old salt wrote: ↑Thu Aug 05, 2021 1:30 am
PizzaSnake wrote: ↑Wed Aug 04, 2021 8:21 pm
"The whole system needs to be undone."
And replaced with what, exactly?
"You break it you bought it."
Consistent sentencing & bail/bond. Taking into account criminal record & violent vs non-violent offense.
Bail/bond & sentencing for BLM/Antifa mob rioters in cities across our nation who assault police officers, breach, burn & loot Fed court houses, police stations & private businesses should be the same as for the supposed insurrectionists.
Convicted felons, facing further murder charges, walk free, to kill again or behead their wife, thanks to feckless cash bail "reforms" or Soros funded prosecutors who don't even show up in court.
Demoralized police are afraid to do their jobs because they know they'll be hung out to dry if they try to stop a crime or serve a warrant, while our craven former tough prosecutor VP now helps raise funds to keep criminals on the street.
The system is already broken. Foolish liberal Dems bought it for us, ...with somebody else's money.
From a recent in depth book interview with Bill Bratton about his experiences in Boston, NY, LA, & NY again.
https://www.city-journal.org/policing-a ... am-bratton
{the interviewer} ...the United States saw one of the biggest single-year spikes in homicides in 2020 that we've seen at least in my lifetime. And the source of that has been the topic of a lot of debate, some people blame the economic stress brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, others blame the decrease in police legitimacy. I myself have suggested that the crime spike seems likely due at least in part to shifts in policy that have both raised the transaction cost of enforcing the law while at the same time lowering those breaking it. But I want to just read a short edited excerpt from your chapter on whiz kids and get your reactions.
So, you write that by the end of the 1970s, economic circumstances caused government to start cutting back on resources, budget considerations, creative deinstitutionalization, the court system began to reevaluate America's way of looking at the law and a sizable number of actions that would previously have taken people off the streets became decriminalized. Now, in the last year alone, a New York Times report found that 30 states have passed more than 140 police and criminal justice reforms.
We've seen a steady rate of decarceration over the last decade, somewhere in the range of 20 percent, as well as a 25 percent decline in arrests. We've seen bail reform, sentencing reforms, the election of progressive prosecutors in big cities across the country. And so my question is, do you see any parallels between what's happening in the policy space today and what was going on in the 1970s, and how should we be thinking about before moving forward given your experience with that world?
Bill Bratton: ...what's going on right now? We have the defund-the-police movement, reducing the size of police forces. We have the decriminalization movement with so many of the laws as part of the criminal justice reform effort the police used to deal with issues on the streets are being taken away. And what is the deinstitutionalization happening now? We are emptying our prisons and jails at a rapid rate. And what's coming out of those deals, 50 percent of people who were mentally ill, because we had no mental institutions to put them into, we put them into jail.
So, they're back on the streets, but also a lot of hardened criminals are being let out with no supervision like they did with the mentally ill back in the 1970s, with no jobs, with effectively no controls over their behavior. So, déjà vu all over again, ...what happened in the 1970s is now happening again, ...we don't have to reinvent the world, we don't have to effectively start from scratch to reform the criminal justice system. So much of what we did was successful, could it be modified, could it have better outcome now that we know some of the unintended consequences?
Certainly, but one of my frustrations... there's this new term... progressive phobia. The progressive group basically has the phobia for anything that came before their ideas. And so, that basically erases the last 50 years of policing as they seek to reform policing. And it's crazy. It's absolutely crazy, because despite our failures, we got a lot of successes, there's a lot of things that worked.
{interviewer} : ...the arc of our history in terms of criminal justice policy. ...I see so many parallels to what is happening today, I see us repeating that history. And what I fear is that, what came after the 1970s will come after what we're doing right now, which was one of the most incredible crime spikes in urban American history in the 1980s and 1990s saw just untold numbers of people shot, killed, wounded, robbed. In 1990, New York City saw 2,262 homicides, more than 114,000 robberies.
Bill Bratton: You know what's even more frightening than that ...? 1990 also saw 5,000 people shot on the streets in New York. And I think the murder count will be even higher now that we have so many improved trauma centers that a lot of those shooting victims are saved that would have been 20 years ago homicide victims. And the shooting number is the one that most frightens me, not so much the homicide number, but the shooting number, because that's the real issue.
But it is this idea that it took almost 25 years to get to 1990, it took us a year to get to 2021. So, the dramatic explosion of crime after almost 30 years of a decline, it was like the pandemic, nobody saw it coming and all of a sudden it was here with such devastating effect. And that's what's the frightening aspect about it. In the twenty-first century, everything is accelerated anyway, we're in the whole world of internet it's digital, but the old-fashioned thing about crime and disorder how did it just fall apart so quickly? I still scratch my head about what the hell happened.
{interviewewr} : It really is a disconcerning and precarious time that I think we're living in. And then I think people in American cities are starting to feel it. And one of the things that you talked about in your chapter on community policing, was this sense that people weren't going to put up with untold amounts of disorder, eventually everyone had a breaking point and you talked about the suburbanization that followed the crime increase.
And when I think about the financial positions of American cities today, they rely on a relatively small slice of their population for their tax base. But these are also people with means to leave if safety is not something that they view is guaranteed to them. And I wonder what you make of the risk of that happening again. Do you see a move away from cities as crime gets out of control? Do you think that that ultimately harms the ability of municipalities to fund their departments to the requisite degree that's going to be necessary to get this problem under control?
Bill Bratton: I do, in the sense that 50 years repeated the cycle, what happened in the 1970s that American cities were dying, American cities were being written off basically, everybody, the whites who could afford to get away from school to segregation, housing desegregation were fleeing... to the suburbs. And we're seeing that potential once again, and with the cities what's left behind in the cities is the poor and the minority, in cities that in many instances rely on not so much manufacturing like they used to years ago, rely now on tourism, rely on the ability to attract outsiders whether to come and work or to come and be entertained, to come and be educated.
