2020 Post Election MEGAthread

[hobart]

Originally Posted by douglas1999 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

How about this: Give the police *more* funding so that they can hire social workers. Social workers are already a thing, they are dispatched to situations that call for their expertise. What people have been proposing, which is completely idiotic, is that social workers be dispatched to situations where there is an imminent lethal threat. Cops already perform the role of social worker in many situations, for example when they talk jumpers off the ledges of buildings all the time.

Suggesting that a social worker should be called in when somebody like george floyd, who had an extensive violent criminal history (he robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint, among other things) and had been in prison fourteen times, which the cops *are aware of* as soon as they ID him and look up his priors, is insane. Or somebody like jacob blake, or that dude waving a knife around, or literally any of the other people that have inspired rioting this year. This is what armed police are for.. It's super easy to criticize them after the fact when it wasn't you whose life was in danger.

George Floyd's criminal history isn't relevant. From top to bottom it was a failure of training and procedure. Surely three people could subdue him in a way that protected his safety.

I have a good bit of sympathy for the two officers that were relatively green, who weren't training officers, and who didn't kneel on George Floyd's neck for the length of your average Led Zeppelin song.

The issue I find most troubling with a lot of these cases of "abuse" is that the egregious behavior often isn't breaking the law. The idea that fear is automatically a reason to use deadly force needs to be reconsidered. Risking your life to serve others is part of the job.

I think the one thing we might be able to agree on is that "defund the police" is a stupid slogan that means different things to different people and each interpretation is almost universally a bad idea.

I'm really disappointed that Trumpism wasn't impugned at the ballot box this last cycle, but I was glad to see that performative wokeness from the illiberal left was.