From the Daily Mail: Deadliest city in America plans to disband its entire police force and fire 270 cops to deal with budget crunch
From the Daily Mail:
The deadliest city in America is disbanding its entire police force and firing 270 cops in an effort to deal with a massive budget crunch.
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The police union says the force, which will not be unionized, is simply a union-busting move that is meant to get out of contracts with current employees. Any city officers that are hired to the county force will lose the benefits they had on the unionized force.
(Featured image is “Camden, New Jersey” by Dougtone is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.)
1. This story is from 2012.
2. This story is from the Daily Mail.Report
According to wikipedia, the police department was, in fact, disbanded.
Here’s a story about the current Police Department from two days ago:
If you don’t see that as relevant to the 2012 story, just a human interest story, but want to ask “well, how is *CRIME* doing?”, Wikipedia says this:
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Camden is one of those cases where the city proper — 75,000 people or so — lacks the resources to be a big-city police department. The 500,000-person county has them. It was in everyone’s interest to absorb the city force into the county’s.
My suburban city of 120,000 lacks the resources to provide a full-range of police services. We knew that decades ago, so along with some of the other west metro cities, we gave the county responsibility for incarceration beyond holding cells, labs, and SWAT.Report
Here is an interesting take on Camden: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/01/what-happened-to-crime-in-camden/549542/
This was written in January 2018, so isn’t the most up-to-date but offer a good perspective nonetheless.Report
There’s a roadmap, then. There *IS* a way to do this right.
Fingers crossed.Report
The old dept was known for corruption and absenteeism, the new dept wasn’t union but in 2013 they re-unionized.
Sounds like they fired everyone and restarted.Report
Sounds like de-unionizing is the ticket to a better police department, at least at the outset.Report
Sometimes a fresh start is what is needed.
The lower murder rate speaks volumes.Report
There it is:
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I’m in favor of it.
If you’re looking for a way to impress the various police powers-that-be (high level police, the union) that they need to get rid of bad apples and not save them, then you need to give them some sort of motivation.
Same reason why I’m in favor of 9+ digit court judgements against institutions that enable sex criminals who work for them.Report
Out of curiosity, and because it used to be my job to ask questions like this…
How many specialty services does the MPD provide? For example, laboratory tests, forensic accounting, bomb squad, federal liaison? How many of the surrounding suburbs are dependent on those services? If the MPD is disbanded, how many years will it take to reconstruct those specialty capabilities? Or to have them picked up by law enforcement at some higher level?Report
Well, my answer to the “specialty services” question was “amateur Rolfing” but I don’t know that anybody knows what that is anymore.
Anyway. The good thing about your questions is that they all have answers (even though I don’t know what they are). Lab tests and forensic accounting strike me as things that are likely to benefit from having a nearby university in the short term (and likely medium term as well) and the federal liaison position strikes me as easy to fill (I imagine that there’s always someone looking to retire in a few years who wants to finally move away from Virginia).
As for the bomb squad… I don’t know. How often do they get called out? (And, honestly, I’d be suspicious of any jump in numbers following the old bomb squad being disbanded.)Report
An interesting thread that deals with this (and covers some of what Michael Cain gets into above):
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I have seen in a couple of places (on twitter, of course) where the argument is between “Defund the Police!” and “Abolish the Police!” with the defunders being painted as accommodationists.
I don’t know whether this is indicative of The Future or is indicative of The Disconnect.Report
I’ve seen several tweets linking to this article saying that Minneapolis is going to disband its police department:
This follows the Mayor getting booed out of a rally for saying that he doesn’t think that Minneapolis ought to disband its police department.
This will be one heck of a data point.Report
CNN is reporting it now.
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Marianne Williamson makes an observation:
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Disband means they are doing a radical change to have a different department. That isn’t really what disband exactly means but whatevs. It’s the word of the times so as long as it leads to a good end, more power to them.