If those cities are seen as dangerous places, people who can afford to are going to look to send their kids to school elsewhere, they're going to look to go someplace else for their entertainment. And that's something that New York is going to have to watch very closely, as we hope this will be birth of the Theater District, et cetera. As colleges and universities, as they begin to reopen once again for kids coming back to school. Your parent is going to pay $75,000 to send your kid to NYU.
And you're seeing night after night on the news Washington Square Park degenerating into chaos, is that where you're going to send your kid? USC had an experience years ago, USC receives over a billion dollars a year with Asian students attending USC, principally Chinese. They had a young Chinese student murdered on the periphery of the campus some years ago and the fall-off on Asian applications in that school was immediate and phenomenal. So, those are issues that are going to have to be looked at going forward, that we saw a time when Americans were fleeing the cities.
This audience I'm sure is very familiar with the term broken windows and the idea of references quality of life. ...the basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent, prevent crime and disorder. In the 1970s, ...as we come out of the 1960s, society, government, political leaders said to the police, "You cannot prevent crime, you can only respond to it. Society is going to have to work on what causes crime, poverty, unemployment racism."
So while we fix that, ...you the police you should just basically focus on improved response to crime, 911 calls, numbers of arrests so you can show activity, but it was all after the fact. ...I was assigned to help develop a neighborhood policing program in a very distressed area of Boston that house some of the leading institutions in Boston, ...Northeastern, Boston University, the Museum of Fine Arts, 21 of the leading institutions in Boston were concentrated in an area called Back Bay, Fenway Kenmore, and the crime rate there was phenomenal in the 1970s.
And what was also phenomenal was the disorder, prostitution, aggressive begging, the homeless, graffiti, all the things that drive the public crazy. So, very early on, after having been exposed to Sir Robert Peel's emphasis on crime and disorder, I saw firsthand as I went to community meetings that I organized, people didn't want to talk about the serious crime and there was no shortage of that. They wanted to talk about stuff that was driving them crazy, the prostitute on their doorstep at night, the gang in the corner raising hell all hours of the night.
And why weren't the police doing anything about that? Well, in the 1970s and 1980s, police as we reduced our numbers, as we basically pull back, we focused on responding to 911 calls, and to serious crime and officers were no longer walking a beat so we lost intimacy with the neighborhood. When we got air conditioning in 1978 in our police cars, we just rolled up the windows and we lost even more contact with the neighborhoods. And so, I early on, was exposed to... the idea that it is important to focus on not only serious crime, but what the patient and every community is a patient basically and police chiefs are doctors.
You have to listen to your patient, what do they want you to work on? I understood for the next 50, 40 years that you had to work on both. If you only worked on one, you were not going to cure the patient.
...the rest is history ...the crime turnaround in America began in the subways of New York, the success on the streets of New York, where it was much more visible, really began the catalyst of the trying turnaround in America for so many reasons, quality life enforcement, broken windows, CompStat, focusing on serious crime in a very different way. And the idea of the old adage, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. New York was viewed as the most dangerous major city in the world at that time and in a few years, it was rated as the safest large city in the world.
{interviewer} : ...in our current moment, calls for police reform has really coalesced around slogans, like defund the police to which you've responded we should refund the police. And so the question is, what do you tell people who argue that you can't achieve reform while rewarding police departments with more funding? Do you see a tension between the calls for defund and the calls for improvements?
Bill Bratton: I certainly do. I'm very active in rebuking the defund-the-police movement label, that at this critical time with rising crime, with rising dissatisfaction with the police, to reform the police to the level of expectation that so many who wants to see police improve, it's going to require refunding as police have for too long in America been asked to do too much with too little, in the sense that the burden of the homelessness, burden of the emotionally disturbed, burden of the drug addicted has fallen to the police to deal with while at the same time, the training is so necessary to deal with the equipment, et cetera.
The ability to recruit people who are capable of dealing with those complex societal issues has just not kept pace. So, the L.A. chapter ...in the book, ...spoke to dealing with a department that had been at war with this black community for 50 years, and the issue of race and police entwined, you can't separate the two and you're never going to resolve police reform or ever resolve the issue of race reformation without basically addressing both issues at the same time. They're joined like this, and you can't separate them.
... The political cowardice of today, phenomenal. Phenomenal.
OS gets it.
If you are at all invested in the reform of the carceral and policing systems of America, start with the easy stuff. The problem however lies in our left side of America, who either aren’t bright enough to understand how the little things create big things, or simply are unable to rise above partisan differences to actually ever address systemic reform.
If you look at this board alone, behold how liberals like MD and Brooklyn demand pretrial detention and no bail for a guy like Thomas Barrack. I have no idea if Barrack is guilty or not, nor does anyone tbh, nor frankly do I even understand what he’s charged with, and in spite of MD saying he knows everything about everything, liberals don’t even understand the charges. What we ALL know however is Barrack is not charged with a VIOLENT crime. Even the most partisan liberal can agree that violence is not in this guy’s past nor future. So what happens to him? He’s forced to post bail of $250,000,000.00
If you can’t understand how idiotic our system is based on this case alone, I’m not sure I can ever help you.
I don’t have a problem if a judge demands $250 million from a career criminal who is charged with and almost surely guilty of a new murder. But non-violent confusing charges?
It simply eludes liberals that a system which demands $250,000,000.00 from a NON-VIOLENT SUSPECT gives cover to systemic abuses of the indigent or the least able to defend themselves. You need to grasp that basic concept to have any further dialogue with brighter people who are able to see the system for the problem it is, regardless of politics, skin color, or net worth.
