George Floyd, Protests, Riots, and what’s next?

[ucbalumnus]

@thibault

@ucbalumnus - most of what you’re posting here has been well known, to anyone who follows urban policing in America, for nearly half a century.

Cops in America are forced to be social workers-- a role for which they are not equipped and against which they are unfairly and wrongly measured.

The dumping of social work leftovers (that no one else wants to deal with) onto police (and the resulting mismatch) is not well known to the general public. Most people (whether praising or protesting the police) seem to have an idea of what police work is that is very different from what police officers actually do on the job.

@thibault

Among other monstrous problems, these include all the pathological behaviors of unbelievably violent drug addicts and murderous gang members whose rites of passage include random slaughter of their neighbors, as well as the self-destructive actions of mental health sufferers who were de-institutionalized in the Reagan era.

Believe it or not, violent crime has gone down considerably over the past few decades, probably due to the end of leaded gasoline. But people seem to believe that crime is going up all the time. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-convinced-crime-is-rising-in-the-u-s-theyre-wrong/

For one police department that posts a weekly summary of police actions, the most common type of incident they found worth noting is a call regarding homeless people.

@thibault

The solution is not to blame the police but to fix those institutions that give rise to such extraordinary levels of social dysfunction in this nation’s urban areas.

If we Americans could agree on the above and stop trashing our police, we might start solving our problems and move forward. Peace.
(and peace out, for me)

Seems like you agree with some of the lefties who seem to have realized that social work problems need actual social workers, and that dumping the social work problems on police is a bad situation. Unfortunately, they seem to have used the slogan “defund the police” for that (really meaning that some money allocated to police can be used for actual social workers, so less police would be needed since police would not be doing social work) – it is a really bad choice of slogan when they keep having to explain what it means when the obvious meaning is something different entirely.

However, some police officers and departments actually do have problems with corruption, racism, etc. that are independent of the inappropriate use of police to deal with social work leftovers. That needs to be cleaned up as well.