewhere,

We forbid social workers from carrying guns. We forbid CPS from carrying guns. And they get by fine. They got to knock on doors in the exact same hoods and they ain't always gonna be well-liked. Police, if they leave the role of militarized thugs of a semi-apartheid state and take on new jobs as pro-community street workers, won't be in any more danger than you or I when we out on the streets.



Of course, in a lot of cases you might not be able to train an armed cop who is used to power and violence how to be an unarmed cop. So you could be recruiting an entirely new force for that role.

 

[Shogun]

I think you can be generally pro-union, and critical of unions at the same time. Some unions, particularly civil service unions, it seems, have no moral center when defending their members. It’s just defend regardless. In the teaching world I had to fight the union for three years to fire a teacher who had several DCF investigations...and finally was arrested for his fukkery. Even after the arrest I still had to fight the union, and the best we could get is for the dude to resign and I was forced to write him a letter of recommendation.

Frankly, if you’re pro-union it would probably be helpful to be especially critical of shytty unions. Blindly supporting anything is counterproductive.

 

[Crayola Coyote]

Black people: Let’s get rid of White supremacist pretending to be police officers And the system of white supremacy

America: let’s just get rid of police departments

black people:

 

[Tommy Knocks]

In my experience it's damn near always a mixed team, like they're doing it on purpose. A Black cop and a White cop, or a White cop and a Hispanic cop, etc. My biggest "incident" in South LA was with a Black cop (he was chill in the end tho).

That was my experience too though. However, I never seen 2 black cops. have you?

my biggest incident was off labrea and jefferson, 2 white cops pulled up on us, they pushed me up against the wall, and put my older friend (he was 13) up on the car hood which was hot af, and checked his pockets. They didnt even say anything to us or why. 90s was crazy thats why I got the fukk up outta there in 05. obv I still go back home to visit fam every couple of years. I was in the Jungles earlier this year. Good to see it's still black.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I'm way way luckier than a lot of people though, I ain't never once been cuffed or in custody in my entire life. Just once I had five cop cars pull up and some of the cops pulled on me cause someone made a false 911 call, but I was able to resolve that shyt without any of them touching me.

 

[Tommy Knocks]

I definitely have but I lived in Inglewood a lot more than South LA and Inglewood has somewhat more Black cops and way fewer Latinos.

I had Inglewood police get mad suspect with me a couple of times, including one where they literally pulled me out of my own car and threw me up against the side of it before I told them I was a fukking teacher leaving my own damn apartment. There were a ton of Bloods in my building and they thought they could just hit at random and catch something on me. They apologized after they found out I was a teacher but said this bullshyt bout me "looking like someone they were looking for". That was a White cop who did that one though.

Worst with LAPD was near Exposition Park. I'm just walking down the street at night and they hit the siren and pull up so the headlights are on me but don't get out of the car. Shine the big ass search light in my face, make me put my hands up, spread my legs, just wait there for a while. Eventually Black cop comes out and starts questioning me. Just bullshyt probing questions like he didn't have anything else to do with his night and wanted to make me sweat for a while. So he eventually lets me go, I keep walking, and ten minutes later ANOTHER cop pulls the siren on me and same deal, searchlight right in my eyes and everything and force me to stand there holding the position. Like what are these motherfukkers on when you can't even walk down the street.


I'm way way luckier than a lot of people though, I ain't never once been cuffed or in custody in my entire life. Just once I had five cop cars pull up and some of the cops pulled on me cause someone made a false 911 call, but I was able to resolve that shyt without any of them touching me.

damn. I've only gotten pulled over 2 times in a row off Florence. and for no reason, I was driving a black on black camero near firestone. at the time I was young, he asked for my paper work (they just wanted to know if I had everything which I did), he gave them back and said "slow down" but I wasnt speeding cause saw that fool a light away ....boom 3 lights later, SAME shyt. now Im older before even hand anything over "what am I being pulled over for?"


I've been in custody though, twice, but I did that shyt.

and yea inglewood is def more black, and has a healthy amount of upper middle class black folks. id go to my god mothers house near the airport when I was a kid...hella bloods.

 

[feelosofer]

Title is misleading because Bernie Sanders is looking for pretty sweeping police reform.