What seems far more interesting is on the tweeters people are saying hundreds of NY cops are retiring along with the comish. If true this is almost certainly a good thing. This is assuming they are retiring because they see which way the wind is blowing on reform and know its coming for them. If so then the ones retiring are very much the ones who should let the door hit them on the ass just to rub some salt in the wound.Report
I admit that I am always vaguely irritated when I hear some variant of “Oh, by ‘abolish the police’, we don’t mean ‘abolish law enforcement’, what we mean is ‘institute reforms'”.
But, hey. If it moves product, it moves product. It’s not like the whole “we need to institute reforms” message worked.Report
Reform, typically very substantial, is what almost all the abolish people want. But people want simple three word slogans so that is what we get. If we get reforms it wont’ be because of the slogan it will be because of the giant protests.
My guess is it wont’ take more then one or two big cities doing something like what Minneapolis is looking at to bring about an attitude change among many other cops. That would be a good thing.Report
You wanna see an interview that won’t help? Here’s an interview that won’t help.
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I will never understand how anyone can get to a place where they don’t realize how stupid statements like that sound to normal people.Report
They circled the wagons so long ago that they cannot even discern that there are other voices.Report
Is it inability to consider other voices or complete detachment from reality and replacement with make believe critical theory nonsense? Like, the question was ‘who do I call if there’s a burglar in the house?’ And her answer to that is ‘check your privilege’? That’s nuts.Report
Have you seen Amash’s list of reforms?
Justin Amash@justinamash
End qualified immunity.
End civil asset forfeiture.
End the drug war.
End overcriminalization.
End no-knock warrants.
End militarization of police.
End mandatory minimums.
It’s a pretty good start at the federal level.Report
They dont’ need to talk about defunding the cops. Going after CAF would be good on it’s own and do much the same job.Report
Yeah, that’s a great list! And it covers a lot of the onesy-twosy “but doing only (your suggestion) won’t fix the problem!”
I’ve long thought that Federal Sentencing Guidelines were not only wacky but, more importantly, an infringement on the separate powers thing. But the War on Drugs was the War on Drugs and that carries with it all kinds of pathologies. Civil Asset Forfeiture was *GREAT* when the cops liberated a cigarette boat used by a drug dealer. Confiscated a Lambo. Confiscated something that made you just ooze envy when you walked past a movie poster that had it on it (because you weren’t ever likely to walk past a real one unless you went to Vegas or something). That sort of thing made asset forfeiture *FUN*.
And hearing that it’s used to take away the $800 POS car from someone who was found smoking a joint on their own back porch to be auctioned as scrap for some junkyard is depressing as hell. That’s not why we did that.
Which seems to indicate that the cops themselves have a problem that they’re auctioning off $800 POS cars that they take from some poor schmuck smoking a joint on his own back porch.
The entire system is just so captured and needs reform. It’s daunting because the people who point out doing (one thing) won’t fix the problem are right. There are so very many things wrong that we not only have to do multiple things, we have to do multiple things over long periods of time.
But Justin Amash has a good list.Report
Why was he ever a Republican to begin with?Report
they say: “disband the police”
they mean: “rebrand the police and reorganize the management”Report
I suspect a lot of them also mean, “Substantial changes in the hiring and firing criteria.” The available personnel information is thin, but Chauvin appears to have been hired on the basis of his experience as a military police officer with little or no other formal training, and averaged almost one personnel-file-worthy complaint per year over his entire career.
My suburban city’s (pop 120K, about 30% the size of Minneapolis) police personnel policies have up sides and down sides, but Chauvin wouldn’t have been hired (insufficient formal education) and if he had been, would probably have been dismissed after a few years (too many complaints, no improvement).Report
Two things:
First, on Camden, there is a great interview on NPR that you can read or listen to at https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/08/872416644/former-chief-of-reformed-camden-n-j-force-police-need-consent-of-the-people
Second, how about “disband and replace”? The hard part will be finding a replacement and the transition, but there are some models. I do remember though that the Republicans promised to “repeal and replace” Obamacare, only they had no replacement. They finally went for repeal without replacement, before luckily failing.Report