Boges

Again those articles are just cites to the issues being raised. I was being a bit tongue and cheek about offence. All these issues are intertwined IMHO.

If you're accusing me of thread drift, I'll concede a bit of that. This is the thread where this whole BLM issue has kind of migrated to. My deepest apologies if you're offended. I will say that better trained cops wouldn't have allowed this to get escalated as quickly as it did. And the shooter did get fired and will likely get charged.

Defund the Police is a really bad terminology, but it's the one Lefties use. Bad Marketing I concede. https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/502648-what-defund-the-police-actually-means It's more redefining the police. As I've said multiple times, it appears a community, Camden, NJ has done this with great success. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/12/camden-policing-reforms-313750

Just a by-product of the Defund the Police debate. But I do think that someone trained better wouldn't have resorted to a physical confrontation as soon as this cop did.

You would have to analyze why crime happens first. It's not just evil people being evil. A lot of it can be linked to societal problems that can be fixed by other things than cops banging heads.

Even if they did. What would they do? If someone wants to stop theft they'd have to invest in a security system. Do you contend that I'm saying to abolish police? I'm saying there are many things cops currently do that they don't need to be doing.

Are you? Complain police aren't equipped to handle the mentally ill and also complain that there isn't funding to handle the mentally ill. Something has to give.

The largest line-item there were police being specifically targeted. Meaning a Social Worker probably wouldn't be.

Polce actually don't do a great job at stopping any of those things. They just come in after the fact, write a police report and usually insurance has to take care of everything. Do police really catch petty thieves at any great rate? Well, if you wanted, every car could have a GPS, I'm actually pretty sure they all do now anyway.

You just said these people were "released" indicating it's some funding issue, not a rights issue.

I'm not a fan of it, but Photo-Radar is a good replacement. For sure, but criminalizing simple possession has created a huge problem in minority communities. Imagine all the people who's lives are ruined because they had some pot on them. And now it's legal.

He wasn't driving now was he. He was sleeping, in order to not be driving drunk. Actually we'll never know exactly what he was doing because he's dead now. It's funny, they told him to drive the car into a spot. Was that some sort of entrapment?

Perhaps some of the police funding can go to keeping those people in said institutions.

Do you think that's a majority of what a cop does? Or handing out tickets to people going 20 kms/h over? I'm sure you don't agree, but the idea is to treat drug use as a public health issue and not a criminal one. See Portugal as the case study. Simple possession of any drug shouldn't land you in jail.

Watch this interview from Bill Maher on Friday. He contends that you can probably hire better cops if you reduce the number and only focus on violent crime. That means decriminalizing drugs and not having cops deal with traffic issues. It seems that police budgets are always increasing. It's the one public service that Conservatives like paying for. Nor should they. It's just that if mental health is such an issue, maybe more of the public health dollars should be focused there instead of kitting out a paramilitary service with tanks.

He also was running and not really aiming. Cops always say how hard it is to hit extremities. Always shoot centre mass because hitting the head or the legs is very hard.

Then cops shouldn't complain their ill-equipped with dealing with mental health issues. Perhaps more money should be focused on mental health so they don't get to the point where they're a risk to the public that police have to end up putting down. Whenever a white guy shoots up a school or a concert or a church it's always labelled as a mental health issue.

Actually you started that with the Biden 1994 stuff. Why does that matter in 2020?

I was talking about Philando Castille. AFIK Brooks was unarmed and didn't steak the cops sidearm. Then perhaps don't follow the suspect close enough to get tazed. They had all the leverage in that situation. Imagine how different things would have turned out if the cops impounded his car and offered to drive him home.

They didn't have to do anything. Did they really think he was going to start Tazing innocent civilians? Everything that happened was a result of cops escalating the situation.

That speaks to the shitty nature of policing and more particularly police unions. If they receive more scrutiny they just decide to not do their job. Note, crime in Camden, New Jersey dropped after they disbanded the police and re-trained them. https://abc7chicago.com/this-city-disbanded-its-police-department-in-2012-heres-what-happened-next/6238880/

DoFo's strategy has seemed to have worked out. https://www.cp24.com/news/ontario-reports-181-new-covid-19-cases-and-8-deaths-lowest-since-march-28-1.4984486 Cases, deaths and hospitalization continue to drop. And this can't really be explained by the warm weather. Warm weather states in the US are actually seeing a huge spike in new cases.

He had a gun, as is his right as an American. Tazer's aren't fatal. Cops continue to remind everyone of that. The cops had all the leverage there. Dude wasn't going to get away. They had his car. And they already know he didn't have a real gun.

Yes, it's still a conspiracy to overwhelmingly target black for crimes that they don't do at any greater rate than whites. Now they're criminals, they can't get good jobs, they're more likely to go back to prison out of desperation. Self perpetuating problem.

Who's blaming Trump? BLM was a thing under Obama. And the problems go back well further than that. But it's good that you concede that.